It's six a.m. and Lisablog comes to you from Jackson Heights, Queens. We inhabit a new homestead, or as the Beast says, we have a new habitat. 

As always, moving shakes things up and we've been thinking about new unschooling possibilities.  Learning Spanish seems like a good idea. In Sunnyside Bea picked up a little bit of Spanish from our friend Zenado at the bodega on the corner of our block. In Jackson Heights, the immersion will be even more intense. Sixty percent of our neighbors are from Central and South America, with Ecuador, Argentina, and Colombia high on the list of home-countries. So, Spanish it is.  And very good food, of course.

Leaving behind the Americas, we have Asia. We're a stone's throw from the 74th Street strip of Jackson Heights that is dense with Indian groceries, restaurants, sweets shops, and fabric stores. Maharaja Sweets is our favorite for Indian burfi:

Burfi is made with condensed milk and nuts (cashews and pistachios). Trivia note: the Persian word of origin is "Barf" meaning snow (and these are cold white treats), and really you can call it barfi, if you must.

And hopping on the subway we can be in Flushing's Chinatown in ten minutes. My understanding is that Flushing Chinatown is a Mandarin community, where as Manhattan Chinatown is a Cantonese community.  When I was a youngster (21 or so) I spent three years living in Oakland's Mandarin Chinatown and it was life-changing. (Being white meant being a ghost, and it was quite fantastic, and strange, to walk crowded streets and always be invisible.) And of course there is the lure of cooking delights: raw water chestnuts, five spice powder, and winter melon for soup.

Now, as my 45th birthday looms, I can really say I have the best birthday presents anyone could have. A share in a cooperative housing project (80 shares, that is), a Burmese Prince and a Beast, and a shift in the voting patterns of this country that finally brings us closer to an integrated civilized world. (I know, the last one is a little bit utopian, but at least the Mormon didn't win.) 

And a final note about the neighborhood: we're walking distance from Malcolm X's house over near Laguardia Airport. So, that will be a pilgrimage too.

Hurricane Sandy howled through yesterday, giving us enough time indoors to knit, sew, and even now, yes, blog.

This entry comes as a simple plea. Please vote next week. And vote for the muslim. No, I don't like the drone strikes either, but please vote.

Here is inspiration in the aftermath of yesterday's fourteen foot storm surge—

(thanks to the Burmese Prince for alerting us to this speech snippet)

"President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet." (laughter from Republican backers) "MY promise … is to help you and your family."

                                                    --Mitt Romney

And if you don't want to vote to save the planet, can you at least vote to save the rights of the women who you love?

We are away from the blog these days because we started using a typewriter. The article in last week's New York Times on carbon emissions and the internet actually made us kind of sick. And then we stopped over-using the internet.  We, meaning not the whole household, but me, Lisa of the Blog. But actually Bea stopped asking to watch Winnie The Pooh when I stopped checking my email during the day.  This was really interesting.   What do we do?  The daily email check is at 8 am and usually takes about 15 minutes.  Business gets caught-up-with, and then the computer is off for the rest of the day.  Bea and I have been using the typewriter, knitting socks, sewing (yes, the sewing maching is up and running), and tomorrow we pick up our raw milk delivery so that we can make some yogurt. We're not shunning technology, but are trying to use it more wisely.  The result, for me, is better sleep and better concentration. Go figure. And peace out.

Thinking today of something Bob Dylan said in a telephone conversation circa 1971 to A.J. Weberman that great gentleman junkie Dylanologist who routinely picked through Dylan's garbage when he lived in the West Village.  Dylan was complaining to Weberman about his scavenging activities, since Dylan's kids, toddlers, would watch out the living room window. Weberman said "The kid didn't look scared," and Dylan said, "no, my kids aren't aware of this or that." 

Having a three-year-old means living with someone who's not aware of this or that, but is aware of everything. My kid knows the phases of the moon, she can scout out tiny mushrooms across a field, and she remembers the exact conversations of Tin Tin and Captain Haddock inside the frames of 80 pages cartoon books. Today she matter-of-factly recounted seeing a guy with no legs, and she often cheerfully tells strangers about our cat Harry who died last summer. But she isn't aware of the waves of bloodshed in the Middle East, or death by lethal injection in Texas, or hate crimes against queer and transgender people [and Sikhs, and fill in the blank].

It occurs to me these days that my energies are so consistently funneled into the daily orders (as Robert Duncan would call them) of raising a child, that another part of me is missing.  It used to be that I could read the New York Times and check in with Democracy Now and see what Noam Chomsky was saying and I even had the time and desire to exchange letters with those guys down there in Texas on Death Row.

Those guys have since been executed, and it's not the time, of course, to bring my kid into a conversation about all such things. It may be that there never will be a time or a reason for her to know about Anthony Nealy who possibly robbed a gas station and killed two clerks. I never asked him during the course of our letter exchanges. Mostly we talked about appeals, about what he read in the newspaper, about what he could and couldn't get with the few bucks he had in his snack bar account.

Sure, I'd like my kid to know that marching on the pentagon in 1987 to protest American policies in Latin America was a highlight of my youth. But who knows if that will be meaningful to her either. Perhaps what I hope for is more of what Alfred North Whitehead called "a feeling state." I'd like her to know that she's loved and that she can love other people. I'd like her to have some cosmic empathy for all the creatures in the universe, without any indoctrinating influence (or forced viewings of Eyes On The Prize) on my part. Perhaps I've set the bar too high.

This morning one of our neighbors across the street here on 39th Place stabbed his wife.  Bea and I went out for our trek to the park at about 9 and had to wade through a little crowd gathering on the sidewalk. "What happened", I asked? "A guy killed his wife; he's on his way to Boston, but they'll get him." My first thought wasn't to "get him," but there it was. We made our way up to the train platform at 40th Street and strolled down to our regular spot at the end of the platform (less crowded at rush hour with a stroller). And there he was, about my age, barefoot, sad, weary, wearing a white tee shirt with the red streak of a bloody hand-print across the shoulder. He was sitting on the white metal box at the end of the platform, looking at me while I looked at him. Everyone else was busy as usual with their personal devices. I thought to say something to him, as a gesture of reaching out, or figuring out if he was who I thought he was, but there I was with the kid in the stroller who was not aware of this or that, my little bundle of joy who I protect from trips and falls and sugar-rushes. So I stood there, and looked at him, and called Thomas to ask him to mention to the cops crowding our block that here was the guy they were possibly looking for. And then the train arrived, and I pushed the stroller through the doors and took one last long look at him, who was still looking at me, not in any particular way, except for in some deeply empty human despair that simply called for compassion. Ten minutes later he jumped off the platform onto Queens Boulevard and died there. It was probably about the time we were pulling into Queensboro Plaza and I was trying to decide if the kid and I needed to get off the train because she was shrieking, an ear-shattering shriek, loud and sustained, that came out of nowhere except for the morning crankiness that sometimes takes over.

Now we're at the end of the day; the New York Post reporters are gathered on the street eating potato chips waiting to take photos of the family coming into or going out of the building, because someone has to show up to clean the place up and make sense of what happened. One murder, one suicide, one kid who's not aware of this or that, and me, still not understanding the chasm between me and my neighbor as I watched him making his way out of the realm of human relation.

A few photos here from the Old Manse in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday. We've moved out, moved on, are moving on up to a new apartment in Jackson Heights, but our hearts will forever be in the Catskills. 

Now we say farewell and thank you to that small piece of land and little bit of paradise and musty mousey cabin in the woods. Thank you Esopus Creek for quiet fishing interludes as dusk descended and the trout were jumping and Herb the heron was soaring overhead. Thank you little patch of lawn for the opportunity to watch wild turkeys turkey-dancing their way into the woods behind the house. Thank you beech trees, sugar maples, red maples, hop hornbeams, shagbark hickories, cherries, black oaks, red oaks, hemlocks, white pines, and sweet birches for being yourselves looming all around. Thank you Mount Tremper neighbors for being friendly country advocates rather than noisy city adversaries. Thank you rolling hilly roads (Wittenberg, Old Wittenberg, Winne, Sickler, Mount Pleasant, Upper Ohayo Mountain, and Riseley) for being the best marathon training course in the universe complete with romping deer, crispy red and gold foliage, and wild grapes. Thank you bears for scaring us. Thank you Emerson Spa for being so weird and having hot water in winter and martinis year-round. Thank you rare spice bush next to the ancient red maple in the far corner of the back yard for being scented as you were. Thank you tipped tree for the tree of life root system awe. Thank you cabbage whites and swallowtails for dilly-dallying around the deptford pinks, the soapwort, the joe-pye-weed, the bergamot, and the chickory. Thank you agile garlic mustard of May who made an appearance in a poem and on a plate. Thank you Jotul woodburning stove for crackling through the midnight hour while ice crept on the windows. We shall return, sometime, as soon as possible, to hug all the trees in our forest.

The last week has been filled with more questions than answers. Partly this is because every other word out of the kid's mouth is "What?" Not as in "I didn't hear you." but as in "Repeat the sentence you just said in images and ideas that I understand." Meanwhile I've been volleying lots of whats to our Central Park Forest Nursery Moms and Dads (that motley crew of parents who continue to challenge all of my ideas about food-eating, kid-raising, and dentistry and medicine.)

The big "what" last week was food coloring. It's not like we didn't know about the problems with food coloring (when the Beast was little we threw out all the pink baby tylenol and went with the undyed stuff). (Yes, I know, if we had been really hip back then we wouldn't have given her Tylenol at all for those baby fevers.) Now as summer rolls around, so does the ice cream truck. Our kid particularly loves the blue and red Spiderman ice cream pops.  And what's not to like? They have bubble gum eyes. (And yes, I loved blue and orange Superman ice cream as a kid.) But sadly Red # 40 is not really good for humans. (The blue dye is equally sucky— more on this later.) As for Red #40, even the FDA has admitted that it exacerbates emotional disorders (increases ADHD responses) and is potentially carcinogenic (at least in lab animals). It's not used in Europe (they mostly go with beet coloring). But how to get our little lab animal away from the Spiderman ice cream that we've always said yes to? (At Forest Nursery we've been talking about the ongoing process of "re-evaluating our choices".)  We had some luck last week on the ice cream front, switching to a vanilla-based cone. It still has the same old sugar and god knows what other chemicals, but it feels like a good gradual change. As for me, I'm trying to temper my love for snow cones and M&Ms. I can't exactly tell the kid I don't want her eating food dyes when I'm wolfing them down on the side. 

The other big what for the week has to do with kid spoilage. Will our kid spoil because of our parenting techniques (or lack of them)? This is the question. It came up first when the kid was nine months old and we went to a pediatrician who suggested we sleep train.  She said "It's your choice. You can have a princess or a tyrant." We didn't sleep train of course (and promptly switched pediatricians). Fast-forward to life with a three year old. Princess? Tyrant? Both, of course. And this seems to be what three is all about— the fierceness of "yes, I am lovely and kind and bestow my blessing upon all of the stuffed animals of my kingdom" and the rage of "yes, you will understand that I need ice cream and that you must buy it for me now." It has not been my habit as a mom to call in the UN or NATO or even to issue any statements of censure against our tyrant. It's rare for me to make an executive decision with my kid. (Sometimes I slather her shoulders with sun screen against her will.) And I do sometimes voice my humble opinion ("you should eat some lunch before you have ice cream" or "I'd prefer that we didn't start the day with ice cream" or more recently "I'd like to try the ice cream that is not bright red because the bright red ice cream has artificial food dyes in it.") Sometimes we bicker, sometimes we come to a compromise, and sometimes we get the ice cream because it seems really important to the kid. There's a part of us (the social superego part) that whispers "you are totally going to screw up your kid" and there's another part that says "this is how I want to raise my kid." What? (As the kid says.) My intuition as a mom is to form a certain kind of companionship with my kid— it's a companionship that allows for us to both experiment and make decisions and make mistakes and even sometimes get stomach aches from eating too much ice cream. It's true I envy moms whose three-year-old kids have never eaten sugar.  It's true I strive for an all organic kitchen (and it's true that the kid doesn't eat packaged food at home and doesn't have sugar in her real meal food ever). But we have these glitches that have to do with entering the world, exploring it, and figuring it out together. It's not a particularly unique idea. Any unschooler can tell you that this is part and parcel of the radical unschooling philosophy. For me, it has a little bit to do with anarchy and a little bit to do with democracy.  Ultimately I would like my kid to make decisions for herself about the value and comfort related to eating well, cleaning the house, and learning, loving, and working.

Hashing this over with my fellow-moms this week I wondered "will my kid be spoiled?" "will she not be able to negotiate the world?" My instinct again is that she'll probably be just fine. I get little inklings here and there of the person she's becoming. She doesn't yet say thank you when a store clerk gives her a treat, but we have our moments here at home where I put a plate of food down in front of her and she says with genuine unprompted enthusiasm "oh, thanks mom." We don't expect her to help with housework or cooking, but she loves to sweep, organizes her toys (into weird color coded rows with all the dinosaurs facing the princesses), and the other day she made us some lasagna (kale, feta cheese, milk, and cashew lasagna). My guess is that as she gets older she'll continue to take part in household rituals in new and more complex ways.

I fall back on Marx's statement "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." (This is also very helpful in marriage I think where it just doesn't make sense to always demand a fifty-fifty split of any responsibility— we all have different needs and abilities from week to week.) Do I envy my friends who are building more structured households with their kids? Sometimes. Yes. There's also a part of me that loves little charts with stars for good performance (I make those for myself). When I was a kid, I marveled at family scenes that ran smoothly with father-and-mother-know-best parents. I loved those television shows like Little House on the Prairie where there was some order to the universe and kids had chores. There's a part of me that would like to train my kid to be a particular person. Of course my influence on her looms large anyway, and my prejudices flow into her life whether I like it or not. But my goal is to see who she becomes with as little traditional parental intervention as possible. As she says, "Be yourself!"

Today's rant is pretty simple. I spend four hours in the park with my kid and she's tired and cranky and my back hurts from lugging around kid food, water bottle, kid. We wait for the M1 bus on Fifth Avenue. When we try to get on, the bus driver says "What happened to that child's clothes?" (She's wearing her dress native style, tied around her waist, because she doesn't like the dress and it's the only compromise we could come to.) He says "You can't ride the bus." So the mom and kid can't ride the bus because the three-year-old is showing her boobs. (If you want to call them "boobs" on a three-year-old.) 

The kid and I come to another arrangement (she'll wear the dress in a more standard fashion, but without the straps up, because they are itchy.) So the dress is on, but it's below the "cleavage line". (If you want to call it a "cleavage line" on a three year old.)

We walk down Fifth Avenue and several people comment that her cleavage is showing. We get on the subway at 59th Street and while we're on the train a woman comes up to me and says "her dress is low."  I say, "She likes it that way" and the woman gives me an odd look. 

Can I say What The F*** now? The kid is three. It's a hot day. We're trying to get home. Why is it everyone's business to take issue with her bra line? (If you can call it a bra line on a three-year-old.) Thank you weird repressed puritans of New York for making the afternoon so difficult.

Coming next week: Four thumbs down on underwear, winter hats, Jesus, and school. 

It's summer here, humid with thunderstorms. The fan is on, which makes me think of that great John Godfrey line "Like Mick Jagger, I turn on my fans".  It was eighteen years ago that I moved to the Lower East Side (East 6th Street between A and B, to be specific). We had a fan in that apartment. It filtered in the musty cat-piss scent of early June’s Tree of Heaven saplings springing up in the back alley.  I lived with my friend Dave and thousands of roaches, and O.J. Simpson was on t.v. driving around the Los Angeles freeway in his white Ford Bronco.  Every night I got a slice of pizza for $1.25 and went to Kim's video on Avenue A to pick out a Fellini movie. It was a steamy Italian summer. Those were the good old days. Were they?  Probably not. Some things were good. The rents were cheap, but of course they seemed really expensive. Pizza seemed cheap and was cheap. Falafel too.

There are these heyday moments in life. In 1986, sophomore year of college in Buffalo, I met a bunch of cool twenty-year-olds. Green, New Left, queer/lesbian/straight, feminist, punk, folk, eco-conscious recycling freaks and food-coop-shoppers. We all moved into a big place on the North Side of town at 67 Englewood Avenue and started a sprawling chaotic cooperative community soon to be called “Love House”. Phil lined the floor of his room with leaves and welcomed in spiders, Tae-Wol lined the attic with red carpet and entertained interesting boys, Mr. Kim cooked ox tail soup in the kitchen, Julie and Aaron tripped on acid and stared at a light bulb through a spaghetti strainer, Lori and Kim raged against the patriarchy, we made tie-dye tee shirts in the basement and sold them to pay the rent. I learned about the finer pleasures of life: cashew butter, darjeeling tea, French press coffee, hashish, vegetarian Indian buffet, and magic mushrooms. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll (the Smiths, the Cocteau Twins, Jonathan Richman, and Bob Dylan) were themes of the place, but all kinds of things happened: we hosted poetry readings and edited a magazine called No Trees (published by the Love House Press Collective). On one occasion an ancient friend of Jack Kerouac's named John Montgomery came through town and we lured him to the attic to recite his verse. Discussions of politics inevitably turned into organizing meetings, which turned into direct actions. We locked horns with the college republicans, kept the CIA from recruiting on campus, took over the president’s office to protest the university’s Star Wars-related research projects, held a three day fast in solidarity with the Sandinistas, bused down to Washington to march on the Pentagon. William Blake, Emma Goldman, and Bob Marley were our heroes. Life was good. And then eventually it all fell apart. We squabbled over the virtues and vices of pornography, tofu, and revolutionary violence. The rent didn’t get paid. We stopped sharing food. Some from the group fled for San Francisco. Others stayed on and went to graduate school. Everyone turned out okay in the end (a bunch of lawyers, one librarian, one poet, one nurse, and a queer city council person).

I never thought it would be possible to again have that feeling of belonging and a shared “ethos” like they say. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, really. In New York City the rents are high, everyone works a lot, and people are focused on “making it” in some field or another.  And then once a kid comes along you’re lucky if you have the energy to get down the block to socialize with the Pakistani cashiers at the 99 Cent Store.  For Thomas and I, the first two years of kid-raising were bright with the joy of the kid and dark with the emptiness of the world around us. Every instinct we had about becoming a family was impinged upon by pediatricians, friends, neighbors, online mom groups, and even people passing on the street (“put a hat on that baby”).  We felt more alone than we ever had, and New York was already a pretty lonely place. 

Then the unthinkable happened. Back in September, after Bea got tossed from her preschool Waldorf-modeled Central Park-based outdoor nursery group (dress code violation), my first instinct was to buy her an ice cream and head to the Museum of Natural History to see the dinosaurs. Within a couple hours I realized that we had to continue our relationship with Central Park, with or without the acorn-worshipping Waldorfians. (I had had just about enough of Grandfather Gnome anyway.)  So I asked around and lucked into the right places (the New York City Attachment Parenting group, a couple unschooling email lists, and the Queens homeschooling community). On our first day out in the park there were a dozen or more families with toddlers and babies. Within a month there were fifty people on our mailing list. By mid-winter the group had shrunk to thirty, with a core group of about a dozen moms and dads who were very serious about having fun with their kids in all kinds of weather even if it meant spending an hour plus on the subway with a hyper toddler. It’s taken months for me to permit myself to believe that there is room for ethical communal social life in New York City in the 21^st Century. For the last seven months our free range forest nursery group has gathered every week (indeed three days a week), and the kids are now comrades who cross the rocky ledges of Central Park like a herd of wild mountain goats.  Sex, drugs, and rock and roll have become co-sleeping, breast-feeding, and running with sticks. Shoes are optional, clothing is optional, raw carrots, raw milk, and seaweed are staples. In a great turn of events, every instinct I’ve had about child-raising has been confirmed. It’s okay for me to really want to spend entire days (and nights) with my kid by my side.  I don’t have to hide the fact that we’re breastfeeding past the age of three. I can say “I didn’t sleep last night” without hearing the tedious return “You need to sleep-train”. I don’t have to bow to any social pressure to tell my kid to share or to say thank you.  No one looks at me in slack-jawed disbelief when I say I’m not sending my kid to school.  The conversation is not “how many vaccinations did you do at once?” but “are you going to do any vaccinations?” Weekday meetings now extend to weekend camping trips and cross-borough dinner gatherings and child care swaps and online recipe exchanges and chance meetings at secret Amish raw milk delivery sites. The kids make it clear that they’re quite capable of forging hiking routes, inventing games, sorting out squabbles (usually), and thriving under the old Crowleyan maxim “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” As for the parents, we now have a sanctuary where we can sit in the grass peeling apples with Buck knives removed from the damning mainstream accusation of “extreme” child-raising.  Call me extreme, but I’m grateful that my kid has a place in a community where she can become herself in relation to a bunch of other kids, and adults, and red-bellied woodpeckers, who are all also becoming themselves out under the oak trees.