chicagodads

[Note: continued from yesterday’s post]

Second, I don’t know how to cook a turkey. It is significantly different than cooking ground turkey. Notice, for one, that one has an article and the other is preceded by an adjective. Primarily, though, because it still looks alive. You could, if you tried, imagine a head and a fleshy neck protruding from one end or another of the poor creature. And then there’s that ominous verb-cum-noun-cum- padding-cum-side dish, stuffing. You’re supposed to cram that in the opening of the bird that isn’t the head. No mother of no species would wish that upon even the most annoying neighbor kids. Well, except maybe humans.

Normally, that wouldn’t be a problem for us men. The only stuffing we tend to worry about on this feast is the one that begins in our mouth and comes out from an opening that isn’t in our head. All we need to worry about is coming home from tossing the ol’ pigskin (not the ham. Or even the bacon) in the anticipation of the pure joy that will arise in our pie holes and in our wives as we savor, taste, and swallow the fruits of our sweat and our wives’ labors. Or something like that.

What was astounding about Thanksgiving was how obvious the pro-turkey bias is. Big turkey has got its grabby claws on everybody. Even dear ol’ grams, when referring to our potted pig just out of the oven, mentioned what a good-looking bird that must be. To be fair, though, she could only see it from a distance and my wife absentmindedly agreed with her.

To say that I was making ham on Thanksgiving Day and not turkey was tantamount to admitting that Benedict Arnold was a true American patriot and that nobody should knock the idea of eating human flesh for the Holidays until they’ve at least tried it. You would have thought that I slapped George Washington’s mother in the face.

But the truth is twofold. First, I eat turkey all the time. It is our number one substitute for meat. You want a hamburger without the guilt but you want to know that it had some form of (non-turnip-related) blood? Try a turkey-burger. That’s what we do. All. The. Time. Pasta meat, homemade pizza sausage… well, that’s about it, I suppose. But if there more items that I would make on a regular basis, you could bet that turkey would be on the meat-substitute. Either that or peanut-butter.

TBC tomorrow.

<!–[if !mso]&gt;

st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } &lt;![endif]–>

What was kind of weird about Thanksgiving week (so large it just has to expand) was that I experimented on my own extended family. They were the guineas for my pig because they’re family and therefore expendable. What was doubly off-putting is that my trial run was so much tastier than the actual event. Maybe that’s because I was such a pro-ham that I needn’t worry about the particulars – the little stuff like the actual amount of cooking, the glaze and its beautiful application, and the fact that I kept opening the stove every twenty minutes. I may no longer have been a little suckling, but in the process, my meat wasn’t as succulent.

The other end of the deal was that – although we only needed one ham this time – we had to make more food. This took more time and preparation, of course. None of which I applied.

Cranberries? I opened up that can and I poured it out. And not only that, I chopped it up too, so that it wouldn’t look like it came from a can and sat there the last two years.

Mashed potatoes? Wife made them. I just needed to apply (lots of) milk and butter.

Green bean casserole?  You’re kidding, right?

Dinner rolls? Yeppers. I split them from the little tube myself.

Add delicious, melted butter to hot rolls as they stream fresh from the oven? Oops. Sometimes it really does pay to have a kitchen bigger than a walk-in closet.

Stuffing? Yes. The cubed variety, cooked on the stove with chicken broth.

Gravy? Fired up the stove myself. Turkey flavor, just to add the meat variety.

Deserts were ably provided for by the in-laws. Included in that list is some Frankenstein’s monster of a doughnut-cookie experiment that stopped my blood from flowing for a couple heart beats. Anybody who thinks that that is a criticism just doesn’t understand food or its enjoyment.

Nothing particularly exciting like death happened this last week. I guess that’s what I meant by that. The most exciting occurrence for me was in making the hams. One was glazed, one was not. In either case, it was the first time I ever – what’s the word for it? – roasted meat on my own. My concern is that roasted meat is a gateway food to casseroles. Then, whatever is cool about me being a dad who cooks – not just grills, but actually on a stove and in an oven cooks – will cease to be. I will no longer be experimenting with different flavors, textures and temperatures. I will only throw together whatever is available and mash them together in cheese. Not that I particularly have a problem with cheese. But cheese is like fine wine, it should extend and expand upon the tastes to create a memorably savory experience; it is not like scented candles in a dorm room, pretending to be spiritual yet really covering mistakes, danged mistakes.

I know I don’t like casserole for the same reasons a convert knows she doesn’t like her old cult – it’s a bit weird, I’ve grown up with it, I’m tired of it, my mom made it and she’s not creative.

The weekend passed without event.

Sometimes that is a good thing. But when you’re trapped indoors most of the day and opportunity arises, you want to make sure you’re on that train. Unless something near-tragic happens, there is little chance that something beautiful and unique will transpire before your eyes. And when you’re looking at all the world in a type of bubble – in this case, one with six eyes and two mouths (one of which is so cluttered with storage that the Fire Marshall will shut it down), you begin to see why Old Man Johnson was always creeping outside his window. He was looking forward to seeing Mr. Thomas die of a heart attack on the way up his walkway after a long day at work – or, having failed at that, at least a dog get run over. When none of that panned out, he just took up to taking young kids’ balls away from them.

I have in my possession (somewhere) a photograph taken from their last meet-up together. It is from a series of staged shots, where the two models were framed on a love seat. Jocelyn (the daughter) was by this time five months old and obviously the big cousin, a designation set and locked for the rest of their predetermined lives. Or at least, that’s what the picture would have you believe that Jocelyn would have you believe.

She popped her in the mouth. That’s what it looks like. Right in the kisser with a tensely slow-moving left upper-cut. Chloe, partly because she could not believe that her own flesh and blood was doing this to her, nor could she comprehend why anyone would want to bother her sweet self, but also because – as it stood at the moment – neither one of them could even sit up yet, watched the even unfold in live tragic comicplay.

Of course,some would argue, the transgression could easily be viewed as a demonstration of the elder cousin’s perfume. But that is a foolish argument; the reasoners may as well have said that unicorns are extinct because they were made out of candy or Loch Ness has never been sighted because he swam off the edge of the earth. Why would it be, alas, the back of her hand facing the face of the younger one? No, the only logical explanation to the eye is that the girl with the light, Charlie Brown-esque hair is insanely jealous of the much shorter girl with the full set of hair. Heck, I would have beat her up. There are plenty of men moving on to middle age who could use some of what she’s got.

Jocelyn was probably equally infuriated by the fact that she had to dress up in a red Santa suit while the little one mocked her with cool detachment.

It is the still-photo equivalent of a football-in-the-crotch shot. Jab to the nose. A moment locked up and stored forever – or for however long it takes until we need a new manner of storing photography.

In a matter of hours, the sixteen month old sleeping soundly in the room adjacent will meet up with her only cousin, a young pixie-haired lass turning one year within the next week. Together, they will probably make up stories, sing folk songs by the camp fire, talk endlessly on the phone, gossip, discover males and music, fight over boys and bands, travel to each others’ cities, moonwalk and breakdance, play in preschool and kindergarten and then find out that learning isn’t supposed to be fun in grade school through high school, get in trouble with the law, wonder why on earth anyone would want to move where ‘nana lives, go to university and hopefully learn while having fun – not mutually exclusive as PBS shows us. Maybe they’ll even learn from each other about raising their own families. The first of the two new-generation Dye kids. The first post-college babies.

But that’s not gonna happen tomorrow. Or anytime soon. Tomorrow will just be a familiarizing, a meet-and-greet. They should have a couple more of those during the next few days, but then my brother and his wife are going to take the baby with them to the East Coast, where they all live, presumably without any cousins of any kind. The daughter and the niece may see each other in the near future, hopefully within a month. And that may be it for a while. It’s hard to travel with family. It’s really hard when you’re not much of a traveler yourself in the first place.

I want to show you all pictures of my sweet Jocelyn and her (slightly younger) cousin. I may not do it at this site, but I’ll at least try to link to it. Chloe is a doll, but I rarely see images of her myself. So, when she (and the requisite accompanying parents) arrive tomorrow, you can bet we’ll take millions upon millions of pix.

Economy’s killing. Personally, we’re doing all right. And we expect to continue to do all right. But we have friends who are feeling the housing and financial crisis. Just got back from blistering up my thumbs trying to help some friends ready a garden apartment so they could rent it out and afford their mortgage payments. On the flip side, at the beginning of next week, we will have a steady job between the two of us for the first time in a year and a half. That’s before the baby was born. And by steady job, decent (if not outstanding) income, good benefits, bi-monthly checks, etc. To boot, she’ll be working with a non-for-profit company that is trying to make the world a better place (and none-to-soon, I might add).

Also, we’re trying to finish off our debts and we may be able to completely cut them off within the year. My hope is that when employers are talking about “trimming the fat,” they’re not speaking of people’s livelihoods primarily, but of excessive consumerism and wasteful spending.

Trying to get the NGO off the ground. We just got an EIN (Employer Identification Number <?>), and now we’re looking at banks that will work in the US and the country we’ll be working in as well as trying to figure out how to set it up so that we can begin fundraising. Looking for some good, free lawyers.

Now, I’m hungry…

I’ve just discovered that facebook status updates (and the comments for them) is my preferred choice to communicate nowadays. It may be the perfect choice for me now. And I’m not sure why that is. After all, if it is true that eighty-five percent of all communication is non-verbal, then how do I explain my favor of a style of communication which is ninety percent verbal?

Maybe it has something to do with the inverted sense of context. Face-to-face communication is first and utmost about body language, about the stance the participants take with each other, about vocal inflection, the winks and head-nods, lowering or raising of the shoulders, opening of the arms and clenching of the fists, pursing of the lips, the looks over your shoulder, under the desk and deep into your eyes. These all signify something primal and instantaneous in us. A smile may mean something different in certain cultures, but generally a kiss is a kiss is a kiss.

Written communication is, by contrast, relatively new and still not universal. Written communication is all verbal; context has to be created. This is why novels are so long - most words are not talking words, they are words setting up context, creating new context. Most short stories also create most of their context. Yet the shorter the medium, the less likely it is to create its own context, but rather play with other contexts. Poetry tends to drive off of already created contexts as much as creating new worlds. But even the new worlds are made with shards and remnants of the old ones. Poetry is different, though, in that it is largely about the baggage we bring to the mix of words and fragments and combinations of words. Facebook status updates, on the other hand, are by definition smaller than haiku.

If words used in face-to-face communication are surrounded by context, and words used in novels create context for verbalized words, and words used in poetry evoke and play with context, then Fbsu’s are completely encased in context.

As mentioned, we’ve had a rough time of sleeping recently. It’s a bit weird because it’s not like the baby is a newborn anymore so we expect to sleep and tend to revolve our calendars on the expectancy of sleep nowadays. Whereas for the first six or so months you expect that you won’t get any sleep, so you reserve your energy likewise. Neither of us would be very good at trying out new careers, for instance (not that I’m all that great at it now…).

So, we lay in bed last night as exhausted as the electricity on the circuit we blew. And my wife is telling me stuff. I’m not sure what she was talking about. I remember it slightly this morning, but she was excited about something. The fact that I was very tired probably doesn’t bode well. But I was trying hard to be a good husband and listen to her. Until I figured that I probably shouldn’t anymore and flatly (too flatly) told her that it was late. Do you know how I know? I daydreamed at night. While she was talking, I had a moving picture in my head of the sort that features people trying to outfit a hippo with hot-pants.

It was, indeed, time to sleep.

We’ve waited a long time. A long time to have someone in charge of the nation who understands and has worked with the poor. Who has chosen to take a low-paying job right after an Ivy League graduation. Who, though accused of trying to start class war, is trying to bridge gaps between those who have and those who have not - not by taking people’s money, but by listening to each side and asking all to be attentive to the needs of others.

We’ve waited a long time. Someone of color is now in the White House. Someone who can represent the vast majority of the world to the vast majority of the world. Some people can’t appreciate that. Some people are bigots.

We’ve waited a long time.  She’s sixteen months old now. Today. That’s a year and a third. But she still refuses to sleep through the night. And that’s my fault. I’ve gone in to rescue her when she was sick, when she would scream at an unusually high pitch, when she would scream for an unusually long period, when I figured that she might be too cold or too hot or too hungry. There were a few nights in a roll when we’d make a concerted effort to let her calm herself down (or, rather, learn to calm herself down) but those nights were broken up by visits and out-of-house experiences. So, for the last five nights - and counting - we have been trying to outlast her crying. And it’s making me miserable. But the guarantee is that she’ll get the hang of it and subsequently sleep through the night.

Some things are worth waiting for. And fighting for. Savor the good moments when you get ‘em, because there are other things that we are waiting for still.