Sticky Pudding and a cup of good cheer!

"Because I've odd ideas about Christmas. Because I have all that money can buy. I want more people, but no more things."
Howards End

I've got to agree with Margaret Schlegel on this one. As I get older and acquire more stuff, I find that providing Christmas gift lists gets harder and harder. I don't need any more things, just more people. Or rather, more time with the people I like.

Yesterday was the Annual Holiday Lunch* with the girls -- oh, and husbands and children and even a dog, but really it's the girls that matter here. This particular group of girlfriends all centres around the lovely S. who married an adorable Englishman in 2005 and went to live in London for a few years. In her absence, and missing her dreadfully, us bridesmaids would get together for lunch or dinner every so often and boom! a group friendship was cemented. I adore these women. They're so funny and so bright, they sparkle. They eat everything I put on their plates. They're wonderful. And now that S. is back in Canada with husband and daughter, the group is complete and all's right with the world.

You would think. But not quite. The fly in the ointment is that, despite the fact we're all in the same general geographic area, we still can't seem to get together more than once a month, and that's if we're lucky. What has happened to the world that we're all so busy? Children, jobs, family commitments, I know, I know, it all adds together to eat up every moment of free time, but suddenly the year is over and you realize that all your communication with your friends is electronic and you can't remember what they look like. It's kind of sad, when you think about it. Your friends are the family that you get to choose (what a luxury!) and here we are, squandering it because we're all so busy that in some cases 2 years may go by before you can actually pull together a casual dinner.

Sigh.

Ah, well. What can you do?

Resolve, I guess, to make the most of the time you do spend together. Try to ensure that there's at least one high-quality weekend away a year together. Keep dreaming of renting a house in Sonoma together. And seal the deal with food, of course, as N. did yesterday with her superb roast beef for lunch and I did with this heart-stopping dessert made specially for S. who counts herself as something of an Sticky Toffee Pudding expert. It passed the test.


Sticky Toffee Pudding with Toffee Sauce**
ingredients
1 1/2 cups pitted dates, chopped
1 1/2 cups water
1/2 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp.baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
pinch of salt
pinch of nutmeg
pinch of allspice


For Toffee Sauce:
1 cup whipping cream
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
method

Combine the dates and water in a medium-sized saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer gently for 10 minutes, or until most of the liquid had been absorbed by the dates or evaporated. Puree the dates in a food processor, blender or stick mixer.

With an electric mixer, beat the butter with the brown sugar. Beat in eggs, one at a time.
In a medium-sized bowl, mix flour with baking powder and baking soda. Add to the wet batter and then stir in pureed dates.

Spoon the batter into a buttered & floured 9" x 13" baking dish. Bake in a 350° over for 35 to 45 minutes or until the top feels firm when gently pressed in the center.

While pudding is cooking, make the toffee sauce by combining cream sugar and butter in a heavy-bottom saucepan. Bring to a boil then cook, boiling and stirring for about 3 minutes. Let cool slightly.

When cake is done and cooled slightly, prick with a skewer to make lots of tiny holes. Spoon half of the toffee sauce over the cake.

When ready to serve, heat remaining toffee sauce (stirring all the while) and spoon over individual portions. If you really want to kill them with kindness, add a scoop or two of highest quality vanilla ice cream.


Kara

* this event does not, in fact, happen annually because of scheduling conflicts. Go figure. However, I am determined to make it so and start by labelling it, quite firmly, as the Annual Holiday Lunch.

**adapted from Food & Whine:http://www.fortysomething.ca/2008/01/sticky_toffee_pudding.php

And so this is Christmas

Okay, so Christmas.

It's been intimated around the office and on Facebook lately that I'm a Grinch or a Scrooge, that I lack Christmas Spirit and all that. And the thing is, it's absolutely not true. I love Christmas. I love the last wheezing gasps of the old year and the promise of the new. I love that there's all this lovely time off, that there's days and days of feasting ahead, the whole giving and receiving of gifts and good wishes. I love all the lights and the shopping (bah! humbug! on this online shopping thing – I need to see and feel the gifts I’m choosing for you) and the whole suspension of reality. It’s lovely and from mid-December onwards I’m capable of tearing up at the tiniest thing, sentimental fool that I am.

But the thing is, it can’t be forced. You can surround me with all your tinselly shit and good cheer at the office all you want, but until that mid-December moment comes, I just won’t feel Christmas. I have to wait, every year, until something triggers it for itself.

Last year it was the night my husband and I decorated our first Christmas tree together (we’d been married for 5 years but had never had a tree before because we feared what our border collie/lab mix dog would do to it in our absence) with all these wonderful old glass ornaments from his grandfather’s house. It was such a nice moment, and the house smelled so good, and the ornaments were such little nostalgia-globes, and I think we watched A Christmas Story afterwards and laughed, and maybe it snowed, and maybe I’d had a few too many glasses of cabernet, but whatever it was, that was the night I felt Christmas for 2008.

Well, tonight was the night I felt Christmas for the first time in 2009. And it’s all my sister’s fault.

My elder sister is mentally handicapped, which, for anyone reading this who has a handicapped relative or friend knows, is a situation that’s incredibly layered with emotion and meaning and good stuff and bad stuff and, just, stuff. Anyway, about once a month the two of us go out for dinner. Sometimes when I pick her up she’s had a bad day and is grumpy, but lately she’s been in fine form almost every time we have dinner. Tonight was no exception.

We sat in the crowded restaurant, chatting as we do on these evenings out about how busy or not busy the restaurant is, how things are in the house where she lives, about what she’s going to order (complete with the dessert that she promises to never tell our mother about, yet invariably does, so thrilled is she to have snookered me into buying her dessert when my parents never give in on that) until the waitress came to take our order. Looking up at the 20-year old server with bright eyes and a smile, my sister stuck her hand out and introduced herself to the girl, saying “Me, Andrea.”

(I always have this teeeensy moment of fear when my sister makes any sort of gesture to the outside world, when she breaks her focus away from me and reaches out to someone else. Because I never know what sort of reaction Andrea’s going to get and there’s nothing worse than to see someone recoil from her, as though she’s a monster of some sort. It’s a reaction that hurts, that ruffles all those layers of emotional stuff -- she’s as familiar to me as my own skin, how can she be a monster to others – that’s just so damned rude and yet what can you do. You can’t blame people for their instinctive reactions, that’s just who they are, just as my sister is just who she is.)

So, yes, I held my breath as my sister trustingly introduced herself to the young waitress. And I was richly rewarded as the girl, without missing a beat, laughed and put down her tray, shook hands with my sister and said “well, hello, I’m Michelle!”

And that was it. That was the moment when the whole Christmas spirit or whatever you want to call it started to trickle in. For Andrea, simple contact with non-handicapped people means a lot. I think it makes her feel like she belongs, like she’s less different. And, because of the way she is (in the sense that she’s not always in such a great mood that she’ll reach out to the outside world) and because of the way people are and the way they handle difference, it’s something she doesn’t get to experience on a regular basis. So Michelle the waitress’ kindness in treating my sister like anyone else, a tiny event she likely forgot minutes after it happened, meant the world to Andrea right at that moment.

And then, about an hour later, as Andrea and I finished some Christmas shopping and she loudly and happily wished the cashier a Merry Christmas with great, innocent enthusiasm, well, that pretty much sealed the deal. Put out some cookies, crack open that box of tissues, prepare for floods at the first sentimental t.v. commercial, Christmas 2009 is officially open for business.

Kara

The problem with blogging (Part Deux)

The problem with blogging is that sometimes the only things you want to write about are the things you absolutely should not write about in the public domain. Your dysfunctional relationship with your family or your employer, for example. Or about your observations on Christmas, which is a time of year that you adore, but that has a dark side that you'd like to explore in print, but you don't want to scare your mother (who is the only person reading your blog, of course), again. Or about how some of your most meaningful conversations these days are happening on Twitter with strangers you'll never meet and though you tell yourself that Twitter is like a big ol' virtual cocktail party, there's a part of you that thinks it's all so weird. Or about how too much vitamin water will give you a case of the electric scoots. You know, stuff like that.

Kara

PS The photo is the cover of Scared of Santa: Scenes of Terror in Toyland, by Denise Joyce and Nancy Watkins (Harper Paperbacks, $10)Read more: http://www.esquire.com/fiction/books/bad-holiday-books-1208#ixzz0ZmFtUOLq . 'Nuf said.

knitwit

There's this blonde driving down the road at 100 miles an hour, and she’s knitting.
A policeman on a motorbike chases her for twenty miles before he manages to pull up next to her. "PULLOVER!" he screams at her.
"NO, SCARF!" the blonde screams back.

(What? Okay, so not the best use of blogspace, but I've been knitting a lot and I'm bored. And blonde.)

Kara

It was 20 years ago today...

I remember watching the live coverage of the Berlin Wall falling the night the border opened between East and West. I stared at the t.v. in the dorm lounge at school, my reaction ricocheting between amazement, disbelief and a vague sense of worry about just how it would all play out.

I'd been in Berlin just two years before, having spent about five weeks of the summer of '87 in Germany with relatives and friends. That trip, my Hanover relatives took me to Berlin for a long weekend. A visit to my father's cousin in East Berlin was scheduled for the Sunday. At the last minute, however, I bowed out of going. For one thing, the very thought of crossing Checkpoint Charlie was enough to induce a panic attack (I've always hated dealing with anyone in uniform -- I believe this phobia began at the hands of some evil Brownies in grade 2), and then I also needed a day away from my very kind (but occasionally overbearing) relatives. By that point in the trip, I'd been someone's guest for at least 3 weeks and my need for alone time was almost a medical condition. And, to be honest, there was something kind of creepy about my West German relatives' attitude, this weird sort of smugly schadenfreudish air -- oh, the poor Ossis, they seemed to say, what would they do without our annual visits to bring over our high-quality hand-me-down clothes and shoes and foodstuffs? I had the feeling I'd be encouraged to look at the East like it was a diorama in a museum, its residents like animals in a zoo, to be entertained by the lack of shiny consumer products.

So, off went my aunt, uncle and cousin, to visit the Ossi relatives across the Wall, while I spent the day blessedly alone, wandering the shopping areas around the Kurfurstendamn, eating currywurst from street vendors and eventually making my way through the Tiergarten, a huge park, to an elevated lookout platform by the Brandenburg Gate. If memory serves, this platform, which was about 25 feet high or so, was situated at the end of the Strasse des 17. Juni, a broad boulevard that swept through the tree-filled Tiergarten to meet the Brandenburg Gate, which is a 18th century triumphal arch type of thing. The Wall crossed over the boulevard here, blocking you from the gate and the neighbouring Reichstag building. All you could really see over the wall was no-man's land, an empty stretch of nothing. I don't remember seeing any people, or guard towers, or dogs, but it's quite possible they were there, too.

It was the Reichstag that really held my attention. The huge building was a scorched ruin, heavily pockmarked with bomb damage from WWII, its windows vacant and black. In my memory, there was nothing but empty meadowland in front of its stone steps -- I have a distinct mental picture of the contrast of long grass and wildflowers in front of the desolate ruin, but again, this could be some embroidering on the part of my brain. Seeing the bomb damage made my head explode -- it's one thing to grow up hearing stories of WWII from my parents who were small children in Berlin at the time, stories of air raids and evacuations, of shrapnel from phosphorus bombs making apartment buildings glow at night for months afterward, of raising rabbits in the apartment for food, of the Blockade and the Airlift (and the weird to them food that got dropped from the Rosinenbombers), of black market trading, it's one thing when these are just stories. But it's another thing entirely when you see, in person, a building that played a role in that horrific conflict (though what war isn't horrific) standing still-damaged, over 40 years later. It was, in an odd way, like sudden, unexpected slap.

Or, at least, this is how I remember it.

I spent a long time wandering along the Wall itself that afternoon, reading all the graffiti. Some of what had been written was simple and heartfelt, but a lot of what I saw was very stupid. A lot of anti-communist epithets, sprayed on with the kind of cowardly bravado only possible when there's no chance of an answer from the other side, do you know what I mean? Honestly, what's the point of writing "F#$ You, Commies!" or whatever, on a section of the Wall entirely surrounded by trees?

The whole experience was eerie. As a Westerner, used to having the freedom to do anything and go anywhere, the concept of restricted liberty was almost too much to understand. This was likely another reason I bowed out of crossing the border to the East to meet Renate and Rolf, that I just wasn't ready to wrap my head around the enormity of what the Wall and the Iron Curtain and the Cold War really meant. I was 17 and just not ready to try to understand the politics of how it all happened and what it all really meant. It was easier to deal with in books and films, at one remove from my own life.

And then, two years later, on a November Friday night, I watched from the cocoon of my university dorm as that same bit of wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate came tumbling down. I remember waiting for the guns to fire, thinking it all seemed too simple, that it was all some sort of horrific trick. I remember thinking of my un-met relatives and wondering whether they were part of the crowd (they weren't). I remember worrying that there'd be riots or some other sort of violence, maybe not immediately but at some point because how on earth was this all going to work??

But it has worked, in its own way. For people like my father's cousin, who lived a nice life there behind the wall, it was difficult to see symbols of their old culture dismantled, such as the Palast der Republik. There must have been (and likely is still) great tension between the West and the East as the city reshaped itself. I wonder what its like to have been a part of a separate culture for over 20 years and suddenly that culture is gone, subsumed into another? On our last trip, my mother got into a conversation with a woman at the opera, a long time resident of Berlin. Mum had noticed that people were speaking the Berlinerish dialect more and more this visit than in other past trips. The woman replied that, in her opinion, the dialect had been kept alive more so in the East than the West and that its increased usage was an attempt by the Easterners to maintain their cultural identity as something other from the cosmopolitan Berlin community.

However, as a visitor, the reunified Berlin is a wonderful thing. The museum system is finally, mostly sorted out, you have a choice of three (count'em three!) opera houses, the Reichstag is entirely renovated with a new glass dome on top, you can travel easily to Dessau or Leipzig or the Spreewald, and you never have to stand at the top of a lookout platform and have the past slap you in the face. The past is still there, mind you, there are a million little reminders across the city so that you can never forget, but it's no longer akin to stepping from technicolour to sepiatone.

Kara

The Kitchen Is Closed...To You!

My baby turns 2 tomorrow. That means on Sunday I will have the big family party for her. That means I will have about 25 -30 guests for dinner, coffee and cake. This is life in my family. My husband comes from a fairly large family, as do I, and almost all of our family members reside in the Greater Melonville Metropolitan Area.

To be honest, I really enjoy the planning and preparation that goes into these gatherings. I like to feed people. (Slightly off topic, but just bear with me for sec, have you ever watched something like Biggest Loser, or a Dr. Phil or Dr. Oz show about weight loss, and they always talk to some fatty who blames her girth on the fact that she comes from a culture or ethnic group where food is the centre of all important gatherings or celebrations? Really? Like don't we all? If someone knows of the culture or ethnic group that celebrates weddings or births with fasting and abstinence could you let me know?)

Anyhoo, the point is, I believe in Kara's motto for entertaining " For God Sakes If You Are Going To Invite People Over For A Meal Then Break A Sweat." Do the work. Make an effort.

Of course once all the revelry is over there will be clean up. Its part of the bargain, and I am more than willing to deal with it. I have a fabulous dishwasher, and a husband who is more than willing to help with the heavy lifting.

Here is my problem. Some people can't take no for an answer. I always have a couple of guests who will prance into my kitchen and begin to help with clean up. There are a number of problems with this. First off ,my kitchen is freakishly small given the size of my house. Not only is it small it is a victim of bad design. This means that only one person can comfortably work in the kitchen at any given time. Two, they decide to clean up at the end of the meal portion of the evening. This is usually the time that the gifts are opened. Invariably I end up missing most of this because my "kitchen help" is constantly ducking into the living room to ask where I keep my flatwear, or where they should put the serving platters. Thirdly, on the off chance I take your offer to help either with prep or clean up you have to be a bit of a self starter. If you come chasing after me to get my approval on every cucumber slice, or you need me to pat you on the back and thank you with every item you dry, well, lets just say I'll give you the approval and the thanks, but I can't guarantee there is going to be a whole lot of sincerity in my voice. Also, I really don't think its cute or funny that you have a habit of breaking something everytime you "help" me in the kitchen. Lastly, just stay out of my freaking kitchen. My kitchen is a small sacred space. When you come into it uninvited, or worse force your way in even after you have been told your help is neither needed nor wanted you are violating my personal space. You might as well fashion a speculum out of my salad tongs and ambush me for a surprise pap swab because I find your presence just that intrusive and unwanted.

The thing is my family is a busy one. These days it seems like we have most of our meals in shifts, or we are keeping one eye on the clock to make sure we are on time for pick-up or drop off as the case may be. So when I have a chance to get my whole family together to celebrate a happy occasion with a meal I have prepared specially for them, I want to enjoy the company. I'll tend to the mess after everyone goes home, and if I don't do it then, I deal with it in the morning.

I put in a lot of hard work to ensure that everyone would have an enjoyable evening, so put the dish cloth down, exit the kitchen and for godsakes, relax and enjoy yourself.

Kate

And now for something completely pointless (though quite pointy)

A few months ago, the husband came home with a new digital camera. Like a real digital camera. I don't really understand 90% of what it can do, but I will tell you that it takes outstanding pictures.

I had to photograph some rice pudding for an article on the weekend and decided, since the light was right, to take some pictures of the husband's latest antique corkscrew. Look at that effing clarity! Damn, I love that camera.

Kara

Maybe baby? Maybe not. Tales of a NON "Mommyblogger"

A friend of mine just made a big decision regarding fertility, or rather, treatment for infertility. Having been there myself, watching her struggle with the question brought the whole damn issue right back to the foreground for me.

I never really wanted children. In fact, for most of my 20s, I found the whole notion of pregnancy quite revolting -- I believe "parasitic" was my adjective of choice. And then I met my husband and my opinions on children were turned upside down. Well, maybe they did a quarter turn. Because it wasn't so much that I'd gone to bed disliking children and woke raving to open a daycare, it was more that I was so in love with my husband and our joint existence that I suddenly had the urge to replicate it/us. The intensity and unexpectedness of my feelings about my marriage caused me to fall in love with the idea of a small version of us. A rounded, blonde haired, blue eyed us, who combined my husband's dry wit, great legs and generous heart with my, well, something fun from me too. Of course, we joked that any child we created would need serious math tutoring, probably from preschool onwards, and would be terrible with money. Our child would be a hopeless dreamer, probably paralytically shy in groups, precociously verbal, and likely lead an intense inner life. A real nerd, in other words.

We even tossed around names, ridiculously old fashioned monikers for our imaginary, nerdy child. Oliver Hugel for a boy (Hugel is an Alsatian wine producer whose wines I particularly love), or keeping in the wine theme, Lucy Claret. Charlotte Louisa was a longtime contender, finally ousted by Prue, short for Prudence Dorothea.*

It took a few years of marriage to find out that I have a thing, a condition that makes conception highly unlikely and then to learn about the various options available if conception, indeed, was what I wanted. So, rather late in the game (in baby-making terms, I was already geriatric) we started that process. The doctor explained the various routes to baby (more complicated than your standard Insert Tab A Into Slot B) and I chose the least invasive and least mechanical option. And endured about a year of regular blood tests, ultrasounds, doses of chemicals, and a terrible cycle (punny!) of hope/disappointment, hope/disappointment as the treatment failed to bear fruit (again, punny!) over and over again.

What is mildly interesting to me is realizing that, at the time, it was all quite normal. It very quickly became normal to give up a daily vial of blood (let me tell you, a technician who can take your blood painlessly becomes someone you add to your Christmas card list if you have to do it for long enough), and take doses of hormones and start your day with a thorough rogering by an ultrasound wand, not to mention planning every bit of marital intimacy to the minute so that it coincides with your body's medically-assisted phases. It all became totally normal.

But it wasn't natural. Which, in the end, was what killed the whole thing for us. Well, that and the fact that the clinic was relocating to another community and the whole thing was going to become that much more inconvenient. Apparently, my limits on humiliating medical procedures are geographical. But, anyway, the point is that there was nothing natural about my attempts to do what some would argue is the most natural thing on earth. And this, in the end, begged the question of whether the whole thing was meant to happen. So in January of this year, I said no more. There were a few months of minor-key emotional turmoil about this decision, and I still flip-flop a bit on how to answer the bog-standard So Do You Have Kids? question at parties (do I tell the truth and deal with the sympathetic Why Don't You Adopt question, or do I just say no and deal with the silent You Must Hate Children baleful stare), but ultimately it was absolutely the right thing to do.

Kate, herself the mother of four children under 10 years of age, has suggested that the universe actually intends for me to mother others, meaning that my maternal instincts and skills have been, and will continue to be, put to use mothering my friends and family (sometimes an alternate mother is a good thing) and pets, and pets of friends and family, and so on and so forth. She wrote, "It's easy for me to see you as a mother, because you already are one." Just not in the conventional sense.

So, it will just be the two of us 'til the end of time. There are still moments when that makes me sad, that we'll never get to play the "she gets that from YOU" game, that my husband's innate good fatherdom will never be exercised on anything more taxing than the dog, that we won't get to make something so amazing together. Of course, as time goes on and I listen to trials and tribulations of the parents I know, the list of reasons why I should be happy I'm not a parent (I never have to deal with other parents, I never have to be on Parent Council, I never have to play Bad Cop, I never have to say no, I never have to pay for orthodonia) grows. And besides, lots of my friends have adorable, healthy, beautiful children that I can play Auntie to and then give back when their diapers become too full, or their questions become too difficult. To be honest, looking around our tiny unkempt house, chances are good that we'd just lose a baby to a family of marauding dustbunnies, anyway.

Kara

* It is a strong possibility that the universe didn't give us a child because no one under 68 should be saddled with Prudence Dorothea as a name.

Misty Watercoloured Sepia-Toned Glasses

This afternoon, at some point, I had a really great idea for a blog entry. Something I really wanted to discuss with whoever it is that reads this (Hi, Mum!), something a little fun and a little thought provoking.

And then I went to my parent's house for my sister's birthday dinner and was drawn, like the proverbial moth to the flame, to the photo drawer (we've never been the scrapbooking/album making types) and it obliterated every thought I had in my head. And now I don't remember what the hell I was going to tell you about.

(I used to have an incredible memory. When I worked at the opera the first time around, I was like a human back-up disk for our donor database. I could remember donors' postal codes, for pete's sake! And now? Not so much. I really need to start playing those sudoko games or something to sharpen my wits. Except I always forget how they work.)

So, instead, let me tell you about the family photo drawer. I love, no I lurrrrve the photo drawer at my parents house. It's a big, wide, shallow drawer in a huge oak wall-unit that they've had since the late 60s, and it's absolutely stuffed with photographs, negatives and a few boxes of slides. Remember slides? Why was it that sometime in the 70s everyone went to slides? Was it because they were nice and small to store? Because surely to God they didn't come into vogue because finding a place to project them was so much fun. Remember the hum of the slide projecter, and that delicious schlish-click noise as the slides changed? Oh, and the smell of hot dust from the light bulb? Oh, slides.

Anyway, the drawer is full to bursting with photographs, all loosey-goosey, no organization whatsoever, most of them not even labelled. There are lots of black and whites from the 60s when my parents first came to Canada and had a darkroom of their own (the photo-enlarger is still in their basement if anyone's interested), and many of the prints are somewhat curled as I went through a period as a child where I liked to roll them into cylinders, I don't know why. Then there's lots of colour photos from the late 70s/early 80s where the photos have this interesting matte texture. I somehow remember that you could choose whether you wanted them developed in glossy or matte and my mum liked matte because then fingerprints weren't an issue, which was important when your youngest daughter is forever manhandling the photos. There are pictures of my brother's bike races (Ontario Junior Champion at 14, don't you know!) and my mother's art work over the years, pictures of the house in all stages of renovation (two additions, several interior changes and at least two porches built since 1971), pictures of my father and brother building stuff, Christmas pictures, more pictures of the family cats than anyone cares to see (besides me), and way, way too many pictures of my embarrassing haircuts circa 1983-89.

Then there are the millions of vacation photos. Now, in our family, "vacation photos" doesn't mean pictures of people sipping mai-tais at a swim up bar in Cuba. For us, "vacation photos" means picture after picture of buildings and streets and trees and patterns and reflections of light on water and details of textiles in castles (never mind the gilt walls and Meissen tea-service, would you look at these tassels???) and photos of ravens eating our leftover cheesecake on top of a Bavarian mountain, and snow shadows and lichen and pebbles and, on one memorable occasion, my mother's hind end in the air as she picked blueberries on the side of a cliff in Cape Breton. And numerous, dimly lit (and therefore slightly blurry because the film was too slow) pictures of paintings and artifacts in galleries and museums. Our vacation pictures must be incredibly dull for other people to look at, but then, they're never taken with the purpose of showing other people. They're taken by us, for us, to remind us of the little specifics that we hang our family memories on. For example, in the past decade I have been to Dessau twice. Both times, without thinking, I managed to take the same photograph of the same railyard from the same bridge. There's something delightfully old-school DDR about the track/power line arrangement that caught my eye. Twice. But the point is, I didn't take the pictures for your viewing, I took them to remind me, years from now when the former East has been fully spruced up by the German government, of how it used to look.

There are pictures of my parents' relatives, mostly on my mother's side although we do now have a few copies of old pictures from my father's side thanks to my father's cousin in Berlin. Tons of old black & whites (well, sepia-ish, actually) of New Years parties and other celebrations with people I've never even heard of. There are a handful of mystery photos of people we truly never knew that somehow have gotten mixed into our photo drawer. There are baby pictures and wedding pictures and endless class pictures and a few newspaper clippings and the thing is that each one of these artifacts is absolutely, 100% precious to me.

Actually, all old photos, whether they belong to my family or yours, are precious to me. I tend to live in the past, and not necessarily my own past. I don't know why this is, but I've always been this way. I have always loved to listen to my mother's stories about growing up in Berlin during and after WWII, so much so that in many ways her stories have become my stories (stories which I will pass on to anyone who cares to listen, ad nauseum, by the way) and when I go to Berlin I don't see the city as it is, I see it as it was. Which, of course, is impossible as there is no "was" for me in Berlin, but I tell you that's how it is.

(I suspect it's because the past is known. It doesn't move around, it's there to be analysed, dissected, revered and enjoyed. Whereas the future is unknown and I'm not that comfortable with the unknown. The picture above is of me in my favorite place as a very small child, the laundry basket. I liked being in there because I was safe, I could see my mother, and I knew the boundaries. Doesn't that say it all?)

I have always loved reading autobiographies and memoirs, and spent a bizarre (now that I think about it) amount of time as a youngster reading about old Hollywood stars and the studio system when everyone else was reading Bruno & Boots or Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Books. I was the 12-year old who knew about Sam Goldwyn and Darryl Zanuck and Irving Thalberg and Fatty Arbuckle, for goodness sake. I was a weird kid.

But I digress -- the point is, that really, when it comes right down to it, what I've always loved are stories. Real stories, based on real lives, on what really happened, or at least our interpretation of what really happened. And that's what our photo drawer, and your photo albums or scrapbooks or boxes of slides, are all about. Stories. Tales. Legends. Family. What came before you and what shaped you. This is what I like to know. You.

Kara

Can't Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me

Okay, there's not actually a woman-eating clown here. It's just a saying we have in our house. A house which is remarkably clown-free, if not clown-sanitized, because of my husband's complete and utter phobia about them*. In fact, I'd have illustrated this post with clown image (not Gacy, though), but I can't because he reads the blog and I don't want him to connipt right there in front of his computer (we have the fridge magnet, right, so that won't scare him).

Does anyone, actually, really, love a clown? Apparently someone does because the tradition persists and every year countless children are entertained (or terrorized, depending on your viewpoint) by adults in grotesque make-up and ridiculous costumes who insist on playing tricks in the name of Fun! and Whimsy!

The Spec is running its Readers' Choice awards program again and there's actually a category for Best Clown. Admittedly, in this city of 7 hospitals, the people who run around in makeup entertaining patients (the aptly named Clownz on Roundz) are likely performing a wonderful service and lightening the mood in many a ward. But do people actually hire clowns for birthday parties anymore? I want to know. And do the children like them? Or is it just upon reaching adulthood and looking back that you realize the inalienable creepiness of a clown?

(Kate knows a clown. She's even hired said clown for school events. We don't speak of it, though.)

Anyway, I suspect, having spent a pleasant hour this week babysitting a three-year old of my acquaintance, that children probably do like the occasional clown. Playing in the sandbox with the wee man and getting drawn into his intricate game of pretend (Heaven Help You if you fall out of character while playing pretend -- "No, Kara, YOU'RE THE TOW TRUCK!"), I was reminded just how much little people can suspend disbelief. To someone like little N., a clown isn't an adult hiding their humanity behind a sinister mask of greasepaint and pancake, it's just a clown. A silly creature with big feet and droopy drawers and a funny voice. Just like the Cookie Monster (please tell me that kids these days know about Cookie Monster) isn't a puppet on t.v., he's just a big blue thing that likes cookies and sings songs about cookies and says Nom Nom Nom when he eats cookies.

Damn, I wish I could enjoy that kind of innocence again. Sometimes a clown is just a clown.

Kara

*He also hates Home Depot and the day he girded loins to shop there and came, unexpectedly, upon a clown in the mailbox aisle is one of my favourite stories.