Breach of Faith

I just finished reading a new book called "Breach of Faith" by New Orleans' Times Picayune's Jed Horne. The subtitle of the book, "Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City" doesn't begin to describe the horrors to which people were borne witness during this great, political debacle that resulted in one of the most horrific catastrophes in American history.

I could say that I grew up in New Orleans. No, my mama and daddy didn't raise me in that city. I moved there to attend graduate school and then didn't leave for a long time. In New Orleans, I was on my own -- for the first time in my life -- thousands of miles from my folks, at first friendless, always penniless. And that forces a person to grow up pretty fast, to be resourceful, to work harder and smarter -- all so that you can keep your head above water, literally and figuaratively in that city -- all so that you can survive.

As tough as it was, I had a love affair with New Orleans, which, in my mind, was the finest of American cities. But as a friend of mine likes to say, being in love with New Orleans is like being in love with an abusive lover -- you know you should leave, you know you shouldn't go back, you know better. But you just can't help yourself.

The first year after I left New Orleans for Chicago, I visited every other weekend. It was as if I was feeding a fix -- for food, for music, for color, for character. Chicago was a fine city with a lot to offer, but its stark gray skyscrapers and overly crowded, hurried sidewalks couldn't hold a candle to turquoise and purple shotgun houses, to stooped banana and palm trees, to hot pink azaelas, to blaring brass bands, and to neighborhood social clubs. I longed for those slow, sub-tropical afternoons spent sitting at outdoor restaurants, lingering over anything from Cuban pork sandwiches to fried green tomatoes to iced coffees; those long New Orleans nights, which often turned into mornings, dancing away in clubs to the glossy sounds of trumpets and trombones, fueled by free red beans and rice and cheap vodka cocktails; and those soft, lavender evenings swinging on my front porch swing, breathing in the honey-sweet gardenia bushes that lined my house and the magnolia tree across the street, and listening to the soft murmurs of the bar, Norby's, next door.

New Orleans was such a thing of beauty.

After I moved to Montana, I had to stop visiting New Orleans cold turkey. There were no good flights, and even the bad flights were prohibitively expensive. But I still kept connected to the city, listening to its public radio station while at work, reading its newspapers online, and, of course, through friends who were still there.

And I railed hard to go back -- to move back permanently -- going so far as to apply for jobs for both Brent and I. Then, last summer, I thought we had done it. Brent was accepted into a teaching program that would place him in one of New Orleans' public schools' roughest buildings. The day he received notice that he had been accepted, I was ready to pack my boxes and head South.

But Brent had other ideas.

"Are you trying to get me killed?" he asked. "Do you know what teaching in the New Orleans' public schools would be like?"

Then he raised a whole host of concerns: crime, which had again been steadily escalating in the city; schools and opportunities for Mike; housing prices, which had been escalating faster than the crime rate. And, last but not least, he mentioned hurricanes.

"Would you want to have to live with that kind of threat again?" he said. "New Orleans has dodged the bullet for too long, and someday soon, her time is going to be up. Do you want to be there for that?"

Certainly at the time, I had no idea how ominous Brent's words were.

We stayed in Montana. And then, a couple of months later, Katrina hit.

I watched the news coverage compulsively and in horror. I couldn't tear myself away from the television. I cried. I sobbed. I couldn't believe what was happening to this incredible city as it was ravaged by flood and fire. And I certainly couldn't believe what was happening to its people.

Then one day, as I sat and watched what was happening at the Convention Center, a place where I had enjoyed many a raucous event, I saw her: a woman, my age, or a little younger, who was holding onto a baby, who was about Mike's age. She was filthy as was her son, who was clad only in a tattered, dirty diaper. She was crying; she was madly fanning her baby, trying to keep him cool in the stifling summer heat of New Orleans. She begged the cameraman for help and said that she didn't think her baby was going to make it.

I turned off the TV. I couldn't watch anymore.

The next day, I saw a photo of her. In it, she is holding her son, who was now naked and still; his eyes are closed. Maybe he is dead. She is sobbing, her tears marking clean lines through the dirt on her face, and she is looking up at the sky, with her arms outstretched, seemingly making an offering of her child. In the background stands the glaring starkness of the Convention Center, a symbol of New Orleans' economy, now surrounded by starving, dehydrated people who were told to go there for help.

I swear that there is not a single day that I do not think of that woman and her baby.

I wonder where she is and what she is doing now. I wonder if her baby made it. I wonder what his name is or was, and if she thinks back to those days at the Convention Center with hate or disgust or wonder. I wonder if they got out and where they went and if they ever went back. I wonder if she has nightmares, and if her baby is still alive, if he does.

Whatever it was about this woman, she resonated with me. It was not that she was the first mother with a baby I saw stranded and crying because like anyone who watched the coverage of Katrina in New Orleans, women with children were omnipresent. You couldn't NOT see mothers, doing the best they could under the circumstances, trying to take care of their children.

But this woman was different. She was angry, but she wasn't cursing the government. She wasn't saying to the cameraman that she was hot and dirty and starving and thirsty and tired. She was saying, "Please help my child. My son isn't going to make it." She was saying, "I've done everything I can. I stayed because I couldn't leave. We survived the hurricane. We survived the flooding. We lived on a roof for days only to be dropped on an overpass with no water or food. We survived a long walk here looking for help. So please help my child. He is dying."

When you become a mother, you make a solemn oath to do whatever you can to ensure the safety of your child. Whether that means driving more carefully or moving to a safer place or eating organic food or staying in your home during a hurricane because you don't have the means to leave town, you do what you can to keep your baby safe.

But unfortunately, as evidenced by this woman and her baby, no matter how hard you try, there are many things out there that mothers can't control and can't fix and can't make better and from which they cannot protect their children. You can take all the precautions, read all the labels and the manuals, and look both ways. And then, because of someone else or something else lurking in the corners, you and yours are left powerless and bare and vulnerable.

New Orleans will never be the same. I cannot comprehend the sadness that must surround a city that has seen such incredible devastation as a result of carelessness and poor planning and politicking. And when I think of that woman, I think of how New Orleans is a perfect symbol of her life, of how she will likely never be the same. How could you? If she and her son survived, maybe she is tougher, maybe she is bitter and angry, maybe she has just moved on. But if her son died, what sadness must envelop her and hold her close, what helplessness and tiredness she must still feel in her bones for overcoming so many insurmountable obstacles only to watch her son die in her arms from dehydration and the heat.

Me and Jon

Jon Bon Jovi and I now have the exact same hairdo.

Except his looks about 1,000 times better than mine does. That bastard.

Dose of Reality

I saw something very disturbing this week.

A woman, who had given birth less than three months ago, looking fabulous.

Her make-up was flawless, and her skin positively glowed. Her hair was clean and looked beautiful – thick, clean, and shiny – straight out of a shampoo commercial. She wasn’t a member of the fine Drooping Boobies tribe, which many women join after giving birth. She was even very obviously wearing her pre-pregnancy clothes – a tight shirt and an equally tight-fitting pair of jeans, displaying her obscenely flat stomach. In fact, she looked as if she had never even had a baby, and instead of spending the last several weeks recuperating from the birth experience, looked as if she’d actually spent the last few months doing sit-ups and crunches for hours a day.

In contrast, let me share with you what I looked like three months after having Mike.

My skin, adjusting to the varying levels of hormones beating around my body, alternated between flaking off and resembling the Exxon Valdez oil spill. My hair, after becoming thicker and changing texture during my pregnancy, was falling out in such vast quantities that I contemplated becoming a member of the Hairclub for Men. Dark circles and enormous bags do not even begin to describe what was going on under my eyes. And concealer for all of those unsightly pimples and dark circles? Forget about it. I hadn’t even figured out how to budget time for showering on a regular basis – let alone for concealer and make-up application.

But all of that was nothing compared to my body.

Because I was fat. Morbidly obese, actually. Like sitting around waiting for diabetes and heart disease to come and kill me kind of fat.

To be fair, it should be stated that even at my thinnest and most fit (when I competed in triathlons – not exactly a trial for the morbidly obese and pathetically unfit), I was still 25 pounds overweight by government (and blasted Weight Watchers) standards.

But while pregnant with Mike, I very stupidly listened to a stunningly beautiful friend of mine who assured me that no matter how much weight I gained, if I nursed, every ounce of that weight gain would miraculously disappear from my body with absolutely no effort on my part at all.

It sounded better than Metabolife.

So I ate a lot of ice cream. And sausages. And pierogies. And I gained 65 pounds.

Since I had already been 25 pounds overweight before I got pregnant, that meant that I was 90 – 90! – pounds overweight. I actually contemplated doing things the American way and just gaining another ten and signing up for gastric bypass.

But instead of enduring a major surgery that results in serious complications and even death for 40% of people who undergo it, I decided to take the high (and harder) road and do the South Beach diet.

After three days of depriving my body of the sugar that normally propels me through life, I wanted nothing more than a Pixy stick shoved right in one of my major arteries. But I persisted, and over the course of a year, by eating right and exercising like a crazy woman, I managed to shed all 65 pounds – plus five pounds more -- coming to rest at a mere 20 pounds overweight.

Now, one would think, that because I was actually thinner (albeit only five pounds) than I was prior to giving birth, that I would have reclaimed my body as it once was, such as it was.

But as most anyone who has ever given birth before might tell you, this is not so. As a matter of fact, I am convinced that this is one of those secrets, like the first after-birth poop and the pain of childbirth, that other mothers neglect to share with future mothers all so that the human race may continue.

Because I am now chief of the Drooping Boobies tribe. I also have this soft little paunch below my belly button that will not disperse no matter how many sit-ups I do. And did I mention stretch marks? Because my skin, which expanded to accommodate my 50-inch “waist” during my pregnancy, was apparently no Stretch Armstrong bouncing back miraculously, and is now riddled with glaring marks on my belly and drooping boobies. And, last but not least, my soft little paunch below my belly button looks pocked – because the skin there is so loose – making me resemble those people who actually DO have gastric bypass.

Perhaps my case is extreme, but the fact of the matter is, for 99% of all women, your body after baby will be a different body. Whether you have bigger or smaller breasts, they will be shaped differently and will probably point down instead of out. You will have some stretch marks, and you will have some fat that wasn’t there before or your fat will deposit in places that it may not have previously. Other women are left with hemorrhoids and varicose veins. And, as a friend of mine who has been seeing an urologist for years would want me to warn you, you may have some urinary incontinence. Yes, dear readers, it is possible that you may leak pee. That is the way the cookie crumbles when your body acts as a conduit for another human life.

But, after witnessing my little friend last week, she in her tight jeans and t-shirt, I realize that real women do exist who look just like their pre-baby selves. How they do it, I will never know. I have always liked to believe that these women exist only in the glossy pages of People magazine, and have fortunes to hire chefs and trainers to whip their post-baby bodies back into shape. My little, skinny flat-stomached friend, however, disproved this theory and demonstrated that mere mortals, government employees even, can achieve this kind of fanciful body.

To all of those women who look just as good post-baby, if not better, than they did before baby, I say “Wow – you look fantastic!”

Then, behind their backs, I damn them all to the eternal depths of hell.

Grizzly Man Moment

There is a relatively recent documentary out called “Grizzly Man.” It is a very compelling story about this fellow who goes to Alaska year after year and lives among the grizzly bears. He filmed many of his experiences with these incredible animals, and his film comprises the lion’s share of the documentary footage.

And do you want to know how it ends?

A grizzly bear eats him. And his girlfriend.

Their deaths, which were actually caught on tape – just the sounds of their screams, not the actual visuals – are smartly not played back for viewers of the film. Instead, a narrator describes the tape.

What I found most compelling about this story was that as the grizzly bear was gnawing on her boyfriend, the girlfriend starts trying to save him by pounding on the grizzly bear’s head with a frying pan. The narrator explains that you can hear the man telling her to run and save her own life, when all of a sudden her screams change and the frying pan beating stops and the grizzly eats her too.

If this woman was still alive, I would like to ask her a few questions, like:
1) What made you think dating a man who lives in a tent with grizzly bears was a good idea? Didn’t your mama teach you anything?
2) A frying pan? Come on, sister.
3) Didn’t you once think of that phrase, “Run for your life!”?

When Brent and I first started dating, we had a similar life/death moment, during which I acted completely differently from the girlfriend in the film.

We were living in New Orleans, and had decided to try to escape the city’s heat by heading down to the Gulf Coast for the day. We drove my Volvo through the coastal marshes of Louisiana (many of which probably don’t even exist anymore) and spent a lovely day at the beach, splashing in the water, having a picnic, and generally enjoying ourselves.

At one point, we were in the water and Brent, being a man, thought it would be funny to dunk me under the water. When I came up for air, I saw a rather enormous dorsal fin not too far from us.

“Shark!” I yelled. Brent must have thought that my cry was a lame attempt to get him to stop dunking me because he just dunked me under again. When I came up this time, there was no question – in fact, there were three very large dorsal fins swimming ever closer to us.

“Shark!” I yelled again.

Then I pushed Brent as hard as I could toward the sharks and ran to the shore, without so much as glancing over my shoulder.

This is a moment that has been hard for me to live down – the moment when I purposefully tried to feed Brent to the sharks in order to save my own hide. I can’t tell you why I did it. I don’t remember having any conscious thoughts, like, “We’ve only been dating six months and I can always find another man.” It was pure instinct to save myself.

Perhaps for lesser men, it would have been a signal that perhaps this relationship wasn’t worth pursuing. If your girlfriend is willing to feed you to the sharks, will she be there through sickness and in health, for better or for worse?

So far, my instinctual moment of trying to save my own life by pushing Brent as hard as I could towards imminent danger seems to be just that – a moment. In the many years that we’ve been together now, we’ve endured our share of tough and trying times, and we know that many more are ahead. And, best of all, I know we’ll work things out like we always do, and manage to get through them and to forge forward.

But, just to be on the safe side, Brent has never asked me to go swimming in potentially shark-infested waters again. And, to be certain, if Brent ever got the crazy notion that going to live among the grizzly bears was a good idea, I’d file for a bigger life insurance policy and wish him well. And arm him with much more than a frying pan.

More Than A Thoughtful Gesture

There are a lot of things I write about my husband on these pages with which he takes issue and accuses me of complete fabrication at his expense.

To which I say: This is only my perception of how things really are.

However, my husband will be hard-pressed to deny what I am about to say; in fact, knowing him as well as I do, I would not be surprised to see him embrace what I will put here for the world to see.

My husband is a cheap S.O.B.

My husband’s cheapness has resulted in marital strife because we do not see eye to eye on the value of really big and expensive presents to demonstrate his love and devotion to me. And, if it weren’t for my parents spending their retirement funds on clothing and toys for their only grandchild, Mike would probably be clothed in the latest burlap fashion line and playing with toys we might find at the park, toys that were left behind by other, more privileged children whose fathers were willing to spend money on their development.

But, Brent’s cheapness has also worked to my advantage. It gets me out of washing the dishes because his method of dish-washing uses considerably less water than my method does, thus saving us nickels and dimes on our water bill every month. And, best of all, Brent’s cheapness gets me out of changing Mike’s poopy diapers because my motto when cleaning up poop is “As many wipes as it takes…” Brent, on the other hand, is the master at the one-wipe wipe job, no matter how poop-covered Mikey is. It should also be noted here that Brent has actually stated out loud, “Those wipes cost 2.5 cents each, so there’s no need to use twenty just because you’re afraid of getting a little poop on your hands.”

That’s right. Brent is the master at calculating exactly how many pennies each usage of any item we have purchased costs. As someone who is incapable of doing simple math, I find this habit of his both slightly amazing (that someone can actually calculate, within seconds, how many cents each serving of Life cereal may cost us), as much as I find it annoying. Brent also is able to remember the exact cost – to the penny – of any item we have purchased at any store within the last six years and will sometimes say things like, “Be sure to endure the pain and suffering of shopping at Wal-Mart because the apple juice there is seven cents cheaper than it is at Safeway.” OR, he might reminisce and say something along the lines of, “Do you remember when we were on vacation six years ago, and we stopped and bought gas for $1.02 a gallon at that little privately-owned gas station on Highway 2?”

So imagine my surprise, (complete and utter shock, if you will) when Brent said a few weeks ago, “I think we should buy an air conditioner.”

Because not only is the air conditioner expensive, but running an air conditioner, which uses approximately the same amount of energy as, say, propelling an airbus from New York to Paris, is prohibitively expensive.

So, in spite of how much I loathe being hot, I advised against this extravagant purchase. I envisioned having the AC unit installed, and more marital strife resulting because the cheap side of Brent didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars to the energy company to turn it on, rendering our AC unit completely useless and the subject of much debate in our house.

But Brent, who occasionally surprises me with his thoughtfulness (though never by buying me a large and expensive item to demonstrate his love and devotion), went out and bought an air conditioning unit anyway.

Brent came home with this very large unit, quite pleased with himself because he bought the floor model and got something like $50 off the price, and installed this behemoth thing himself. And then, lo and behold, he actually turned it on – without me even having to say, “Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ – I’m sweating like a whore in church here, so turn on the AC before I expire.” He just turned it on, like it didn’t even pain him to watch the little wheel on our energy meter spin fast enough to result in lift-off.

And he has turned it on, without any prodding from me, every day since then. Our house is an oasis in this overheated mountain desert we call home. I do not leave its confines after 1 p.m. – unless I am going to Dairy Queen to further assist my body with its complex cooling processes by consuming a large blizzard.

And so, for all the years of no presents and the reassurances that his love alone should be gift enough, my cheap husband has redeemed himself by purchasing his overheated pregnant wife an air conditioner, and by turning it on daily, out of concern for my health and well-being. At least, that’s what he says. For all I know, he is doing it out of concern for his own well-being because I feel very strongly that if I am hot and miserable, so should those around me suffer in spades.

Whatever the reason, however, it does make me appreciate Brent all the more. Though it certainly doesn’t get him off the hook for Christmas this year.

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

Many very kind people have already started asking me what I need and how they can help me when I have this new baby.

Layettes? Blankets? Teddy bears? Books? Booties?

Let me remind you people. I already have one kid and so I know what I need, which is definitely not more layettes, blankets, teddy bears, books, and booties. In fact, I am fairly certain that we now have enough teddy bears in this house to restock FAO Schwartz should they ever run low.

So here's the deal. I will need two things: 1) a cleaning service and 2) meals brought to me or else take-out picked up and delivered to my door.

Yes, it is true. The things I think we will need most are not soft, fuzzy items in which to swaddle my newborn. Nor do I think that engravable boots, picture frames, or small silver spoons will be what get me through those first few weeks. Not that those lovely items wouldn't be much appreciated after I come up for air in about ten years.

See, I've done this once already, and while I may have once believed that there was no way we would make it through early childhood without that extremely adorable duck bathrobe with matching booties, I know better now.

A maid, people. Food.

Or if you don't feel like spending money, how about showing up and watching my kids while I bathe? Or even just coming over and walking around the block with me and providing some adult conversation.

These are the things that will make me giddy inside, I promise you.

My memory is definitely foggy of those first few weeks with Mike, but I do remember eating a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches standing at the counter. I remember being horribly depressed and lonely and overwhelmed. And, I have absolutely no recollection of cleaning anything, including myself.

But then the cavalry arrived in the form of my parents. They cleaned the house from top to bottom (even the windows!) and cooked and froze meals for me to microwave for myself while Brent was at work. They also ooohed and aaaaahhhed over my son while I bathed -- every day they were visiting. They talked to me about adult things like what was going on in the world. It was glorious!

I have always loved my parents and been thankful for them. But after having them come and clean and cook for me for a week, I felt forever indebted to them -- like I should give them my first born. (I tried, but they politely declined.)

Warning: Rantings of a Sweaty Pregnant Woman Follow

I am about to admit something here that will likely result in hordes of fire and pitchfork-wielding villagers banging on my door, demanding my expulsion from Montana. But here goes...

I LOATHE the summers in Montana.

Montanans always refer to "Montana summers" as if Montana has the corner market on summer fun. Granted, after enduring the months of cold weather we suffer through here, it does make sense that one should revel in the few days a year we have that get above 40 degrees. But if Montanans actually ever travelled out of state, they might realize that summer is about 1,000 times better in any number of wide-ranging places.

I moved to Montana after never having actually visited here before, which was definitely my first mistake. My second mistake was assuming that because we endure temperatures that can hover in the 40 to 50 BELOW zero range for weeks at a time in the winter, that the summers would be cool and breezy. Not so, as evidenced by the weather we have been having as of late.

We are in the midst of a stretch of 95+ degree days. Whenever I complain about this obscenely hot weather to a Montanan, they typically respond (and rather too cheerfully, I might add) "Well, at least it's a dry heat."

Fine. It's a dry heat. But it's still almost ONE HUNDRED DEGREES outisde. And here's what I think about your nearly 100 degree dry heat: you can stick it where the sun don't shine, as the saying goes.

Which brings me to another problem with Montana. The sun ALWAYS shines.

Several years ago, a friend of mine was contemplating a move to San Diego. "It's always sunny and 80 degrees there!" he announced as if this was a selling point.

Sunny and 80 degrees sounds like my definition of hell. Sunny and nearly one hundred degrees sounds like living in hell while having to endure nothing but chain-restaurant food for the rest of eternity.

I grew up in a place that has so many grey days the weatherman keeps a tally of how long it has been since the sun has shone in the winter months. "It has been 97 days since the sun last poked out of the clouds!" is music to my ears.

A few days ago, after enduring another hot, crappy, sunny day, this incredible storm moved in. There was thunder and lightning, high winds and rain that came down in sheets. I was ecstatic. My son could barely contain himself. While it had been years since I'd seen a storm like that, my son had never before witnessed such a glorious event.

"Further evidence we need to relocate to a more hospitable climate," I told my husband as my son danced around naked on the porch being pelted by ice cold rain drops.

"You mean someplace where it doesn't rain like this?" he asked.

"No. Someplace where it rains like this often enough that it's not a small miracle," I said. "Look at him -- the poor boy has never even SEEN a thunderstorm. What kind of a childhood is that?"

But the problems with Montana summers don't end with the weather. Let's move right along to geography.

Because Montana is a treeless desert. My husband is always pointing out all of the trees on the sides of the mountains, trying to prove me wrong. But in my opinion, a scrubby pine tree rooted in a quarter inch of soil does not a shade tree make. Give me maples with their incredible branches, thick with leaves; give me towering oaks one hundred feet high. But scrubby pine? It makes for good kindling.

There's also a very definite dearth of water in which to recreate in Montana.

This is where all of those pitchfork and fire-wielding villagers get really angry and start shouting for my immediate expulsion from this fair state.

I can hear it all now. "The Clark Fork! Canyon Ferry Reservoir! Holter Lake! The Misouri!"

Yes, yes, dear villagers. But your recreational water has issues. Let me list them for you here.
1) The majority of your lakes are not lakes. They are dammed-up rivers.
2) Your "lakes" and streams and rivers are fueled by runoff from the mountains, which makes all of the water in this state obscenely cold. Like goosebumps and blue lips and only able to stay in the water for a couple of minutes cold. And that's not any fun.
3) Have you ever walked or played or slept on a sandy beach? Probably not, because the "beaches" here are composed of rock. I had never even heard of such an inane invention as a "water shoe" prior to moving to Montana, but now I don't leave home without these rubber-soled treasures.

Here's the deal. I love Montana -- from October through mid-June. It is magnificent, and I often find myself thinking, as I barrel through mountain passes, that I will never leave.

But in the summer, take me back to Michigan -- with more sandy coastline than the state of Florida -- to Michigan's cool lake waters, to its majestic forests, to its Northern Lights and its raging thunderstorms, to its fudge shops, to its cloudy days, and best of all, to my parents' house, which has central air set at a balmy 64 degrees.

If Everybody Jumped Off a Bridge...

Until you have a toddler, you will never be able to properly conceive how often you will think of pee and poop; it is omnipresent in your life. You spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning it up, and you're always looking for advice on how to get your kid to sit down and use the potty.

Yet, potty-training is a toddler minefield, both with your own toddler and with anyone who has ever potty-trained someone -- or for that matter, been potty-trained. My own mother swears up and down that both my brother and I were completely potty-trained -- night and day -- by the time we were a year old. NOTE: This was before we were able to talk and say "I HAVE TO USE THE POTTY" and before we could walk on our own two legs. Apparently, we were so motivated by our desire to use the potty that we crawled over to the potty and used it the right way every time.

Thus, it is one of my golden rules to never discuss potty-training with my mother.

And, a few weeks ago, when I was talking to my dad on the phone, he started in on how I needed to get Mikey potty-trained, I just mumbled something about how Mike was about to set the house on fire and got off the phone as quickly as possible and crossed my dad off the potty-training discussion list.

I have friends whose kids are four and are still wearing pull-ups and so you certainly don't want to bring up potty-training with them. And I have friends whose kids are using the potty willingly shortly after they turn two, and you don't want to talk about potty-training with them -- just in case you should fly into a jealous rage.

It has now gotten to the point that whenever someone asks me how potty-training is going, I just lie through my teeth and say that Mike is slowly "getting it" and change the subject as quickly as possible. Because whenever I am honest with someone and say, "He screams bloody murder about having to sit on the potty," their inevitable response is: "Maybe he isn't ready."

Well, people, I've got news for you: he's ready. He is completely cognizant of when he has to pee, as evidenced by several times when I've had him running around naked and before he pees all over the floor, he yells "Mikey needs a diaper!" He is also completely cognizant of when he has to poop, because he will announce, "I have to poop!" and run into the pantry closet and close the door for privacy.

His unwillingness to use the potty and the inevitable fights we have about it have nothing to do with not being ready and everything to do with the fact that it is possible I have given birth to the world's most stubborn child EVER.

So my next most favorite piece of advice is this: "Don't make potty training a frustrating experience for him or for you."

To which I want to say: What medication do you give your children because in my house EVERY situation is a frustrating experience -- from washing Mike's hair to getting him to pick up his toys to getting him not to crawl into the refrigerator. NOTHING is easy with this child. Let me say it again one more time for emphasis: NOTHING.

So potty training is just one more of those battles I figured we'd have until he turned 37 or so and suddenly became more agreeable. We've been working on potty training for months. I cannot even begin to tell you how many books I have read about dinosaurs/dogs/cats/little boys/girls and how they use the potty or how many child-rearing guides I have read about potty training or how many hours I have logged sitting on the "big girl toilet" and reading to Mike while he sat on his little potty. I have lost weeks of my life to this whole potty training business. But still, every time we go near the potty, that child of mine screams and yells and acts as if his plastic potty chair is actually made of rusty nails that poke into his little butt every time I force him to sit down on it. AND, worst of all, he has yet to pee -- even one single drop -- in the potty.

But yesterday, Mike saw one of his little friends, Andrew, use the potty.

"Andrew used the potty like a big boy!" I announced to Mike as Mike swung open the door to witness this miraculous sight for himself. "And Andrew is wearing big boy underwear!"

Because wearing big boy underwear, no matter how cool it is and what piece of construction equipment is on it, is also a fight we have on a regular basis.

Mike didn't say anything, but as soon as Andrew and his mommy pulled away, Mike ran to his bookshelf and pulled off all of his potty books. Then he sat down and read through those books as if he was studying to pass the medical boards.

After dinner last night, he got a cookbook out and put it down in front of the toilet so he was tall enough to get everything in the bowl. Then he asked for help with his pants. Then he voluntarily stood there, trying with all of his might to take a pee. I couldn't believe it.

"What a big boy!" I must have said at least a thousand times. "Wow -- you're trying to use the potty! That's great!!!! Wow, is that wonderful!"

If I could have located a brass band to parade down the street in his honor, I would have done that too. He still didn't pee in the potty, but he had wanted to pee in the potty -- and that was something akin to seeing the Christ Child's image in the cheesy sludge that covers Doritos. I mean, it was a miracle.

When Mike was safely in bed that night and Brent had gotten home from work, I told him we needed to stay home for the next few weeks and work on potty training.

"He turned a corner today," I told Brent. "This could be our only chance until he starts kindergarten to use peer pressure to our advantage."

So this morning, we fortified ourselves for what we envisioned would be the usual fighting and screaming about potty and big boy underwear usage.

"Let's go upstairs and pick out some big boy underwear for you to wear today!" I said with completely fake cheeriness after Mike had finished breakfast, bracing myself for the "NO NO NO NOs" that normally follow such an absurd suggestion. But before you could say "Pee in the potty!" that kid was off, rummaging through his underwear drawer before finally settling on a pair with Roley from Bob the Builder.

We put on the underwear and then began putting Mike on the potty every 20 minutes. Shockingly, amazingly, he willingly sat on the potty each and every time. He even stopped one of his favorite activities, watering the flowers, to come in and use the potty.

Then, after about the eighth time of corralling him and sitting him down on the potty and in the midst of our 37th read of "It's Potty Time!", Mike peed in the potty.

I was so shocked and amazed that I nearly fell off the potty myself.

"Brent!" I yelled. "Get in here!"

Brent came running in and then we stumbled all over ourselves offering up congratulations as if Mike had just won the Nobel Prize (and dedicated it to his mother).

"What a good job!"

"We're SOOOOOOO proud of you!"

"Who's proud of Mikey? Mommy and daddy are!"

Then we awarded him with a new hot rod and called his grandma and grandpa who told him he'd get a present in the mail.

Mike was uncharacteristically quiet; his normal chattering self that offers running commentary on anything and everything was quiet and reserved.

Then, later, when it was just the two of us, he looked up at me.

"Mike used the potty like a big boy! Mike took a pee in the potty!" he said, obviously very proud of himself.

"You did!" I congratulated him, simultaneously delighted and terrified that my child is so strongly influenced by what one of his peers was able to do.

But, at this point, whatever works. Prior to this breakthrough, I had actually suggested to Brent, only half-joking, that perhaps we could locate an electric cattle prod at Big R Ranch and Home and poke Mike with it whenever he peed in his underwear.

So, today was definitely a momentous day. Mike took a pee in his potty, without being electrically reminded of why it's best that he do so. Sadly, I think it's a first step in a long process, like most of parenting. But today, for the first time in a long time, I thought we'll make it.

Dumb and Dumber Snippet

I recently discovered my husband, who likes to read things like "War and Peace" in his free time, paging through one of my old textbooks: "A History of Russia."

"That was a pretty interesting class," I said to him.

"This is your textbook?" he asked, incredulously. My husband seems to be under the impression that I have earned two undergraduate degrees and one graduate degree by taking classes like Ballroom Dancing and Making Farting Noises Under Your Armpit 101.

"Yes," I said. "Who else's would it be?"

"Well what do you remember from the class?" he asked, as if testing whether or not I actually took a Russian history class.

"That Rasputen was considered one of the best lovers in all of Russia because he had genital warts and it made his penis bumpy."

"That's what you remember? Do you remember anything about Stalin? Anything about the Romanovs? Napolean's invasion?" he asked.

"That all sounds vaguely familiar. But that little tidbit about Rasputen sticks out in my mind."

My husband, who I think was excited about the possibility of common intellectual ground, looked disappointed.

"I also remember we had to read a bunch of books -- by Dostoevsky."

"So what'd you think?" he asked.

"Oh, you know -- crazy people, philosophical nihilism, the birth of existentialism, blah blah blah," I said.

"So you're not a fan."

"I suppose I like Dostoevsky as much as the next person," I said. "But Rasputen's bumpy penis -- now that's interesting."

Please Stop and Think For a Minute

There is something about a pregnant woman that screams "No boundaries" to the rest of the world. This means that pregnant women are inundated with belly-rubbers, personal questions, and unsolicited advice. Now that it is more obvious that I am pregnant and not just putting on weight, I have been rubbed and patted; repeatedly asked if I planned to nurse and questioned on the nursing habits of my first child; and interrogated about everything from my sleeping habits to my urinary tract to my penchant for coffee, red wine, soft cheese, and sushi.

To these intruders, I would like to say the following:
1) Take your hands off my body before I break them both.
2) What I do and have done with my breasts is none of your business. Though you may be able to see some of it in a "Girls Gone Wild: Mardi Gras" video from my pre-nursing days.
3) Yes, I'm having problems sleeping and no, I'm no longer feeding my sleeping pill addiction with enormous amounts of Tylenol PM. Yes, I'm peeing a lot more and yes, I can tell you about the public bathrooms all over Montana. And O.K. -- you caught me, yes, I still occasionally drink a cup of real coffee and it is delicious. Sadly, I have unhooked my red wine IV drip, and am looking forward to re-insertion minutes after delivering my new baby. As a precaution, I smell the soft cheeses I eat to make sure there's no evil bacteria lurking in them before I consume them in vast quantities. And, I am eating sushi sans raw fish.

Are you satisfied?

These intruders are annoying, but harmless. What I find most offensive are people who seem to relish telling me bad things that happen to pregnant women. These comments range all over the map from women who burst various things during the pushing process to babies that die in utero. Yes, you heard me right: babies that die before they are born, and then their poor mothers must be induced to give birth to their dead child.

I truly cannot imagine anything much more horrifying, more devestating, more life-flattening and changing than giving birth to your baby who is dead. Having a moment that is supposed to be one of your most glorious turn into a moment that makes you want to rip out your own heart.

But sadly, incredibly, overwhelmingly sadly, this happens to people.

And then their friends and acquaintances tell other pregnant women about it.

The first time someone mentioned this to me was when I informed the HR people at work that I was pregnant and would be taking maternity leave. After receiving the in-order congratulations, one of the HR ladies said, "I had two women in my lamaze class whose babies died in utero and then they had to give birth to their dead babies!"

Hey! HR Lady! Did you have to take a state-sponsored sensitivity class to become an HR lady? Because if you did, I'm guessing that you failed!

Since then, other people have asked me if I saw the ER season where Noah Wylie's character's girlfriend had a baby who died in utero.

"They were going to have a baby," these people always start out, "and then she didn't feel it moving anymore and the baby had died!!!"

Another friend drew my attention to an incredibly moving story that appeared in the New Yorker.

"Did you read that story written by the father whose baby died in utero?" she asked. "I hope that doesn't happen to you!"

Yes, I hope so too, you insensitive jackass. It's an unbelievable shame that it happens to anyone and if there's any evidence that life isn't fair, dead babies are it.

Finally, when someone brought up the ER show again at work the other day, I had reached the end of my polite-smiling and head-nodding.

"What in THE HELL makes you think that telling a pregnant woman who is already fraught with worry and concern and has an insane amount of hormones raging through her body making her crazier than ever that someone's baby died in utero for no apparent reason is a good conversation to have? WHY DOES THIS SEEM LIKE A GOOD IDEA TO YOU???" I asked.

My poor-taste co-worker just looked at me with her eyes blinking, but I was on a roll.

"It is like telling someone undergoing chemo about all of the people you know who have died of cancer. It is in extremely poor taste, and so the next time you open up your mouth, just stop and think if it would be something you want to hear," I said and waddled off in a huff.

Perhaps I overreacted, and I did feel badly that I lost my temper with this person because it is a person with whom I regularly lose my temper, and she probably thinks that I am an evil meanie who is out to make her feel bad about herself.

But honestly, the last thing I want to hear about is someone whose baby has died, or whose baby was born early and never recovered, or any of the myriad ways in which something can go wrong with my unborn baby. I'm doing the best I can -- just like all of those people who have experienced terrible loss during or shortly after pregnancy did the best they can. And every time I feel my baby move, I pause and am thankful for that little gift -- those flutters that remind you that, for now, things are good. And chances are, in just a few short months, things will be glorious when I get to hold my new, healthy, perfect, ten-fingers, ten-toes, blinking wide and blue-eyed baby.

The Grass People

Growing up, I watched my dad maniacally mow our enormous lawn up to three times a week. I remember him practically running through the yard with the lawnmower spewing nothing -- because he never let the grass get long enough that it actually needed to be cut. He also gave my brother and I enormous buckets and paid us a penny a weed (as long as the root was intact) to crawl around on our hands and knees and remove the weeds from the cracks in the driveway and sidewalks. And the old man mixed up what was probably a lethal concoction of chemicals that my brother and I always referred to as "Dad's Agent Orange," which was designed to kill weeds and promote lawn growth at the same time. It always gave us a wicked rash for up to a week after my dad's initial application of it, and if I ever give birth to a three-headed monster, I'll know who to blame.

As an adult, I rebelled against my dad's lawn care rules, and did absolutely nothing to maintain the small yards that accompanied the homes and apartments in which I lived. In fact, a New Orleans neighbor whom I not-so-lovingly referred to as "Joe Suburban" once turned me into the Mosquito Control Board because he believed that my six-foot lawn was promoting the spread of encephalitis. And, my old roommate and I, in what must have been some very thick booze-induced haze, mowed the lawn once by pouring lighter fluid on it and setting it on fire. I certainly never mowed the lawn that way again; I simply never mowed the lawn again.

When Brent and I bought our house in Helena, the yard was in what might be referred to as a "persistent vegetative state." An experimental garden plot gone awry, our backyard was so thick with weeds, trees, flowers, and herbs that it was impossible to open the back door.

Thus, we spent the first summer in our house hacking through the backyard with machetes, axes, and saws; digging up trees and bushes; taking out rotting wooden pathways; pulling weeds; and killing infestations of bugs of every kind -- ant hills that were so large you could hear them moving from 20 feet away, wasp's nests, beetles, and aphids that were slowly digesting two of the giant trees on the property. And then, blessedly, it became winter, and we shut the back door for six months and did not think about the backyard.

Until springtime -- when we opened the back door and saw that all of our digging, cutting, and removal of various things had left us with a yard that was essentially a mud-wrestling ring. We were poor, and we were cheap, and having a lovely lawn wasn't one of our priorities. So we headed off to Kmart where we bought the cheapest bags of grass seed we could find, planted it, and hoped for the best. (It should also be noted here that we did not bother to water said grass seed, because we saw watering one's lawn as an enormous waste of a precious resource, and because we were cheap and did not want to pay the water bills.)

Somehow or other, the grass grew and we had a satisfactory yard in which Mike could play. We didn't water the lawn and so it didn't grow much, but we did spend $2 on an old push mower we found at a garage sale and I occasionally (about once every six weeks) pushed the mower through the yard in a haphazard manner, which usually left half of the grass the same length as it was before -- just in narrow strips that I had missed as I wandered around the yard.

Again it became winter and we didn't have to think much about the backyard. We just played there in the snow -- so much so that the lawn became an ice rink and because we live on a hill, you could stand on one side of our yard and slide down to the other without any kind of exertion at all.

As spring came and our skating pond broke up, it became evident that the cheap Kmart grass was not going to grow back. Whether it did not come back because it was cheap grass or because Mike's favorite activity was dumping pounds of sand from his sandbox in the grass I will never know. What I do know is that we were left with the same mud-wrestling ring from the previous year.

Brent and I sat around one afternoon and reminisced about the backyards of our youth -- giant Midwestern backyards with soft grass on which we had walked and ran barefoot, laid on, dreamed in, and rolled around in.

"We have GOT to get Mike some decent grass in this backyad," I said to Brent.

And so, while Mike and I were in Michigan (so that the grass would have time to grow without being trampled on by our son's giant, constantly moving hoofers), Brent sodded our backyard.

When we returned from Michigan, our backyard was a different place. It looked incredible. Female mud wrestlers would have to go elsewhere to perform. The grass was truly magnificent. We walked barefoot in the backyard. We dripped watermelon juice down our arms and chins in the backyard. We laid in the grass and watched the clouds go by in the backyard. We suddenly loved the backyard.

But with this new backyard came new responsibility. We had to water the grass on a regular, practically daily basis. So, after years of railing against people who live in dry climates and have lush lawns, I am now the pot calling the kettle black. We had to invest $90 in a new push mower because our old $2 mower did not do the job anymore. We spent $90 on a new push mower because we have to mow the yard all of the god damn time because we are watering it so much. It is a vicious circle -- this backyard thing.

This is not to mention all of the weed pulling all three of us are doing. Once again, I am down on my hands and knees pulling weeds -- though no one is paying me a penny a weed this time around -- root intact or not. We have even gone so far as to weed our obnoxious California neighbor's yard so that the noxious weed seeds do not infect our glorious sod.

But what I found most horrifying -- way beyond wasting water to make the grass green and to get it to grow, way beyond wasting my time weeding, which is a losing battle anyway -- was the morning I spent yesterday in the backyard with Mike. Because this is what I said:

"Mike, don't put sand in the grass," I said. "We keep the sand in your sandbox."

"Mike, where does the gravel go? Does it go in the grass? Nooooo, it doesn't go in the grass."

"Mike, don't dig up the grass!"

"Mike, don't pull the grass out!"

"Mike, why aren't you listening? DO NOT PUT THE SAND IN THE GRASS."

And so on and so forth. I have become one of those nutso grass people, caring more about my grass than what goes on in the grass. My motivation for nice grass was to provide my son with a great backyard -- a place where he wanted to spend his time, lolling about, wasting the days away. But now I worry that when Mike grows up, he will immediately turn his backyard into a giant cement patio so that he doesn't torture his children the way we torture him.

There's not much time to worry now, however, because it's time to go out and move the sprinkler again.

Big and Sexy

If you've ever been to Helena, Montana, you might notice something is missing.

We have no Saks. As in Saks Fifth Avenue.

As a matter of fact, the two closest Saks are in Denver and Seattle, and they are weak imposters of the midwestern and East Coast Saks of which I am a devotee.

There is a store called Saks in Bozeman. But it's a cruel joke on Saks-deprived Montanans (I refuse to believe I'm the only one), because it is a discount store. They actually sell stuff that was in fires and is smoke and water-damaged -- under the name SAKS, for chrissakes! I'm sure the owner of the imposter store has had A LOT of laughs at all of the people moving out here from large cities, and who nearly run over pedestrians as they drive by the sign on his store that says "SAKS". What a cruel bastard he is.

I used to think that I could not survive without a Saks. Not so much for the clothes, but more for the makeup. I had four different make-up artists at my three most oft-visited Saks. They were beautiful people, and they had business cards. They would call me and invite me to come in when a new product came out. They even called me in Montana to invite me to visit their stores when certain make-up celebrities, like Bobbi Brown and Trish McEvoy, would be giving presentations. They were quoted in magazines; they did make-up for the stars. I loved these make-up artists and what their incredibly expensive concealer did for my skin.

Of course, this was back in the day when I made a lot of money and thought nothing of dropping $100 on a small bottle of cream that promised to keep me looking young. Back in the day when I applied various fruit acids and peels to my face to ward off crow's feet and age spots. I thought it all worked incredibly well, and dreamed of turning 70, but still being able to pass for 40.

Of course, I was doing all of this in my 20s, and so I did not really have to worry too much about my crow's feet. I was also not aware that no matter how much you go to the gym and how many salads you eat, your body does funny things as it ages -- especially after you have children -- and no amount of glycolic facial peel is going to put your boobs back where they belong.

No matter. Because after I had my son and took a pay cut of tens of thousands of dollars so I could stay home with him and worry that I was wasting my degree while waiting for him to stick his finger into the moving fan again just to have him announce "That hurts," shopping at Saks wasn't much of an option anymore. Because it is hard to justify spending $100 on a bottle of cream when you're scraping together money for groceries every week.

So now I go to the local "mall" (please notice quote marks because "mall" is a bit of a stretch) to this store called Pro Beauty Supply, where I have a 10% VIP Member Discount Card. And instead of getting make-up advice from the exotic Basha Love at Saks, who taught me how to use my natural-hair make-up brushes to apply layers of eyeshadow in order to bring out my eyes more, I am now listening to 17-year old Brittney with 2 inch black roots staring at me through an obnoxious peroxide dye job tell me that the NYC line (which actually has printed on their packaging "FOR SEXY BABES ONLY") is just as good as any found in department stores.

I've got news for Brittney, with many apologies to Gertrude Stein. An eyeshadow is not an eyeshadow is not an eyeshadow is not an eyeshadow. I am fairly certain, after spending $65 for an eyeshadow and $5 for an eyeshadow, that much of this discrepancy is marketing. NOWHERE on my old Bobbi Brown tubes and Trish McEvoy packages does it state anything about being "FOR SEXY BABES ONLY." Because when one is sexy, one does not need to be reminded that one is sexy. It is simply understood. And that is the way I like it.

In spite of the fact that I LOATHE the "SEXY BABES" marketing ploy, I must admit that it works (the eyshadow, not the marketing). Maybe it doesn't adhere to my eyelid in exactly the same way my Trish did, but for a $60 price difference, slightly less adherence can be forgiven.

Nonetheless, it pains me greatly to have eyeshadow labeled "FOR SEXY BABES ONLY" tucked into my ultra-sleek, ultra-understated, and ultra-sexy Trish McEvoy make-up ensemble. But, these are the things one must do to keep one's children from growing up into ax-wielding mass-murderers as a result of being in the hands of a bad daycare provider. I certainly hope that someday Mikey appreciates my constant sacrifice so that he can grow up into a healthy adult who will make a lot of money and support his mother in the way she was once accustomed to living.

I've Glimpsed the Future, and It Ain't Pretty

I love the Fourth of July as much as the next person, but last night, around 2 a.m., I had had enough. I forgave the fireworks at 11 p.m. and even at midnight. But when I was awakened at 2 a.m. by bottle rockets that seemed to be exploding approximately 3 inches from my open bedroom window, I was irritated enough to rouse out of bed.

I went downstairs and opened the front door to see if I could identify who might be shooting off fireworks, seemingly aimed at making my normally fitful sleeping more fitful than usual. But the offenders were nowhere in sight.

I sat down on the couch for a few minutes to see if it stopped, but it didn't. So I did what every highly irritable expectant mother who also has a toddler sleeping upstairs with an open window would do.

I called the cops.

The dispatcher wasn't sympathetic to my cause.

"It is the Fourth of July," she said.

"Technically, it's the fifth of July," I reminded her. "And I have to get up in three hours."

She made a tired promise to send someone out, and I went back upstairs to bed. I don't know if she actually did dispatch the police out to ruin someone else's merrymaking, but within the next 20 minutes, it was quiet outside my window. Very, very quiet. Unnervingly quiet.

In spite of this relative new calm outside, I could not go back to sleep.

Because just a few short years ago, I would have been the asshole fueled on cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and cheap vodka shooting bottle rockets at people's dark and open bedroom windows at 2 a.m. in the morning. Did the reproduction process suddenly turn me into a crotchety old woman who wanted everyone else to go to bed at the same time I used to leave the house for the night? I used to be cool. I used to be hip. I didn't just party like a rock star; I partied with rock stars.

But now -- I'm the turd in the punchbowl.

Christ! What a Country!

We celebrated the Fourth of July today with a Russian Jew who fled Stalin with his parents as a child and two Canadians. We had hamburgers and potato salad and, of course, pie. I don't think there could have been a more American celebration.

I am a descendent of two proud lines of Americans -- one side, which can trace its roots back to fighting in the Revolutionary War, and the other side, new arrivals to this country, in comparison, who came here as most folks do -- to find a better life.

There are a lot of things wrong with this country. But there are a lot of things that are right.

When I worked as a consultant and traveled with my boss, a man in his late 70s, I gained a new appreciation for America. "Where else are you going to see scenery like this?" he'd ask, as we barrelled through Glacier National Park. "Where else are you going to find a person like this?" he'd remark after we'd met a man, real salt of the earth, who made cowboy boots and horse saddles by hand. "Where else can you eat eggs and bacon for breakfast, sushi for lunch and spaghetti for dinner -- in restaurants all on the same block?" he'd ask, after a long day of business meals. And always after every question like this, he'd exclaim, "Christ! What a country!"

He was right, of course. Where else? I've been fortunate enough to travel the world and to live in many parts of America -- the Midwest, the East Coast, the Deep South, and now, the Rocky Mountain West. Each part of the country is home to its own traditions, its own history, its own food, its own dialect. The one thing we have in common, perhaps, is that we are all descended from people with guts. People who wanted more. People who weren't afraid of hard work or of getting their hands really dirty. People who lent a hand to their neighbors or even to strangers in need.

When you drive through Montana, you can still see homesteaders' cabins speckled across the landscape. They're smaller than most modern garden sheds, and they pop up in the most unexpected places.

"Can you imagine living at this elevation in the winter?" I always ask my husband. Or, "Would you want to haul water that far just to wash dishes?" or, on the treeless plains, "How far did they have to go to find wood to build their house, and what'd they use for firewood?"

These ramshackle cabins serve as a reminder that making a life for yourself in a new country was only for the very strong and is never easy. And every time I see one of these little wooden sheds, I have to admit that I probably would have just stayed where I was -- no matter how much I longed for something better.

But still, today, people are risking their lives to come and make a better life here for themselves and for their children and for their children's children. Where else will people have the opportunity that they would have in America?

As a teaching assistant in graduate school, I taught a semester of English as a Second Language classes. My students were all newly arrived in the United States, and their grasp of the English language was tenuous at best. They came from all over the world: Vietnam, Columbia, Argentina, Hong Kong, China, Egypt, Cuba, Israel, France. I can say, without hesitation, that these students worked harder than any other group of students I have ever taught. They utilized office hours, did all of their homework, called me at home with questions, completed revision after revision, and got better and better. Though most longed for their home country, they all looked at the opportunity with which they were presented in the United States as a gift, and they were enormously grateful.

Opportunity. It is a gift -- a gift of the highest order. I think of my own friends, all born in America, but who came from poor to middle-class backgrounds with parents who had only graduated from high school. Today, my friends are lawyers, political activists, doctors, epidemiologists, statisticians, public health officers, writers, college professors, and elected officials. Where else? Where else could poor to middle-class people have the opportunity to receive a public education that would prepare them for amazing, interesting, and fulfilling careers of their choice?

And, I think of the many friends and colleagues I have had over the years who immigrated to this country for any number of reasons. Columbians who fled to escape the dangerous climate caused by the drug trade. A Chinese scholar who sought political asylum. An Egyptian woman who wanted to practice medicine. A Russian who wanted a better life. A Croatian Serb who couldn't return to her country. Somalians and Cambodians who both escaped execution being carried out by their own governments. Where else would they go? Where else could they have the opportunity to attend school? To succeed? To make a better life than the one they had?

Again, that's not to say that just because people arrive on our shores that they are handed the keys to the city. Opportunity may be present, but success still takes hard work, perseverance, risk, and more hard work -- whether you were born and raised here or whether you just landed at JFK. And there's something really beautiful about that.

Christ -- what a country! From sea to shining sea and everywhere in between -- those amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties. Where else can you be so in charge of your own destiny? Where else can you practice yoga and tai chi and get acupuncture done, and then go have a chocolate milkshake with fries? Where else can you spend weeks driving from one side of the country to the other and meet folks of every religion and color and belief system? Where else could have produced the blues and rock and roll and jazz? Where else can you still rope cattle and then later on check your email? Where else would the automobile have been invented? Only in America.

American Pie

If my grandpa, Anthony Elenbaas, was still alive, today would have been his 105th birthday.

I was a teenager when my grandpa died, and I was fortunate enough to have spent a lot of time with him when he was around. I can remember hours of time spent with the man doing nothing special, though every activity seemed special at the time. Feeding the ducks. Listening to Ernie Harwell calling the Tigers game on WJR. Playing "Button button, where's the button." Learning how to tie my shoes. Washing dishes. Listening to big band records. Picking raspberries from his garden. Going for walks. Cleaning spark plugs. Listening to him read from a Bible in Dutch.

My grandparents only lived two blocks away from us, and they were omnipresent in our lives -- the way grandparents should be. I spent enormous amounts of time at their home, and they at ours. We shared many meals and every holiday and birthday and celebrations for everything from winning baseball teams to good grades.

One of my memories of my grandfather is his love of pie, particularly fruit pie. I remember pies cooling on the small counter in my grandmother's small kitchen. I remember enormous slices of apple pie, served with equally enormous hunks of cheddar cheese. Blueberry. Peach. Strawberry rhubarb. And the quintessential Michigan pie -- cherry.

It seems that after my grandpa died, we didn't eat pie as much -- though that may have been partly my imagination. I never cared much for pie either way. If presented with the choice of pie or cookies, cake, brownies or ice cream, pie never won out as my first choice. And, if pie was all there was, I would pick at the filling and try to forget about the crust.

All of that changed a few summers ago when I tasted my first piece of huckleberry pie. For those folks that have never tasted a huckleberry, it can only be described as a smaller, firmer, and significantly more tart blueberry. And, I'm not positive on this, but I think the huck is found only in the mountains of Montana.

Like anything that may be indigenous to a small part of the country, Montanans have marketed the hell out of huckleberries and you can buy just about anything huckleberry at any tourist trap in the state: huckleberry chocolate, huckleberry tea, huckleberry syrup, huckleberry honey, huckleberry potholders -- and yes, even huckleberry boxer shorts.

But back to the huckleberry pie. We were staying at a friend's house up on Flathead Lake, and his mother came home one night with a giant bag of huckleberries she had bought for around $40. As I sat on a bar stool, I watched her roll out her pie crust and mix the hucks with a small amount of sugar and tapioca. As that pie baked and the smell reached out to me down on the lakeshore, I had a feeling that it would make me a pie believer. And it did.

As I sat there and savored that piece of pie still warm from the oven, I remember thinking that I wished more than anything that my grandpa could have been there with me at that moment to share in the flaky crust that paired perfectly with the still slightly firm huckleberries, whose tartness had been greatly mellowed by the sugar and the baking process. They literally seemed to pop in your mouth -- little explosions of juice and seeds and flavor like you could never imagine. Tony Elenbaas had always been a pie man, but tasting a huckleberry pie was one pie experience I know he would have ranked above all others.

I recently just finished reading a book called "American Pie." In it, a food critic from New York travels the country in search of pie. She discovers that there are as many pie flavors as there are regions in America -- everything from Belgian prune pie with its mashed potato crust in Wisconsin to the buttermilk pie in Arkansas. And, she discovers that pie-baking is becoming a lost art form, something that only little old ladies take the time to do.

But she also talks about the pie being most popular and prevalent in the hamlets of America that seem stuck in time -- places that aren't so affected by the fast-paced lifestyle of our modern life. It is no wonder that she found her favorite piece of pie, a huckleberry peach version, in Montana.

Oddly enough, when my mom was visiting, we stopped at that same roadside cafe and shared a piece of the very huckleberry peach written about in the book. Plain huckleberry was tempting, but the huckleberry peach seemed a perfect combinatin -- and it was. The two different fruits played off one another with their different textures and flavors playing together and making for the perfect pie experience. Again, I thought about my grandpa, and how much he would have savored a piece of that pie.

A few days later, I read about the author's nirvana experience with the huckleberry peach pie, and I knew exactly where she was coming from. What luck to have found that same piece of pie along a long stretch of highway only days earlier. Luckily, the author got the recipe from the cafe, and so in honor of my grandpa's birthday, I'm going to share it here and encourage you all to make a huckleberry peach pie and raise your forks to Tony Elenbaas.

**Note: I'm not sure if you can buy hucks outside of Montana, but getting your hands on a bag of these is worth the trip here in the summertime. Any farmer's market on the Western side of the state will have them.

The Spruce Park Diner's Rustic Huckleberry Peach Pie by Laura Hansen

Crust
1 9-inch double-crust (Laura uses the recipe on the back of the Crisco can)

Filling
3 cups of huckleberries (fresh or frozen)
2 cups of peaches, sliced and peeled (fresh or frozen)
1 cup of sugar
3 tablespoons of tapioca

Pick your huckleberries clean of stems and leaves. If you plan on freezing them, do not wash them as they will release too much juice when they cook.

In your favorite mixing bowl, gently toss huckleberries, peaches, and sugar together. Add tapioca, mix well but gently. Score bottom crust with a fork.

Pour fruit mixture in your deep-dish pie tin lined with your crust.

Cut the remaining dough into four wide bands, interlay them on top of the pie to create a weave effect. Sprinkle top with 1 tablespoon of sugar.

Bake at 350 degrees for 75-90 minutes. Top crust should be golden brown.

Eat with your best friend.

The Return of Big Bertha

Back when I lived in New Orleans, I celebrated every Mardi Gras with Big Bertha. No, Big Bertha was not an oversized friend with whom I had interesting conversation as we shook it for beads. Big Bertha was the most important Mardi Gras sidekick -- the most enormous pair of underwear ever created that served her purpose not as ass-covering for a large woman, but as a way to get more beads during the Mardi Gras parades.

My friend David is proud owner of Big Bertha. I first met David when he was my boss at the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. Shortly after I started there, I was out at a bar with a bunch of friends around Mardi Gras time. "Look at that over there!" a friend of mine announced. I turned to see David, my boss, waving Big Bertha madly in the air as he second-lined to a brass band. "That's my new boss," I told my friend. "Wow -- only in New Orleans," was about all she could muster.

After meeting David, I joyfully shared in the glee of a Big Bertha Mardi Gras year after year. One particular Mardi Gras, I remember riding in the front of a shopping cart through the French Quarter, standing with my foot perched on the edge a la "George Washington Crossing the Delaware", dressed as a nun and waving Big Bertha around. All I can say is you don't need large breasts to get beads when you've got the big panties.

During my first pregnancy, when my normal underwear got so tight that the elastic was, I am fairly certain, cutting off oxygen and blood supply to my brain, I broke down and purchased some BIG panties, which I sadly dubbed "the Big Berthas." While the original Big Bertha was a white faux silky eye-catcher and her appearance every Mardi Gras season was very ceremonial indeed, there was absolutely nothing eye-catching and ceremonial about the new Big Berthas. They were just big, ugly, cotton (albeit very comfortable) panties.

Well, in this pregnancy, the time has come to shelve my normal panties and to purchase something that doesn't cut into my gut and thighs, with elastic that is loose enough to allow me to still think clearly.

This time around, I just couldn't bring myself to buy any more Big Berthas. I wish I had a photo to show you of my old Big Berthas (or better yet, of the original Big Bertha) so that you could perhaps understand what I mean by the term "orthopedic underwear." If you are small and cute and you've never been pregnant, you are probably completely unaware that underwear that looks as if it could correct your posture existed. But as sure as I am standing here, there is underwear out there that is big enough and white enough and ugly enough to fix whatever might be ailing you, save for your sex life. Because if anyone ever sees you in your orthopedic underwear, I can guarantee that they will not want to have sex with you in any way and that they will find you enormously (literally and physically speaking) hilarious.

After I had my son, I went through a long period of feeling like if I was ever to get pregnant again, it would have to be through some process akin to pollination helped out by wind and worker bees. This was most likely caused by a combination of constantly being covered in goo created by someone else's body functions, never having time to shower, and my newly enormously, obesely obeseness as a result of my ice cream/pierogie/sausage cravings during my pregnancy. My Big Berthas were half-comfort/half-curse during this dark period.

So this time around, I vowed "No more Big Berthas! Down with orthopedic underwear!" But I assure you, as your waist expands to accomodate the human being growing inside of you and your thighs, for whatever reason, begin to resemble giant sequoias, your underwear choices are pretty limited.

There is the thong, which I have never liked, because I simply cannot get beyond the feeling that something is going up my butt. And there is the small bikini, the top of which rests under your burgeoning belly. This time around, I am going with the small bikini and hope that I can find some with leg holes large enough to accomodate my sequoias.