ice cubes, old style

We've been trying to phase out the plastic in the house one slow piece at a time. So we'd gotten rid of the plastic ice cube trays which left us buying bags from the Plaid Pantry. So RT went on ebay and found this little vintage cutie.

Who knew that ice cubes could be so good? These homemade, vintage ice cubes are to convenience shop ice cubes what a good maple desk is to an Ikea build-your-own. And RT walks around clinking the cubes in his glass saying "Listen to this. You can't get ice cubes that sound like this these days." And he's right.

To me they sound like my parent's martini hour, like getting iced tea ready for my aunts on the Fourth of July, like a cold glass of water after raking the leaves. I say it's slow food. He says if it was slow food we'd be chipping slivers off a block of ice. I guess you can always go slower.

making dollies

Ever since I sold Barbies on Ebay, I've been fascinated with doll collectors. I even read a whole book about them with chapters like "Dollification" and "Innocence and Fear". I'll admit I was biased against them, or at least the obsessive collectors, who, after I listed an Ebay auction for Barbie's "Solo In The Spotlight" outfit complete with microphone, would send me detailed questions * about the state of the label (was it fully stitched on?) the shine of the dress (original sparkle?) and the condition of the microphone (mint, unused and from a smoke free home?) I'll brag here and say that I ended that Ebay write-up saying "You'll have your vintage Barbie singing Happy Birthday Mr. President in no time" which I thought (and still think) is hilarious.


What I'm trying to say is that I've always thought of dolls as a bit strange. My mother bought me a new Madame Alexander Doll every Christmas and Birthday and I was made to display them in my room. I never had a feeling for any of them. Never wanted to play with any of them. Maybe that's where my bias originated. But I don't think I'm alone in finding the whole doll thing at best curious and at worst downright creepy.


Well, now I have a little girl. And bless her heart she's turning me on to the coolness of dolls. Especially simple cloth dolls. And of course, with me, if I can make it then I can love it. So I've been having a blast making dolls for Addie and her friends. Here's the latest. Made for our neighbor for her fifth birthday. I downloaded the pattern from here and I've been having a lot of fun with it.

Next stop. Original design mouse doll. Stay tuned!


*Ebay Doll Collector questions are loosely based on my recollections. These quotes are not verbatim and are solely intended to indicate the level of obsession typical of hardcore Barbie collectors.

walk the dog

I’m thinking about commitment. Probably because I’ve made a serious commitment to my dog. She’s a sweet thing, a little on the needy side, very high energy. Oh, and she licks and licks and licks. I’ve created a rich fictional back story for her, a doggie fairy tale we tell, where she was abandoned by the side of the road and lived for months foraging pieces of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum from underneath piles of leaves along the highway. And then she was scooped up and dropped off at the Humane Society, where she came this close to death. But she was saved at the last minute and hustled off to the New Life Shelter (I know, sounds like a religious rehab joint for dogs) where Rollie and I found her. When the dog shelter employee picked her up (her shelter name was Opal), she promptly peed all over the poor woman. We played with her. We hemmed and hawed until the doggie re-hab people kicked us out. Then we sat in the car for ten minutes, trying to drive away, before we turned around, went inside and signed the papers.

So, I want her life to be better. She just seems so confused. Her feelings are so easily hurt. She’s uncertain. (Or maybe she’s just the victim of an obsessive anthropomorphizing owner?)

I rented the Dog Whisperer and studied two episodes intently. And came to this brilliant conclusion – she needs a good long walk first thing in the morning. So I’ve made a commitment. Every morning for almost two weeks now we are out the door in the dark and off to the park. I do what the Dog Whisperer says, keep her close to me, on a short, short leash, and she hustles by my side, focused and loyal.

And I practice “calm assertiveness”. Which, incidentally, is turning out to be a good lesson all around. Who knew three-year-olds respond to calm assertive as well as dogs? And maybe I can start phasing out my “monkey howler” voice.

The plan is she’ll finally find her place in life. Quit bopping from submissive to assertive, type B to A. That she’ll be able to relax in to her role as follower, that she’ll learn to trust that we’re the uber dogs and we’ll protect her. That’s the upside.

The downside is that now I’m locked in to getting up early every morning to walk the dog. Every morning. ‘Til when? The rest of her life, right? Because if I don’t get up and walk her I have to face those disappointed brown eyes. And who wants that on their conscience all day?

Of course I’m learning from all this. Getting out in the morning is nice. Fresh air. Pinecones. Misplaced seagulls circling overhead. A well exercised dog which means less irritation (and obsessive licking) for the whole family. And I get a tiny bit of exercise and alone time every day. But I can’t help feeling a little bit of the dread that, for me, inevitably comes with commitment. Because long term promises are, ultimately, so hard to keep.

good snow, goodbye

So I thought it was good, the two weeks of snow. It’s good to have weird, big events in our lives, the kind of things that create befores and afters. Of course many big events, the kind that create a before and after, are terrible. And I don’t mean to overlook that aspects of the snow were terrible – what it cost to the city, the inconvenience, the car accidents, the bitter cold.

But all that aside, there was something to it. To being completely stopped for awhile and being stuck at home. Not thinking about what you need to buy or where you need to go. Not drumming up activity just for activity’s sake. The kid loved it. She’s not a big fan of gear switching these days and so it suited her just fine. Hunkering down on the couch with a pile of books. Glue and paper and paint at the dining room table. And I loved it too. It was restful. And, miraculously, I felt like I had space. A feeling which comes, apparently, from having lots of time and nowhere to go.

Back in my twenties I lived West Virginia for a while and I became friendly with the mailman. His wife was a hard working farm woman and they’d lived in Heaters their whole lives. They worked so hard, all the time, every day, despite the fact that they both must’ve been close to 70. When they’d tell a story it was almost always introduced by the year. And the year was always marked with the big event. “Back the year the barn caught on fire…” or “The year they built the church…”

When you grow up in the suburbs you don’t learn North from South. And when you grow up in the suburbs you don’t learn to tell time by years. It’s a matter of context, orientation. I feel like modern life, city life, whatever you want to call it, lacks context. It lacks places and events that clearly orient us. It lacks a tangible timeline.

So it’s good for a city to have a big snow. Because we’ll remember this year. Our memories of this Christmas will be, I’ll bet, more vivid and specific. Because we had a big weird event that pulled us out of our patterns, pulled us out the blur of days and double yellow lines and faces at the mall. When I think of this Christmas I’ll be oriented, grounded by gingerbread men, wet mittens, a handful of gifts and plenty of space.

what is with this weather?

We've gotten, who knows, at least a foot of snow here in the last two days. Even by Michigan standards this is a pretty bad storm. We've been loving it...making gingerbread men, home made Christmas tree ornaments, watching the muppet show and generally just kicking back and having fun. They weather folks are calling for more snow so there is no end in sight.....

I avoid writing about losing my mother. Even as I sit here my mind battles me (“No one wants to hear about this. It’s such a downer.”) My fingers rebel -- reaching for the backspace button every time I get a sentence down. My eyes well up. I keep my neck tight. When I allow it, the grief is close to overwhelming. And now, here I sit, in my cube at work, dabbing my eyes with a tissue, my mind racing to locate a private place to cry place in this huge, over-populated building. (See. This is a downer. And can I say that it is inhumane to have a work place with no safe place to cry!)

But today is her birthday. And year after year I let days like these sail by. Her birthday, the day she died… Anniversaries that mark an absence. Anniversaries that measure time-away.

When my mother died I inherited her sewing machine. And it’s a beauty. A top of the line, for the times, Bernina that lived, most of my childhood, on the floor of the guest room closet, only coming out for a quick mend here and there. In the last twenty years I’ve hauled it from town to town, taught myself to sew on it, manhandled it, misused it, broken countless needles. But, such an excellent machine, it refuses to quit. And now I use it to bust out puppets, dolls, tiny pillows for teddy bear heads. The stuff of childhood. The creations of mothers.

The sewing machine has a little storage area and, ever since I’ve owned it, my mother’s “storks” have been tucked in the top drawer. I dug them out the other night and put them down on the table next to my “storks”. (My storks were snatched up, new and shiny, back in my estate sale shopping days in Michigan. I thought of my mother immediately, grabbed the scissors, and in the next moment felt grateful that I was raised to recognize a quality pair of indispensable scissors when I saw them)

When I saw the two pairs of scissors on the table, side by side I was floored. And, as it always seems to be with death, I was sad in a new way. Her scissors are old. They are fragile, no longer useful. They are rusting away. And, doing the math, I realized my mother would be turning eighty this year.

Most of my life I haven’t really understood the appeal of fairy tales. Or, honestly, the function. They’ve always seemed old fashioned. They seemed indulgent and hokey. If you listen to a professor I worked for at the University of Michigan, they are all Freudian and perverted. But something about my mom's storks seems so fairy-tale-ish to me. I feel like a little girl, frozen in time, desperately clinging to a pair of magical, disappearing scissors.

I've been wrangling with this last paragraph. I had something philosophical (mildly) and distant and melancholy. It was about death and myths and what the living are left with. But the truth here is a simple one. I miss my mom. Despite that fact that I have no idea what it is that I'm missing anymore. I just miss my mom.

carl warner is a tom waits

Remember when you were in seventh grade and you called the radio station to make a request? Maybe it was "Hotel California" for that babe in your English Class. Maybe it was "Opposites Attract" because Paula Abdul was cute like a little crazy button. Anyways, now when you call a radio station it's called a suggestion. I'm shaking my head right now as I write that. A suggestion. How lame. Team Member. Store Associate. Flight Attendant. Climate Change.

So we've had a request. A dedication. A suggestion. No, no....a contribution. Yeah. A contribution to the tom waits pool. The artist Carl Warner. His art might make your stomach hurt. But there's no denying it. He's a tom waits. Go see. Thanks, Doug!