Disaster

For about the last six months, Maia has been telling me almost daily what she would like her birthday cake to look like. I am not a hugely artistic person, but I can draw a little bit with frosting, and the kids get cakes with their favorite Yu-Gi-Oh! character or a unicorn on it.

"Mama," she would say, "for my birthday I want a ooey-gooey butter cake for the family party, and I want a white cake with chocolate frosting and a pink, you know, around the edges, and pink polka dots, for the party when my friends come over."

Seriously, it was almost daily. Until it got to the point where I asked her to stop telling me that unless she changed what she wanted, because it wasn't likely that I would forget what she did want.

On her birthday, I made the butter cake as requested, and because we had no birthday candles (NICE, MOM), I stuck a match in it for her to blow out. Which, yeah, is a little sad. But she didn't seem to mind.

Maia's birthday-party-for-friends was scheduled for Halloween day. The flu was raging around here in a major way last week, and on one day 20 percent of the students were absent from the elementary school. Figuring some kids would call in sick, we invited a few more than usual, and of course everyone was healthy. TEN KIDS were coming over for her party. TEN!

On Friday, I cleaned through one of the worse head colds I've had in a while. My last chore of the evening was to get her cake out of the oven and into the fridge for thorough chilling before I decorated it in the morning. Maia was malingering on the couch in a funk born of a Halloween party at school gaining possibly more attention than her on her birthday, and also battling a head cold. I got up to check the cake in the oven, opened the door, smelled it, and came back to the couch to sit with her, and I said, "Aaahhhh....doesn't that cake smell good?"

"Mama?" she said in a small voice. "Did you make a chocolate cake?"

"Yup," I replied.

"Because..." and here her voice got all Cindy Lou Who and her eyes had violet shadows because of the cold, "...because, Mama, I had wanted a white cake. With chocolate frosting."

Of course she had. Of course she had. I knew that. Obviously I knew that, because she had been telling me EVERY DAY for MONTHS. And I made a chocolate cake from scratch anyway. What the hell was I thinking?

"Is there any way" -- I spoke slowly, because I knew what the answer was going to be -- "that a chocolate cake would work? A chocolate cake, with white frosting?"

"Well," she said, honestly considering for a moment, "......no. I'd really, really like a white cake."

I got up early the next morning -- yes, the day of the party! -- to make a white cake with chocolate frosting. I put the chocolate cake in a Ziploc bag in the freezer for some other day. And I decided to save time and make the white cake out of a box.

I have an egg allergy, so if I want to eat some of my children's birthday cake, I have to make it from scratch without eggs (and there are good recipes to be had). But this was too much; I would sacrifice my cake-eating to convenience and make a cake from a box with eggs in it.

The problem is, either I completely forgot how tender a cake with eggs in it is, or cake-mix-makers assume you're going to be lazy and put it in a 9"x13" pan. I mixed up the mix and baked it and it smelled fantastic as I was finishing up the cleaning and game prep and the worrying. I got it out of the oven and cooled it thoroughly. I took one cake out of the 9" round pan, and put it flat side down on the cake plate and frosted the curved top. I took the other one out and put it curved side down on top of the other cake, which is what I learned from Mom and 4-H in order to make a nice, flat-topped cake.

But the cake began to break.

I'd never seen anything quite like it before. As I started to -- gently! -- frost the top cake, it uncannily broke into quarters, thusly:

What the? Here's a view from the top. I starting to panic a little bit here.I tried to prop it up with toothpicks, but it was so tender and moist it just slid back down again. Did it rise too high? Is this how eggy cakes act? Why was it doing this?

Get ready to say "oh no you di'n't" so I can say "HELL YES I DID": I decided to turn that bad boy over and put the misbehaving cake on the bottom where it couldn't cause any more damage. I scraped off the frosting I had already put on, then flipped the whole thing. The new top cake started the break a little bit too, but some extensive and fervent swearing on my part put a stop to that in a hurry:

This, I knew now, was going to be an ugly cake. It was already and ugly cake and it wasn't going to get much better. I stuck it in the fridge, where I felt like it was lurking at me every time I opened the door:

After the chocolate frosting had cooled and set a bit, it was time to "decorate" the cake. I put "decorate" in quotes because there is nothing I could do to make that cake look good except maybe attach $100 bills to it with pink frosting. So I gamely put the "pink, you know" around the edge and polka dots all over it, and decided a giant lucky 7 down the middle would be just the thing to cover the gaping rift down the cake's prime meridian.

It was not my proudest cake moment. But it was covered with frosting and that was good enough for the kids.

Rainbow

On Magic

It's not clear to me what John's views on Santa are. Faith is a private thing, and I don't need to go digging around in it. He has given me looks while writing letters to Santa, as if looking for affirmation one way or the other, and I have provided ambiguous answers to his indirect questions. He will never ask straight out, because that's not his style.

The other day he lost a tooth and told me, "I think you should tell the Tooth Fairy that I think I should get an extra fifty cents for this tooth. I don't have many left, and this one is kind of a big one."

"I'll let her know if I see her," I said, continuing my work.

He paused, and I looked up. I winked at him, and he winked back. Then he sat down and said, "Mom, I'm having trouble believing that Santa can come down our chiminey." He made the word three syllables, as he always has.

"Oh?" I asked.

"I mean, how can Santa fit in it?" he asked, indicating the hearth.

"Well, they say he's magic," I said.

He nodded. "I'm just not sure I believe in that kind of magic anymore." He paused. "I mean, I believe in Harry Potter magic, and Artemis Fowl and Narnia and that kind of thing, but..."

"There's always magic, sweetheart," I said, trying not to feel like a Disney movie. "Sometimes things change and you look at something in a new way, but you can always see something special in it. Even when you're an old person you can go outside on nights like Christmas and feel like there's something different. That can be a kind of magic, too."

He thought for a minute, and nodded, and smiled. He went to his room to put his tooth, only one of a few baby teeth left, on his bedside table for the Tooth Fairy to find.

The Child Is the Teacher

So after two weeks of school, things seem to be going fairly well with new teachers and new classes. John has been getting his work done at school, which greatly reduces homework battles at home. However, we had a huge one yesterday about putting forth effort. He had to sit outside for awhile, listen to nature, and write a page about sounds of the season. He took a long walk in the woods by himself and came back and wrote about a third of a page.

It wasn't bad, but it wasn't enough, and I told him so. Instant outrage, the kind usually reserved for when I have the gall to help him with math homework after he asks. He said he didn't have to write a whole page. I said he did. He said that was too much work. I said he was being lazy. Huge, gasping, angry tears. Finally he said, "If you think it's so easy, why don't YOU do it? Why don't YOU write a WHOLE PAGE about sounds?"

"All right," I said. "I will."

This was too much. He stomped down to his room, while I sat and listened to the afternoon and then wrote a page about what I heard. He came back upstairs, face blotchy but composed, and read it.

"Mom," he said, "I'm sorry, but you can't write about human-made sounds, like the traffic."

"All right," I said. "I'll do it over."

I wrote again while he did his math homework, and I handed it over. He read it and said I was a good writer. I told him I had had a lot of practice. We talked a little bit about what made good writing, specifically about how observation and description is a good place to start, but then you have to ask yourself, in the kindest possible way, so what. Go deeper. What does it mean if you hear wind in the trees? So what if you hear water in the creek? Then what? And then what?

He got it. His face lit up. He sat at the table and wrote as fast as he could. "My hand is getting writer's cramp!" he cried. "My head is so full of ideas it's going to burst!"

And it turned out pretty good. He was done with his homework, before supper on Friday. I was too.

First Day of School

A work and its translation.


IT WOS THE NITE BEFOR SCOOL
VOLUN 1

It was the night before school. Volume 1

IT WOS THe NITe BefOR SCOOL. as THe CHILDREN aLL SLePeg DREaMING Of SCOOL SOPLIES.

It was the night before school, as the children [were] all sleeping, dreaming of school supplies.


THaR PaReN'S all pAKeg LuNCHes foR THe fRST Day Of SCOOL.
Their parents [were] all packing lunches for the first day of school.


WeN THe CHIDREN awaKEN aLL ekSIDeD THe GRAB THaR LuNCH'es AND HRe To SCOOL.

When the children awaken all excited, they grab their lunches and hurry to school.


WeN THay aLL geT TO SCOOL THay MeT THaR TeCHR THe eND
When they all get to school, they meet their teacher. The end.


AoBaT THe ATHR SHe WOZ BORN IN WIOMeG MENOSOTO SHe ROT THeS BOOK WeN SHe WOS 6
About the author: She was born in Wyoming, Minnesota. She wrote this book when she was 6.


First grade, and fifth grade.

Change

When I kissed John goodnight the other night, he had that look on his face. His eyes get all shifty, her purses his mouth like he's trying not to laugh, and he burrows the back of his head and shoulders into his pillow as if he wants to hide. Then we go through this dialog:

Me: Do you want to talk about something?

John: No.

Me: Are you sure? You have that look like you've got something on your mind.

John: No no, I'm fine.

Me: If you ever want to talk about something, Dad and I are ready to listen, or you can write us a note if it's too embarrassing.

John: No no! I know. Thank you. It's not about puberty or anything.

Me: OK, I'm not going to sit here and try and pull it out of you. I'm going to go upstairs to bed now.

John: No, no -- you go on upstairs to bed. Good night. I love you.

Me: I love you too. Good night.

And I walk to the bedroom door, and as soon as I get there he says, "Actualleeeeeeee," so I come back and sit on the side of his bed and he pulls the sheets over his head and I hear one muffled word: "Girls."

That's right, friends. Girls.

Or more specifically, a girl. She's on his mind, and he's thinking about writing her a note (and yes, school hasn't started yet). "But I don't think I'll sign it," he said. "Signing it would take away its touch of mystery."

I Still Wonder How It Ends...

Before I lived in Russia, I studied there twice. The first time was in January 1992, days after the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. I spent a month studying Russian at Moscow State University. We were supposed to be living in the foreign-student dormitory there, but about a week before we left for Russia, we were told that they dorms had run out of food and they would find another place for us. I spent a month living in Russia at a trucker hotel miles from the university.

The second time I studied there was the first semester of my senior year in college, fall of 1992, when I studied at Krasnodar State University in Krasnodar. At that time, Krasnodar had about a half-million people. We lived in the dorms and conditions were so bad that the professor who came over with us completely overhauled our academic requirements for the semester. Originally, we were supposed to pick some topic about Krasnodar -- history, culture, politics, whatever -- and make a huge senior-project type of presentation. One of the requirements was producing a 20-minute lecture in Russian and then a 20-minute lecture in English about your topic. That worried me, but having been in Russia before, it didn't worry me as much as wondering where I was going to find posterboard and markers for my presentation.

In any case, as I said, the professor decided that conditions in Russia had deteriorated so badly at that time that our main concern was going to be the basics of finding food every day and making sure we weren't overrun by Chechen refugees who would somehow throw the whole city into a riot (in September 1991, the Chechen-Ingush autonomous government was dissolved, and in November, Yeltsin tried to send troops to Chechnya). There were weeks when basic staples were missing from the stores (the week cheese was gone was a particularly rough one), and I still have my sugar ration card.

It became very easy to think like a Russian -- to carry your bag everywhere you went just in case you found something useful, to share information if there was a sudden glut of something unexpected (friends would come back from the market with reports of a box of Snickers or extra Fanta, and we would all rush off, hoping to get some before it was all gone), or to keep some information to yourself. If opportunities came, you took them, and sorted them all out afterward.

It was in this spirit that one day I accepted the invitation from some people on the trip to go see a movie. I was friendly with these other three Americans, but didn't hang out with them often. They lived in the other dorm. But it was a weekend and most of my friends were off with their host families or studying, and I didn't have much else to do, so, having not seen a movie in Russia, accepted their fourth ticket.

I asked Amy what the movie was going to be. "I'm not sure," she said. "I don't recognize the name. It's something from, like, Roman times. Like Ben-Hur, or something."

Krasnodar has an impressive movie theater, the Avrora:

and it took a tram ride, a bus ride, and a long walk to get there, because the university was located in an awkward part of town, far from the center.

We went in. The theater was full of large groups of very young soldiers in their dress uniforms. Clearly they were on their weekend outing. There were also some couples here and there, but the vast majority of people in there were soldiers. There weren't any older couples, or families, or groups of young people, the way young people go to see movies in the U.S.

When we walked in, everyone stopped to stare at us. This was not unusual. We stood out no matter what we did. In Krasnodar, strangers lectured me for wearing shorts, because that's what children wore. (This always annoyed me -- if I wore shorts that reached my knees, that was bad; if I wore a mini-skirt that showed off my butt-cheeks, that was OK.) An old woman ticked her tongue and shook her head at me when she saw my (male) friend and I smoking on the street: "When young men smoke, it's not good, but when young women smoke, it's VERY BAD." People would lecture the young women of the group for sitting on the ground or benches without a blanket or newspaper (or, preferably, the lap of a young man) under our tender woman parts; sitting without protection would make us barren. We knew we stood out, we knew we were obvious, and walking into a packed movie theater and being stared at didn't seem like anything out of the ordinary.

It was fun to go do something semi-normal in Krasnodar, where anything you tried to do was always set about with difficulty. Our dorm rooms had no phones; there was an outside phone at the dorm entrance that only made local calls. Calling outside the city (or country) meant an almost-all-day trip to the central phone exchange, which is another blog for another day. Grocery shopping (there were no cafeterias at the university) was another all-day proposition. Anything you wanted to do was going to take more time and effort than you thought it would, and finding everyday things to do was a challenge. So to pick up and go to a movie, and find some escape, and feel semi-normal, was a real pleasure.

None of us had ever heard of the movie Caligula before, and so neither the title nor even the opening scene set off any warning bells for us. Not even the involvement of Bob Guccione made us consider what what coming.

Stunned, embarrassed, choking with hilarity and horror, alternately covering our eyes in disgust and covering our mouths to keep from screaming with laughter, we sat through about two-thirds of the film, until finally Gretchen pulled herself together and said sensibly, "We need to get out of here. We don't want to be here when this film is over."

She was right. It was evening and would be dark by the time the film finished, and with hundreds of frustrated soldiers and four American women and a big park next to the movie theater, it was not a good place to be. We got up and left, and laughed on the tram and bus all the way back to the university. That is the story of how I saw most of Caligula in Russia. I still have the ticket stub.