Storage Wars

Posted on December 7, 2014 by Nicki

It’s a cool, cloudy Saturday in December. There’s the potential for rain, and for clear skies. Some of us are up and already buttering toast at 7.17am, while some have decided on second thoughts today is not a workout day and wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone brought me a cup of tea right about now?

It’s early December and there’s much to think about: high school applications, the pants he needs for the wedding, pink ballet tights for next week’s Secret Nutcracker concert. Hopefully he makes it through the weekend with the pokey wire from his braces, definitely order dreidels for the Chanukah presentations, and now Pretzel is doing downward dog which means he needs to go out, so I guess I’ll get up and make my own tea.

And then through the open window I hear it. The scraping, muffled sound of boxes being pushed, dragged, stacked. An occasional huff. A very big puff. Oh. No. He’s clearing out the garage. Again.

(Please note I said clearing with an r, not cleaning with an n. When I noted that he was cleaNing the garage, he shot back with so much indignant vehemence that the garage is so spotless we could eat off the floor, I quickly recalibrated my word choice!)

The garage is his pride. And burden. An ongoing year-round project. Spring clean, summer clean, autumn and winter. And a few times in between. A free-standing structure at the end of the driveway, it’s large enough for a car and a minivan, a few bikes along the walls, three skateboards in the corner and a bunch of sports equipment neatly organized down the middle.

He is proud that he keeps it clean – I mean clear – enough that we can park our cars behind its black doors and not in the driveway every night. But we are six people living and growing out of clothes, soccer cleats, baseball bats, scooters, bikes faster than we can figure out what to do with it all. Did I mention the few dozen bins of girl and boy clothes tidily stacked floor to ceiling? The cars do fit in the garage, but the minivan driver may have almost flattened at least one of those bins, on more than one occasion. Luckily Boys Size 7-8 are soft and flattenable, even if the bin isn’t.

It’s a cool, maybe-rainy December day and there is so much to think about, plan for, take care of and definitely no time to clear out the garage – again – but that’s exactly where he is, again, and of course he needs me in there with him. Not to sort or organize or lift or unpack. That’s his one-man show and he’s brilliant at it. What he needs from me is to definitively say, right here and right now: Get rid of it!

Yes, get rid of the bins labeled 6-12, 18-24, 2T/3T. There are no more babies for this house. Yes, toss that box of fabric paint circa 1998. Paint does not last forever, and certainly not long enough for your paint muse to finally pay a visit almost two decades later. And hell yes definitely throw out the cassettes from the 80s, because a) there is no way to play them here in the future and b) they’re from the 80s and this is the future.

I find my Drama and Journalism binders from university, the contents outdated and irrelevant, my handwriting unchanged. I gingerly leaf through barely-held-together high school scrapbooks, precious photos, movie ticket stubs, birthday cards painstakingly placed on each page. Yellowed, aging memories slide out and spill into my lap as I sit on that spotless garage floor, the 20-year-old glue not so adhesive anymore. There’s a journal from camp, lines filled with writing I don’t recognize: “Dear Nix, I hope all your dreams come true.” The sweetest, sappiest notes from friends-for-eva who I vaguely remember and some I will never forget.

Part of me really wants to clear out the garage as much as he does. To be able to open my car door and not bump into a bicycle, not collide with a bin full of clothes or pop yet another basketball as I reverse.

But I can’t. I can’t throw any of it away. I can’t get rid of it. Not the baby clothes we have no need for anymore, but a nephew might. Not the old-fashioned cassettes (I labeled one of those “Slow Mix.” It must’ve taken me hours to make!), and definitely not the scrapbooks and journals. To read and remember my teen self is awkward, great, painful and wonderful all at once. Like floating on perfect ocean swells, and then suddenly getting tumbled and dumped by a frothy surprise wave that leaves my eyes burning, my nose running and my bathing suit disheveled just enough to reveal a little too much for a moment.

I don’t think of myself as a keeper of things. I love to pare down, de-clutter, and hang on to only what we need and use. But these childhood things that we’ve brought with us halfway around the world, schlepped from apartment to rental and finally to this house where we’ve created our family and our big grown-up life are the things that tell the story of me. And keeping those things, that story, feels way more important than an empty garage.

I grab my phone to take a photo of those old cassette tapes.

“There is not enough storage to take a photo,” it says. “You can manage your storage blah blah blah.”

This is a Finish the Sentence Friday post, inspired by the prompt,”If they made a reality show about my life, it would be called…” Hosted by Kristi from Finding Ninee and Stephanie from Mommy, for Real, and guest hosts Michelle from Crumpets and Bullocks and April from 100lb Countdown.

This Is The Sound a Vinegar Van Makes

Posted on November 15, 2014 by Nicki

My father’s father owned a vinegar factory in South Africa. Born and grown in Lithuania, my gentle grandfather migrated south to the bottom of Africa via Israel as a very young adult. There he married my grandmother, raised three sons, and made vinegar.

One of the first sounds I ever heard in my life was my father blowing a very loud, put-put-puttering noise through his nose and mouth. “This is what my father’s vinegar van sounded like,” he would say. And do it again.

I don’t know how he creates that sound, with his nose, tongue and palette. But if I don’t have my eyes firmly turned to his at the time, I would swear there is an old, rusty, white van spluttering down the street outside, delivering vinegar.

He made that sound when we were crying. He made it when we were bored. He made it to distract us, to entice a laugh, when we asked him to do it and especially when we didn’t. And always it had the same effect: wide-eyed astonishment and giggles!

The scraped knee stopped hurting. The whiny baby forgot she was hungry. The kid brother ceased annoying me, and even the grown-ups would laugh. Misery, pain, attention diverted by the funny imitation of the vinegar van.

My dad is a mostly cheery, good-natured, laidback kinda guy who is most comfortable amidst jokes and laughter. Sometimes witty, usually corny, he cracks jokes almost all the time and shares funny stories whenever he can. Most of them we’ve heard many times over, and while they get old they never get tired. Not to me, anyway!

“What’s yellow and points north?”

“Um… dunno. What?”

“A magnetic banana!” Ba-dum-bum.

His humor is pure. He is funny because he wants to be. Because he wants to make the people around him laugh. Because funny is often more satisfying than sadness, anger, worry, or even hunger. And if it’s possible to smooth the frown, laugh through the tears, lighten the moment, why not tell a corny joke or make a weird and wonderful sound?

Sadly, I did not inherit my dad’s natural aptitude for making people laugh. I don’t have innate comedic timing, my brain is not quick-witted, and my jokes are usually dry and sarcastic, sometimes funny, often obscure and never the type that leave giggles and “Tell that one again.”

But the magical effect of the spluttering vinegar van has taught me the power of laughter, the power of brightening the mood and blowing away the gray, if only for a few silly minutes so that when the hurt knee is remembered, when the difficult conversation resumes, somehow it doesn’t sting as much as it did before.

“What’s yellow and very dangerous?”

“Um, a spray painted vinegar van?”

“No! Shark-infested custard! But have you ever heard what my dad’s old vinegar sounded like?”

source: cartoonstock.com

This is a Finish the Sentence Friday post, inspired by the prompt, “The best advice my father ever gave me was…” Hosted by Kristi from Finding Ninee and Stephanie from Mommy, for Real, and guest hosts Michelle from Crumpets and Bullocks and Ruchira from Abracabadra.

One Halloween I Went to See a Play on Broadway

Posted on November 2, 2014 by Nicki

One Halloween I bought pumpkins, but didn’t help carve them. The kids asked their dad.

One Halloween I didn’t discuss, plan or purchase costumes. They made, borrowed and raided the dress-up box. Without me.

One Halloween I didn’t volunteer to buy treats for the class party.

One Halloween I didn’t go to the parade at school.

One Halloween I refused to buy candy, and told them to keep the house dark.

One Halloween I arranged for them all to go trick-or-treating with others.

I hate Halloween. I dread it. As soon as summer is over and barely a week into the new school year, it looms. Mentions of costumes, parties, candy, pumpkins creep into conversation around the third week of August when I’m mourning the fading glow of a perfect summer, when the leaves are still green and clinging to their branches, when I’m seven after-school activities deep into my four color-coded desk calendar and I can’t get my head around tomorrow, never mind Halloween that’s still two months away.

I loved it the first few years – when there were two kids to dress up, and we could go trick-or-treating early because they went to bed at 7pm. When they were too young to know about carving pumpkins. We would marvel at the neighbors’ jack o’lanterns, and scary Halloween decorations, collect candy from five houses, and head home. It was low-maintenance, easy, something we watched more than did.

But now, ten years and an additional two kids later, it’s an all-consuming operation. It’s too many costumes, and too much candy, and she has plans with those third-graders, and he is going to that part of town, and the teenager doesn’t want to trick-or-treat but does want to go to a sleepover. Not-so-secretly, I hope it rains.

Yes. I’m the Halloween Scrooge. Not Boo… Bah!

The kids have quickly learnt not to engage too enthusiastically with me about it. To figure most of it out for themselves. They gently suggest a good time to go to the pumpkin patch, because it’s fall, Mom, and the pumpkins look good on the porch. They each pick out a perfect-to-carve pumpkin, and even I choose two for their weird shapes and colors. They creatively brainstorm costumes amongst themselves, and resourcefully borrow and make. We have Batman, a Green M&M and a Zak-in-the-Box this year. I am proud of his originality and creativity – all on his own!

One Halloween I left my kids with the babysitter for four days, and flew east with my husband.

We visited the Washington Monument and saw the President leaving town in a convoy of low-flying helicopters. We walked the streets of Manhattan in the rain, and took fun photos outside the gleaming Plaza hotel, hundreds of windows twinkling in the twilight.

One Halloween we rode the subway downtown and then uptown with a mummy, Homer Simpson, kids wearing plaid shirts, torn jeans and blood-like paint (were they murderous hipsters?) and a guy in the most authentic costume ever, except he really is a Fedex delivery person.

One Halloween I sat in a 100-year-old theater on Broadway, and couldn’t wait for the play to start. The set was beautiful: a grand, old house dappled in afternoon sunlight. James Earl Jones’ comic timing was gravelly pitch-perfect and the actress who played the ballet-obsessed sister was my favorite.

The Trick-or-Treaters back home had fun too! The Green M&M took her small cousin by the hand and showed her how it’s done. Batman all in black got together with his BFF the white ninja and the Dyna Duo hit the ground running, while Zak-in-the-Box bounced his way around the neighborhood. I haven’t heard from the teenager yet but he liked the photo of Rockefeller Plaza I posted on Instagram, so I take that as a sign of life and greeting.

One Halloween I surprised myself. I missed it.

This is a Finish the Sentence Friday post, inspired by the prompt “One Halloween, I…” Hosted by Kristi from Finding Ninee, Dana from Kiss My List and April from 100lb Countdown.

New Kid in the Neighborhood

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Nicki

It sucks to be the new kid. Lonely and intimidating. It feels like everyone is noticing you, snap-judging you and the dorky whiter-than-white shorts you chose to wear, but really nobody is… and you’re not sure which you’d prefer.

I was 13 when my family left South Africa. I departed the cozy womb of my small 8^th grade class at the only Jewish high school in Pretoria, and entered the loud, frenetic, unfiltered school of new everything in Hod Hasharon, Israel. The faces I knew even better than my own, the voices I had heard every day since Kindergarten, the secrets and jump-rope games (24 Robbers Came Knocking at My Door!), netball practices and Liquifruit juice boxes, blue blazer with the school badge and sensible black shoes… all were replaced with unfamiliar, uncomfortable, daunting and overwhelming.

I stood in the doorway of my new class, in my ridiculous white shorts, my almost-grown-out perm caught up in a scrunchie (omg I know, but it was 1987) and tried to smile as every strange face turned toward me. Gulp. Then turned away. Double gulp. Would I ever feel familiar here? Would I ever learn all their names? Recognize these voices? Would anyone ever greet me, never mind tell me a secret? Who wears white shorts when she wants to blend in and be cool? We called the teachers Shmulik, Malka, Naomi… Mrs West, Mrs Burger and Mr Coetzee were unimaginably far away.

Within weeks, I had ditched the white shorts. Learnt how to play Five Stones and basketball. Fell in mini-love with a cute, shorter-than-me boy named Dani. And shared laughs, secrets, dance moves and sleepovers with my new friends. Lonely, scary and intimidating made way for happy and comfortable. Hebrew colored my dreams. Unfamiliar became home, and I never did miss wearing that blue school blazer.

Twenty three years and a drastic hairstyle change later, I was once again the intimidated, lonely new kid. This time with a baby in my arms, a clingy child wrapped around one shin, and a flailing, angry seven-year-old. Who inappropriately and very loudly declared to all those gathered on the blacktop in excited anticipation of the first day of school: “I’m not going to school with these freaks!” He didn’t declare it loudly, I correct myself. He yelled it. And by all those on the blacktop, I mean the entire student, teacher and parent population. He too was a new kid.

Heads turned. The baby cried. My little girl tightened her koala-grip on my leg, and I tried to dash after my indignant, scared boy who didn’t know what to do with these new feelings of bewildered and uncomfortable loneliness. I felt them too, and I wished for any length of badly-permed hair to hide behind, instead of the short spikes that were surely standing every which attention-grabbing way on top of my head.

New year. New school. New teacher. New friends. I hoped. For both of us.

It had been decades since I had been the new kid. Since I had felt out of my element. Lonely and alone. And there I was, wishing I were anyone, anywhere else, the 36-year-new kid, feeling 500 hundred shades of glaring invisible on the blacktop.

My newly minted first-grader was mad. He hadn’t wanted to leave his old school. The friends he had known, played with, shared meals, toys, germs with since he was two-years-old. That was my decision. And his dad’s. And as my heart shattered on the blacktop into so many sad and lonely pieces that first day of new school, when he floundered and raged against a decision that wasn’t his, I wondered if we had done the right thing. For him or for me.

“It’ll be okay. Here, give me the baby,” a kind, firm voice said in my ear. She had a baby and a clingy kid of her own to deal with, but she whisked mine away so that I could help my distressed son. And myself. Her blue eyes looked straight into mine, “First days are hard. It’ll be okay.” I passed the baby into her waiting arms. And I believed her.

Four years later, there is not a new kid my son doesn’t notice. Befriend. Invite over. He shows them the pass-through in the fence between our house and the neighbors’, and all the kids fill water balloons and throw them at each other. They leave flip flops, hair ties and other bits of themselves in their wake.

“It’ll be okay,” the blue-eyed-stranger-now-friend said, when she drew me out of my lonely, bewildered new-kid moment on the blacktop. It’s not okay. It’s wonderful. Because of her. And all the moms and dads and kids and teachers and grandparents and people like her. It’s a small-ish town, with a big, big heart. Where everyone is a neighbor, a friend, someone to help, to care about. And hopefully the new kids don’t feel new for very long. Especially if they do not wear white shorts!

This post was inspired by the Finish the Sentence Friday prompt, “When it comes to my neighbors…”
Hosted by Kristi from Finding Ninee and guest host Allison from Go Dansker Mom.

Life is Too Short for “Bad” Music

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Nicki

I can channel-surf like nobody’s business. A song comes on the car radio that I don’t like, and it’s gone before anybody even realizes it was a song.

Could be because it reminds me of things I’d rather not remember right then – old relationship gone wrong, bad break-up, an argument with a friend when I was 15 – or because it’s been played on the radio and on my kid’s iPod and the Disney channel too many times to still be enjoyable (anything by Maroon 5 immediately comes to mind), or because it’s simply not a very good song, in my opinion.

I listen to music mostly in my minivan. I spend a lot of time in that goddamn thing, usually schlepping someone to somewhere. Kids to karate, ballet, soccer, orthodontist. And also myself, to meetings, appointments, never-ending errands, lunch with a friend or drinks with the girls.

And honestly, I hate it. The schlepping, and the minivan. I hate that it’s so big. That it’s a minivan. That it has sliding doors, and seats that tuck away, and a trunk that opens and closes with the press of a button. It’s too convenient. It makes Costco runs and carting kids and two-bikes-two-scooters-and-room-for-more too easy. There’s no excuse not to do any of that. “We won’t fit” is never a reason not to schlep. So we’re always schlepping. Nothing screams Stay-at-Home-Mom like that mofo minivan – clearly I am struggling with both!

But I do love the sound system. The source of the music. It’s not state-of-the-art or fancy in any way. It came standard with the car, and is a typical 2012 Honda Odyssey system. CD player. Radio. AM, FM and XM. (Yes a DVD player too, but that is used only on long road trips and no, driving to Costco is not a long road trip).

I love that sound system because it makes the drive, any drive, feel worth it. Most days, most times, I need a soundtrack. Music speaks to me or speaks for me or just lets me be me, as I traverse the roads and freeways, U-turns and one ways. The lyrics, the beat, the melody… they elevate the moment, the mood, the task at hand (namely, schlepping) to something less permanent, less obligatory and more enjoyable. And life is too short to be mired in the mundane, the tedious, the boring. Schlepping, let’s face it, is exactly that.

I channel-surf so quickly because it’s all digital, and pre-programmed, and brightly displayed in pretty blue lights on the dash. The song, the artist, the genre and sometimes even the year. I know where my preferred channels are stored, and if my favorite alternative rock isn’t doing it for me on Alt Nation, there’s always Dierks Bentley crooning country magic over on The Highway or even a random chart topper on Hits 1 to get me through the five o’clock drive (love that new Taylor Swift!). This week I discovered that the hidden value of Rick Astley lies in helping me survive Highway 13 not once, not twice, but five times in less than two hours. Never gonna give you up, 80s on 8!

But the real reason I channel-surf at lightening speed like some amateur DJ is because life is just too damn short to listen to music I don’t want to listen to. Music that doesn’t enhance the moment I’m in some way, some how. Daily driving can be mind-numbing, exhausting even while I’m doing nothing more than sitting on my butt, stopping, starting, accelerating and opening a sliding door with the press of a button to let a kid in or out. When we suddenly, spontaneously all join Garth Brooks on the final verse of “Friends in Low Places” even the endless gray of Highway 13 looks a little brighter.

Yesterday my head-bopping, finger-snapping boy reached out to change the channel. (He channel-surfs faster than I do when motivated). “Don’t touch it,” I said, as the opening chords of Spandau Ballet’s “Gold” filled the car. “This is music from my childhood.”

“But Mom, I like to listen to music from my childhood too,” he replied with a smile. He’s only ten.

I nodded slowly, appreciating that for him too, life is too short for music he doesn’t like.

This has been a Finish the Sentence Friday post.
Hosts: Kristi from Finding Ninee and Stephanie from Mommy, For Real
Guest hosts: Kelly from Just Typikal and Katia from IAMTHEMILK

This week’s sentence was: “Life is too short for…”