About a bird

Anxiety is high around here. August always seems to ratchet up the nerves. Summer has lost its charm, but not its edge. The humidity and the heat and the smells and strangers barking at each other in the street. Hurricanes and tropical storms are coming this way, they keep saying. One after another. Who can say what's next?

I've had conversations with not one, not two, but three loved ones who were beset with (they knew) irrational fears. I feel like I spend most of my time in Reassurance Mode. I'm glad I can be the one who's relatively calm (for once), but then I worry about their worry, because worry is bad for the health.

No one is sleeping. And when we manage it, our dreams are weird.

A few days ago I found a dying baby sparrow on the sidewalk. He blinked fast, flapped his wings, toppled over. His claws were mangled. There was nothing I could do, but I couldn't leave it. My downstairs neighbor came by. We sat down by the bird, in the middle of the sidewalk. Other passersby stopped and weighed in on what could be done. The baby bird kept blinking. I made some phone calls. No one asked why I was bothering with a baby sparrow, which I appreciated, but there was no real help to be found. We murmured to it. The blinks stopped. Mostly we were relieved. We wondered whether we helped the baby bird as it died, or terrified it. We did the best we could. We knew it wasn't much.

Yesterday that same neighbor texted me: "I am not kidding, there's another dead sparrow in our driveway," she wrote.

"Don't worry," I wrote back. "It's just Zombie Sparrow, come to exact revenge."

She was sure there was a bird epidemic. It would just figure, wouldn't it? The heat is rising, birds are dropping from the sky. What's next?

There's no question there's plenty to worry about. There's always a crisis. But I keep thinking how, on one of the hottest days of the year, people came upon two goofballs crouched over a baby bird, and they stopped to see what could be done. I don't know, I guess what I'm trying to say is we have each other, which is so cloying, but I mean it. Everything's scary, but we can be pretty great. Even in the middle of August, and everything dying around us.

Sleeping away

Henry went to sleepaway camp for the first time last year. He was gone for two weeks, and let me tell you, those two weeks were a giddy thrill ride of unbearable anxiety and mild to moderate fretting/longing. I missed my kid so much it physically hurt, and although Scott and I enjoyed going out and having grown-up fun (not a euphemism) with fellow adults (friends! platonic friends!), it almost didn't make up for all the discomfort. It was often painful, and I considered whether I needed daily therapy, or an hourly meditation practice, or for someone to come along and bop me on the head with a mallet.

Part of the anxiety was due to the fact that Henry promised and swore he'd write and then we did not receive any correspondence until, oh, the day before we picked him up. While I told myself his radio silence was due to his extreme fun-having, and if anything had gone wrong surely the camp would let us know, the nonrational side of me was shrieking, "Call the camp! He wandered into the woods and no one noticed! He's going to be raised by raccoons and even when you find him he will speak Raccoon Talk and he'll have imprinted on his new Raccoon Mother! His new name will be known only to his fellow raccoons! It will be Chrrrhrrfrrrr! But you'll never pronounce it correctly! Where was I going with this!"

Then we got a letter from him, and it was happy and carefree. I was then able to enjoy the last 24 or so hours before we picked him up, and boy, did I make that time count! (I don't think I really did. I can't recall.)

The point of this is that he had a great time, the greatest time of his life ever, and he's spent the year longing for the carefree days of camp. Which made sending him this year a much easier decision, and a far less painful experience for us. We decided to send him this year for a month, mostly because 1) his best friend was also going for a month, and 2) who wants to be in Brooklyn in the dead of summer, when the world smells like garbage? I know I'd rather not be here.

This weekend was Visiting Day (which the one-month campers have after two weeks), and we were dying to get our hands on our (probably) grubby camper. He gave us a tour of the place, and we took him out for lunch and dessert. And then ice cream. And then we tried to get him a toy at the toy store, but all he wanted was a rock. A polished rock, but still. Kid's gone native. I shouted "DON'T BE A RACCOON" but he just stared at me. He's already forgetting our human language!

He's got another two weeks. It's pretty great, knowing what a good time he's having, out there in the woods. But we miss him, you know, a little.

We are so back!

Winners! That's you. You are all winners, in mine eyes.

Nonetheless, I do in fact have five winners for the A GOOD HARD LOOK giveaway. I will announce them when they are CONFIRMED as actual live human beings and not spambot MILF-hunters. (Curse you, spambot MILF-hunters! Stop sending me filthy Twitter spam and then adding insult to injury by trying to win free books from me!)

I am pleased to inform you that my family and I traveled to California and back--and lived. Miracle of miracles! The planes remained aloft! The pilots did not forget their years of training! I lived yet another day without spontaneously combusting! Will wonders never cease?

(Did anyone else read The Book of Lists when they were little? I skated right over the dirty parts in that book so I could preoccupy myself with tales of spontaneous combustion. It seemed not only possible, to me, but likely. Of course I would burst into flames for no reason. Of course my mom would come to wake me for school and find a pile of ashes lying in a me-shape in my otherwise pristine, unburned bed. It would just figure.)

I went to BlogHer for precisely 22 hours (I counted!) and then Rebecca whisked me away for dinner with Bethany, who I've only wanted to meet for forever. It was a lovely ending to a crazy but awfully fun day, during which Eden and I signed countless books and I somehow managed to not see countless people I went  there specifically to see. BlogHer is getting a little... big, for me. Not bad. Just big. SO BIG. I was overwhelmed. After dinner, and once we found Rebecca's car (it took a while) (she's pregnant, you guys! With twins! She's THREE PEOPLE!), she kindly drove me north to Carlsbad, where I met Scott and Henry at Legoland.

Oh, Legoland. What can I say about this "Legoland"? If you were to ask Henry what his dream vacation would be, he could not have devised a more perfect place than this. An entire park dedicated to the thing he loves more than food and sleep and also us? He'd probably leave out the mean parents who curbed his spendthrift impulses, which kicked in every time he saw a gift shop, oh and p.s. there's a gift shop every few feet. Despite his frustrations with us and our damned sense, he had so much fun.

Of course, if you asked me what my dream vacation would be, it would not at all resemble Legoland. Nonetheless, Henry's utter glee was contagious, and the experience was entertaining enough for two days. (I don't know how you could do Legoland for more than two days.) My main stressor during those two days was sun protection, and whether or not we had applied enough so that we wouldn't be destroyed by the awful yellow orb in the sky but not so much that we resembled zombies. There seems to be no way to achieve this happy medium, by the way. Lord knows I tried. Also, is there a wide-brimmed hat that does not look completely dorky? Answer: no. Don't even bother answering that one for me.

We returned at 2 a.m., Tuesday morning, and I have still not recovered. I am a delicate flower. Dim the lights on your way out, would you? Be a dear.

More about...the intruders

I can just tell that you're all dying to know how Apocalouse 2011 is coming along. And I am dying to tell you.

The update is thus: having read the entire Internet in a matter of hours, I figured out that the best method was the ol' Pantene-conditioner-and-comb shimsham. I mixed in some baking soda, because someone somewhere recommended that, and I figured it couldn't hurt. Baking soda never hurts! And always helps! Is there anything baking soda can't do? I take it for my nerves! 

I also ordered this fancy German lice comb, the Nisska, because that's what the pros use. And LICE LAUGH AT AMATEURS.

The first night I combed out my son's hair, it took about two hours, and I spent most of the time crying and screaming. This is not at all true. Actually he watched Pirates of the Caribbean, and I gave Scott significant looks every time I wiped the comb clean and found colonies of nits. But no live lice! So that's something….?

We did it again the next night, and there were definitely far fewer nits. That there were any at all amazes me. But fewer, that's something! Right? Oh, God!

The day after that I checked my own head, and what do you know! Nits! I smashed the apartment until everything was rubble. Then I did the conditioner-and-comb routine on myself. By the way, Pantene smells like the worst perfume you could ever imagine. I'm used to my all-natural, touch-of-rosemary conditioner, and this stuff smells like I'm putting my grandma on my head. Actually both of my grandmas smelled better than Pantene.  Scott went out and bought another cheap white conditioner, and what do you know, it smelled just as much like a funeral home. Why?

ANYWAY. Once I found out that I was horribly infested as well, I figured, let's be thorough, and after taking a hefty dose of tranquilizers, I combed out Scott's hair. Need I tell you what I found? I had already spoken to one of the Lice Ladies of Brooklyn, and she was lovely and caring and seemed to think that I didn't particularly need her help, now that I had the fancy comb and the mental illness required to obsessively groom one's family. She had mentioned that men rarely get lice, because of the testosterone. I found this logic specious, to say the least, especially because I know plenty of men--virile specimens all!--who've fallen victim to lice, but while I combed out Scott's hair he was crying like a little girl, so maybe she had a point?

I'm joking, of course. When I showed him the nits in his hair, he merely grunted, poured lighter fluid on his head, and asked where the matches were. Good thing we couldn't find them! It turns out that lice love fire.

So that's where we are now. Tonight we will embark on another family-time combing adventure, while we watch several movies. And we will do the same tomorrow. And the next day. I don't see this ever ending.