I Am Everything That Is Wrong With the World

I suggested we go to Applebee's for lunch.  I have piles of books and scholarly magazines that I honestly want to read, yet spent my two free hours today watching television.  When I watch television, I watch tivoed episodes of ABC Family's Secret Life of the American Teen.  Sometimes I do this while eating Wawa subs, which I love.  My garden is well past its prime, yet I continue to let it grow, and by 'it' I mean 'all of the weeds that are overtaking it'.  I think I'm a writer yet only write blogs, and an occasional ill-conceived personal narrative that I do not even post in blog format.

But there is hope.  I still have yet to drink a milkshake whist eating a cheeseburger.  And that, at least, is something. 

Romancing the Corn

       I’ve been giving some thought today to the word romantic.  I use the word a lot, at least in my head, and am beginning to wonder when the idea of romance expanded to include so many things that have nothing to do with interpersonal love.  For example, one might use the term ‘romantic’ to describe a moonlit walk on the beach.  That’s a classic example, and it does, in fact, involve two people in love; unless you prefer to take romantic walks on the beach with, say, your dog...but that’s a completely different issue that I’d rather not think about.  However, many other things can be considered romantic.    Moving to Paris to live in a studio apartment and paint--doesn’t that sound romantic?  Spending a year living in solitude in the wilderness, like Thoreau or Abbey, to write and reflect on the nature of life, well, that’s pretty darn romantic.  In both of these instances, one is alone, yet the word romantic springs immediately to mind.  The problem with this is that it is not the actual apartment in Paris that is romantic in and of itself.  It is not the cabin on the lake or the trailer in the desert that is romantic. It is not the reality that is romantic--it is the idea of these things that is romantic.  

I have come to romanticize an idea in my own life--the idea of a garden.  Notice that I did not state that the garden itself is romantic.  It is quite the opposite.  In fact, in the creation of our first garden this spring, my husband and I fought over the silliest of things, simply out of frustration.  But we were working towards some romanticized ideal.  Surely once it was built and we were reaping the literal fruits of our labor, then there would be something magical, something primal, something romantic about sharing in the food we created.  Having realized the creation of a garden was not at all romantic, we looked forward to the next step.

This morning and afternoon I spent cooking a meal made primarily with food grown in this very garden.  I decided that it would be quite romantic to go out, pick the food, gather it in my skirt, and bring it inside to prepare.  Quite to my dismay, I discovered there is very little magic in the de-stringing of string beans.  On my list of Things that are Dull and Mundane, that chore is near the top of the list.  Making fresh pesto from the stalks of basil that I chopped down--I’m going to have to label that tedious.  And don’t even get me started on the corn.  My husband went out and picked and gathered, only to pull back the stalks and silk to find the most snaggle-toothed corn we’ve ever seen.  But we’re still serving it for dinner tonight.  Maybe I’ll cut some fresh flowers and light some candles, and we can see if an accidental flaming hydrangea and a screeching smoke alarm are romantic.  

Relaxation

       All I wanted to do was relax, near water, on sand.  The beach was too far away to qualify as relaxing--how relaxed can one really get after driving for three hours, knowing that the drive back will be just as long? But lakes--Pennsylvania has a lot of little lakes. (Though we are not as quaint as Vermont, which I recently learned has a website devoted to ‘swimming holes’.  Seriously?  Swimming holes?  Who uses that term anymore?) So off we went, to visit a pseudo-local lake about 45 minutes north east.

I knew it was a bad idea before we left.  In the summer, we typically don’t do anything or go anywhere on the weekends.  Weekends in August are for those poor souls who have to work during the summer.  From June until September, we do everything on weekdays between the hours of nine and four.  But this summer, something unusual happened.  It rained.  For days and days on end, it rained.  And there was one bright, glimmering, shining day in the middle of many days depicting lightening bearing clouds on The Weather Channel homepage--Saturday.  So we went to the lake.  It was a bad idea.

Please recall that relaxation was our goal.  We were immediately met with traffic--first with the traffic out of town.  There was a car show, and we smiled and laughed thinking we were leaving the crowds behind.  Then we arrived at the lake--correction--we arrived in the town that is near the lake.  And there was traffic.  

An hour after leaving, we pulled into the parking lot of the promised lake.  It was packed.  There were mini vans as far as the eye could see.  If I had not just sat in traffic for thirty minutes on both sides of a major mountain range, we would have turned around immediately.

But instead we got out and spread out our blankets.  I changed into my bathing suit in a changing room that only I could possibly be ok with, having spent years using public port-o-potties at hippie music festivals, typically with a wicked hangover on a ninety degree day.  My husband--who I love and am thankful is still married to me after many outings such as this--dutifully carried the low-sitting beach chairs into the water, so we could lounge, presumably in a relaxed fashion, with our feet in the lake and our asses dangling mere centimeters above the water.  I grabbed my book, sat down, and prepared to relax.

That’s when I heard it.  The screaming.  It was terrible.  It surrounded me from all sides.  Literally--in every direction, there was screaming.  The screaming of dozens of children.  They yelled, they ran, they whooped, they generally were very, very loud, and very, very noticeable.  They were everywhere at once.  It was a giant, mewling mass of kids under the age of nine.  Correction--it was a giant, mewling mass, and a smaller, calmer, more tired-looking mass of parents who could not have cared less.  They simply arrived--much like we did, after sitting in the same traffic--laid out their blankets, as we did, and set their kids free.  All of the children ran into the lake at random intervals.  No child simply walks into a lake.  And running into a body of water is very splashy business, and none of it was lost on me or my book, with which I was supposedly relaxing.  Several kids boogie boarded into me, despite the clear lack of tide or waves that would justify a boogie board.  Finally one admittedly very cute child inched closer and closer to me until he could finally reach out and grab my foot--his whole reason for inching--and I gasped and smiled at him, all the time wondering if his mother was watching.  If she wasn’t, he could easily have drown in the seven inches of water; if she was, she should have stopped the inching before he got even remotely close to my-foot-grabbing-distance.  Either way, she deserved to be slapped.  

It was at this point I realized something--it must be really hard to be a teacher.  I love my job--I really, truly do.  I don’t even especially love it in the summertime--I’d much rather be in my own classroom in November, working, than on a lake-beach in the middle of August. The reason for this is very simple--in my classroom, no one grabs my foot.  No one boogie-boards into me, and no one, I repeat no one, screams.

Thirty-seven more days until school starts.  I cannot wait.