Gracias, Mamá

While I was in Peru, my mother-in-law would often cook lunch for us in her kitchen. Then she would hop a taxi to our apartment and we'd sit around our dining table for a few hours, just talking and enjoying the delicious meal she'd prepared. Rosa would arrive with her canasta (Spanish for 'basket') and a bottle of Inca Kola, and though I wouldn't openly admit to it at the time, I was just as interested in the canasta as I was in the cloth-wrapped pots of food cradled within. It was pure awesomeness. Throw-back colors, hand-crafted, extremely sturdy, and put to obvious good use. I longed for one of my own.

A few months went by, and I decided I couldn't leave Lima without canastas. But the hunt for this particular variety proved more challenging than you can imagine. I scoured every small market in my district to no avail. I also searched larger markets - the kind that are the size of a football field and two or three stories tall, where you can buy a whole bloody chicken or the head of a hog and then march upstairs for a wristwatch and a three-piece suit. All that variety and still no luck. Sure, there were other, lesser canastas, but not like the one on which I'd set my heart.

On the day we were flying out from LIM, my mother-in-law said she would meet us at Ciudad de Dios (one of the markets in her district) to give canasta hunting one final go. We searched for an hour and found nothing, so we decided to bail and get some lunch. Shuffling down the crowded sidewalk, I saw Rosa talk to a passing stranger. Then she turned around and said we were going back inside. Why? It turns out this random lady had the right kind of canasta tucked under her arm, and had tipped Rosa off to a vendor on the lower level who had what we were looking for. We pushed our way back through the marketplace and there, hiding on a shelf 15 feet off the ground in the way-back of the downstairs of Ciudad de Dios, we came upon a secret stash of old school canastas. I bought every last one the woman had (five, yay!), and walked out of that place happier than anyone has ever been.



And this... this is the basket that sparked the obsession. A little gift from my mother-in-law, and it means more to me than anything else I've ever smuggled home from a foreign land. It's Rosa's canasta... the canasta... and now it's my canasta. I don't have a lot of prized possessions, but I can honestly say that if anything ever happened to this item, you'd find me in tears. Yesterday it did a dandy job as my beach bag, and it's far cooler than any of my previous farmers market stuff-holders. To me, this isn't just a basket. It's a memory, and I love it.

Sorry I'm late, Mr. Lipton...

Months ago, when my own writing tapered off, my sister put up James Lipton's famous Inside the Actors Studio list of questions for all the blogettes to answer. Liz is on vacation right now. To give her something to read while Drew is driving, here are my answers. Hold on to your muffins...

What is your favorite word? Love (funny side note: Liz's answer was 'Vacation')
What is your least favorite word? Blind
What turns you on? Courage
What turns you off? Snobbery
What sound or noise do you love? My kids having their own conversation
What sound or noise do you hate? Chewing, especially gum or crunchy things
What is your favorite curse word? Shitballs
What profession other than your own would you like to attempt? Race car driver
What profession would you not like to do? Politician
If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates? Oh good, you made it. So my directions were okay, then?

Alrighty, I believe that officially catches me up. Have a great weekend, y'all.

My son, the reader. My daughter, the ripper.

Now that I'm constantly walking around with a book in front of my face, Nico is growing more and more curious about what's stealing all his attention. You know I'm reading Duma Key (still), and I also plucked The Purpose Driven Life from one of my mother's bookshelves (unexpectedly God-based, but interesting nonetheless). What you probably do not know is that my sister gave my mom a fun little bit o' reading material the other day... a copy of Relentless by Dean Koontz. I quickly picked it up to see what it's all about, and have been ignoring poor Stephen King ever since.

So. My son. He loves books. Not yet able to read for himself, he is constantly choosing books for us to curl up with, and that's just fine by me. Olivia, on the other hand, could not care less about reading and prefers to - whoops! hi Mommy! - accidentally fall into my lap and - oh, no! rip! - brazenly dismember her brother's beloved stories page by page right before his very eyes. Oh, we brawl, people. We brawl.

But back to Nico. Yesterday evening he said he wanted to sleep in my room while I read him a story. I tucked him under my covers and after we finished laughing about how Ernie annoys Bert, he pointed to Relentless which was sitting on my night table. I opened it and said, "Well... no pictures, and it's scary." He didn't care. I leaned back against my pillows and he put his head on my shoulder. I read aloud (omitting anything remotely scary) from my grown-up book and he was fast asleep five minutes later. I lay there for another half an hour, half reading to myself, half wondering how I wound up with such a remarkable little boy at my side.

Readin'. Runnin'. Beerin'.

That's what I've been doing for the past two or so months. I really needed a break from the writing. Please forgive. I have been lending my writing time to other excellent hobbies (see post title) and, while this poor page has suffered horribly, I am happy to report that I have got three books going at once and am thoroughly enjoying a pretty much constant runner's high.

Additionally, I am happily basking in the NJ heat. Not sunning, necessarily, but warming myself to the bone. It's fantastic.

Daddy is the cookie alpha dog, although his bark is worse than his bite

Tonight I gave the kids each four little cookies as a bedtime snack. After I brushed their teeth, I got four cookies for myself. Just to stack on the desk and eat later tonight. Olivia ever-so-sweetly asked me for one of my cookies. "Coo-kee? Mommy?" I said no and explained that these were (placing right hand on chest) Mommy's cookies. Mommy's cookies for later. She persisted, and when she started skipping in place and escalating her volume, I told her to wait because they were Daddy's cookies. Daddy's snack cookies for Daddy to eat later. She said, "Okay, Mommy." Then she breathed in and walked away.

Incommunicado, mostly

A few weeks ago, I left my cell phone in New Jersey. I´d forgotten it druing my final sweep through my mom´s house, and we were half way to Newark before I realized it was still charging on the kitchen counter. I haven´t had service on it lately, but it´s an iPhone and I use it almost every day anyway (for playing music and shows, as an alarm clock, camera, etc.). So, leaving it in Jersey was (and still is) a bummer. My computer died about a week and a half later. Then, yesterday, our living room television set fizzled out. Boo, boo, and boo.

My technology/communication situation is not quite as pathetic as it sounds, though. We still have what I like to call ¨tv on the computer¨ in the main office, and I can still check my email and whatever else. And I don´t know if it´s coincidence, but around the time my computer lost all signs of consciousness, I lost interest in the computer in general. There´s no real plan to fix my six-year-old laptop. We´ll take it to the repair people eventually, try to retrieve the data; right now I am just not in any hurry. If you don´t hear from me in the immediate future, rest assured that I still adore you all and I´m perfectly fine down here living in the moment.