We had a fabulous time in Vancouver, an extraordinarily beautiful city, as the pictures below will attest.

So it was well worth the spot trouble we had getting into Canada in the first place.

Here follows my conversation with a (young, male) Customs Officer on a Tues. afternoon in the Toronto airport. He was certainly only doing his job, but this was by far the worst grilling I’ve ever had in a fair amount of international travel over the course of my life.

Let me preface it by saying, with confidence, that I am by no means an imposing or sinister figure—I’m a curly-haired, bespectacled person, only about six inches taller than my nine-year-old. I don’t think I looked particularly crazed on that afternoon, though maybe a little frazzled by international travel with two children under ten. The kids in question sat dopily by while all this is going on.

Customs Officer: What is your purpose in visiting Canada?

Me: Attending a conference—my kids are coming with me.

CO: Who’s going to be looking after the kids while you’re working?

Me: Um, my friend found a babysitter.

CO: And you trust this babysitter?

Me (slightly put out now): Well, I trust my friend.

CO (skeptical, but on to something else now): Where’s their father?

Me (taken off guard): Uh, in Colorado. I’m divorced.

CO: Okay, then—let’s see your letter.

Me (taken completely by surprise): Letter?

CO (impatient): Yes. If you travel internationally with your kids, you need a signed letter from the father giving permission. Didn’t anyone tell you that?

Me (starting to get a little freaked out): No, no one told me that. I had to get a signed, notarized form from him to even get them passports—I thought that was all I needed.

CO: No, ma’am. You also need a letter.

Me (unable to get my head around this): But I have full custody. I really still need a letter?

CO (solemnly): Yes, ma’am. [and getting a little personal now]. Do they see their father?

Me: Yes—they just saw him yesterday. He knows all about the trip. You can call him if you like.

CO: Can’t do that—privacy issue [“What about my privacy?” think I, but absolutely do not say aloud]. You still need a letter. You can understand why we ask for it—you know what kinds of things go on.

Me (switching tactics to full-on obsequious charm, as wide-eyed and earnest as possible, because, seriously, this has gone long enough): Oh yes sir, I do. I can completely understand why you ask. I just didn’t know about the letter—but I absolutely understand why you need to be vigilant.

We go back and forth for a bit about the terrible things that happen and the depravity of mankind, and he eventually seems somewhat mollified. But he has one
more parting shot:

CO: Where are you staying in Vancouver?

Me: With my friend.

CO: And how do you know this friend?

Me: Well, we went to grad school together. I’m American and she’s Canadian….

CO: She’s Canadian?

I nod.

He lets us through.

Now, let me say in his defense, that:
1) I have been in Heathrow and LaGuardia in the past few months, as well as the Vancouver and Toronto airports, and Toronto was by far the busiest and most hectic of all of them—even at 6am, when we passed through on our way back (no trouble in that direction, just a glad-to-get-rid-of-you sneer).

And 2) Yes, terrible international kidnappings of children happen every day, and objectively speaking, I’m glad the Customs Service is vigilant about this.

I asked people in Canada about the letter business, and many had heard of it, though no one traveling alone with their kids had ever been asked to produce said letter.

It’s just that weird sensation of being taken for a much more suspicious person than you in fact are, y’know?

Guess I’ll bring a letter next time.

And in any case, it was well worth it to get to Vancouver:

Wild in the streets

I spent most of the past week trying to finish a long overdue essay on "Women and Power in the Enlightenment" (you can see the irony anvils falling from the sky already, right?). I thought I'd begin said essay with Mary Wollstonecraft's famous line, "I do not wish [women] to have power over men, but over themselves." But after a week of buying new shoes for the boys, dealing with the blisters from said new shoes, intermittent puking and non-stop rambunctiousness, I feel like saying, "you know what, Mar'? I think I'd settle for the former right about now."

It made me think of my favorite passage from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own,

"What had our mothers been doing that they had no wealth to leave us?...If only Mrs. Seton and her mother and her mother before her had learnt the great art of making money and had left their money, like their fathers and their grandfathers before them, to found fellowships and lectureship and prizes and scholarships appropriated to the use of their own sex...[But no, because] to endow a college would necessitate the suppression of families altogether. Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children--no human being could stand it. Consider the facts, we said. First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in feeding the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about in the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say the sight is not a pleasant one."

Who's a pretty bird?

Well, after ~6 mos. of research, negotiation and questing, we finally have a new family pet: meet Gerry, the baby cockatiel. I have to say that's it's way more fun to have a bird than I expected! He's pretty and friendly--happy to sit on one's hand or knee or shoulder (or head)--and yet happy to go into his cage with a sheet over it all night. (nb: the boys named him after Steven Gerrard, captain of the English football team. Why? I have no idea, but it suits him).

Austen-land

I'm back from England. Despite my diffidence, it was a really wonderful trip--as everyone except me told me it would be.

I went to a conference, which was surprisingly interesting. Along with everything else, it was lovely to be treated as neither a domestic nor an administrative drudge (these days, I think of my paper-giving persona as my professional avatar, and I'm always shocked by how differently people treat her than "me").

Then I spent an amazingly sunny weekend in London seeing old friends and doing a little bit of sight-seeing. It was an English "heat-wave" at ~82F, and everyone was pretty much stripped down to their underwear. Since it was 101F when I left NC, it was a cool and lovely respite for me. I didn't go west of the Tate Modern or north of Clerkenwell--mostly, I just walked up, down, and across the truly magical Thames.

Jane Austen's writing desk, Austen House, Chawton.


Ivory letters (like in Emma)


Austen's hair, and some topaz crosses:


Austen's house.


Graffiti in the Tower of London.

Not-Birthday

Since I bent your collective ear with about how sucky my birthday was, I wanted to let you know what a lovely not-birthday I had.

I had long-standing plans with friends to go to the coast at the end of last week (taking advantage of the boys’ spring break)—and even though I lost a day of it to the atypical chicken pox disaster, I sent the eight-year-old off with most of the gang Thursday morning, and followed with the four-year-old, and the working spouses (ie, the husbands) on Friday morning

And even though it was mid-afternoon by the time we rendezvoused with everyone else, we still decided to take the nifty little motorboat ferry out to the National Seashore barrier islands (Shackleford Banks, if you’ve been to that part of NC).

And it was a gorgeous, clear, spring day.

And we saw wild horses.*

And dolphins in the harbor.

And pelicans skimming the waves.

And the beach was deserted and pristine enough to remind me of my favorite poem about the ocean:

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
from Elizabeth Bishop, “At the Fishhouses”

And my friends made me an angel food cake with pudding sauce and berries, and everyone—five kids, five grown-ups—sang happy birthday.

So, I declared my real birthday null and void, and took that day for my birthday instead, because I’ve reached the age where you can do things like that if you want to.

Remember our slightly bizarre rabies vaccine experience? Well, here’s the latest:

Tuesday morning, I took my four-year-old in to the pediatrician for the hive-like rash he’s had since Friday. He’s been on spring break from preschool since 3/29, and was supposed to go back tomorrow—but I knew they’d show him the door tout suite if he showed up with an undiagnosed rash. Hence the preemptive strike, even though he hadn’t been sick, and it seemed to be clearing up on its own.

The doctor took one look at him and said, “That’s not hives, that atypical chicken pox.”

Cut to my astonished face.

“But,” I spluttered, “he’s been vaccinated” (as is mandatory).

“Yup,” said she, “that’s why we call it atypical chicken pox. It’s the kind you get when you’ve already been vaccinated.”

“But,” I spluttered some more, “they looked like hives—no blisters.”

“Yup,” she said,” with atypical chicken pox, it can look like anything.”

“I’m stunned,” I said.

“You look stunned,” she said, “but at least you’re laughing.”

Well, because, lucky for her, I had already hit rock bottom the day before, as I spent my whole birthday watching four sweaty, squabbling little boys (we’re having a heat wave here, wrapped in a green haze of tree pollen)—watched them in the service of having my friends watch my kids so that I could actually work today and tomorrow. Which now? is moot—since I’m home with the (not-sick) four-year-old until new pox stopping popping out (just a day or so, with any luck).

So, yup, hit the muddy bottom of the slough of despond and have bobbed back up to the surface-- where there’s nothing I can do about the fact that it’s impossible to look after my kids, have a full time job, and retain my sanity except laugh. Laugh slightly maniacally.

And, on the upside, it got me out of the horrible meeting I was supposed to be in yesterday. And after you’ve had four cranky boys rampaging through your house, one pox-y one seems relatively peaceful.

And, poor thing, he is kind of itchy, though not, I repeat, particularly sick. Still: Job? What job?

NB: Before you ask, apparently being vaccinated does make things better—makes you less sick if you do end up with chicken pox, for one, and much less contagious when you have them, for another.

The flowers that bloom in the spring (tra la) have nothing to do with the case.

I know that it is the kind of thing you either love or loathe, and that it makes me an irredeemable geek that I love it, but I was inordinately cheered up by seeing the local Savoyard production of The Mikado Saturday night. For approximately three hours, it made me forget how pissed I was that my eight-year-old had spilled water on my laptop and shorted out the keypad, and how guilty I felt when my four-year-old wailed inconsolably as I left him with a sitter. Because, no matter how much the mire of domesticity has felt like quicksand lately, you can always get a USB mouse, and, if you are four, be instantly consoled by a battle between the forces of Playmobil and Leg. And it was the genius of Gilbert and Sullivan to write an operetta that actually works better when it is performed with a fair amount of amateurishness and campiness—as long as the love and gusto is still there.

The Mikado is an amazing panoply of silly costumes, pretty songs and people motivated either by pure love or pure pettiness. My most musically literate friend organized what amounted to a field trip for us all last night: ten adults, seven kids, joining an already packed house (who knew?). Given the incredibly fond memories I have of my dad taking us to G&S productions every year, I had to bring my eight-year-old. And I have to say, the eight-year-olds—three boys, two girls—all seemed to enjoy it immensely. But then eight-year-olds do have a natural affinity for comically exaggerated characters and crazy turns of fate.

(picture of Tim Spall as the Mikado from Mike Leigh's Topsy Turvy--a film about the making of the opera that I recommend no matter how you feel about G&S.)