Why so serious?

Paul and I were glad to end up in NYC for many reasons. Not the least of these is that there is still a goth scene here. Goth is a dying subculture, after all, in a quite literal sense. In cities all over America, clubs are closing and in places where the subculture wasn’t strong to start with, it hasn’t taken much to wipe it out entirely. And while my husband and I do not feel like we need to be hardcore goths every single day, there are times when we just want to wear our stompy boots and black outfits and dance with each other to that particular strain of melancholia that is goth music. Hence, we are happy to live in New York, the birthplace of American goths, and one of only a handful of cities remaining with a dedicated scene.

And so, we have been trying to explore the goth scene, and trying to understand where we belong in it. In Los Angeles, we knew all the promoters and clubs. We followed DJ Xian, with her synth pop and steampunk scene. We went to Das Bunker, with its three rooms of hardcore industrial, retro EBM and powernoize. And we went to Bar Sinister, Los Angeles’ longest running, privately owned goth club, which was predictable in the best way possible in that it always looked and sounded like something out of a dystopia, plus it had both a live band playing outside and a dance floor. (I saw Shiny Toy Guns there. Before they were cool)

We have found some clubs we really like in the process. Two weeks ago, we went to Necropolis, in the basement space of a club in the Lower East Side. We were early, and walked in before midnight to a DJ a little older than us, playing a mix of what we could only describe as real goth, first-wave goth, classic goth rock from before the culture started evolving and splitting into sub genres in the 1990s. It’s a style of music we know, and like, but not a genre where we know any artists beyond the big, popular, bands that are still staples of clubs everywhere – bands like Virgin Prunes or Christian Death, or, most recognizably, Sisters of Mercy.

The second DJ who came on was playing music that was more from what we think of as “our era”: Rosetta Stone, London after Midnight. I bounced off the floor when he threw in an EBM dance track: Icon of Coil’s “Dead Enough for Life” (it had been so long since I’d heard it that I didn’t remember the song title, even though I was happily singing along). But after that oneindustrial techno track, it was 1990s goth rock – not a synthesizer, sample or drum machine to be heard.

I’m used to second -wave clubs where the DJS play a mix of synth, electro, Deathrock and mandatory classic goth tracks. In fact, a year ago, if someone had told me there were clubs where no one put VNV Nation on the playlist, or where it wasn’t mandatory to play “This Corrosion” once a night, I would have been surprised. After all, I came of age in the goth scene in 2000, in Seattle, which, at the time, was all EBM and electronic industrial and the Metropolis record label. And Los Angeles, much to my surprise and delight, was very similar to Seattle. I adapted fast to L.A., and it was that existng familiarity with the West Coast goth scene that led to meeting my husband at Bar Sinister a few months after I started going back to goth clubs.

But here in NYC, there is no Bar Sinister…or, at least, we have yet to find it. There is no self-stereotyped goth club, nothing that is borderline vampy and campy like Sinister was. The scene here is serious, old-school serious, Deathrock and goth rock and post punk dominate, and there are none of the new goth bands (like my beloved Birthday Massacre) to be heard. My equally beloved rave-influenced electronic dance music is missing, and instead, everything is from a generation I missed entirely. Not by much, mind you – the advent of electronics and synthesizers into goth coincided with my 21st birthday – but it’s still something I never picked up.

It isn’t that I don’t know or haven’t heard of these bands. I know who Mission UK are, or Gene loves Jezebel, or Fields of the Nephilim. I definitely know the Chameleons, because “Swamp Thing” is our song, a late 80s alternative track that my husband liked enough to gain enough courage from to ask me to dance, all those years ago (and we played it at our wedding, and I sang it to Ben as a lullaby). But hearing these songs without a track listing in a club, I can’t identify the artists. Much of it has that melodramatic sound, the melodic, mournful sound of that late 80s/early 90s goth rock. Or it has the sharp edges and asynchromatic nature of post punk, the discordant, minimal bass, guitar and drum around less sung than spoken vocals. ( Paul likes post punk better than I do – it overlaps with his indie rock nature.)

And it has been like that in the clubs we have been to in Lower Manhattan. Maybe its that these clubs are in “Gothtown”, the East Village, Alphabet City and Lower East Side scene that goth came from, and it just hasnt changed since. The only other major variation has been the extremely stompy hardcore industrial club that Paul enjoys, but it is really stompy, like Skinny Puppy stompy. Before my time, and not my variation, either – I was never a rivethead.

It is also a different scene here, in terms of dress and fashion, than it was in LA. The biggest DJ/promoter in LA was DJ Xian, who somehow managed to run and play at multiple clubs. Her influence skewed to New Romantic and synth pop, in clubs like Malediction Society and MODE:M, which was an entire night of music influenced by Depeche Mode. She ran Alice in Wonderland and Victoriana special events: Paul and I spent one NYE at a party called “Theater des Wyrm”, complete with absinthe. This fit my corsets and long dresses style perfectly. I have always been a Victoriana style goth, and my favorite clothes – the ones I feel most comfortable in – are ankle-length, laced at the waist, and high necked, preferably with lace sleeves and visible lacing.

The box of clothes I brought from LA are therefore all skewed to this aesthetic. Yet I don’t see any steampunk or repro Victoriana in the clubs here. I don’t even see much cyber goth, although that may be more due to cyber goth being outdated. (I flirted with cyber goth ten years ago, but even then, my PVC dress was ankle length…and I was never able to get the cyber goth braids and dyed hair I wanted because I work in office jobs)

But while I miss the predictability and the familiarity of the L.A. Goth scene, I am getting used to this more old school version of the goth scene. It’s still a scene, a sound, a style I love. It’s still music I like and enjoy listening to, even if I don’t know it. And that’s why, when I went out with my husband two weeks ago, we still managed to dance for an hour, even though we didn’t know the music by heart. It was music we liked, it was our people, and we could have stayed all night had we not been already tired.

holy pickles, mama!

Recently, I decided to become an even bigger Brooklyn cliche by learning to can foods. This started when I acquired entirely too many peaches a couple of weekends ago, in the course of a visit to a farm in Dutchess County. In order to preserve them, I downloaded “Canning for a New Generation” to my Kindle, and began reading about how to can.

After a practice batch of peaches in syrup, I began to get the hang of it. I have now successfully “put up” a half dozen jars of peach jam (with apple pectin, of course), three and a half pints of classic cucumber relish, three pints of “Dilly Beans!”, and two quarts of Quick Kosher Dills, using apple cider vinegar. This eliminated a lot of the surplus produce from our CSA, who seem to be having a bumper crop year of cucumber and peaches. It also took advantage of local sales on seasonal vegetables.

But one thing I really wanted to make was real, honest to goodness brine pickles. Ben and I have discovered traditional pickles since moving to NYC. We both love pickles, and we are starting to really get into the fermented kind, rather than the commercial vinegar kind. Of course, our Quick Kosher Dills were tasty, but they didn’t have that depth of flavor that comes from the lactic acid on fermentation. Also, because the quick pickles were pickled in jars, I had to add a whole tea bag to each jar, instead of being able to add a few tea bags to a whole crock, and it was just too much tea for the pickles (Tannins like those in tea make for crisper pickles, since they slow the enzyme that breaks down cucumber cell walls, and since I don’t have fresh grape leaves to add, I used black tea bags. Problem solved with SCIENCE!)

So this weekend, I took advantage of a sale on Kirby cucumbers, and we put up a crock of pickles.

Ben neatly stacked the pickles in the glass jar. I measured spices and made brine. And together, we made pickles! (Also, the bowl to the left of Ben is relish, in the process of soaking in salt water)

Two days later, the jar is starting to smell a LOT like pickles.

Two more weeks, and we will be ready to put pickles in jars, pasteurize them, and prepare for distribution to friends and family. And, of course, eat them ourselves. Because, as Ben tells us repeatedly every chance possible, he loooooooves pickles.

And I’m not sure how it is I regressed into being an L.M. Montgomery character, despite living in Brooklyn in 2012. First I started baking our own bread, now I’m making pickles. If only I knew how to properly sew, knit and garden, I’d be all set to live in a PEI settlement circa 1890. As it is, I will just have to be a part time urban homesteader in New York City, in a very modern age.

too tired to sleep

One of the worst cycles I get into is the Short Sleep cycle. Most people have been there at some point, stuck in a recurring pattern where there isn’t enough time to sleep in, which results in overcompensating with too much caffeine too late in the day, which results in a sleepless night, when you can’t sleep in during the day, etc.

This week, I’m already behind on my sleep quotient because everyones sleep schedule is off in my household. We just got home from BC yesterday on a red eye flight, on which I couldn’t sleep, and Paul and Ben only napped for an hour or two. We all crashed upon getting home at 8am, but had decided to wake up at midday to avoid losing the whole day to sleep. So there we we were: up at noon, making coffee and trying to function. We let Ben sleep in until 1:30, but had to wake him then so he would go to sleep on time in the evening.

However, waking up tired still meant, in theory, that we would be able to fall asleep at a normal hour. I had also hoped it would help us avoid jetlag. But I had one too many cups of coffee yesterday, which was a Mistake. I still fell asleep at 9pm, but that had more to do with the wine we were drinking with friends than it did with actual sleep. I woke up at midnight, wide awake and dehydrated…and by the time I rehydrated, I realized I wasn’t falling asleep again anytime soon.

So, instead of staying in bed, this time, I just got up. I went into the living room, picked up my laptop, answered some personal emails, paid bills, and filled out the forms for a NYC drivers license and car registration. I watched a couple episodes of Once Upon A Time. I finished making a bread machine loaf of multigrain for Paul’s lunches, and thankfully, I was right there when Ben woke up after having a nighttime “accident”. It did make the insomnia a little more worthwhile, too, because I was able to be right there when my baby needed me to change his sheets and help him get into dry pajamas.

But after all that, I still couldn’t sleep until 5am. I almost gave up again and went back out into the kitchen to do dishes, cook for the week, do something productive to make the apartment look less cluttered. Instead, I read non-fiction for a while, and finally passed out. I woke up at the usual 6:30am weekday time, but then, lulled by rain, I fell asleep again…and didn’t wake up for good until 8am, when I realized I was going to be late for work.

I used to just push through after a sleepless night. But i know that when I’m tired, I dont work efficiently. I am not particularly coherent, or well spoken. I can lose train of though mid sentence. Worse, I don’t stay focused. My mind wanders, my work isn’t completed quickly or well. I don’t process information, or I make stupid mistakes and have to re-do work. On low sleep, I am not a valuable asset to anyone, and inefficient workdays result in long workdays to try and compensate for the low productivity.

It also kicks off an unfortunate cycle, because those tired days are laced with extra caffeine. I get home late, go to bed on time, and then can’t fall asleep because
I’m both wired and tired. Then I just lie there thinking about all the things I could be doing. Last night, I kept thinking I should be doing dishes or putting away laundry, because the house is a disaster area right now, and our suitcases aren’t even unpacked. I thought about going through my email and preparing for today, about getting ready to roll back into work, about even VPNing in and pulling the flash report for today’s client meeting.

I tried my favorite standby: nonfiction. I love historical nonfiction, but processing the information often makes me sleepy. I usually fall asleep after a handful of pages. But I made it through a whole chapter of Gotham: A History of New York City through 1898, and still was awake. I even ran white noise to try and induce sleep. Nothing was soothing enough to get through the caffeine.

I find this immensely frustrating because it’s such a waste of time being tired. My life feels so full these days, with so many things in it. Losing productivity due to sleep deprivation reduces the amount of things I can fit in a day. I feel like I don’t get as much value from time when that happens.

So tonight, i will get that sleep I need. I will resume life at its usual pace and velocity tomorrow. But I need that sleep. Sleep no longer seems like that waste of time it did when I was in my twenties, but a key part of living my life to the fullest. I think that’s part of being in this phase of life, when thre is a lot I need to be able to do, and people I need to do it for.

a week or family time

I’m writing this from my mom’s house in Oak Bay, in Victoria, in British Columbia.  Paul, Ben and I came out here on Monday, after a couple of quick days visiting friends & family in Vancouver.  My sister, her husband, and their  baby daughter have been here for the week as well.  The six of us have all been happily visiting Nana for longer than our usual four-day weekends because this may be one of the last times we’re all together in our childhood home.  Monica and Jonathan move to Toronto in two weeks, and with Paul and I settled in Brooklyn, who knows when all of us may make it home again from the East Coast?

This is not something I like to think about too much.  I’ve loved being here this week, with my family, in a leisurely visit. Being able to live everyday life, without being on a short visit timetable, has given all of us the time together we’ve only had in scraps and pieces for years.  Being all together in the same house has been quietly wonderful, a series of ordinary interactions and events that add up to be memories.  And while it’s a little strange to be the grown-ups in the place where we grew up, I also haven’t had the transition back to being Child In Parent’s House that usually goes with anyone’s trip back to their childhood home.

And now, today is Friday.  I’m not quite sure where the week went.  I spent part of Wednesday taking Mom to get a new TV, and switching her over to satellite from cable to go with it.  We spent yesterday at the Royal BC Museum, which is Victoria’s Natural History museum, and then took Ben to get his birthday present (a tiny scooter) in the Village.  We’ve spent hours at the beach I played on as a small child here, taking Ben to throw rocks, play on the driftwood logs, catch tidepool fish, and examine the purple shore crabs that live under the biggest rocks.  And today, after I supervise the installation of Mom’s new satellite dish, I’ll take my son out to a forest park somewhere, so he can enjoy the Pacific Northwest a little more before we leave tomorrow.

But still, the days have somehow both drifted by and flown by.  Drifted, because each day has been unhurried and slow paced; flown, because I can’t believe it’s Friday already and almost time to go.  This week has been a lesson in slowing down, for me, as I’ve put away my work computer and focused on time with my family or just plain “down time”.  It’s also been an example of how sometimes, the most ordinary things, like a week at home with the people who are closest to me, can be extraordinary.  This has been a week of being together, for days on end.  It’s been something special.  I’m very grateful that all of us, together, could take the time to be here.

Bootie on a BOAT!

Back in Los Angeles, my favorite two places to go dancing with my friends were Bar Sinister and Bootie. Bar Sinister is LA’s gothiest club, the only goth club with an image to keep up. Sinister was pretentious enough to have a dress code, but the DJs stuck with a familiar set of music genres I never got tired of, and the over-the-top goth club scene was always just fun to be in. We always knew we could go there and just dance all night, however we wanted, and always feel comfortable in the club.

Bootie, like Bar Sinister, was someplace we could go to just dance, where we always knew we would like the music, and where we knew we would always feel right at home. But Bootie was a very different scene than the goth clubs. Bootie refers to “bootleg mashups”, those songs which are more than the sum of their parts. For those of you who do not know the genre, a mash-up is two or more songs which fit together, in melody, rhythm, or even in concept. They’re usually highly catchy, because they contain Top 40 music, and very danceable, because they have rap or dance songs in them. Most have a clever title, which is also a mashup.

There’s a handful of very well known mashup DJs, but only two that go so far as to run a nationally known dance club. Two DJs out of SanFrancisco, Adrien and the Mysterious D, started bringing their SF based dance club, Bootie, to LA in 2005. I’ve been going ever since. My friend Heather introduced me to it initially, and the I started bringing my friends Wendy and Zee. Over the years, we saw Bootie grow in size, going from the Echo club in Echo Park, a small club, to Safari SAMs in Hollywood, and then, when it outgrew that venue, back to the Echo’s downstairs, larger counterpart, the Echoplex. The club even went from once a month to being twice month, and was still always full. Bootie is so popular that it didn’t just grow in size, but grew in appeal, bringing in more and more different people. At first, it was just Echo Park hipsters, but with time, I saw all sort of both alternative and mainstream cultures represented. At the Echoplex in 2011, I would see punks, roller derby girls, rockabillies, ravers, you name it. And, of course, the club was always full of people who just loved to dance. Like we did. At Bootie, you didn’t have to be anyone. You just had to love the music, and be able to dance for hours.

When it came time to move to NYC, we were very sad about leaving behind our favorite dance club in LA. Bootie comes to NYC, but not often -only every two or three months. And I managed to miss it in March, when I was visiting BC last. Fortunately, it came back quickly, and on a BOAT. I’m guessing a dry land venue could not be found, but for a club that’s already sort of pirate themed, a boat is perfect. Ahoy! Arrrrr! Pirate reference here! Obviously, my friends and I all bought tickets the second they went on sale. And then we literally counted down until it was time to get on the boat. All we could think of was how much we loved Bootie, and how we knew we would spend the whole night blissfully dancing.

So, two weekends ago, we returned to Bootie. And for the most part, we did spend the night dancing. It was just a very long night. The thing is with boat tours is that you are on the boat for the duration of the tour. There is no leaving early, or arriving late. In order to be sure we were on the boat, we had arrived at the pier at midnight, the time we thought we needed to be on board. After some panicked searching for the boat, we checked our emails for more directions, and realized that the boat wouldn’t leave until 12:30. In reality, due to the will-call ticket process and the security checks, this ended up being almost a 1am departure. I did some mental math, realized that the 3am return had just become a 4am return, and prayed that the diet Red Bull I’d slammed back in the cab would keep me from becoming a napping heap in a corner.

After a trip to the restrooms (a year of working similar boats in the Seattle waterways taught me that one toilet ALWAYS goes out during a cruise), we went upstairs to the main dance floor for the promoting DJs’ sets. Because Bootie isn’t usually in NYC, the DJs were playing more of a “best of” than the new tracks they usually broke out over the course of an evening in LA. We knew most of these mashups, and loved them, and that was enough to keep dancing for a long time. As the DJs traded off, and kept playing, we would wander to the window to look out at the lights of Midtown, or of Hoboken, but, for most of the night we just danced.

Still, after two hours,I realized that the boat was just going up and down the Hudson, and not really going anywhere that was interesting. By the third time the boat went up towards the West 50s, i was getting tired, and even a little bored. We went downstairs to listen to the guest DJ, DJ Lobsterdust, and to dance under the black lights on the lower deck, for a change. But when we came up, I noticed that several other people on the ship were also a little bored. The boat was spotted with couples making out, far more hookups than we usually saw at Bootie. Bootie is not usually a meat market, but I suppose, on a boat, with three hours in a small space, it increases the odds a bit.

Standing by the door, I heard the DJ calling out that he still had CDs to give away, and I realized that we had been going to this club for so long that the CDs people fought over in 2005 were now obsolete. CDs, to me, are tiny liabilities, clutter, physical objects that take up space. I know I can download the same songs and listen to them on a device, without ever touching a CD. The fact that the DJ was still handing out physical media made me realize that times had actually changed around Bootie. Bootie, while always awesome, is simply no longer cutting edge.

In fact, mashups are so mainstream now that they show up as part of corporate America. The sound team used them as the music that preceded the SAP CEO’s keynote at SAPPHIRE, playing twenty minutes of mashups while over ten thousand conference attendees found seats at the Orlando Convention Center. This, to me, meant Mashups were now acceptable to play at a corporate event run by a huge German software company. Mashups were even considered for promotions on an ice cream brand handled by the agency I freelanced for last fall. Mashups are no longer relegated to underground clubs in hipster West Coast cities. Going to Bootie now is starting to take on a faint patina of nostalgia, a sense of being timeless instead of being on the front edge of time.

By 4am, everyone was starting to slow down, and when the pier came in sight, people started lining up for the door. We were some of the first ones off, and we ran to catch a cab. It took two more blocks of walking east to find one, but eventually, we flagged one down and took it to Houston and 1st. I could have hopped on a train right then, but I decided to stay out for a bit longer, and go for a post-dancing snack with my friends. Also, by then, I was hungry, and a bowl of matzoh ball soup sounded perfect. So, at a comrade’s suggestion, we all went to Katz’s Deli, picked up plated of salty, delicious deli food, and sat down to rest our aching feet and replenish with beef sandwiches, French fries, pickles and soup.

After the meal, we went outside, and realized the sky was getting light. It was almost five in the morning. We had successfully managed to stay out all night. For me, this was a victory. It was a triumph over Getting Older, a victory over the exhaustion that I fall into at the end of the day. It was a success to not be the Mommy Cliche who goes home early. I had stayed out all night just being me, just Jillian, a me that wasn’t a mommy or a wife, but who was out dancing all night. It may not have been the smartest decision, but it was my decision.

Seeing the sky get light, rejuvenated by soup and pickles, and with the last of that Red Bull still in my system, I wanted to go watch the sun rise over the East River. It would have been amazing, to me, to stand in the Lower East Side, and see the sun come up over Brooklyn. But everyone else was tired, and wanted to just grab a cab and head up to their apartments. And I knew that not only was it not very safe for me to go wandering around the LES before 5am, but that exhaustion would hit me sooner rather than later. I also knew my already sore feet would become unbearable if i kept going, and that i would be limping from blisters soon.

So instead of going to look for a sunrise over the East River, I went to the F train, took it home to Park Slope, and walked home. But even at 5am, exactly seven hours after I had left my own house, I still walked with a bounce in my step, still with a mashup song in my heart. I walked home from the subway, under a rapidly lightening Brooklyn sky, and thought about how much I love my life, and how happy I am to have what I have, in New York City, with my dearest friends to dance lal night with, and then my husband and son to come home to.

food appreciation for preschoolers

To date, we’ve been pretty lucky with Ben and eating. This is because when he was very small, our pediatrician gave us the Best. Advice. Ever: “just put the food in front of him”. So we did. And we kept putting it in front of him. I read somewhere that a kid has to try a new food at least five times before they will eat it, so we just kept trying. Now, Ben will taste almost anything new, even if it takes months for him to actually eat it, and we have managed to get him to eat a fairly good variety of fruits and vegetables. He eats vegetables with hummus (usually carrots, cucumber or celery) most nights as an “appetizer” before dinner. And he will eat ANYTHING that is fruit based. Berries, apples, bananas, oranges, melons, peaches…if its fruit, even a new fruit, he will eat it.

Obviously, this makes meals easier. Having Ben accept and eventually eat new foods means that we prepare one meal for everyone, with no substitutes, most of the time. We used to give him frozen mixed vegetables at almost every meal, with the green beans picked out, instead of whatever “adult” vegetable we were eating. Now, he eats the green vegetables we eat: broccoli, asparagus, green beans. I still cook a limited variety of those green vegetables to keep it to the Big Three above, or related varieties (broccolette, for example), but mostly, I can cook a meal with a protein, whole grain, and vegetable, and serve it to the kid, and have him eat it with minimal fuss. We have even been able to get him to eat vegetables when they show up in food outside the home, like when he got bok choy in his dumpling soup.

This isn’t to say Ben doesn’t prefer the usual “kid food”: the basic sweet or salty foods all kids eat. He would much rather live off granola bars and cheese sticks, fries with ketchup, grilled cheese, Mac and cheese, chicken nuggets, pasta, etc. He is never going to turn down candy, especially M&Ms. He still wants nothing to do with a lot of foods, like sweet potatoes, and it’s tough to get him to eat more than a few bites of non-fried fish that isn’t salmon. But overall, he is pretty good about eating whatever healthy food we put in front of him. With the nutritional problems that run rampant in Western society these days, and a 30% child obesity rate in America that is partially linked to “kid foods”, this makes me extremely thankful to have a little boy who will eat more than the usual monotone of junk designed for a “child palate”.

So we are fortunate here, because Ben is an agreeable kid. But I still wanted his vegetable repertoire to expand. So I picked up “French Children Eat Everything”, a book by a Vancouver academic who moved to France for a year with her two small daughters, and had to adjust to the French “food rules”. Rules like “kids eat what the adults eat” and “slow food is happy food”. Those are rules I can agree with. Also, obviously, I want one of those Euro-trained kids who will go to a nice restaurant and eat a multi -course meal. Mostly though, I just want a kid who eats a healthy variety of food, including the vegetable based foods I think are delicious, like beet salad with goat cheese, or roasted Brussels sprouts, or collard green wraps with avocado or hummus.

So I ramped up the food introductions last week, through a variety of tactics. We got Ben to eat lettuce based salad, a food he previously said he “didn’t eat “, by introducing it to him with ranch dressing, and then rolling to vinaigrette. On Sunday, he tried the lentil and carrot salads on offer from a bistro’s food booth at the 5th Ave Street Fair, and he ended up eating several bites of each. And last night, I took a literal page out of “French Kids” and cooked one of the recipes: beet purée. But I cooked it because, when we were in the grocery store Sunday night. Ben pointed at beets and asked, “What’s this, Mama?”. I explained it was beets, and he told me, “I would like to try that.”. Of course, he didn’t eat more than two bites of the resulting dish, which was actually delicious, since it was really a puree of three parts zucchini and one part beet, with butter and salt added. But he tried it, and I will keep trying it on him and hope he develops an eventual taste for beets.

One of the most successful tactics to date, however, has been leveraging screen time. I used Ratatouille as an introduction to, well, ratatouille. I used a Sesame Street segment about colorful foods to bring in more colorful vegetables. And now, our new favorite show is Around the World in 80 Plates. Ben likes “cooking” (standing on a stool to help prep simple foods with Paul), and I figured a cooking show that goes around the world would be a great way to learn about cultures AND introduce new foods. This is actually working, because after watching last week’s episode in Lyon, France, he wanted to go shop for and cook the foods we saw on the show. So we went to the farmers market on Saturday (by bike, naturally) and bought the ingredients for salad Lyonnaise:

That is Ben’s salad, above. I rendered duck prosciutto (instead of slab bacon) in a bit of olive oil, and poached the eggs. Ben shook the dressing, made from the rendered fat and red wine vinegar, and the assembled the salads after I tossed the arugula with the dressing. We all then broke and mixed in our egg yolks, and Ben actually ate half his salad.

This tactic of involving Ben in cooking doesn’t always work. Ben still refused to eat the mussels he helped me prepare. Or rather, he ate one, announced he did not like it, and so I quickly cooked him some plain fish as a protein substitute to go with the fries I made to accompany said mussels. But that’s OK. The point is that he ate the mussel before saying he did not like it. He tried a spoonful of beet purée last night before dismissing it. He tastes things, and then talks about how it tastes. Like we did with broccoli, we will get there with other foods. We will just have to keep offering these foods to him, along with foods he already knows and likes, and remind him that every food was, at one time, a new one he didn’t know he enjoyed.

Sharing the world from the back of my bike

I consider the bicycle to be the perfect solution for short distance transportation. Its faster than walking, yet isn’t at a speed where i lose connection to the world around me. In a car, you’re cut off from the world around you; in a subway, the subway is the world around you. On a bike, I can speed through the streets of NYC, from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back, and see, feel, and even smell every detail of the city around me. (This is more pleasant when it’s a passing restaurant than when it’s Garbage Tuesday). Living in a city as dense and fascinating as New York, i think riding a bike is the perfect way to get around.

And, because I am from the Pacific Northwest, being able to ride my bike in a city is important to me. I still take the same joy from flying through a city street, from outpacing a car in traffic, from seeking a path through the urban landscape, that I did as a teenager. Riding through traffic, I’m focused on the calculations of my own movement, and the movement of the objects around me: cars, pedestrians, buses, Other cyclists. I’m in a zone where I am totally immersed in the present moment, where I’m focused on being in motion through a fascinating, and often beautiful, world around me. I’m in complete control of my speed, connected with both the machine I’m using to move, and the world I’m moving through, and it’s an amazing mind-clearing experience.

But in all of this, I just love riding a bike because it allows me to really see the city I now live in. I can go anywhere without worrying about traffic or parking. I can see the streets around me, yet have time to notice details. And I can experience the most beautiful places in New York, along the waterways and historical edges of the city, and choose to stop, to slow down, to pass by. I am fully immersed in the city. I am able to know the city better from my bike, by covering more of it at bike speed, than I ever could otherwise.

So, of course, I have been waiting to share this with Ben. I had been planning to acquire a trailer bike: one of those half-bikes for children that attaches to a grownups bike. I mentioned this to Paul’s cousin in law when we last visited Philadelphia for Easter. She immediately went to her garage, and handed me the bike she had been using with her youngest child. “We never use it anymore,” she said. “Take it, and send a picture.”. I was delighted. It was like getting a new toy, and I couldn’t wait to connect it to my newly tuned up and fixed up bike, and head off into Brooklyn with my baby.

It took us a month, while we searched for a missing hitch piece, but Ben and I finally started riding together this weekend. I connected up the trailer bike to my bike, and did a test run with it, up to the bike store to pump up Bens tire. Ben was apprehensive at first, but finally allowed himself to be coaxed onto the bike. Then, once he felt safe, we started moving. Once he realized he wasnt going to fall, he sat on the bike, thrilled to be moving so fast, and occasionally trying to pedal (his little legs are JUST a bit short, so he can’t really pedal yet, but he does half rotations when he can). After the first test ride, Ben proclaimed the trailer bike to be “awesome”. With that endorsement, we took off our on first neighborhood adventure, and set off to ride around Prospect Park.

I found out quickly that, while having the trailer bike on the back doesn’t affect my balance too much, it does mean I have to adjust to the added weight. I can’t turn corners too sharply, and I can’t stop suddenly, so I do have to ride in a more conservative way than I usually do. The trailer bike also adds over sixty pounds (the bike is 30 pounds and Ben weighs about 36 pounds), so I’m riding with a lot more weight than I’m used to.

But it is so worth it to be able to ride with Ben on the back of the bike! It opens up a whole range of Brooklyn for us to experience. Yesterday, we actually saw the other side of Prospect Park, parts of the park we’ve never been to because it just took too long to walk there. We looped the whole park in less than half an hour, when it would take hours, even with Ben’s trike, to cover that much ground, if we had been going to the library or the Greenmarket at Grand Army Plaza, we could have covered the mile and change up there in ten minutes, and not in the twenty-plus it usually takes us. Small differences, but when you’re dealing with a small child and his short little legs, they become bigger differences. Plan changing differences. Suddenly, extra minutes add up into hours, and I can travel without planning around subway lines, around bus schedules, or around Ben’s ability to walk or ride his trike.

Saturday, we managed to loop the park and pick up take -out on the way home. Yesterday, we decided on an even bigger adventure. After hearing that Ben’s BFF Aidan, and his dad Brian, were going up to DUMBO to visit Brooklyn Bridge Oark and ride the carousel, we decided to bike up and meet them. I checked a bike map of Brooklyn, loaded up the kiddo, and off we went. We coasted down the hill, from Park Slope down to Gowanus, and then headed north though Carroll Gardens into Cobble Hill. We pedaled through Brooklyn Heights, and downtown Brooklyn, and finally came out at the new waterfront park. After some confusion, we made our way to the little beach between the bridges, whe Ben happily threw rocks into the East River for twenty minutes while I gulped water and rested.

We had a lovely time at the park, too. Aidan and Ben got to ride the carousel. For them, it was just a carousel ride, but for us grownups, it’s an experience. Jane’s Carousel is in a clear plastic enclosure on the East River, to protect it from the weather. It is an exquisitely restored carousel that was orginally commissioned, like a work of art, for the then prosperous city of Youngstown, OH, in 1922. The horses are beautifully carved and painted, the floor is honey-colored wood, and even the ceiling is gorgeously detailed, painted with flowers and vines and butterflies. It’s a fantasy carousel, even more so because of where it’s located, across from Manhattan, with views of both the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. The music it plays is from a pipe organ and an automated drum, and combined with the grass, the sunshine and all the happy families out for Mothers Day, it felt more like we were in a small town, part of a community, than in the big, impersonal city. It was just astonishingly beautiful, and it made Ben so happy to ride the carousel with his buddy.

After that though, we had to say our goodbyes and ride home. We followed the bike lanes back down through Red Hook, east into Carroll Gardens, down through Gowanus, over the canals, und the subway…and back to the start of the hill up to Park Slope. They don’t call it the Slope because it’s flat. It’s called Park Slope because there is a very long slope that leads up to the neighborhood. It’s just under a mile, five long streets, from 2nd Avenue to 7th Avenue. I shifted down several gears, and took it one street at a time. Unfortunately, by then, Ben was starting to get tired, hungry and crabby, and was whining that the hill would make him more tired. As I pushed the pedals, gasped for breath, and just tried to keep moving, i kept hearing “I’m tired, Mama. I don’t want to ride anymore,” and only the threat of walking (“I will stop this bike and we can both walk it home!”) got him to stop whining.

But we made it home successfully, albeit with slightly frayed nerves. And except for those last few minutes, it was a wonderful bonding experience. While that bonding is the best part of the rides, I also love that being on a bike lets Ben see the world around him. While we were riding through Cobble Hill, he suddenly observed, “These are pretty houses, Mama.”. And they were. We were in a section of brick town homes, some painted colors, some left reddish brown, and Ben noticed that. I want my baby to grow up to really notice and observe the world around him. Letting him see it from the back of my bike is worth every second of the ride up the Slope.