Doesn't it sound cute to say that we took sugar cookie dough, had each child (my two plus a friend) cut out/sculpt shapes of states, and once baked we frosted them green and, referring to the map, used chocolate chips to mark the capitals (and any other major cities), and blue frosting to show prominent rivers/lakes? It sounds really cute. They look really ugly. Let's face it, Colorado aside, the states are not easy to form... and sugar cookie dough can only take so much manhandling... by the time they baked up it was like, "Is this my New Hampshire, or my Virginia?"
I've committed to go through all fifty states. Today we did our first five. When deciding on which five it made sense to start with the top-tier battle ground states so as to prep us for following the news tomorrow. They started with Ohio (kind of sort of okay because it at least has two straight sides), went on to Florida (The Boy told The Girl that hers looked like a ray-gun), happily chopped out sensibly-shaped Colorado, tried to grasp Virginia by comparing it to a small mountain next to a larger one with a straight line on the bottom, and then finished really wonky with New Hampshire.
The food coloring we had to use for the frosting was from a past, slightly more gourmet project, so instead of good ol' grass green it was "Juniper Green" and instead of a conventional blue it was "Delphinium Blue." Which both sound nice enough, but for some reason don't translate well on a bumpy amoeba-shaped sugar cookie. Sometimes colors -- I don't know -- let's just say blue for example -- should just commit already to being a consistent, reliable, decided blue.
So as not to further alienate half of my blog readership (1.5 person), I'll switch now and talk about our personal economic woes. The scheme is expensive. I really wanted it to not cost much because I'm already embarrassed to be doing something that not everybody can do (I absolutely get that having a parent at home is an insane luxury -- please refer to some of my first blog entries). I'm trying to be creative and take advantage of free resources and nominally-priced classes/opportunities, but good gravy, it all adds up (sugar cookie dough doesn't grow on trees my friends). To that end, today I began the bartering of my services.
While my kids are busy taking their Oscar Wilde/theatre class I'm now conducting an essay workshop class with a couple of teenagers (in exchange for a class that my moppets will take next session from the same organization). I had to dust off the cobwebs a bit. My students wear super-smart-pants and are writing essays to apply to "top-tier boarding schools" and "top-tier Manhattan privates." I have to admit that I feel like the "doctor" in The King's Speech... like should they find out I went to a (say it in a whisper) state school they will get all teary and pissed off at my having deceived them and I'll have to be all: I never lied! I never lied! You never asked...
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I speak of sugar cookies and make reference to financial hardship while absolute despair is going on mere blocks away. In all honesty, I haven't got a clue how to make my existence somehow congruent, or non-offensive to that other reality. I've been asked how we're fairing here in the aftermath. I don't know how to answer. We feel grateful. We feel impressed at the help that we are seeing and hearing about. Our building collected clothes and household items for the NYPD to distribute and within hours you couldn't see the carpet or the couches in the lobby for all the donations. Some of the stories that are surfacing about loss are staggering. I don't understand how certain areas can ever be cleaned up and fixed. What I'm holding on to, and I get that it's ridiculous in its simplicity (and again callous because any "suffering" on my part is reflected/sympathy), is that time is miraculous. When I've been in the middle of heartbreak I could not have fathomed that anything could ever be okay again; I could not have believed that a time would come when I wouldn't hurt. And then time passes... and somehow, miraculously, during that time healing happens. I'm resistant to make the connection because it's not yet been a week and already it's cliche because it's so on the forefront of people's minds here, but I'll put it here to document a local sentiment: in the rubble left from September 11th, it would have felt impossible, and even cruel to suggest that a mere decade later the space would be what it is now. I don't think that anybody is saying that that decade has erased pain, or blotted out the loss, it's just a reminder that a lot of clean-up and building has happened... and fingers crossed, can happen again. In the interim I make cookies and teach privileged teens the craft of writing essays. And I hope. Mostly I hope that my neighbors who have lost so much haven't lost their hope.
