Confessions: Meal Planning Has Saved My Life

When my dad and step-mom got together, they had four children combined (of which I was the oldest)(not that I acted like it). With four kids, there were several things they did to keep or manage what they had left of their sanity.

My dad happens to be not just a computer programmer who thinks best in neat little categories of things, but also a former Eagle Scout. He is meticulously organized in his own way, and a bit - even self-admittedly so - neurotic. Most of this he came by honestly and I can say this now after I spent two weeks living with my grandmother in Portland after we arrived back in the country. But, this meant as kids, the four of us had routines and checklists for absolutely every thing. We had checklists for our bedtime routines (we even laid out our clothes for the next day before going to bed) and star charts if we completed every thing on the checklist. We had packing checklists for vacations and weekends away.  All of our checklists were typed up on the computer and printed out on my dad's dot matrix printer.

(My dad - I should point out - is still this way even with no children in the house. He still uses this grocery list and check list system.)

For meals, the family was just as organized. School lunches were made on Sunday afternoons at the dining room table, with all of the kids and their chosen sandwich ingredients, and a week's worth of sandwich bread before us. The sandwiches were then placed in the freezer with our initials marked on the plastic sandwich bags in black sharpie, and in the mornings, each child just grabbed their sandwich.

Even my little brother, who was 4 at the time. (When Dad and Karen got together, he was three. Just so we older kids didn't think he was being favored for being young, all the dishes were moved to the lower cabinets, so he could unload the dishwasher as one of his chores.)

For dinners, once every two weeks, we sat around the dining room table, at one of our numerous family meetings, and each of us got to pick a dinner each night of the week. Six people in the family total meant that we each got to choose the family dinner one night a week and we had one night of each week, where we either had leftovers or it was fend for yourself night. (This was also how my parents handled the issue of us not liking the food they served us - if we chose what we ate and helped make it, then there wasn't much to argue about - and we chose the night's vegetable as well as the main dish.) The ingredients for two weeks' worth of meals then went onto the printed off copy of the family grocery list. Yes, of course. The grocery list was in the order of the store layout.

There was a lot of this that worked. While we were in Bali, we met a family, whom we became dear friends with, who had four children. My friend, Ginny, the mother, after some family melt down that generally happened either around mealtimes or bedtimes, would inevitably grab me by the elbow, and ask, "What was it your parents did again? How did they handle this? Hold on while I write this all down..."

As a kid, I sometimes found it a bit over the top, and thought it was one of those things that made our family less like the families of my friends, and even a little weird. On the fridge, we had our star chart, a calendar of the month with all meals written on in pen along with whichever kid was helping to make dinner that night, and the grocery list (so we could mark in pencil on the line next to the pre-typed item that was needed), so our fridge looked more like the bulletin board of a well managed boarding house or institution than the fridge of where children lived and brought home paintings and homework. I don't remember where artwork went, or A papers, or successful spelling tests.

But as an adult, I can get it reduced a lot of stress, and in the long run, saved a lot of money (the family budget was a whole other animal). Occasionally, if an ingredient was needed for dinner, a quick trip to the store could be made, however, on the whole, you didn't want to get through a day of work only to come home to four children, who may or may not need help with homework, and still have to get dinner on the table. With four children, you didn't want to have to open the fridge door, peer inside and wonder, "What on earth can we pull off? We have half a gallon of milk, and a bottle of ketchup..."

As a parent now myself, I can appreciate the organization, and I have been grateful I haven't had to resort to the same level of charts and lists.

Until now. And, I only have one child. But now we live in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn (and I imagine New York City) require new levels of organization.  We don't want to own a car in Brooklyn for various reasons. Our neighborhood is full of cute little grocery stores; we even have a lovely organic grocery store just a few blocks away that has good quality organic meat for a surprising good price (compared to how expensive the rest of the store is). Yet, the neighborhood stores can be a bit expensive. Trader Joe's isn't far away at all - we could walk there and often, Fyo and I will take the bus there, load up the stroller with groceries and walk home. Except such trips to Trader Joe's take up an entire morning, and it's still just four days worth of groceries. I don't want to spend several mornings each week grocery shopping.

We did sign up for a Zip Car for three hours, so we can go to Fairway and stock up on groceries. I didn't want to waste the trip and not get absolutely everything we needed. I thought of all the things I didn't want to carry home via bus, subway, or walking. Also, I have noticed, with Husband working long days, life is so much easier when I have thought ahead and planned dinners in advance. The day - and the Witching Hour - are much less witchy when you have a way to combat dropping blood sugars.

So how did I spend yesterday - the eve of our much anticipated grocery shopping trip? At the kitchen table, with my favorite cookbooks spread open in front of me and my calendar and my notebook open, as I planned the next two weeks of meals. I even planned how leftovers from dinners could go in the freezer or for lunches the next day, or how I could roast a chicken one night and use the leftovers for chicken quesadillas. I made the grocery list.

Yep. I made the grocery list in order of the store. (I defended this - that Fairway is much like Ikea, where if you forget something it is a pain to have to back track for it.) It was all I could do - as if I was arguing with my own hard wiring - to keep from typing it up.

Afterward, I felt oddly productive. I felt organized. I felt relaxed despite the chaos of moving boxes we still have to unpack. I felt like I had one small clearing of clarity. And I was slightly embarrassed - that one successful housewife task could have me feel not just satisfied but victorious.

I told Husband, I could see having a month's calendar on the fridge door with all our dinners mapped out on it. Husband said he'd be down with that.

But I didn't put one up. (Yet.) Immediately, the thought of having so much of my own childhood in my kitchen makes me slightly queasy.

Some Meanderings - From the Popover, to Home School, to Ansel Adams

     My son's love of the kitchen and all its glorious appliances has begun. First, it began with our one dish meal of pesto (I guess it's two if you count the pot for pasta) where we threw everything into the food processor. As mentioned, I did so merely to distract him from his asking for the TV. Also, at 2, he seems pretty capable of standing on a chair and pushing the pulse button. He loved it. Now he walks into the kitchen and points to the food processor on the shelf and says, "Make something!"
 

So, the next day we made play dough. In my own childhood I couldn't stand the smell of store bought play dough. It made me sick. But I remembered my own parents making an odorless homemade version from flour, salt and water (2+ flour, 1/2 cup table salt, 1 cup hot tap water), so Fyo and I mixed a batch in our trusty Cuisinart (perhaps it's appropriate that I don't have a gorgeous new Cuisinart food processor, but the old standby from my own childhood-) like we would any kind of dough, first the dry ingredients then the wet.

He loved it. We turned the dough onto his place mat to knead in more flour to get it the right consistency. He enjoyed playing with it and making circles (a recent love of his), but by far his favorite part was the making and the kneading.

I thought, Glorious! Bread making is next.

Except, yesterday, rather than the lovely Spring like 60 degree weather that we had the day before, we had cold, cloudy weather with gusts of winds up to 60 mph. After a short trip to the morning farmer's market and playground, we (I) resolved to spend the rest of the day inside - not go to the store for yeast and whole wheat flour. So we entertained ourselves by making popovers, which, I discovered, are perfect for the two old attention span. You have a simple ingredient list (flour, milk, egg, dash of butter) to mix, you ladle this thin batter into your muffin tin et voila! You have this perfectly browned piece of magic in your oven. Fyo turned on the oven light, peered in inside and gasped like it was Christmas morning.

I used the recipe from one of my favorite blogs, Notes on Dinner. The title of her popover post is Impress Your Friends - I thought, hell, impress your two year old, or any child really. I remembered loving them as a child but only getting them on rare and unpredictable occasions (odd considering they are in the same family as Dutch Baby pancakes which we had practically every weekend).

At the end of Sarah's post on popovers, she writes she doesn't know the science behind the popover, which is just fine with her. I can totally get this, being one who does not naturally have a scientific mind.

But maybe because I was making with it my two year old, or maybe because I've spent a lot of time researching public education (this seems like a tangent - but I swear it's not) and talking with Husband and each of us concluding that we don't trust the current public schools to give our child an education, or maybe because I'm out researching pre-schools for my son and discovering that while it is only February 20, I have missed the application deadlines for Fall 2011 pre-schools. Not just at one school, but at several. I was told to apply by the end of the month for his Fall 2012 pre-K school year.

No, it's not early admissions at the Ivy League universities; it's pre-school in New York.

This has left Husband and I brainstorming, coming back to that in the beginning we hadn't really planned on sending him to school -well, ever, really. Even before we had a child, my husband talked about wanting to home school. I was more reserved - because you know who would end up doing the home schooling, and while I love the idea of it, I just have lots of other things I want to do with my time. I also want a break. The first year of my son's life we were in LA; I had a great group of similarly minded friends and we talked endlessly about forming our own home school co-op, and just hiring a couple of teachers or taking rotations so we could still get a parenting break. I have heard from a few fellow moms on the playground that some parents in Brooklyn are doing this - getting four or five kids/families together and hiring a couple of teachers to teach their kids pre-school. Just having moved here, I have yet to meet these families.

Then, watching my son in the kitchen and watching him love the process of making something and watching it change through the oven door as it bakes and transforms into something he didn't even know was possible, I found myself taken - inspired even - marveling at his marvel - and wondering precisely about the science behind it. I grew up baking with my parents (cookies and cakes with my mom, bread with my dad) and my mom always just simply said that Chemistry was easy - it's just like baking. She even predicted that I would find Chemistry easy because of all the baking I had done growing up. But in high school, I did not find Chemistry easy. There was no mention of what happens when you mix a cake and forget the salt or the baking soda. It was about atoms and molecules and protons and electrons and neutrons - things I couldn't see. And I am one of those people that if I can't see it I don't know it exists, whether it's a gang of atoms making up the chair I'm sitting on or a sweater I forgot I owned.

So I started wondering about the science of popovers, and I started wondering what if someone had started talking to me about the science from my son's age, would my heinous experience in Chemistry have been different? And I think it would have - because the science of it would have been relevant.

I looked it up. The science behind the popover is actually really interesting. The proteins of the flour (aka the glutens) along with the proteins from the egg form a web that traps the steam from the eggs and milk, consequently, you need high heat to create the ideal environment for steam. You drop the temperature mid-way so it traps the steam where it is, once it's "popped" your popover.

I know. I can't see the glutens or proteins either. But now I find it magical in its own right. Probably because it's relevant.

I struggled a lot in high school, even though I loved reading and writing. In small doses, I didn't even mind math (and oddly have always tested higher on math tests than language tests). As a good friend pointed out, I just wasn't interested. I think his assessment is right. I don't think I was interested because I failed to see how it was all relevant. Even when my dad said I would use math every day of my life, I'd ask in return, "Where? When will knowing the cosign of an angle save me?" (It hasn't yet.)


I found myself coming back to the notion of home school. Some of my favorite former students were home schooled, and by far they were far more prepared - and just more interesting as people - for college than their public schooled counterparts, partly because they were taught to think for themselves and mainly, they were allowed, and encouraged to find their interests and have their entire education wrapped around their interests. The home schooled kids had a sense of self I rarely saw in public schooled kids. So I know home school can be successful. My main concern is I want my time. Currently, I get up at 4am to write while my family sleeps. As some point, I'd like to sleep in knowing I'd have my time to work during the day like other people. And I have read blog posts and articles by moms who do in fact work at home and somehow home school their children. Sometimes people forward me blog posts about how these Wonder Women do it. More often than not, the posts about how they get it done are essentially "Six electronic educational things I dump my kids in front of while I work." No offense to these women and more power to them if this is in fact how their kids learn, but I want my son to enjoy learning, to have fun, to find it interesting, and I want him to learn from interacting with other people.

Baking with my son, researching the science of it, I started wondering, what if "this" could be his school? What if that's all it is? Looking deeper and exploring the world around him and then getting how it all is related and interconnected? And wouldn't that be more interesting than rote memorization? Or being test prepped two months of the year for state standardized tests?

Then this morning, I got up, put off writing for a few minutes by reading Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac and found myself reading about Ansel Adams' education experience. Essentially, he was home schooled/self-taught. He didn't understand how school was relevant either.

I like hearing these kinds of stories; I like knowing I'm in good company. And it has me think, maybe my meanderings on the popover are leading me in the right direction as I consider what to do about my son's education. In the meantime, I have several books on hold at the library about the science of cooking.

The Sins of the Tired Parent

As a former college professor and as a child of computer programmers, I have noticed for a long time the ability of people to be so absorbed in their computers or phones or various forms of technology that they literally do not hear someone who is speaking directly to them - even when the interlocutor is in their face. Recently, I have noticed adults either around my son or around their own children on the playground being so absorbed in their iPhones that their child has to repeat what they are saying or ask several times for what they need before the adult realizes the child is talking to them. Even more recently, I have noticed that I have been the guilty adult so absorbed in my iPhone that my son had to repeat what he was saying several times before I realized he was asking me for something.

I try to stay conscious of my use of my computer and phone around my son. Mainly, I don't want him playing with my computer or my phone. Secondly,  I don't want to be one of those parents who is always absorbed in technology rather than the living breathing person in front of me that I wanted and created. I don't want my child to be one of those kids who's so absorbed in his iPad or video game - thanks to the example I set for him - that he's oblivious to the world around him. I don't want him to value his gadgets more than his friends or family.

Also, I try to save my computer and phone for when I really need them, i.e. when I need him to be fascinated by the Dr. Seuss's ABCs app because we're at a doctor's appointment or in a restaurant or when I need him to watch a movie on my computer because my husband has worked twenty-seven sixteen-hour days in a row and I just need ten minutes when I am not being asked for food, or toys, or the park or to take my son to pee or something else.

Except that currently my husband really has worked twenty-seven sixteen hour days in a row and I am needing an instant queue Netflix movie download around 6pm every night (aka the Witching Hour in our house. Sometimes it applies to the child. Sometimes the adults.) just so I can get dinner made with some degree of peace of mind. I have fallen into the trap of the tired parent.

My husband and I don't own a television, because we don't like it. We do watch a few select shows that we download or Netflix (Mad Men, The Wire, and alas, I'm a sucker for re-watching the West Wing), but generally we find it a depression inducing time waster. Having geeked out on baby brain research, I am not a fan of television for small children. There's no movie watching or Seseme Street viewing before 6pm (Witching Hour). I don't let him watch more than an hour because it turns him into a slug. I don't like television as an everyday thing; I like it as a sometimes thing - when we're having a snow day or when we're sick.

Also, I agree with the studies that show over time - especially in children under three - it lessens creativity as well as the ability to entertain one's self or use one's imagination and these are all skills I want my son to have. I'm not against television all together. I do think there are some quality shows, and as he gets older, I look forward to discussing with him what makes a quality show or movie.

But now -again because my husband has worked twenty-seven sixteen hour days in a row - I am that tired parent. I am that tired parent in survival mode trying to get through the day and remember my own name at the same time. Not to mention we just moved into a new house in a new city and I am also researching the pre-schools in the area, trying to find periodic childcare and playgroups as well as unpack enough boxes so I can wear something different than the select few items that have been in my suitcase the last 8 weeks. I'd also like to find the blender so I can make my son and I a smoothie.

So, alas, I'm that tired parent who reaches for her computer at 6pm so he can watch a movie, and so I can get dinner on the table, and maybe I can take a turn at online Scrabble.

I should state I'm still neurotic about what my son watches. Old Sesame Street episodes are okay in small doses, but the newer Sesame Street episodes are heinous and I want no part of them. We have a children's stage production of Shakespeare's A Comedy of Errors that we love and have watched at least a hundred times. Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Wall-E are also favorites (but they were before my son was born). Lately, we've been watching a lot of Pingu the Penguin and Kipper. (My husband finds Kipper annoying. I like Kipper because he's quiet.) These have been our rotation the last week or so when I - not my son - hit the 6 o'clock witching hour.

Except the other night, because my son and I had eaten our way through a Trader Joe shopping trip, we weren't hungry for dinner. We only snacked. I still was tired enough I put Pingu on for my son. I wanted that few minute break - when nobody asked anything of me and when I could just flip through a West Elm catalog on the hunt for bookshelves or make an online Scrabble play on my iPhone.

But my son told me to put my book away. He crawled into my lap at the table where he was watching Pingu. I looked at Scrabble.
        "Mommy," he said, "Put the phone away." He didn't want food. He didn't have to pee. He didn't want a particular toy. He just wanted me to watch a movie with him and hold him.

Needless to say, while I do have some degree of compassion for myself as my husband is working non-stop, I felt like an ass.

Here I was worried my son could become one of those boys who's so obsessed with video games, he fails to notice there's a world to explore, I was that parent absorbed in her iPhone, failing to notice my son just wanted to be held.

And I have to say, I felt relieved my son - at 2 years old - feels comfortable asking in a nice tone of voice no less for what he needs and for telling me to put away my phone and pay attention to him.

The next night we approached the Witching Hour differently. Sure enough, at ten minutes to 6, my son started asking for a movie (How do toddlers to that? They can't tell time, but they're like clockwork.). I said, "No. I don't want to watch movies every day." He didn't start to throw a tantrum (though he easily could have) but he did his I-want-a-movie dance. Instead, I distracted him. I had him pull up a chair to the kitchen counter and help me make dinner. We were just having pesto (we keep it stupidly simple when it's just the two of us). The entire thing could be made in the food processor, so I had him put all the ingredients into the food processor and push the pulse button after each ingredient. By the time, the water for the pasta was boiling, he had found a toy to play with.

Oddly, I finished the day much less tired than I have been.

Unpacking Home

In September of 2009, we packed up our dogs and took a field trip to San Francisco to drop them off to their foster parents. After our weekend away in one of our favorite cities, we went back to LA and packed up the rest of our things. Many of our things we sold - every single bookshelf we owned, our couches, the wicker chair and ottoman that had sat on the porch in Denver and LA. We passed on the small amount of baby things we had for our then 10 month old boy, except for the cradle my step-dad made. That we disassembled and stored, unable to part with it so soon after his sudden death a few months before.

     What remained we stored. Some things got stored by accident, like a box of old New Yorkers that was supposed to go in the recycling bin, but one of the moving guys loaded into the truck. Over the last 17 months, when the topic of our stored belongings came up, I have wondered how much money have we spent storing our recycling?

No matter, Husband points out repeatedly - as an avid and addicted fan of the purging process - that there will be many things we wondered why we kept.

I can't imagine there will be much of that though. We kept only the furniture we absolutely loved, that were antiques or family heirlooms. Scratch that actually. Some of the family heirlooms we gave back to the family. Or to a new family.

17 months later, we have finally landed in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York, in a cute brownstone (with yard!) around the corner from my sister. We don't even have to cross the street to get to each other's house. We moved in on the first, and given that we found the apartment only a few days before the first, we moved in with a borrowed air mattress, borrowed sheets and towels, and borrowed dishes.  We called my cousin in Portland whose always game for a road trip, and hired him to bring us our dog and belongings. It took him longer to get across the country thanks to a short jaunt into the Colorado mountains to visit friends where he promptly got himself snowed in. We originally expected him Thursday. We amended it to Sunday. Late yesterday, my cousin called my husband and said he's just outside the city.

Last night Husband and I sat at the kitchen table the previous renter left behind in shock that our things were actually coming. We tried to remember what furniture we still owned. My cousin has reassured us that we still have an unbelievable amount of crap. (Thanks for that.)

We made a list of what we'll be the most glad to see:

1) Husband's beard trimmer and razor. He's not an everyday shaver. He regularly oscillates between clean shaven and short beard. Except with no beard trimmer, his short beard has quickly become an overgrown thick mess reminiscent of the 70s. Kissing him, I feel like I might as well kiss the latch hook rug I made at the same time such scruffy beards were the fashion.

2) Our coffee cups. Oh the pleasure of the little things- over the last year and a half, having stayed in I don't know how many places, we have had our morning coffee in I don't know how many cheap Ikea cups, or cups that came free from a random bank when someone opened an account. We like mugs of coffee. Those small bank cups require constant refilling.

3) Our bed. I've slept on leaky air mattresses before and so I don't want to complain about the current leak-free air mattress we have been loaned. All things considering, it's not so bad. Over the course of our travels however, we have slept on some sad beds, so oh, our double sided pillow topped loveliness, I can't wait to have a good night's sleep with you.

4) Our kitchen. Our cookbooks. Our Kitchen-Aid mixer. Our baking pans.

5) Clothes. We've spent the last two months wearing the same five outfits. In Winter, I don't know that this matters much. It's all boots, trousers and sweaters. Still, my vintage dresses and jackets, my hats, my spare pajamas, and I'm sure I own more trousers...

6) I have bags of yarn stashed in storage - even after I donated a lot to schools and kids' groups that needed it for knitting projects, but I have to say I feel mixed about seeing my yarn. When it's in storage, I have an excuse to buy more (which I did - and knit my son a rather nice sweater if I say so). But I didn't get through all the yarn I bought rationalizing I needed more knitting projects, so now, I just have more stash. It may be time to plunk my child down in front of a movie or two and get some knitting done...

7) Our (my) collection of oddities and curiosities - a giant piece of coral, framed butterflies, a collection of cool old doll hands that I love but that freaks my husband out. Those kind of small things I've picked up at garage sales and flea markets over the years that end up making our house a home.

8) We bought an amazing dining room table in Bali and had it shipped home. It's gorgeous. It's long enough to host a quality Thanksgiving meal. We don't actually know where we will put it, but we're looking forward to seeing it.

9) We also bought a statue of Buddha in Thailand. We don't know where we're going to put that either.

10) My vintage crystal martini glasses. I bought them at an estate sale at the beginning of the recession. They hold four shots of gin each. The woman was selling them because of the vast amount of gin a batch of martinis required, she could no longer afford to host parties. In actuality, these will probably stay packed given the active running and climbing toddler boy in our house, and our martinis will be served in tumbler glasses, but still I miss seeing them in my cupboard.

As for the cradle, my step-dad made, we realized we can now part with it. Fyo is now almost 28 months - 2 1/2 is just around the corner. While we loved the cradle, and the thought, time, and work my step-dad put into it, we didn't realize until our son was born that we are baby holding types. Instinctively, we somehow knew how fast that initial baby phase goes, so we always held him. I put him in it once, so I could run out and move the car for street cleaning.  My step-dad was this way too - he always wanted to hold the baby. He made the cradle because he loved wood working and projects, but when he saw how little my son slept in it because some one was always holding him, he shrugged. "Ah well," he said, "You don't know until they arrive what you'll actually use." Indeed. Last night, husband and I agreed that even with plans for a second child, we don't need the things that are essentially baby storing devices.

Oh, and the recycling will finally be put on the curb.

Thou Shall Share Space

Yesterday, Fyo and I were up and out of our new Brooklyn brownstone (!) early for a  trip to our favorite grocery store, Trader Joe's in downtown Brooklyn. Walking from the bus stop to the store and pushing Fyo in his stroller, a parade of ambulances and paramedics with flashing lights and sirens flew down the street and then came to a halt. Then right in front of us on the sidewalk were paramedics pushing what I swear looked like a wheel burrow with a woman inside of it. The woman was skim milk blue-white, mostly naked except for a t-shirt and underwear. Except for a few bruises on her face and here and there across her body, her skin had that other worldly look of marble statues in museums. She was conscious, but drugged beyond coherency.
 
I'm a thin skinned sensitive sort, and instantly started to cry at the sight of her as I thought, oh heavens what have you been through and what are you about to go through? Indeed, the mind can spiral out considering the possibilities of how she ended up where she did - and none of the possibilities are nice or pretty. It was warmer out; a balmy Spring like 40 degrees compared to the weather we've been having, but still way too cold to spend the night out doors half naked on the sidewalk.

Looking at her, I couldn't help but think: You are someone's daughter. Someone must be worried. I think such things now that I am a parent.

There's something about seeing another human being - even a complete stranger - in extreme vulnerability that punches me in the gut and instantly makes me feel vulnerable too. Maybe I'm reminded of my own humanity, or that another place, another time, another set of circumstances, another set of choices, it could have been me or anyone else I know and love. Indeed, I had a distant cousin who met such a fate and now lies in the family plot in a Portland cemetery, despite her having had an advantageous childhood.

Husband has a favorite quote from the Ric Burns documentary on New York, that the unspoken commandment of large cities like New York is thou shall share space. And this is true in many cities, where we see much more of each other's lives, even the moments you usually assume happen behind closed doors in the privacy of one's own home. I think of a friend from college who one day sat in his office in a building downtown when a man walked in the entrance and took a gun to his own head. Or even the smaller moments, when sitting on a bus and listening to a stranger argue with her mother on her phone or that strangers on the bus and subway watch me give Fyo his crackers and biscuits while in Portland, I'd do the same thing in the privacy of our own car. When Fyo drops his cracker onto the floor of the bus, he gets down to pick it up and eat it, another woman tells me he's eating his cracker off the floor and that I shouldn't let him do this. (I don't know that this is what Hillary Clinton meant when she said it takes a village...). I shrug and say, "I'm not worried about it. His immune system is stronger than all of ours." She rolls her eyes at me, and I can see the words "Bad Mother!" cross her mind from one ear to the other.

In cities, you do share space, and you witness -to some extent- more of the private moments of people, even the ones that punch you in the gut. But I like it.  When I'm on the subway and even if all the other passengers are absorbed in books, magazines, knitting, Kindles, iPhones and iPads and so forth, or even walking down the street with my son in his stroller, I am always reminded that there's more than just me and my family in the world, and there are bigger concerns in the world than mine.

My heart breaks for the woman we saw yesterday as well as for the people who love her, and the sight of her moved me. I can't say it moved me to a Buddha like moment of giving up all my earthly comforts and loves to dedicate my life to the end of suffering, but it moved me enough to remember that when we share space, a little concern, compassion and "good thoughts on the wings of fairies" as my great-grandmother used to say when we saw an ambulance drive by, doesn't hurt.

I have a fear of the suburbs, and my fear stems from the very thing that some people seek when they move to the suburbs: that you can seal yourself away into your house, yard and car. Get into your car while it's in the garage with the doors shut and you will never have to meet your neighbors. You can forget - except when you see them on the news - that anyone different from you exists. In the city, at least in this one, you can't and I think that's a good thing