From almost nothing

BECAUSE I BOUGHT a Nook Color a month ago, it was lying on the bed.

Because it was lying on the bed, a child picked it up and pushed some buttons.

Because he pushed some buttons, he saw a single-player chess app.

Because they didn’t get bored taking turns with the single-player chess app, I bought them a chess set and a chess book.

Because they requested it, they now get a section from the chess book and a game every night at bedtime, instead of a story.

WE RIDE BIKES.

Because we ride bikes, we get up to Isham for the Inwood greenmarket most Saturdays. It’s .6 miles. We wouldn’t walk it, and the subway or bus would cost $9.

Because the boys have a new travel chess set I got them so they could play on the bus after swim class, they brought it today and set it up where kids run around.

They explained the game to a new opponent and attracted an audience of kibitzers.

BECAUSE THEY’RE SO fixated on chess, and because we ride bikes to the Inwood greenmarket, and because bikes engage you with your surroundings instead of isolating you from them, they zeroed in on two men playing chess while we were riding past on Seaman.

CHESS! CHESS! CHESS! CAN WE PLAY!?

Because Inwood has an active Twitter population, I knew one of the players by reputation.

“You can’t play,” I said, “but you can watch.”

“They can play!” offered the man I’d recognized.

So we braked and walked our bikes over.

The men welcomed them, talked to them, challenged them, and taught them the game of Pawns.

They, in turn, cracked one of the men up when I said, “Hey guys, tell him our name for en passant,” and the boys yelled in unison, WHACK ’IM WHILE HE’S RUNNING!

(“I’m running, I’m running—WHACK!” the man riffed, chuckling.)

After two games of Pawns, the boys played chess, with much better kibitzing than they’d had at the greenmarket, and I learned that Sundays, they set up multiple tables for whoever wants to play and actively help kids with the game. I also learned the man I was talking to had ditched his cigarette as the boys came up. They don’t want to teach that. Just chess.

Because it was all so cool, I forgot to take pictures.

Then because the whiny hungry crabbies had arrived, we said thank-you and rode home.

We ride bikes.

I got a Nook Color.

Therefore life has gone in a completely unforeseeable way.

Children’s chess, Sundays 10am–3pm, Seaman and 207. All are welcome.

A Saturday bike video

My Father’s Day present was a gift certificate from Tread. I got a GoPro camera.

We tried it out this weekend.

A maturing relationship with Pyrex

WE HAVE THIS lousy Pyrex saucepan.

It has three problems. The two most obvious are the bileous mulberry hue it casts on food and its passive-aggressiveness in pouring. But those are just physical things. If I loved it, I could get past them; no pan is perfect. But there’s something more subtle, which I find much harder to deal with:

It doesn’t show its emotions.

WE ALREADY KNOW how hard it is to know what’s going on inside other people. We have slogans for it: Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides; You never know what someone else is going through; Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. But it’s something we don’t always think of when we relate to cookware. For the most part I’m glad all that heat and conflict stays inside the pot—but I’ve been thinking how impossible it is for a Pyrex saucepan to understand that all anyone else can get a grip on is its handle.

Which, regardless of maelstrom or meltdown in the pan, remains at room temperature at all times.

So is the pot hot, or is it cold?

Hot, says the pot. You just don’t know.

Cold, says anybody who holds the pot. That’s right, I don’t.

ANOTHER THING ABOUT this saucepan is that—violently and with very little warning, as though it suppresses and suppresses and suppresses and saves up and saves up and just can’t anymore! and FOOM!—the seething stuff boils over, unexpectedly, while it’s over a LOW FLAME, if you can believe it, and then if you grab the burner and turn it down, or yank the pot off the stove, it just KEEPS GOING, eructations of oatmeal all over the stove and the floor, which it does not apologize for and does not volunteer to clean up.

See, says the pot? Hot. Passionate, even.

I HOVER WHEN my kids use it, waiting for the moment when it takes a shot at their confidence. You did everything right, I told one of my boys today after I grabbed it off the burner while he was whisking. It’s not you, sweetheart; it’s the lousy pot. You didn’t do anything wrong. This pot—you just shouldn’t trust it. It’s just a bad pot. You can’t tell what’s going on with it until it’s too late.

Yanking it off the burner doesn’t work. Giving it a little more care and attention doesn’t work. Lowering the heat doesn’t work. By the time it gets to the point where you can see what’s about to happen, it’s sucked up so much energy that a second later, it’s already erupting. You can’t stop it. You can’t soothe it. You just have to wait until it’s done spewing.

What did you expect? says the pot.

Well by now, I expect that.

LIFE GETS MUCH simpler when you accept your cookware for what it really is, and let go of what you wish it was. Especially when it keeps showing you. Especially when your kids are getting old enough that they’re starting to learn to judge temperature themselves, and you don’t want to confuse them.

Much simpler, that is, unless you’re the cookware.

In which case your life’s going to get harder as soon as the economy improves a little more.

Unexpectedly is the only way it ever happens

Today, even though I really couldn’t, I said yes when asked if I could spare an hour for the boys, and when they called me out to the dining room, their bikes were ready, they had their helmets on, my bike was by the door with sandwiches in the pannier, and the hour was to be spent riding down to the Little Red Lighthouse, throwing pebbles in the Hudson River, eating our sandwiches, and riding home.

It was their idea, I was told.

The descent from next to the Henry Hudson Parkway down to the Little Red Lighthouse—same descent, if you read it, that I used in my story in RIDE—is really two descents. This is more obvious if you’re climbing them, but it’s a steep little switchback, and then a straight downhill, and then it flattens and there’s a sharp curve through a short tunnel, over a short planked bridge, and down again, which shoots you straight past the tennis courts.

Last year my smaller boy wiped out on the flat, and boy, did he wipe out. I carried him and his bike down to the bottom, with blood running down his fingers and me doing a barely acceptable job of controlling my anger while he shrieked Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! This is bad! This is bad! I’d contributed to his injury by trying to micro-manage his bike handling, so the anger was really shame.

But now it was 70° and maybe a little muggy, but also green and gray and pretty. There weren’t that many other bikes, and he was chattering away as we rolled up the shallow half-mile before the bollard that marks where the switchback drops. We were discussing the complexions of the two descents. He asked if I remembered when he wiped out. I put some energy into not sounding like I was wincing and said it wasn’t the hill that made him wipe out, it was that he was going too fast and not paying attention, and then he got scared and froze up and shimmied the bike, and that’s what put it down. But don’t forget, I said. This year, you have hand brakes. So you can feather your speed, trim your speed, if it’s too fast, you can slow it down. You could do the whole hill like— (I held my hand at an angle and made it descend like a funicular for snails.)

His brother, as usual, was fifty feet ahead. Even with seven-year-olds, I’m having conversations at the back of the pack.

DON’T PASS THE BOLLARD! I yelled.

He stopped immediately and looked back at us. So often, lately, when I’m trying to give him freedom, he thinks I’m reining him in.

***

Every time we get to the switchback, I make them dismount and put their bikes off the path and walk twenty feet down with me, where I point at various things about the personality of the first descent. See this part I’m standing on, right here? This spot is the steepest part. Now look, it hooks right here, but then all the way down to there? That’s straight. See how it’s straight? You can go fast down it, but don’t still be going fast when you get to the bottom, because see it turns there? So if you’re still going fast there, you’ll wipe out on the dirt.

They both chose to walk the first 40′ or so. They remounted while there was still a good kid-strength downhill grade and picked up speed through the short tunnel and over the wooden bridge. The chatterer coasted right past his wipeout spot. I saw the top of his brother’s red helmet disappear down the second descent as we were still traversing the flat.

***

And so the shameful wipeout was erased.

***

We threw pebbles in the river for a while. There’s no sand there, just big slabs of rock that you can walk on.

***

While we were eating sandwiches another hundred yards down the greenway, where we ended up after the bathroom, I said tell you what. The day you climb the first part? From where the lighthouse is, up to the wooden bridge? (And here there was another three minutes of getting their attention and repeating myself, which I’ll spare you.) The day you climb all the way to the wooden bridge, I’ll buy you whatever ice cream you want. If you climb it, you can choose the ice cream. If you do it, you can choose the ice cream. If two boys do it? Two kinds of ice cream.

If we can’t do it, do we still get the ice cream?

Nope.

We ate our sandwiches. They explained their secret trick, their plan for climbing the hill, which was to go really fast and then they’d just be up it. I explained how that wouldn’t work on this hill. It’s too long, too steep, and I really don’t even know if you guys can do it. (And there was another fifteen minutes of dickering over what needed to be eaten, why it was impossible to eat that, and the exact terms of the trade agreement governing the distribution of GoGurt, which I’ll spare you.) Then the wrappers and napkins got packed back in my pannier, and back-of-pack boy got on his bike and pedaled for the lighthouse, and his brother marched up to me, flexed like Hulk Hogan, and shouted MUST—CLIMB—HILL! and grabbed his bike.

***

When, in the course of your parenting adventure, you arrive at a juncture that requires you to either yell your guts out, cheerleading for your kid who’s climbing a hill that grownups—fit ones—consider That point where I turn around and go back downtown, or get your phone out and take pictures? Just remember I said this and you’ll be fine: To hell with the phone. It’s not an option. Cheer for that little human like it’s the first time in his entire life he’ll have achieved anything this big.

Because for two little humans, it was.

***

“DADDY! WHY DIDN’T WE GET ICE CREAM!”

We’d just dismounted after coasting down that half-mile. There were still concrete steps and a block of sidewalk to go.

“Did you see any ice cream stores on our way down the greenway?”

***

“Can I have some more ice cream, please?”

“No, you can’t have…yeah, all right. You earned it.”

***

Tonight was shampoo night during bathtime, one of my favorite things.

I’m very tired. I just wanted to get this all down, before things that matter less pressed in more, and I didn’t.

How to find a terrific InDesign production expert within 15 miles of Inwood, NYC

I USED TO do this thing where I had a roster of freelance clients (and the feast or famine that came with them), and along with that, I’d also take a long-term, part-time graphics job that didn’t get in the way of the feast and filled in the gaps during the famine.

My company, TYPEFLOW (I’m the only one here), has been doing production of trade show directories, books, and other long documents for a long time now, and in 2011, my book and ebook business absolutely took off. I mean, like, through the roof. Like busy.

Things finally took a breather this month, and I found myself drumming my fingers, looking at the economy improving, and thinking about that old system.

I want to get that going again. I liked it. It worked.

IN EXCHANGE FOR being my perfect situation, you’ll get an intelligent and highly skilled InDesign production person a few days a week—for the same price as that guy the agency sent. You know, the one you didn’t ask back.

When I’m not being a totally terrific production expert (yet charmingly humble), I’m a writer and long-distance cyclist, both of which I take seriously. I also take my seven-year-old twins seriously—though not so much when I’m holding them upside-down and tickling them. Still, they’re why I’m not interested in weekends.

So what I’m looking for is:

• steady, with a predictable schedule,
• 20ish hours per week,
• no weekends,
• within about 15 miles of Northern Manhattan,
• where they don’t mind me showing up on a bicycle
  and have somewhere I can put it (it’s a folding bike),
• and they need a skilled, professional production artist.
• Oh, and aren’t a large bank, pharmaceutical corporation, or tobacco company. Sorry. I’m sure you’re nice people.

I understand you may need me to stay a little extra sometimes; you understand I may need to switch hours around sometimes.

What are you looking for? Drop me a line: noteon at mac dot com.

THE 15-MILE THING lets me get my riding in. Here’s a map showing the approximate area. (Click for a larger version.)

That might look like too wide an area for a bike commute, but for perspective: Most days, I strap my laptop to my bike and ride to various Starbucks at the far edges of that oval, where I sit and work on freelance jobs. It’s my already-existing commuting area.

Resume: Lots of years of Adobe Creative Suite; know InDesign better than most people who get paid to use it; former Quark guru, now glad it’s dead. Very experienced in print and ebooks. HTML and CSS experience, but not that interested in web design, though I do enjoy working with web designers to create assets for sites. Lots of production-efficiency tricks; fast and accurate.

Samples: Please email me and tell me what you do there, so I know what samples to send: noteon at mac dot com.

Ride report: Rockland Lake 20K petite brevet

MY POLICY IS you can keep whatever trinkets you’re handed, but the one all the kids at your table got because they cleaned up nicely doesn’t go in the family medal case. You’re also allowed to bring them up in conversation every time your brother’s 15K or your father’s Super Randonneur series is mentioned, but the answer is still no, they’re not going in the case. It breaks a little part of my heart to tell you that, and breaks a little part of yours to hear it, but I’m sorry. They’re not.

On last year’s 15K, one of my five-year-olds DNF’d (“Did Not Finish”). So he got to suffer through watching his brother receive the sole award. This year, the suffering started a couple of weeks before the ride, but I was the one feeling it—because the two medals in my dresser, engraved with the names of two six-year-olds, wouldn’t be handed out for participation. The only way to get one—to even see it—would be to finish.

October 15, 2011

Ride start: Filling out brevet cards

THE CLOUDS WERE beautiful and fast-moving, so every few minutes the weather changed. It would be flat gray, and then we’d find ourselves riding through a strobing of sun and branch shadows.

The boy who DNF’d last year surprised me a month ago by suddenly becoming a good climber on the little hills in Inwood. He’s light, which is an advantage in climbing, and physically capable of racing his brother up Staff Street with some effort—adults walk their bikes up it—but whining and giving up were his two favorite hobbies this year. After his brother the Drift King got a brand-new rear tire because he’d deposited most of his tread on various sidewalks, the complainer started challenging himself to pull off longer skids, which somehow conflated itself with better hill work.

So I was able to tell him: I think you’re going to finish this year. You rode sixteen miles in one day at Summer Streets, and a 20K is only thirteen. And—it’s flat.

I think you’re going to finish.

So do I, he said. If I start the fourth lap? I know I’ll finish it.

THE VIDEO TELLS the next part of the story, so don’t skip it. They’re both small white boys in brown vests, but he’s the blue bike. Drift King’s is yellow.

THAT EVENING AT home, we talked about his different medals. He has two little plastic ones that he got at school for being tidy or something.

“Does this one feel different?” I asked.

It was still around his neck—he would eventually take it off at bath time. He rubbed his thumb over the front of it and looked thoughtful.

“I mean,” I said, “in your heart. Does this medal feel different from your other ones?”

He looked a little uncertain and rubbed it against his chest.

“Uh,” I said, “No, I mean…do you feel different about it?”

He wanted to give me the right answer, but he really had no idea what I was talking about. “Your feelings,” I said, “do you feel the same about this medal as you feel about your other ones?”

He slid his thumb over it again, doubtfully.

I took another couple of stabs, but I’d pointed him in the wrong direction, so I let it go and he wandered off.

A minute later, he brought his cheap participation medals into the kitchen, and said, “These ones—I don’t really like them, and I never even play with them, so I think I’m going to throw them in the trash.”

They were in the trash and he was gone before I could say anything.

NEXT OCTOBER: The Rockland Lake 25K.

These little 16″ bikes will be long gone by then.

---

 

 

* Until a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed even a great little six-year-old rider could pull off a twenty-foot skid, but on the way to the greenmarket—I’m on the street, they’re on the sidewalk—I hear the usual schhhhhhhhhhhhh behind me…and then I still hear it…and then I turn to look and he’s still skidding. Seriously, a twenty-foot black stripe. [back]

Song for a Monday

If the playback widget isn’t working, click here to go to the track.

Riff and commentary: Boy on left
Train status: Boy on right
Saxophone: Some guy across the tracks on the uptown side while
we were waiting for a downtown train.

Vocals and saxophone recorded on iPhone.
Thanks to Paul Heitsch for pointing out some mixing stuff.

Like it? Give a buck to a class project you like on donorschoose.

lps

Little Big Heart

I SAW THE BACK WHEEL of the little yellow bike flip up in the air and a little body go over the handlebars. He hit face-first on pavement. It wasn’t a little-kid impact. If it happened in a mountain bike race, they’d suck their breath through their teeth and cut to slow-mo.

Prayer for the Man

Gerald So invited me to participate in the Lineup blog tour for National Poetry Month. He asked writers to say something about their favorite poem from Issue 4. I did this audio setting instead.

Prayer for the Man who Mugged my Father, 72

by Charles Harper Webb
in issue 4 of The Lineup

Best in headphones.
3:33

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Edit: At least one person thought this was my poem. Just to be clear: This is my rendering of Charles Harper Webb’s poem, which appears in issue 4 of The Lineup.

In amber

AND OUT OF nowhere, which is the only way these things happen, which is why you have to force yourself to stay for the entire slog, suddenly one is standing in his underpants in the dining room, serenading me about the belle of Belfast City off a Xerox, and the other has turned into Gene Krupa in the tub.

So I don’t take my tea into the bedroom, and I stand and listen as he struggles through the verses he doesn’t know by heart yet, and listen also to the rattling experiments in stochastic rhythm coming from the hot and cold handles and the plastic bath drums, and try to let the miracle reside. But I’m severely undercaffeinated, very worried about money, and not yet convalesced from the bomb damage of 2010, and I can’t snap myself into being quite the emotionally open human this moment exists for.

But even if I can’t luxuriate, he can. And should. I can do that for him: He can have the experience of not doubting his Daddy wants to be sung to right this instant.

So I hold my mug and listen through the stumbles.

Many stumbles.

Many, many stumbles.

Whenever he glances up to make sure I’m still with him, he sees me looking back. I can do that.

Then I give him a kiss and excuse myself before the next song, and order Krupa to wash his face and get out of the tub.

I’M ON THE bed, doing whatever on the laptop, something imperatively useless, when he comes in with the blue plastic stool that he wrote his name on in marker, which I haven’t gotten around to making him clean off because I kind of like it, clutching his stapled Xeroxes. He places the stool for his performance and lets me know he’s going to sing Put a Little Love in Your Heart to me.

So, he never being six years old on March 1 again, and me never being quite so dense that I don’t notice an urgent memo when it’s hand-delivered, action required on my part, in a song title, I put the Internet addiction aside and close its lid so I won’t be diverted and tell him please sing to me.

Another day goes by / and still the children cry.
Put a little love in your heart.
If you want the world to know / we won’t let hatred grow—

He looks up without any guile and says, “Can you tell me what is hatred?”

That one takes some thinking.

KRUPA INDIGNANTLY SNATCHED up what he claimed were his stapled Xeroxes and sang through them on the bed during Pavarotti’s turn in the tub, in the little-boy soprano I hope I don’t entirely forget when they’re 18, and then Kathleen came in and asked for help on a work thing and, after I provided what I could, mentioned that the community chorale she’s been too overwhelmed to consider is doing Bach this year, cantatas, which could, maybe, mean a beautiful part for her.

Then the singing boy felt a too-long silence and his parents both beaming at him and looked up and smiled as he kept singing.

First you slog; then, sometimes, you’re shown why. It never goes the other way around.

THE SECOND PERFORMER wanted his “1000 Facts On Space” book for story time because he thought it would tell him about radar, so once I was done yelling them through teeth-jobs-pee-shoes-and-pick-up-this-floor, we got on the big bed.

The one instance of radar in the index took us to a page about distances. This boy was born a scientist, but his brother tunes out unless there’s music or acting involved, so their two heads became Jupiter and Earth, and we made movie radar sound effects and counted Mississippis between forehead boinks. Then Jupiter stood farther away and became Pluto and we counted again.

We don’t actually shoot fingers into space. Right, guys? We do it with radar instead.

And then—they couldn’t get this when they were five, but now that they’re six: Looking back in time by looking up at the stars, and how an alien near Proxima Centauri looking through a really powerful telescope into our apartment—what do you think he would see?

Us!

But not us right now. He’d see me giving you a bottle. He’d see Baby You, not Six-Year-Old You.

WHY!?

Because you’re six, and it takes the light five and a half years to get here. Light is how we see, when it goes in our eyeballs. So what he’d see wouldn’t be you now. It would be you five and a half years ago. And another star called Deneb is almost two thousand light-years away, so when we look up, we’re seeing it two thousand years ago.

Yes, sweetie. Really.

Want to know something REALLY cool? If you’re going at the speed of light, and you turn on a flashlight, how fast does THAT light go?

Faster!

Nope. It goes the speed of light too.

WHA—!?

Your brain is telling you that when you add two things, they get more. Right?

Yes.

But light doesn’t work that way. And that’s just the beginning of how cool and weird science is.

Did I make your brain explode?

Good night, sweetheart.

THE FIRST PERFORMER had reached his quota of science facts at the same moment his head stopped being Pluto, back in Mommy and Daddy’s room, so he just got big noisy kisses on his cheeks. Good night, sweetheart. (KISS KISS KISS KISS!) I love you. (KISS KISS KISS!) Sweet dreams. (KISS KISS!)

When the kisses and giggling were done, he held my head firmly in his hands, looked up at me in the darkened room, and filled his moment of being the one to end the evening by saying:

“I need you to shave tomorrow.”

See you in the morning.