Winter Break

One of the (many) things that displeases me about winter is how, right about the end of January, it starts to dawn on me that I no longer have any friends.

We moved to Asheville in sunshine and warm evenings and forged solid friendships with our neighbors on the sidewalk in front of our house. Talk of grilling in the yard floated in the air, but we didn't really need to eat together to create camaraderie. Here it was, right outside our front door, absent any reason to expend undue effort.

But now it's winter, and all I spot outside our front door are the fleeting forms of bundled-up dog owners racing through the arctic air with their pooches and, twice now, our neighbor's chickens fruitlessly scratching at the hard, grassless dirt of the front yards up and down the block.

It's not like we spent our warm California winters buddying up to our neighbors, but at least we had the option. To be honest, we were kind of surprised when Eric and Fernando, our Long Beach neighbors to the north, invited us to the party celebrating the completion of construction on their new, mustard-colored house. Hubby had engaged in a vigorous trash can dispute with them when we first moved in, consisting of silently pushing our shared can in front of their gate when they left it blocking ours and finding it back in front of ours the following morning. He finally locked it up securely inside our yard like a forbidden totem, desperately wished for, temptingly close, but denied. They acquired their own can from the city and thereafter we gave each other friendly waves and not much else in the way of social offering.

The warm Long Beach weather actually cut against any possibility of friendship with our neighbors in the apartment building to the south. Mild, beach-tinged nights allowed Apartment 4 to host frat-like parties that spilled out into the hallway on the other side of our wall throughout the year. The woman in Apartment 2 liked to have passionate 2:30 a.m. cell phone conversations under our bedroom window even in the dead of winter despite Hubby's repeated admonishments to "MOVE IT INSIDE!" I did become friendly with a young mother from the building whom I occasionally spotted as I sat in front of our house in the desperate days when The Boy was old enough to want entertainment but too young to provide it for himself and I was desperate to talk to someone -- anyone -- who could speak my adult language. But she lived on the far side of the building from us, and we weren't quite friendly enough to displace my certainty that every person making their way up or down the front steps was the evil sleep stealer driving us away from snow-less, ice-less climes.

So, too, I'm aware that one can get too much of a good neighbor and perhaps prefer a few months away from the glare of their scrutiny. A sort of detante period to keep relations friendly.

We had no such declared retreat in West Hollywood, where bare-chested Barry (if the thermometer dipped below 65 he covered up with a slumped bathrobe) passed out bon mots about the residents like free samples of Boca Burgers to the shoppers in Wild Oats. There was something truly comforting about having all the neighbors gather sympathetically around our home after the police apprehended the man who had climbed through our living room window at five in the morning by yelling, "Get down! Get down!" and cuffing him on our front lawn as he emerged from the vacant unit next door showered and wearing clothes he had stolen some days earlier from the next house down the block. But I used to grow anxious walking leisurely Roxanne home from the park for fear of being swooped down upon by the lonely guy who lay in wait for people to regale with stories of his wealth and business acumen.

One of the early joys of finding ourselves in Asheville was the neighborhood and, more specifically, the neighbors. We were reminded of how many potential friendships lay within a one-block radius at a Christmas Eve party from which we emerged certain we would be throwing dinner parties every weekend of 2008 and forging life-long friendships, the kind where your kids play with their kids so you don't end up the loser parents who still haven't found a sitter they'd leave their boy with five months after moving to their new home.

There have been, I need not say, no dinner parties.

Which is why I was so grateful for yesterday's brilliance of sun and temperatures in the fifties. This description aptly fits the California winter days of my childhood when we used to bundle ourselves in our down ski parkas, walk the dogs a couple of blocks, and hurry home to drink hot chocolate in front the fire my father had waiting for us. But now that I am a winter-hardy gal, I welcome fifty degrees as an invitation to take The Boy to the park, where other families are enjoying the break in winter.

Usually, my social interaction with other parents at the park consists of directing small smiles in their direction designed to convey the sense that I am not averse to conversation but don't presume to be one of the established members of their social circle. Generally, my smiles seem to have been received in this unfortunate manner, and I find myself talking only to The Boy. Such conversation consists of sparkling phrases like, "Don't put sand in your mouth," and "Yes, that's a dog!"

But yesterday brought a new revelation: Almost Walking. The Boy, so shy when traversing the playground safe in Mommy's arms, gamely tried some walking-while-holding-Mommy's-fingers-for-balance. He discovered this practice has multiple benefits. First, it allows one to make one's way, repeatedly, with no end in sight, back to the steps of the jungle gym where, after a little boost, one can crawl with the speed of a greyhound puppy to the top of the slide and force Mommy to push small children out of the way before one tries to go down head first without her. Second, after an exhilarating slide down the slide in Mommy's lap -- angled awkwardly to create enough clearance for us to pick up some speed -- one lands on one's feet, one's lungs unconstricted and thus primed to give a particularly hearty cry of excitement. One can also lead Mommy with hands clutched around her fingers in full exploration of the underside of the jungle gym because she has to bend over painfully to hold one's hands anyhow, and so needn't worry about head clearance.

Best of all, once The Boy was semi-independently ambulatory, he found himself in the midst of other kids. Kids who talked to him and then asked me why he didn't seem to understand what they were saying. "He's 13 months old," didn't satisfactorily answer the question for them, it seemed, but it helped me save face with the nearby parents who, based on The Boy's height, might have taken him for a two-year-old lagging sadly behind in his development.

While The Boy couldn't talk to the other kids, he could yell at them, often without their notice, but with great brio nonetheless. And when he yelled, touched, crawled past the other kids, it often prompted their parents to speak to me. Or me to speak to their parents, frequently in terms of apology -- on The Boy's behalf for crawling right through the line for the slide and on my own behalf for sliding down without first checking to make sure the 22-month-old had who went before us had cleared out from the bottom. Embarrassing, yes, especially when the child's mother calls to him in a panic to move out of the way. But it has been a long time since I had to observe slide etiquette.

I'm not saying that I walked home with my pockets full of new friends' phone numbers, or even that our conversations made it past "How old is s/he?" But for the first time I felt like I was part of the playground community. No longer must I huddle in desperate, dead-ended conversation with the other pariah-parents relegated to the sandbox. Somehow, on this sunny day warm enough for me to lumber up and down the slide in nothing more than a sweater and jeans, I discovered a place where people interact and belong and really live -- outside the cocoon of their heated homes -- in the winter.

With breaks like this, maybe I'll even find myself hosting a dinner party before the summer solstice.

We Make the Most of Our Health Insurance

In the past 8 days, The Boy and I have been to doctors' offices 9 times. The Boy has had his temperature taken at least 14 times. I have been stuck with needles 8 times, and The Boy twice. Between the two of us, we have ingested 10 different medicinal substances.

And I'm not ready to call things normal.

It all began 11 days ago, when I found out that I would have to undergo out-patient surgery.

It's not that I'm squeamish. I've chatted away with phlebotomists filling vial after vial of my blood, discussed my work while doctors do what they do with speculums. I'm the one who never says it hurts when a physician pushing her hands into some tender part of my anatomy asks if it hurts.

It's just that the past several times I've casually trusted someone to perform a medical procedure on my body, I've come out of it feeling . . . invaded. And the surgery I was told I had to have feels particularly invasive. As if anything that involves strangers putting metal implements into your body isn't particularly invasive.

I had been avoiding the surgery for six weeks and felt more than a little bit defeated that I had run out of options. Acupuncture sure made me feel less gloomy, but it wasn't resolving the problem. I'm grateful I found my way back to regular yoga classes, but they didn't regularize my body. And, frankly, I was sure I had only a limited amount of time remaining before Hubby threw up his hands and told me to move back to California to feel sorry for myself.

So we scheduled the surgery for the following Tuesday, and I continued my week a marked woman.

Two days later, a Wednesday, I received the welcome distraction of a call from The Boy's school. "His temperature is fine, but he's kind of weepy and wants his Mommy," they told me.

What could be better than a child who just wants to be held by his Mommy, who, conveniently enough, really wanted to hold her boy?

I took him home and we played cheerfully and I pretended I didn't feel like I was walking around under a big, black, scheduled-surgery cloud. We had a little dinner, which, these days, consists of The Boy sticking his fingers into whatever dish I'm holding and eating his refried beans/yogurt/other viscous substance by hand. We both enjoy it greatly.

After his dinner, we stopped in the kitchen to feed the dogs their kibble and Mommy a few corn chips.

As I expertly held The Boy with one arm and reached for the chips with the other, The Boy's eyes bugged and his body jerked. About a gallon of vomit cascaded over the chip bag and onto the kitchen floor.

When you have been a mother for 13 months -- 6 of which involved a child with reflux so bad he seemed to spit up twice the amount of milk you had just poured down him at every single meal -- a little bit of vomit doesn't panic you. Even a lot of vomit.

In fact, a few months ago, I watched all of Superbad covered in The Boy's vomit. It was only the second time we'd been out to see a movie since his birth, and I really, really wanted to see it. It probably helped that the theater was dark enough that I didn't see just how much vomit I was sitting in until the lights came up and I had marginally dried out. Hubby claims he missed the vomit entirely and got to watch the movie blissfully unaware of just how groce his wife has become.

Now, as The Boy vomited his way down the hall to the bathroom, I calmly stripped off my chunked cashmere sweater and filled the bathtub. My excuse was to wash him off, but honestly The Boy loves his bath, and, sure enough, it seemed to fix everything.

The next day was what we in Asheville like to call a "snow day" -- about an inch of white stuff on the ground and temperatures reaching the low 40's, so it's pretty much all gone by noon but everything closes down anyhow so no one has to risk driving mountain roads in "weather."

In this case, the "weather" meant the cancellation of the "pre-op" appointment I didn't want to have. Hmm. Maybe there is something to this winter weather.

Furthermore, much as I look at every school closing as a personal affront to my efforts to locate something called a life in the mess of my days doing nothing of permanence, I had to admit it was just as well The Boy's school closed as well or we might have caused an epidemic. Not that I knew anything much was wrong until the afternoon, when I took the first of The Boy's temperature readings and discovered that he would have been sent home from school if he had been there.

Out came the trusty Tylenol. I remember vaguely the days when Hubby and I resisted putting any sort of evil drug into The Boy's perfect system and how I would cry every time I gave in and dosed him at 2:30 in the morning to ease his teething pain. By now, however, we recognize Tylenol for what it is -- our drug of choice to make our boy smile again. I should be embarrassed to admit that when he catches sight of the bottle he reaches for it with great urgency, begging for a squirt of its cherry-flavored goodness.

This time, however, Tylenol let us down. I held him in bed, rather relishing the chance to just read a book and let everything else go to hell. Until I took his temperature again. It had climbed to 103.8. Definitely high enough to justify a call to the on-call pediatrician.

"Try Motrin," she suggested.

Out went Hubby to CVS and back he came armed with substantial bottles of both berry-flavored Motrin and some back-up Tylenol. The Boy and I cuddled up for a night together, banished Hubby to the daybed in the office, and, with him well dosed, we had a peaceful night.

Until Friday morning hit me and I realized that -- much as I would have liked to let the pre-op appointment slip away unnoticed by all but myself -- I had to be responsible and reschedule it.

Which is why I found myself at 1:15 sitting in the waiting room of the satellite office. The last time I had been here, the receptionist had kept me waiting 45 minutes past my appointment time, blandly assuring me that I was signed in and everyone knew I was waiting . Until I huffed out and told her to cancel my appointment because I had a child to pick up from daycare. Only then did she mention that she was waiting for my records to be faxed over from the other office and thus had not even put me in the queue.

This time, I had Hubby sitting next to me missing work and holding a baby who, it was becoming increasingly clear, was not just tired from being rudely pulled away from his nap, but who was feeling really lousy. I sat in my seat brooding and fighting the urge to walk away from not only the pre-op appointment but the op as well.

Forty-five minutes later The Boy was feeling even lousier and the receptionist was blandly assuring me "they haven't forgotten you."

Fifty minutes later, Hubby sprang into action.

There's nothing like watching an angry man clutching a sick baby telling off the receptionist for rolling her eyes at him. "I want to talk to someone who can tell us what's going on," he stormed.

Wouldn't you know it, within minutes we were ushered into a private waiting room by a nurse plainly trained in sweetly handling irate patients. She explained that the doctor had arrived late from the hospital and wouldn't have time to see us for 45 more minutes.

Now, I don't know what kind of world the receptionist lives in, but I tend to think it's only polite to inform someone that she won't be seen until TWO HOURS after her appointment time, oh, when she checks in. "They haven't forgotten you" is just not an adequate substitute.

Happily, the nurse gave us the option of seeing a different doctor, as the one we were scheduled to see wasn't the one scheduled to do the surgery anyhow. Since, remember, my appointment was supposed to be the day before at a different office. Damn winter.

The doctor who did see us was perfectly nice, but what she did just didn't seem like something a doctor was needed for. Or an office visit, for that matter. All she did was ask me some questions that we in the law business like to call CYA. Because lawyers are both painfully unhip and overconfident of their own importance, I'm willing to bet that it doesn't take a law degree to know that CYA means Cover Your Ass and that the waste of three hours of my day was nothing more than a requirement of the insurance companies. Maybe they imagined that if allowed to, say, answer a few questions over the phone, I would lie about not smoking and they therefore needed me within sniffing distance of the person doing the asking. And maybe -- I don't know, I don't have medical training -- but maybe doctors are better able to smell the lingering odor of tobacco on a lying surgery-patient's clothing than, say, a nurse who wouldn't have arrived late from the hospital and hence have a backlog of patients. We live in North Carolina, where people smoke, so this is entirely possible.

At any rate, by the time I got The Boy home his eyes were glazed, his mouth hung down in the corners like an upside-down slice of mandarin orange, and he had a cough that hurt to hear. His temperature 20 minutes after a dose of our savior the Motrin was 104.

This merited a call to the doctor's office. Which, of course, was closing. The doctor told me to bring him in to the Saturday sick clinic in the morning and go to the hospital if anything at all changed in the middle of the night.

These are words that can make a mother already freaked out and frustrated about impending invasive surgery cry.

"I think he has pneumonia," I sobbed to Hubby. "And we're going to have to go to the emergency room."

"I think he's just fine," Hubby said in that way of his that treads the line between soothing and dismissive. He might have even smirked just a little bit at the doctor's the next morning when their thermometer suggested that That Boy was, in fact, Just Fine. (Okay, that was for effect. Hubby would never smirk at me in a doctor's office with our sick boy. In fact, he is not a smirker at all. But, in these circumstances, he could have been.)

Ah, but there is a reason we see doctors instead of merely thermometers. Doctors can do things like look into ears and announce that The Boy has a nasty ear infection. They can validate mothers by saying that The Boy's cough does sound bad, even if they can hear nothing in his lungs. And they can prescribe cherry-flavored antibiotics with just the right amount of apologia for giving him antibiotics to make you feel like a good parent who wouldn't resort to antibiotics if it weren't really, really necessary.

And so we spent a weekend fever-free. The Boy continued to sleep with me, and Hubby continued to sleep on the daybed in the office. In all honesty, he probably preferred it that way, as I spent much of my time shuffling through the house moaning about not wanting surgery. It gets to be a drag after a while, I know.

By Monday morning, we were discussing why we should still take our on-the-mend boy to the doctor because, even though the antibiotics seemed to be working, that cough was worrisome.

"Remember she said it sounded like pneumonia," I said as I wiped The Boy's bare bottom and grabbed a clean diaper. He laughed and wiggled his legs.

"What's that?" Hubby demanded. By "that" he meant a sugar-coating of red spots all over The Boy's chest and back.

As is apparent by now, we are not fans of medical intervention. So, naturally, we blamed the antibiotics.

Off we went to the doctor's office. She examined him, growing more speckled by the minute. She quizzed me on what medications we'd given him -- none since a bedtime dose of Motrin the night before. She listened to his lungs. She spoke to him instead of me, perhaps to remind me that I was holding my baby and not to do anything sudden or violent.

"You're going to have to get a chest x-ray, buddy," she said.

There are any number of good reasons the radiology technicians might prefer to have the father stand in the room wearing a metal apron and holding the baby's arms over his head as he is fitted into a plastic sheath and made to sit still and scream while his chest is x-rayed. It could be because fathers tend to be taller. Or stronger. They are definitely, one hundred percent certainly not pregnant. And -- and I think this is the deciding factor -- they are less likely to grab their screaming baby and flee from the room.

Back we went to the pediatrician's office. It was a long wait, but at least Hubby and I could take turns watching the DVD of Spiderman playing on the flat screen t.v. Until he had to go back to work and I got to hear the news that, yes, The Boy had viral pneumonia, and a bad case of it at that. He got two shots of antibiotics -- my friend at this point, I will never deride them again -- and nestled blearily into my lap while we waited half an hour longer to make sure he didn't have an adverse reaction to the antibiotics -- in which case I wouldn't have such good things to say about modern medicine.

When we settled back in the waiting room I was disappointed to discover that Spiderman had started over again, subjecting me to exactly the same scenes I had already watched. Finally, a mother complained that her three-year-old girl might be, say, frightened by such fare in the doctor's office, and they put in The Incredibles instead.

When I got home and crawled into bed with The Boy, Hubby suggested that at least this day had taken my mind off the surgery scheduled for the morrow.

"No," I assured him. "It just made me more miserable."

How miserable? Consider the odds that your child will be diagnosed with pneumonia the day before you are scheduled for surgery you would cut off your right arm to avoid. Add to this the unlikelihood that the appointment time the pediatrician has available to check on his progress is the very hour you are under edict to appear at the hospital for surgery prep. Make it even more special -- the day of The Boy's diagnosis, the day before your scheduled surgery, is Martin Luther King Day and your doctor's office is closed so you can't call the surgery scheduler and re-schedule.

It was touch and go Tuesday morning whether Hubby would successfully talk me into going through with the surgery. It must have been the combination of the surgery scheduler still not picking up her phone and The Boy's rash fading that found me entering out-patient admissions alone.

I mumbled to everyone I saw that my husband would be coming and must be allowed to come find me. They promised he would as they stripped my clothes, made me sit on a gurney, and tried four times to get an IV going without "blowing a vein." In case you were wondering, it is not fun to be fitted with an IV four times while your veins blow. Especially when you are grudgingly willing to even sit in the room, waiting for your husband to call to tell you the baby is fine and envisioning how you will rip the painfully inserted IV out of your arm and walk to the pediatrician's office if you find out that he is, say, having another chest x-ray.

Finally, Hubby called as I stubbornly sat up on the gurney, refusing to be a lazy body remaining inert for convenience's sake.

"He's doing much better," he assured me. "She's going to give him a breathing treatment to open up his lungs. I'm going to be here another half an hour."

"You probably won't make it here before my surgery," someone mumbled in a deep, toneless, I'm-not-really-here-but-sitting-on-a-beach-in-Hawaii voice.

"Probably not," Hubby admitted. "I love you."

I cried. Until the orderly came to transport me to the pre-op room in a wheelchair and I bitched at her about hating being wheeled around in a wheelchair because it makes me feel less human. She was kind of confused by me and unfortunately had no choice but to make my transport even more humiliating by loading me down with the white plastic shopping bags of my belongings that, by all rights, Hubby should have been holding.

It's only fair to say that everyone was really nice to me. In the case of the pre-op nurse, maybe a little too nice, as I promised her I didn't care whether the plastic glasses case we used was blue or purple. "Oh, the blue matches your eyes," she simpered. I wondered it she had ever had any luck at all making a single grown person about to undergo surgery smile.

Security came and took my things, the doctor had an honest and respectful talk with me, the anesthesiology nurse offered me something for my nerves which I heartily refused, and pretty soon after that it was over.

Plainly those drugs they gave me were good, because I woke up apologizing for my rotten mood and even smiled at the nurse in the recovery room.

It wasn't until a couple hours after I'd been home, when I'd lulled Hubby into thinking it was all over and my insanity had subsided and I was competent to take care of my child that the drugs wore off. "I'm depressed," I announced and dragged myself into the office to sleep on the daybed.

The Boy and I are both on the mend -- his cough subsides as my depression does. But the flurries outside my window don't bode well for our futures. Hubby must agree, as he recently purchased a light machine designed to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Personally, I think living somewhere where winter doesn't exist would be a better solution. But since everything else about Asheville is pretty okay, I'm willing to give the SAD machine a try.

The Year of the Normal

On our first day back to school after the holidays, Hubby's birthday, an in-law visit, and an inch of snow that shut down all of Asheville (a very good sign, I told myself, that such weather is not the norm, disproven, alas, by the blanket of snow outside my window right now), one of The Boy's teachers said to me, "I'm ready for normal."

Amen.

There was a time, not so long ago, that my desire for the normal would have alarmed me greatly. Life as the single mother of a velvet-eared basset hound was about motion. My calendars were adorned with notations in different colored pens to give me something to which I could count down. "Okay, it's Monday today, but tomorrow I teach a yoga class at 5:45, and Wednesday is trash day, and Thursday I'll watch Tivo, and Friday is Friday and I've made it through another week." Hair appointments, therapy appointments, acupuncture appointments, an appointment with an astrologer (just one, and it was pretty cool), lunches with colleagues, and even a date or two made my life run.

Even worse, I pulled out one of my old journals from the mid-90's the other day and found myself gasping for breath as if on a very long and very frenzied run. From the gym to the law firm (black leather book bag crammed full of gym clothes, shampoo, and, yes, hair dryer because the ones in the locker rooms at the gym made my hair frizzy and doll-like) to drinks after work or a meeting for my volunteer work at the National Zoo or a movie or . . . No wonder I experienced panic attacks if I awakened on a Sunday with nothing to do. (The cure, if you should ever suffer the same illness: run 10 miles with a section of the New York Times in your pocket to read on the subway home.)

In those days, normal was bad. Normal was safe. Normal was slow. Normal was . . . normal.

Now my panic attacks are brought on by the fact that I want life to be normal. I want to be the mom riding the slide with my boy on a Saturday afternoon. I want to be the person who eats dinner watching a half hour at a time of The Return of the Jedi or Chinatown (we aren't too picky as long as we can Tivo it for free) before washing the dishes and getting ready for bed at 9:00. I wish I knew that I would be sitting down to the same desk, the same work every day.

What could bring on such a misplaced desire to be boring?

Maybe it's moving into a house on which I actually put a 30-year mortgage. Although I owned a lovely house in St. Louis, I went for the better rate on the 7-year balloon because I just couldn't fathom living in the same place for more than seven years. (I made it a whopping four, a record for me.)

Maybe it's having a husband who's my best friend. Although in the past my best friends and I did more than look forward to watching new episodes of The Wire and driving to sleepy little towns for lunch on the weekends.

Many would say it's a Welcome to Motherhood moment. But I vowed to be a Hip Mama when I was trying to get pregnant (see "At 39, I Want the Baby Without the Blame," Newsweek, 10/10/05; don't see a google search I did on myself to see if I could include a link to a copy of the article because I found some weird comments about it out there and now it's bugging me).

I think the reason I want 2008 to be the Year of the Normal is because I can't remember the last time life was.

Certainly there's been no normal since our move to Asheville. There was that month trying to find child care for The Boy so I could get back to my work. Those few weeks with the sitter who didn't seem to do much with him except take him to Wendy's and didn't free up too much of my time because whenever I walked through the room I had to hold him until he stopped crying. And those endless weeks when his adjustment to school was delayed by: a cold; an ear infection; the antibiotics he took to kick the ear infection; a visit by my parents when he was just getting over the ear infection; a visit to his aunt and uncle's house in West Virgina followed by a visit here by his grandmother by which time he felt he should rightly be the center of all attention and not have to share toys with a bunch of other kids; and the stomach bug.

And then . . . he started liking school. I started working at my desk instead of staring at the school's phone number posted right over my computer and wondering how often I could call to check up on him and whether I'd get the bills paid before they called and told me he'd been crying for 45 minutes straight and would really like to go home now.

In fact, by early December there were even a few days he didn't cry when I left him in the mornings. When he, dare I say it, looked forward to school. I started yoga again. I found time to write.

Until the holidays came. Before I knew it, life was all about being a mother instead of a writer. Imagine the time spent shopping when you have not only a boy's first Christmas gifts, but his first birthday gifts as well. But, wait, there's more -- how about planning Hubby's Christmas gift and making it a surprise party with his out-of-town family members? There just isn't time for normal.

By the time January 2 rolled around and brought with it the start of The Boy's school again I was dead set on normal.

Which is plainly why January 2 was a snow day.

They tell me things shut down here at the merest whisper of snow because of the mountain roads, but I'm pretty sure it's just because everyone else needs a break from normal and no one cares that I am still trying to find my way back to it.

So it's now January 20 and I'm sitting in my office with the sheer brown curtains I bought in September and just put up this morning and I still have holiday cards to send out (unapologetically, I've decided) and I'm figuring that even 20 days in, 2008 has a chance of being The Year of the Normal.

Of course, not this week, because I have too much to do.

We Interrupt Our Regular Programming

Chances are if you read this blog this is old news to you.

But as I am now groveling for votes in an American Idol-style new novel competition, I'll risk repeating myself in the hopes of catching some lovely person who has stumbled onto my blog or one of you equally lovely friends (or friends of friends) whose email account spit my email into spam because the "To" line includes my entire address book.

My novel, Long Beach Baby, cruelly still unpublished, has been selected as a semi-finalist in Amazon.com's Breakthrough Novel contest. And you can read a whole 5,000 words of it by going to http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00121WEUK/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top and clicking on the Download (for free!) button in the upper right corner of your screen.

More importantly -- and here comes the pandering -- you can write a comment or review and help me catch the attention of the folks at Penguin Books who are deciding which excerpts they will review and consider for a spot as finalist.

May I repeat this in grossly clear terms? PLEASE WRITE SOMETHING (hopefully nice) ABOUT MY EXCERPT (and maybe, while you're at it, say how the not-so-great-reviews are written by crazy people who wouldn't know a good novel if they actually sat down and read one) SO I CAN ADVANCE TO THE NEXT ROUND.

Plus, it might make up for the fact that I have posted NOTHING on this blog for the entirety of 2008.

Of that, a posting very, very soon, I promise. Just know that I am spending all my baby-free and sleep-free time right now tracking down every last person who was ever nice to me and begging them to review my piece.

In the meantime, enjoy, I hope . . .

Christmas in Asheville

It wouldn't be Christmas in Asheville, it seems, if we didn't find ourselves herding chickens.

The same chickens, in fact, who had survived Audrey's hunting expedition in September. It was, without a doubt, our duty to see them safely home, both as a matter of holiday good will and because we still feel kind of guilty about the whole Audrey-catches-a-chicken thing.

Fittingly enough, Christmas kicked off with an invitation from the chickens' owner.

It was the 22nd, a Saturday, and she really issued the invitation to our housekeeper. I saw the two of them chatting in front of the house and thought it was nice that a Spanish-speaking neighbor would take the time to chat with our shy, non-English-speaking housekeeper.

Then she turned to me and Hubby. Her tenant, she explained, missed his home in Mexico and was anxious to meet some neighbors. Now. At this moment on a darkening Saturday afternoon before Christmas.

She was quite insistent.

I explained that I had to take our housekeeper home, and the chicken-neighbor assured me our housekeeper had already accepted her invitation. It kind of surprised me to hear this, but I thought maybe our housekeeper knew the chicken-neighbor. And it wasn't like I had anywhere I absolutely had to be.

So off we trooped, Hubby with The Boy in front, our housekeeper walking uncertainly behind them, and me taking up the rear, so as to be respectful of the housekeeper, who seemed as unclear about what we were heading into as we were.

A man we took to be the tenant from Mexico stood on the front porch with another man, smoking cigarettes and speaking in hushed, relaxed voices. They stopped talking and watched with mild interest as we straggled through the front gate.

Hubby turned to me. "Are we sure this is the right house?" he asked.

My response was not as positive as it might have been.

The man we took to be the tenant from Mexico finally asked if we were friends of the chicken-neighbor. He seemed quite unaware of his anxiety to meet some neighbors.

We made our way inside to find a polite but lost-looking college student seated at a table set with ham and a small cooked chicken. Awkwardness ensued.

I looked out the propped open back door onto the screened porch and admired the chickens peeking inside at me.

I asked if the cooked chicken on the table had once resided in the yard. Our chicken-neighbor assured me it had not.

Hubby and the housekeeper ate some of the store-bought chicken and some ham and some pecan pie.

At some point, our housekeeper gave me the nod, and we wished everyone a happy holiday and set out to continue ours. In the car on the way to her house I asked if she knew the chicken-neighbor. She told me she didn't. I told her I didn't really either and felt released from any responsibility.

Hubby and I failed to return the chicken-neighbor's invitation the next day when other neighbors came by to share The Boy's first birthday cake. No doubt it would have been the neighborly thing for us to do, but I think we were both still a little bit shaken by the awkwardness.

And, really, chickens were the last thing on our mind as we watched The Boy open the first of his gifts on Christmas eve. My mind, in fact, was taken up with a horrifying realization. Both of the gifts we gave him to open were from his aunts -- a tradition Hubby wanted to carry on from his childhood. And both of the presents required assembly.

This fact alone is not a cause for terror. We'd have plenty of time to put them together on Christmas Day, after all.

This year.

But in a flash I saw The Boy at two years old, when he would not calmly examine the box with the toy that required assembly and look at us with a perfectly happy four-and-a-half tooth smile and drool on his chin. Instead, he would scream as Hubby and I, hands shaking from the pressure, struggled to understand the instructional pictures that have now replaced any attempts to explain in clear English how to assemble a toy but have failed to make it any easier. Plainly, Hubby and I agreed, we would have to budget pre-Christmas time for gift assembly in the future.

And therein lay the horror. Exhausted from the effort of buying and wrapping gifts for an expanding family and a child with the bad luck to be born on December 23, I tried to imagine how -- where on earth -- I will find the time next year to also assemble gifts. Of course, I knew. Gone will be Mommy's time for sleep. Which should make for an especially pleasurable holiday season.

This year, however, was proving most pleasant. It was Christmas afternoon, The Boy was upstairs snoozing away the overwhelming fact of three straight days of gifts, and Hubby and I were enjoying the quiet of a house with a sleeping baby.

Then Audrey broke the silence with a strangled cry of excitement and frustration. Across the street, the chickens were taking a stroll down the block.

Our first instinct was to take pictures.

After a few minutes I asked Hubby if it wouldn't be the neighborly thing to put them back in their yard.

"Can you herd chickens?" he asked, quite reasonably.

I recalled how our next door neighbor had rounded the corner of our house with the chicken Audrey caught wrapped gently in her tee-shirt. The chicken had seemed calm and not inclined to peck. After all, I told myself, they let someone reach underneath them to take their eggs. Surely I could just sidle up to them, one by one, scoop them up, and deposit them in the hen house.

Except that, up close, these chickens were really big. Exceptionally beautiful, I noted, as I admired the fluff of feathers above their talons and the way the black and brown melted together over their sharp beaks. Surely holiday samaritanism didn't extend to being pecked and clawed by angry chickens whose walk I was interrupting.

Yet, bravely, I crept closer.

One of the chickens made a run for it. "No!" I yelled, shooing it back onto someone's front lawn. "Don't go in the street!" If that chicken found itself under a car's tire on my watch, I thought, I would forever be branded a chicken killer or, at least, very bad luck for any chickens who happen to cross my path.

Hubby ran ahead to do some reconnaissance. There was an open gate, he said, but could we be sure that was how the chickens had escaped?

We couldn't, but there is only so much one can be expected to do when a neighbor's chickens are taking a Christmas walk through the neighborhood.

So I herded them.

Maybe it's a skill I've picked up in four months of country living. Maybe it was simply ingenuity borne of necessity. Maybe the city girl in me hates to back down.

But I managed to get the chickens to the side yard, where Hubby waited with his hand on the open gate.

"Go home," I said sternly, as one might to a vicious looking dog who you just know will be obedient enough to take your order to heart if only you sound serious enough and wish it to be the case hard enough.

The chickens pretended not to understand.

I made as if to pick one up. I can't say if I would have -- if, say, I would have actually touched it had the chicken called me on my game of chicken. Luckily, it blinked first and ran for the safety of the yard.

And with that example set, it wasn't too hard to convince the others that bolting for the yard was a great idea. They are, after all, chickens, who I understand are not particularly original thinkers.

As for us, Hubby and I felt a little bit less ashamed about all the presents we and The Boy had received from other lovely neighbors over the past few days. Birthday and Christmas gifts for The Boy, cookies and party invitations for us. Just when you think you know how well you picked your new home, you find out the neighbors are even more neighborly than you had imagined.

Hubby and I may not have bought gifts for the other kids on the block, and we still haven't delivered holiday cards because we disagree about the name of one neighbor and want to make sure we get it right before we drop off any of the cards and, besides, now I have to write thank you notes as well. We may, in short, have been unprepared for just how generous the people living around one can be. But at least by herding the chickens home we contributed our little bit of kindness to Christmas on our block.

Birthday Boy

Having a baby is, in some ways, like conducting a controlled experiment testing your unfounded beliefs about cause and effect in your own life.

Like my certainty that sleeping eight hours a night makes me smarter. (Or the corollary that having a baby has made me much, much stupider.) Or my faith that the more I practice yoga the more good things will happen to me. (Hey, it introduced me to Hubby, and I'm sure hoping my Asheville yoga classes bring some focus to an otherwise meandering life. Which leads me to feel quite certain that I will lose my way forever and spend the rest of my life searching for some shred of meaning to my sad existence because I have to miss a week of yoga while The Boy's school is closed for the holidays.)

Yesterday I received a damaging confirmation of my unfounded belief that a bit of indulgence, however deserved, is simply not without consequences.

Curse ye fates! For when is indulgence more deserved than on one's first birthday? When should one expect consequence-free pointless pleasure? If not on one's first birthday, then never??? The thought is too sad to contemplate.

Not that The Boy exactly leads a life of asceticism. Still, when a body is that young and unsullied, parents like me and Hubby tend to obsess over every perceived pollutant -- from the fears of off-gassing that led us to buy an unfinished crib that we got rid of a month later when it turned out to pose a strangulation threat, to our fear of medication that faded greatly once we realized that a simple dose of Tylenol will actually make a teething or feverish or ear-infection-afflicted boy feel much, much better, to our insistence on all-natural house cleaning products except when the chemical ones work a lot better.

For all these reasons, and probably a few more too embarrassing to admit, The Boy approached his first birthday without ever having experienced first-hand the dubious pleasures of wheat and dairy.

In this case, our parental craziness was not without foundation. Among the other joys of breastfeeding The Boy and I shared was the discovery that he had more than a few food allergies -- dairy among them. We never tested wheat because I don't eat it myself, as I have what I like to call a "sensitivity" to it which doubtless belongs above on my list of unfounded beliefs about cause and effect in my life.

Still, Hubby has the dreaded peanut allergy, and it's hereditary, so in this case, I am allowed to harbor crazy fears about food on behalf of The Boy.

But a first birthday is a first birthday, and cake and ice cream were a must. So we invited some neighbors to join us in some afternoon cake eating, and, in the meantime, did the other things that make first birthdays so special.

Like first birthday presents. The Boy chose just one to open in the morning -- a little piano with real keys that make sounds whether you bang them with your fingers or with the little plastic German boy you like to carry around in your mouth or with the wooden blocks your grandmother gave you.

Small toy pianos are also good for hoisting yourself up to standing, an increasingly favored activity that suggests walking is right around the corner. (An event to await breathlessly or one to dread as one spots all the dangers lurking in the house? Discuss.) And when you really get warmed up, you can bang a few times, pull yourself up, and warble away. The Boy, in short, was thrilled with his first birthday gift.

By the time he had figured out how to pull the top off the piano (not a deliberate design feature) the morning rain had cleared up and a perfectly gorgeous, un-December-like day had begun. So, post-nap, we loaded The Boy in the car for a walk in the nearby Botanical Gardens on the UNC Asheville campus.

Actually, even if it had been pouring rain, we would have found an excuse to put The Boy in the car. Because there is one event that accompanies turning a year old that is even more magnificent, of even great importance, perhaps the most exciting thing ever and even better than cake and ice cream.

Turning the car seat around to face forward.

The Boy found this new situation a hoot. He laughed all the way to the botanical gardens. He grinned and clapped and kicked his feet. We wondered if we shouldn't have waited to turn around his car seat until our next ten-hour drive to St. Louis in the spring.

We returned from the botanical gardens with time to open another gift before our cake-eating neighbors arrived.

This one, from Grandma, was a wooden box, full of beautiful wooden blocks, with wheels and a string for pulling. The Boy grabbed the blocks faster than I could put them back in the box in a losing effort to keep them out of the reach of dogs' teeth. So far all are still accounted for, but it's only been a day and the dogs have been out in the yard a lot.

With neighbors came yet more gifts -- a set of construction trucks with the wheels that are a current source of fascination and a musical thing that talks a lot and flashes lights and I haven't figured out. The Boy likes it a lot. I don't think I will for long.

And then there we were, with our new neighbors sharing a glass of wine (with us) and cake (with The Boy). We sure wouldn't be doing this in Long Beach.

The Boy approached the piece of cake Hubby placed on his high chair tray cautiously, as is his nature. A little pinch of cake, another little pinch.

And then he figured it out. Cake is to be eaten by holding great huge pieces and shoving them as far in your mouth as they can go.

Inexplicably, we have no pictures of this joy. We decided it was high time we figure out how to use the video camera I bought Hubby for Father's Day. It has snippets of The Boy at six and seven months that I like to play back for myself from time to time, but the technological challenge of putting them on line for others to enjoy has stymied me. Maybe if Audrey hadn't chewed the necessary USB cable two months ago I'd be more motivated. Or maybe I ought to be more motivated to buy a new USB cable. At any rate, if you want to see The Boy eating birthday cake, you will have to either come visit and view it on the video camera or buy us a new USB cable or wait until his second birthday.

Also inexplicably, we gave The Boy as much ice cream as he wanted. I do not know why it occurred to neither of us to stop after the first bowl. Indulgence is one thing when you can chide yourself with your own stupidity as you find yourself huddled in a cold bathroom at 3:30 in the morning wishing like you've never wished for anything before that you could be back in your own bed sleeping.

The only immediate effect of the cake and ice cream was a sugar rush of which I've never seen the likes before. If The Boy could walk, he would have run laps around the house. As it was, he repeatedly threw himself at one of our neighbors, demanding that she pick him up, then, with a screech of delight, threw himself back at the floor so he could crawl after her and once again grab at her legs and haul himself up to ask to be picked up again. Luckily, her own children are grown and she doesn't have a grandchild handy so she was more than happy to help The Boy out.

And MORE gifts to open after the guests left and before the sugar high wore off. The Boy banged his piano impatiently while Hubby assembled the wooden walker. The second the handle was secure, he grabbed it with both hands, stood, and pushed it out of the living room and into the foyer.

This act would not seem so remarkable if The Boy knew how to walk.

Apparently, he realized that he can not, in fact, walk after he pushed the walker into the front door. At this point, he opted to crawl it back to the living room, a reasonably impressive feat, but not one worth videotaping.

By the time we made it through the animal book with the prominent basset hound puppy and the magnetic animals he might or might not recognize as resembling his bath toys and therefore as being related to the funny sounds Mommy and Daddy make with them when he's in the bath and the electronic drum that is just as annoying when you elect the Spanish option he was too tired to see straight.

So we gave him a birthday bath and he fell asleep drinking his birthday bottle.

Which would be a lovely end to the story of the Birthday Boy. But then there'd be no moral. Not that I need a moral. A wonderful, fun, sunny first birthday is all I need, and I'll speak for The Boy on that as well.

But ice cream and cake, it seems, can hurt one's tummy come nine thirty. And sleeping with Mommy when one's tummy is hurting and one has spotted Daddy saying goodnight before heading for the day bed in the office is not much fun come eleven o'clock. Especially when Mommy's chest is kind of bony and uncomfortable and she is not bright enough to figure out that those screams are borne of rage, not pain, and all you really want is your Daddy.

Or maybe she's just tired and warm in the bed and a little bit offended that she's not good enough for you and therefore pretends not to know what you really want for five or ten minutes.

Ultimately, The Boy spent the night of his first birthday sleeping it off with Daddy while I was the one on the day bed in the office. Which I guess is only fair, since a year ago he'd spent an awful lot of time sleeping close to me.

Besides, it turns out one can get a pretty good night's sleep on the day bed in the office where no babies are kicking you and no husbands are snoring and you can sleep off your own over-indulgence in ice cream and, yes, cake. Because occasionally ignoring your own unfounded beliefs about your "sensitivity" to wheat doesn't mean you can't go right back to them the very next day.

The Gift of the (Aunt) Mary

When The Boy's Aunt Mary met him for the first time, she gave him a lovely blanket she had knit, adorned with stripes of orange and tan and green, just the right size for a baby boy. "His cousin says it's so bright it'll wake him up," she laughed, but The Boy slept quite cozily beneath it.

He was six weeks old then, and by six months, the blanket had become a staple of our lives. If it was a tad chilly during our morning walk on the beach, I tucked the blanket around him in the stroller; his chin shone baby-skin white against it and he looked warm and safe. If he fell asleep in his car seat while Hubby and I grabbed a quiet lunch out, he snoozed beneath it, the stripes wrapping him securely. We went nowhere without Aunt Mary's blanket.

When The Boy and I flew to our new home in Asheville, Aunt Mary's blanket was peeking out of his overstuffed diaper bag. When we explored our new neighborhood, it lay in the basket under the stroller. The Boy grew, and Aunt Mary's blanket settled into lap rug status, still perfect to keep him warm on mountain fall mornings in his miniature fisherman's sweater and wool stocking cap with the football stitched on the brim.

And then Aunt Mary's blanket disappeared.

"Have you seen Aunt Mary's blanket?" I asked Hubby one morning. I was slightly crazed, as I often am when we are trying to leave the house on a cold morning. A few minutes ticks into several minutes, which inevitably become fifteen or twenty as I corral and layer a crawling boy, put on and remove my own gloves ten or twelve times to snap snaps and guide small thumbs inside tiny mittens and pull socks up and pants legs down.

"Nope," Hubby answered. He doesn't sweat going outside in cold weather the way I do. As long as The Boy is wearing a hat, Hubby figures he'll stay reasonably warm.

"He needs something over his legs," I moaned. Although the days here tend to reach bearable temperatures, the mornings can be bitter. Our morning walks to the park, where Hubby throws a tennis ball for the girls and The Boy and I huddle together pretending to enjoy the spectacle, were often nothing more than stubbornness on my part. "I can survive another real winter. I think I can, I think I can . . ."

"The blanket my cousin made him will be fine," Hubby said. His voice carried a note of decisiveness with which I vehemently disagreed.

I became even more certain that The Boy could not do without Aunt Mary's blanket when Hubby returned downstairs with the replacement blanket. It was flannel, not knit. It was a serene green, not bright slashes of color. It was bigger than lap rug size. It would not do at all.

Still, I said nothing. Sometimes it is best to let your partner do some parenting, even if he's wrong.

You'd think the sight of The Boy awkwardly wrapped in a green flannel blanket would have inspired me to find Aunt Mary's blanket, but it didn't. Apparently I was too busy searching for my own lost life.

And so the weeks passed. An unseasonably warm spell was met with relief, as The Boy could be strolled to school blanket-less. Cold days became an occasion for unearthing the sweet collection of blankets in which we used to swaddle The Boy, back in the days when he could be swaddled and leaving the house was not cause for fear of frostbite. And still, Aunt Mary's blanket remained mysteriously absent.

Hubby and I wondered again about it this weekend.

We had taken a drive to Maggie Valley as The Boy napped in the back seat. Maggie Valley, it turned out, had little to offer a family out for a Sunday excursion. If we had been looking to rent a room in a motor hotel where we could sit in a hot tub next to a running stream, we were in the right place, at least according to the hopeful advertisements outside a surprising number of motels adorning the main road. The stream, apparently, dipped and turned to accommodate the maximum number of hot tubs.

Alas, we were looking for nothing more than a cozy meal and perhaps the chance to purchase those last few holiday gifts. Maggie Valley offered nothing to meet these needs.

Eager to extend The Boy's nap, we kept driving, out of Maggie Valley, down the road to the ski slopes and the Cherokee casino.

I noted with some vague interest the snow dusting the sides of the road. Mostly, I was glad it was here, and not on the side of my road at home.

Then I looked through the windshield and saw the same fine white dust dashing horizontally across my line of vision. My line of vision isn't the best -- the only way I can tell it's raining short of getting wet is to examine puddles for ripples of raindrops because I am absolutely incapable of seeing precipitation falling from the sky -- so I figured if I could see the snow there was more than a little bit of it.

The car slid on the icy road.

"It says 'last exit before Parkway,'" I said hopefully as I pointed at a sign on the side of the road.

"Do you want to try the Parkway?" Hubby asked.

Hmm. Higher elevation, windier, narrower road. The Parkway did not seem the wisest solution.

"It's kind of windy," I allowed.

Hubby must have found the weather conditions more than a little worrisome, because he turned the car around and drove back through Maggie Valley instead of wending his way through new, no more interesting but at least undiscovered, towns.

We stopped for lunch in Waynesville, which we had visited before, but which we knew would at least offer food and warmth. And as we wandered Main Street after lunch, we wrapped our arms around The Boy to keep him warm because we lacked Aunt Mary's blanket.

We came home in the afternoon with one more short outing on our list -- a visit to the music store around the corner from our house where we hoped to find a gift for our musically inclined nephew.

Hubby grabbed The Boy and I grabbed myself. We dashed through a cutting wind to the store, quickly discovered nothing there, and walked back in a lull between gusts of wind.

Hubby let out a gasp.

There on the sidewalk, covered in leaves and the dampness of more than one rainfall, was Aunt Mary's blanket.

"Maybe I dropped it on the way to the bagel shop one morning," Hubby laughed.

"I'll bet it fell out of the stroller when we walked to Greenlife," I said, certain now that I remembered exactly when it had happened.

Aunt Mary's blanket is washed now and almost dry and ready to use.

But why the Gift of the Magi reference? What made me immediately think of that story when I first saw the blanket, its fall colors poking out of the faded fall leaves? What, in short, is the irony in the return of Aunt Mary's gift? (What makes the hair combs useless because the wife has cut her hair to buy a chain for the watch her husband sold to buy her the combs? for those of you a bit vague in the classic literature department.)

Well, I thought hopefully, maybe the irony is that although we found Aunt Mary's blanket there will be no more need for it because the winter will continue to be uncharacteristically warm and I will make it to spring without ever once having to wear the Timberland boots I bought in college for the deep, cold Providence snowfalls.

To the contrary, the irony, it turns out, is that -- far from my fantasy of endless warm days being fulfilled -- a light snow fell that night, dusting the ground of our front yard. It looked just like the dusting of snow on the road outside Maggie Valley.

I Visit a Pawn Shop

For most of my life, pawn shops have been a sort of fictional abstraction. They are, to my mind, the places where seedy criminals in police procedurals go to sell stolen watches and down-on-their-luck sad sacks shakily forfeit their wedding rings for a hit of heroin. Or, in earlier, G-rated memories, the places frequented by Andy Capp. Since I was about seven years old when last I read an Andy Capp comic, I didn't understand that he was both seedy and down-on-his-luck and that a comic strip about an alcoholic actually isn't a very funny thing at all.

I imagine in more recent years I've seen real pawn shops -- perhaps driving through a part of L.A. I only ever drove through to get to Dodger Stadium or the Disney Concert Hall. But I surely don't recall getting close enough to, say, look in the window. Even when my apartment at 92nd and Riverside in Manhattan was not considered prime real estate, I'm pretty certain there were no pawn shops nearby. (Off Track Betting, on the other hand, was a mere three-minute walk from my front door.)

But now I live in Asheville. And not only do I live half a mile from a pawn shop, I have, as of last Saturday, been in one.

Before you form your opinion of my neighborhood, I must explain that -- the presence of both a Wendy's and a McDonald's within a quarter mile of each other notwithstanding -- we are at least upscale enough that the store does not call itself a pawn shop. No indeed. It is a consignment store.

I am happily familiar with consignment stores. Consignment stores are where I sell the turtlenecks I received two Christmases ago. A consignment store played a large and cathartic role in my abandonment of a promising career as a law school professor, and I'm sure there are some happy professionals wearing my hip teacher clothes somewhere. Better them than me.

No, when we first arrived here, I was far less troubled by the consignment store with the collection of bicycles in front and the amps in the window than I was by the bleached strip malls up the block. And the aforementioned Wendy's. And the general clutter of nondescript buildings and the sorts of store signs one usually sees in deeply depressed economies that line the main thoroughfare by our house.

I arrived here, you see, straight off the pleasures of Second Street in the Belmont Shores neighborhood of Long Beach. Daily -- or close to it -- I meandered half a mile past well kept beach homes to a stretch of shops and restaurants and happy pedestrians smiling in the sea breeze. Second Street had its share of dusty old stores like Herman's Shoes and the American Cancer Society Thrift Shop. But, surrounded by Peet's Coffee and Banana Republic and Taco Surf, they were funky, not sad.

I failed to find similar charms on my first few walks up Merrimon Avenue last August. Narrow sidewalks dumped me and The Boy's stroller practically into the stream of traffic. My legs protested the hills and the heat. I felt alone and stupid strolling down a sidewalk plainly made, not for strolling, but to provide a small buffer zone between the parking lots fronting the stores and the traffic speeding its way past.

I cried for Second Street. I longed for some remote plausibility to the rumors of zoning plans designed to make Merrimon Avenue more pedestrian-friendly (wider sidewalks, parking lots relegated to the backs of the stores). I imagined myself five years from now enjoying my daily walks in Asheville so much that I no longer missed the smell of the ocean. And I despaired of walking anywhere in the present.

And yet. Slowly, my gluteus maximus adjusted to walking uphill. Hubby discovered some lovely side streets that led more pleasantly to Atlanta Bread Company and the Children's Trading Post. Urban Burrito soothed my ache for Wahoo's Fish Tacos and provided me with a good reason to venture into the bleached strip mall and discover it wasn't such a scary place after all.

These days I don't even notice the Wendy's. I know that jewel upon jewel lies nestled among those nondescript Merrimon buildings: Jus' Running with the owner who pooh-poohed my claim that running destroyed my knees because "you're so slight you shouldn't have any problems with your knees" and thus secured him a place in my heart forever; The Wine Guy, who turns out to be a gal, although she can't be expected to carry Two Buck Chuck; The Toy Box, where they let The Boy play with the wooden train set for as long as he likes without ever pushing me to buy anything (rest assured, however, that my Christmas expedition has paid for a year's worth of playing with the train set). I don't even mind knowing that I will never live a few blocks from a pedestrian thoroughfare lined with elms and charming storefronts.

I am, in short, ready for the neighborhood pawn shop.

It was Hubby's idea. Frankly, I was at the point where I didn't even see it as I walked by. It is located on the downward slope of the walk home, just before we veer left through the park. It has its own front walk, separated from the sidewalk by a set of stairs and a reason to walk up them -- a reason not provided for me by the fast-food restaurant next door. I don't have a burning desire to buy a used bike and I don't like fluorescent lights. Don't even get me started on what my mother would have said if I had told her, growing up, that I would like to visit a pawn shop. On my own, I was plainly on a path that would never take me to one.

But Hubby does have a burning desire to buy a used bike. Many used bikes. I am truly not certain how many used bikes Hubby has purchased because: a) he tends to pull them up on Craig's List to admire them far more often than he actually buys them; and b) when he does buy them he takes them apart and reassembles them into new Frankenstein-like vehicles of his own design.

So there we were, out for a stroll on a Saturday afternoon, approaching the pawn shop. And Hubby's eyes lit up.

I could have refused to accompany him, remained a perfectly content pawn shop virgin for the rest of my life. But it is the holiday season. Besides, he had control of the stroller with my baby boy inside. So I followed him through the not-so-menacing doors.

We were greeted warmly when we entered the store. I fooled myself into believing I might look like someone who is perfectly comfortable in a pawn shop.

Assuming an air of interest, I wandered among the keyboards and drum sets, looking them over as if deciding which one best suited my needs. Unfortunately, as I am not in fact accustomed to wandering among keyboards and drum sets, my shoulder glanced what sounded like a snare drum, and I felt all eyes turn to me.

Trying for all the world to look like it was no big deal, I steadied the drum and turned, just at the right angle to bang my knee against a guitar. It is not a given that I would have caught it, so I counted myself doing very well when I did.

Shuffling my way out of the music section and telling myself I wouldn't have to return until The Boy one day demands his own drum set, I looked around hopefully for gift ideas.

The remote control trucks were actually kind of neat. But until the mortgage catches up with us, I'm not ready to wrap battered used boxes with heartily handled toys for my beloved eleven-month-old. Hubby eyed the leather jackets longingly, but I just couldn't see him wearing a leather jacket someone else once wore. Or a leather jacket at all, but don't tell him I said that.

And the rest was the kind of stuff I might find shopping for empowering under different circumstances. Power tools and dehumidifiers and shovels -- the sorts of things I used to borrow from the men in my neighborhood in St. Louis, when I was a single female homeowner and proud to own my own power drill, damn it.

Now, however, I sit with my baby in the front yard as my husband hangs the Christmas lights and cleans the gutters and rakes the leaves. It's not that I no longer remember how to use a power drill. It's just that I'm more likely to use it building a crib. And it is, after all, so easy to let Hubby do the stuff I don't like to do.

Which means a few things. It means I am a 41-year-old mother who does laundry while her husband tackles the manly chores. It means there is nothing wrong with putting aside the power tools for a stroller and a high chair and a beautiful baby boy. And, best of all, it means I will never have to visit a pawn shop again.

Yogini Again

Most people, I understand, will not be unduly disappointed if they are unable to wrap their feet behind their head.

Most people who know me know that is not the case where I am concerned.

Once upon a time, I lived in Los Angeles, a hotbed of uber-yoga, a place where classes constantly challenged me and no one looked askance when I wandered the aisles of Trader Joe's in stained yoga pants and hair dried into clumps from the sweat. I could take classes whenever I wanted -- no baby, frequently no job, no need to pay because I was an instructor.

Under these circumstances it becomes possible to devote one's life to following the path of yoga. Or at least the parts of the path that one can follow while still living a semi-normal, consumerist life with a sane, non-yoga-addicted spouse.

Ironically, my path led me to a life stripped of yoga classes.

First it was our move to Long Beach. I sampled a few studios and felt lost without the familiar comforts and challenges of the Center for Yoga on Larchmont. I did a little teaching in the ghettoized afternoons before the popular post-work class, but the connection just wasn't there. For a time I drove up to L.A. a couple of times a week for my mysore class, but everyone knows that yoga and L.A. freeways just don't mix.

Then there was the pregnancy. I put together a lovely little practice for myself. Alone. In a room so small I had to take care not to smash my face on the dresser as I bowed in my sun salutations.

Which was fine until it came time for the post-pregnancy yoga. Any new mother who has tried to get back to her yoga practice will recognize these popular offerings: The When Is There Ever Time??? yoga. The What Is That Blobby Thing Between My Swollen Breasts and My Varicose Vein-Covered Legs??? yoga. The I'm So Tired I Think I'll Take a Nap on the Yoga Mat yoga.

It's been eleven months now since I ignored all the medical advice to take it easy for a few weeks after birth and did a defiant bound twisted high lunge in the living room when my mother-in-law was visiting her two-week-old grandson. And while I now have a lovely large room in which to practice my yoga and a view of the trees outside the windows as I bow in my sun salutations and ceilings high enough that I can circle my arms and gather energy instead of bruised knuckles, my practice is not what it once was.

As I mentioned, I miss being able to put my feet behind my head.

Yes, I know the yogi thing to do would be to respect my body's limitations and their precious cause. And, to be perfectly clear, it was worth it. It was worth it. It was worth it.

But I miss that clarity of purpose that yoga brought to my life. I miss wanting to eat healthy foods because I can honestly feel the difference. I miss the certainty of following my heart because I know what my heart really wants.

Hubby tells me I need to go to yoga classes.

I answer that he is stoned if he thinks I have time for yoga classes.

He offers to juggle his schedule so he can watch The Boy while I go to yoga classes.

I say, "Mmhmm" and turn on Reno 911 because I know it will distract him.

I did try a few Asheville studios a few times.

On my birthday, soon after we arrived in Asheville, I went to an all levels yoga class at a cozy little studio in funky West Asheville. It was nice to hear music other than one of the three Krishna Das CD's I faithfully put on when I practice at home. And the teacher was a lovely person with whom I will, one day, I promised both her and myself, go to a meditation practice. (You think I need it??) But sore muscles were not had.

Last month I ventured to a class of something called anahata yoga. The teacher said some nice things about energy but I didn't have to summon a whole lot of it to make it through class.

My options, it seemed, were dwindling.

On a visit to Asheville a couple years ago I took a class at a very scary studio where overly tanned, too-thin, suburban-looking fifty-year-olds kicked my butt in shoulder stand and the teacher frightened Hubby by changing clothes in front of an office window under which Hubby and his brother were parked. I was not anxious to return.

Which left me with . . . only a studio close to me and promising some tough classes.

I begged off because they heat the classes to 80 degrees and I have low blood pressure and a tendency to faint in steam saunas. I moaned about their schedule and my limited time and the fact that I can no longer put my feet behind my head.

And yesterday I went to a class there.

I sweated. I shook. I did not faint.

Today I am taking my sore butt back and buying a one-month unlimited pass.

I have studied the schedule and underlined all the classes I might take in order to make a one-month unlimited pass an economical choice. Most of the classes I have underlined start at noon. This means that I sit unshowered doing a few hours of work in the morning, go to a yoga class during the heart of the day when normal people are eating lunch or plugging away at a juicy work project or doing something that does not involve getting sweaty and sore, and take a shower at two o'clock in the afternoon. And I can't remember why, a few days ago, such a schedule didn't make sense to me.

Which just proves how great this yoga studio is. Because plainly it has me back on the path, where my days are, naturally, structured around my yoga practice.

Home Improvement

We have a fence.

It is amazing how something that would have mattered so terribly little to me fifteen years ago is such a source of joy today.

No longer must I stand outside on the deck, The Boy wrapped in a down lap duvet, yelling at the dogs to hurry up and pee already. No more days of leaving them trapped on the deck while the house is cleaned and I look out the window every few minutes to be sure Lilah hasn't escaped. Best of all, I look out at our fenced-in yard and I can see The Boy growing up, turning the tin-roofed tool shed into a fort, throwing a ball with Hubby or me or Audrey, imagining whole worlds in the corners where the bushes hide him from the house.

I think about being four years old and playing "Here Comes the Witch" with my best friend Julie and riding the huge flying birds that to my distressed mother were bushes not designed to carry imaginative little girls. And I feel very grown-up and a little bit scared and very in love with The Boy and our home.

We are in that stage of new home ownership when we magnanimously give ourselves permission to buy important bits of home improvement that we can't afford. Like the fence -- something we promised ourselves as soon as Hubby realized how much work it is to train dogs to respect an electric fence. Or the bench and shelf set for the front hall that Hubby picked off the Pottery Barn website, much to my surprise and delight. Or the lovely sleeper sofa we bought at Crate and Barrel in Charlotte.

We went to Charlotte on Tuesday, when Hubby took the day off as scant compensation for working Thanksgiving Day. Charlotte lies two hours away from Asheville by not very interesting highways and is the biggest city between Washington, DC, and Atlanta. Neither of these facts recommended it as a destination for our vacation day.

Charlotte is, however, home to Trader Joe's. This status has left me wildly impatient to make the trek.

I justified it by hunting down what advertised itself as a kids museum where The Boy could stretch his legs -- and arms, as crawling is his sole means of locomotion that does not involve Mommy or Daddy or some other adult he has decided to trust. Not the best reason to drive to Charlotte, Hubby sighed, but we're parents now.

Then he gave me a surprise even bigger than the Pottery Barn bench and shelf set. He suggested we go to Crate and Barrel to look at sleeper sofas while we were there.

This is not, you must understand, the way Hubby traditionally shops. He favors the local stores, where you might have to wade through a sea of cheap and ugly but can make it if you hold out the hope that there is a gem buried in the back. Crate and Barrel, where everything is stylish and tasteful and therefore expensive is simply too easy.

Over the three months that we have lived in Asheville we have roundly exhausted the supply of such local furniture stores. We have repeatedly visited Tysons in Black Mountain, an endless maze of room after room of wood furniture, wicker furniture, bamboo furniture, patio furniture, and probably more that I haven't seen because you need a map or a salesperson to find your way around. Their collection of sleeper sofas, however, failed to make the grade.

We visited Hafferty's, a pre-fab furniture warehouse, but backed off a decent looking couch because of our lurking suspicion that the quality might not be what we hoped. Our neighbor assured us as much with a story of a sadly decrepit coffee table purchased there.

We even made the rounds of Ethan Allan, where an "interior designer"/salesperson created questionable ensembles of upholstery and throw pillows on a computer screen before my very frightened eyes.

And now, to my delight, we were visiting Crate and Barrel.

Hubby sat and poked and unfolded and tested while I followed The Boy on his journey across a playground of furniture just made for pulling oneself up to standing. The salesperson showed remarkable restraint as The Boy reached for a collection of fragile-looking bamboo baskets and then banged the Kona coffee table with the plastic holder of its information. Other customers pretended not to mind as The Boy showed off his new skill of yelling with impressive force for such a small human being. I wiped so much drool off of tabletops and chair arms that my sleeves were damp until dinner.

And then we were paying for a couch. A lovely couch that will be delivered to our home sometime early next year and will force us to turn that room you never get around to decorating and use for all the stuff that doesn't fit anywhere into a proper library. Surely, once we have a tasteful and sophisticated couch from Crate and Barrel the rest of our home will be perennially clean, warm, and sunny, just like their catalog.

From Crate and Barrel, we headed to Charlotte at Play, the advertised kids museum. I could hear Hubby's sharp intake of breath as the directions led us to a vast strip mall anchored by a Lowe's. I harbored the hope that his unguarded expression was merely disappointment that he didn't need anything from Lowe's and would have to hang out in Charlotte at Play.

In fact, he seemed to enjoy it almost as much as The Boy. He snapped pictures as The Boy played the child-sized Melissa and Doug piano that I now long to see under our Christmas tree. Plainly I do not know how much a child-sized Melissa and Doug piano costs. He slid with The Boy down the pirate ship slide. He sat in a corner of the speed raceway and let The Boy push cars into him. A fine time was had by all.

But whatever excitement and awe The Boy might have felt as he gazed upon the expanse of fun that was Charlotte at Play, it was nothing compared to the giddiness I experienced when we entered Trader Joe's. There was my brown rice pasta, my sundried tomato bruschetta, my beloved dried Tart Montgomery Cherries. We filled two shopping carts with booty and I knew that I would return one day, undaunted by the crushingly boring drive.

We had dinner downtown, where the plethora of cars reminded me of L.A., but the number of pedestrians out for the evening did not. I watched the bank trainees breaking for dinner in their starched shirts and suit pants and felt sad for them and for the person I was fifteen years ago. And as we left Charlotte, I looked forward to the uncongested streets of Asheville, even if they lack a Crate and Barrel.

We pulled up to our home at nine thirty. Our new fence glowed slightly in the darkness. It looked different from the house we bought, our definitive imprint on the neighborhood. It is more than a fence. It is a declaration that we are making a home here.

Now if only we could do something about those storm windows.

Why I Am a Tad Cranky These Days

I have lately come to realize that I am the Barack Obama of baby care decisionmakers. The choices Hubby and I have made tend toward the more liberal side of the spectrum, but not so far off the grid that we fall into Dennis Kucinich territory. We overthink everything without, thankfully, approaching Hillary Clinton equivocation. And we end up, like Obama, making heartfelt, lefty, but far from radical decisions.

Our record speaks for itself. Certain we wanted our son close by while we slept but unable to commit to the extreme of bed sharing for fear of rolling over and suffocating our newborn while as we shared sleep, we opted for the conveniently compromising co-sleeper. The baby sling was a wondrous thing in those early days when any fresh air was a balm to my withering sense of self, but, frankly, there were plenty of times when the stroller suited both me and The Boy just fine. We might even have gone for circumcision if we had uncovered a shred of evidence that it imparts a health benefit or two.

In short, if there's a middle path – preferably one that brings us close enough to the natural-way, selfless style of parenting to lend us a touch of cred – we're on it.

There is, however, one area of decisionmaking that simply does not lend itself to such a satisfying resolution. Sleep training.

I can hear everyone who remembers those years between infancy and "don't touch me, Mom" shuddering. It is a decision without a middle road. Either you let your child cry while you match him tear-for-tear in the next room or you put him in bed with you and try to pretend that your partner really doesn't mind sleeping on the day bed in the office.

To sleep train, or not to sleep train? That is, oh yes, the question.

Our recent bout with that seemingly lifelong conundrum came at the end of a daycare cold which brought with it a hacking cough. The same cough I have, in fact. The same cough that also wakes me up in the middle of the night. Except I am content to give snoring Hubby a kick, roll over, and go back to sleep.

At nearly 11 months, however, The Boy is old enough to know that he does not want to roll over and go back to sleep in his lonely crib. He has a fuzzy recollection of those nights a few weeks ago when an ear infection forced Mommy to prop him up on pillows in her bed (formerly known as her and Daddy's bed, but now Daddy is sleeping on the day bed in the office). And The Boy wants that lovely arrangement again.

The Boy came to this conclusion in the middle of my REM sleep. This is not a good time to discuss with one's partner the merits of Ferberizing versus letting the babe into bed so we can all just sleep and worry about creating a bed-sharing monster some other time.

Ferberizing was not a method we embraced easily. The Boy was a phenomenal sleeper as an infant, generally awakening only once a night (though not always going back to sleep particularly promptly). Then, suddenly, he was five months old and he was awakening every two hours. I can tend to a baby once a night with an impressive degree of cheerfulness. A second nighttime rendezvous renders me a bit less likely to coo in delight with him. By the third time, you will spot me tromping down the hall with him held like a football under my arm muttering, "I will tend to your basic needs, but I will not be nurturing, god damn it!"

A week of two-hour blocks of sleep got me on-line reading about Ferberizing. And what I discovered was that there are a great many parents out there who agonize over it. Probably, it is the most agonizing decision we make in that first year because it is so starkly a matter of whose needs you put first – your beloved darling's or, sad to say, your own.

But I also found that, for some families, it works. And you don't know if yours is one unless you try. So we tried. And it worked. I never had to hold my breath and fight back tears as I stared at a clock for more than five very, very long minutes of screaming from my child. And in no time at all we were experiencing, dare I say it, eight uninterrupted hours of sleep.

But, of course, nothing lasts when you are tripling in size and brain matter every few months. And so, this week, it was time to decide yet again.

Ferberizing, I discovered last time we went through this, is a lot more traumatic at nine or ten or eleven months than it is at five. Because at nine or ten or eleven months your child gets angry. Very, very angry. Angry enough to cry until you recognize the error of your ways.

Still, I am haunted by an article in the New York Times that I read during my pregnancy. It described an epidemic of nighttime bed shuffling as children for whom no sleeping boundaries had been set take over their parents' beds at night, forcing the adults to curl up in their children's rooms to sleep under the princess canopy by the glow of the Spiderman night light.

So when I heard the cries at 2 a.m. Saturday night, I rolled myself out of bed and across the hall. I put my hand reassuringly on The Boy's back and said, "It's okay, Mommy's here."

Plainly, it was not enough for The Boy that Mommy be "here." The point was for Mommy to be here holding him in her arms, a Ferber no-no.

The Boy reached out for me, grabbing at my wrists, hoisting himself toward me, banging his forehead on the bars of his crib, while I repeated in an increasingly clenched voice, "Mommy's here. It's okay."

Finally, it wasn't okay because I really had to pee. So I left him. And he screamed.

I returned, we replayed, I left and stared at the clock while he screamed.

And eventually it worked. The Boy slept and I lay awake drowning in my own guilt.

The next morning I muttered to Hubby, "Should we just put him in bed with us if it happens again tonight?" and Hubby said, "I don't know."

So I did.

It was not, I am sad to report, the idyllic solution for which I had been hoping. The Boy kicked me in the stomach. He tried to climb the headboard. He bounced his butt up and down so strongly the whole bed shook. And I concluded that the book I read claiming that mothers and babies both sleep better when they sleep together is full of crap.

It is possible that The Boy agrees, I reckoned at five 0'clock this morning when the house had remained silent all night. Maybe he figured out that sleeping with Mommy isn't all it's cracked up to be.

He did wake up fifteen minutes later and it was a struggle to convince him that 5:15 is a terrific time to get a little bit more sleep, but that hour or so we snoozed quietly together was . . . heaven.

So what will I do if we wakes up again tonight? I will remind myself that all children walk eventually and drink out of a cup when they're ready and, yes, sleep in their own bed, even if it takes until puberty.

I may not always like my decision to abandon Ferber for a nighttime of stomach-kicking and ear-grabbing. But it is my decision, and as long as I make it with love it's the right one.

Besides, it's always possible that tonight will be the night he stays asleep.

Fame

I just finished watching Fame.

Not your traditional Thanksgiving activity, I'll admit. But neither is having lunch at a Mexican restaurant on Hendersonville Road before Hubby heads into work. Who needs tradition when you've got a movie that reminds you of being 14 and in love with acting and heart-full of the belief that you were going to burn through life with energy and happiness and bigger-than-lifeness and, well, fame.

Honestly, what I remember most isn't the first time I saw the movie. It's coming home between the matinee and evening performances of Dracula in ninth grade to blast the song on my father's turntable as my friend Dana and I sang with far more passion than tunefulness. Fame! I want to live forever! I want to learn how to fly . . . high!

The next day I cried as they struck the set. Mr. Feldman put his arm around me and explained how actors have to move on after each performance. He made me feel as if I was an actor, and I realize now that a little bit of that kindness has stayed with me.

I watched the beginning of the movie with The Boy as the afternoon temperatures dropped into the 40's and winter blew into Asheville. He quite enjoyed "Hot Lunch Jam." He gave me a funny look but did me the favor of waving his arms around like Mommy as the kids on the TV screen danced in the street to "Fame." Mostly, though, he just played with his doggie ball.

I found myself hoping that one of my children has the passion for performing that I did. Because I want to see what happens when that passion is nurtured instead of tossed aside for Spanish 3 in high school. And tossed aside again for an honors degree in American Studies. And yet again when grad school is a far safer bet for escaping the law firm than continuing to take acting classes at the Studio Theater in D.C. Even the community theater that kept me going during grad school fell by the wayside when I got to St. Louis and discovered that I was a 33-year-old law professor, not an aspiring actress.

Such speculation about the future, it seems, is well beyond The Boy, who lives in the moment. At this moment he is much more interested in unlocking the mystery of toys that have wheels than in considering whether his future lies in the performing arts and, if so, whether his mother will try to live vicariously and inappropriately through him.

The Boy had had enough of Fame before the characters were done with sophomore year. And so, one bath, dinner, and a bedtime later, I returned to Tivo alone. I put on the headphones so I didn't have to worry about waking The Boy when I turned up the volume to match the adrenaline that pumps through me when I hear a song about being a performer, being famous, being someone bigger than my own life. I settled under the baby blue lap duvet and I let myself be 14 again.

The second half of the movie, unfortunately, packs in enough melodrama to cut into good, juicy guilty-pleasure musical numbers. But there were still plenty of moments when I imagined myself dancing with those bodies on screen and being able to carry a tune at the same time.

In those moments, I believed that it is only a matter of time before I find my way into that world. Sure, it's been 27 years since Dana and I sang "Fame" with the fervor of 14-year-old actresses. But I've been busy.

I was prepared for reality to hit when the movie ended. The idea was to spend two short hours camping out in a place where I see the beauty of my teenage life that I couldn't see at the time yet feel the biting truth of how I was far too young and uncertain to follow the passion only someone that young can believe in. Then it would be time to wake up. I am, after all, past 40. The majority of my waking hours belong to The Boy. A good chunk of those remaining belong to activities that help pay for Saturday's belated Thanksgiving turkey. I work at home without even co-workers to perform for. I've given up yoga teaching for a solitary practice in my office. There is no stage in my life for that person I've always wanted to be to act upon.

But as the final scene of Fame played itself out and the students sang and danced and graduated from the School for the Performing Arts, I knew I would write about this feeling. About a swirling sense of joy wrapping around my heart and a youthful burst of someone I still want to be animating me. About not caring if I'm over 40 and devoted to being a mother and in love with my private husband and our private life in Asheville, North Carolina.

I thought about how I still sometimes sit in front of the mirror and answer interview questions -- from Terry Gross usually, sometimes Oprah. I describe the book I've written and speculate on why it's touched such a chord with the reading public. I talk about the remarkable transformation I made in my 40's, when I finally became a writer. And I see in front of me a me liberated.

It feels silly to sing with headphones on. But when you're an actress you don't care. And when no one's home to hear you singing you can be an actress if you want to. So I sang and I got ready to write and I believed. And I still do, at least at this particular moment.

I sing the body electric. I celebrate the me yet to come.

Our First Asheville Snow

Ah, the first snowfall of the year. That crisp smell in the air as your boots crunch satisfyingly into the grains of ice sliding against each other. Dogs frolic and the yells of red-cheeked children drift over hills made for sledding. At home it is cozy but not too warm to wear a lovely rag sweater, and no one worries about the cost of heating.

Those who have seen my reaction to the first 50-degree day of autumn are sniggering right now. Those who have not experienced my five-month whining spree that is called winter should know: I hate cold weather.

It wasn't always so.

My freshman year at Brown I quickly discarded the bulky knee-length down coat my father bought for me at our trip to the L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine. We went there en route to Rhode Island as a way of stocking up on the winter essentials a California girl lacked in the days before you could order all that stuff on the internet. A puffy, lavender L.L. Bean knee-length down coat, I quickly realized, marked you either as a weak senior citizen or, just as bad, a weak kid from California whom everyone would tease for being unfamiliar with cold weather. Besides, we were young and stupid and frequently drunk, so we didn't mind a little frostbite now and then.

By senior year, I was so savvy in the ways of winter that my only reaction to the first big snowfall when I was living off-campus and therefore did not have miserable student workers to shovel my front walk was to pull on a second pair of socks to wear with my penny loafers. By the time I made it to campus so many people had cried, "WHAT ARE YOU WEARING ON YOUR FEET?" that I realized I had moved beyond proving my mettle back into winter stupidity. I decided class was less important than heading home in shame and caught the next bus to Boston, where I purchased my still-beloved Timberlands and discovered the joy of warm, dry feet.

After college, I spent two years living in Boston and feeling so abjectly poverty-stricken that the idea of spending $60 on a month-long unlimited pass for the T (the Boston public transport system) sent me into a paroxysm of Ramen noodle dinners and begging my mother for new socks. I decided to forgo the T-pass until the weather forced me to give up my free walk to work so many times that I ended up spending at least $60 a month in T fare anyhow. I never came close. Instead, I braved the frozen tundra of the Boston Common bundled in a long houndstooth wool coat with huge shoulder pads draped over two extra sweaters, long underwear, my trusty Timberlands, red rabbit fur earmuffs, and thick mittens. The first ten minutes of my work day were spent stripping down to normal office wear in a cramped bathroom stall. I don't recall how I handled lunch.

Gradually, I moved to milder winters -- Manhattan, where I vaguely recall feeling the frozen pavement quite plainly through my thin black ankle boots; Washington, D.C., where my body retained so much heat from my early morning workouts on the Stairmaster that I made it to work without any appreciable suffering; Williamsburg, Virginia, home of my too-cool J.Crew barn jacket that swung fetchingly when worn open to the elements with a thin but stylish scarf to provide a modicum of chest covering.

And then I became an old woman.

Rather, my hands took on the persona of an old crone, one of those people whose very touch feels like frozen marble. I became a sort of modified street person, pausing over open vents in the street and searching out indoor sources of heat where I would could rub my hands together muttering with delight.

I had discovered both the bane of my I'm-as-tough-as-you winter posturing and my great excuse for looking pinched and grinch-like when anyone talks about the pleasures of skiing.

I have Reynaud's Syndrome, a condition diagnosed by a cardiologist friend who caught me cursing as I burned my hands on those pocket warmers they sell to hunters and other cold weather enthusiasts. Reynaud's Syndrome is a rheumatological condition that affects about two percent of women -- just enough to prove I'm not crazy. The gist of it is that under certain conditions -- most notably when one's hands get cold -- the blood vessels in one's hands constrict. Which, if you stop to think about it, means that when my hands get cold my hands get even colder. I consider this the physical equivalent of eating more ice cream when you are feeling fat.

How cold do my hands get when they get cold?

Crying because it is necessary to grip the cold steering wheel in order to operate an automobile cold.

Sobbing while running my hands under warm water after walking the dog cold.

Actual nerve damage cold, I discovered after visiting a rheumatologist who used a cool scope to look right through my fingernails.

One way to deal with Reynaud's Syndrome is to take vaso-dilators -- pills that expand your blood vessels, thus counteracting the Reynaud's symptoms and generally making you feel warmer. This solution, I discovered, is less than ideal if you already have low blood pressure and are therefore at risk of fainting dead away when it is lowered further. For a time I took the vaso-dilators anyhow, but the only time I could get away with it was right before getting into bed where it didn't matter if I felt woozy and disoriented.

The ideal solution for Reynauds is to live somewhere without a winter. I did this. The problem is, I did it with someone who likes winter. Further, he likes to point out pesky facts like the insane cost of real estate in Southern California and the alarming health hazard posed by the pollution from the Port of Long Beach. And he takes me to Asheville in the spring and summer when it is lovely and warm and I forget the days when I wandered my house in St. Louis wrapped in my bulky down comforter and skipping dinner because the kitchen was by far the coldest room in the house.

To my credit, I haven't cried once at the prospect of winter this year. By the time I left St. Louis, I spent every morning starting October 1 in a panic over the impending cold. Here in Asheville, I gamely bundle both myself and The Boy in warm layers of modern fabrics so we can accompany Hubby and the hounds on their morning run in the park a couple blocks away. I wear delicious and attractive fleece-lined shoes that I bought at Discount Shoes on Route 191. I even got myself the kind of wool cap that looks cute on 25-year-old hippie-chic chicks and looked cute on me just once, in the store where I bought it.

So I didn't panic the other day when one of the teachers at The Boy's school asked me if I had seen the flurries right before I dropped him off. "Flurries? Really?" I asked, proud that there was no rise in my tone, no catch to my voice.

Two hours later, they called me to tell me he had a temperature of 100.3 and anything over 100 earns him an afternoon at home with Mommy and banishment from school for the next 24 hours. This policy makes perfect sense when it comes to other munchkins sharing their viruses with with my precious bundle. But when I know The Boy is merely teething and those thermometers they use are inaccurate anyhow, it strikes me as a deeply unfair rule.

I noticed a few white grains flying through the air when I crossed the street to the school building. They could have been tiny pieces of styrofoam escaped from someone's moving boxes.

But when I came back outside a few minutes later, The Boy in my arms, I recognized them for what they were. "Look, your first snow," I said with a carefully cheery tone designed to avoid passing judgment on the things in life that The Boy is entitled to judge for himself.

We went to the toy store for the aids I felt were necessary to keep both The Boy and me occupied for the long, school-less, park-less afternoon. We sat on the floor and played with the other children and The Boy ogled the train set that is years too advanced for him, and it felt so holiday-like and cozy that I didn't mind when we walked outside again how much the density of the tiny white stones of ice had increased or how they bit into my face when I headed into them.

The Boy minded, and informed me in no uncertain terms that when you are rearranging straps to get a car seat ready to accommodate a small boy you are not to hold said boy out the open door of the car to be pelted by icy snow.

We did not arrive home to drifts of white on our front steps and a brightly lit living room with hounds curled up by the fireplace. This was not the kind of snow that sticks even if the ground is cold enough. We weren't surrounded by fluffy white flakes you catch on your tongue. In fact, it all felt a bit like standing too close to a shaved ice machine in great need of a tune-up.

Still, it was warm inside, and The Boy quite enjoyed his new set of toys with wheels -- car, truck, and airplane. He wasn't all that interested in the stacking blocks, so I fit them back into their box and put them aside for a Christmas present.

That's the nice thing about having a child who's not yet a year old -- he doesn't care that one of his Christmas presents is nothing more than a recycled snowy afternoon toy.

And that's the nice thing about a snowy afternoon, even one as unpicturesque as this one was -- pair it with a little boy pushing a wooden car across the floor and you can remember the excitement of playing with something new, even the something new that is the first snowfall of the year.