Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Last night I put away the china. It took hours because in my years I have accumulated a hefty haul of the good stuff. And I was happy to do this because I found myself a lovely new china cabinet, actually quite old, at an antique auction that, for the first time in my entire adulthood, actually holds every single dish and platter and bowl and egg cup. Every single piece, which is to say that this is one gigantic old cabinet, moved to its new home in the back of a truck (hired via an app recommended by a dear friend who did not, understandably, want to move said cabinet herself) marked in grease paint: For Sale, $600 OBO. I'll dance around the price difference of cabinet and truck and note that I was noticeably nervous during the entire six block journey home (but happy to report that driver and helper were in fact most helpful and that we all arrived home safely scratch free).  But that is another story; this is the story of the contents, and not the cabinet.

My great aunt Margaret's china, a delicate old ivory pattern, fills most of my shelves . I have full place settings for at least 14, plus assorted creamers and soup tureens and finger bowls. My cousin has an equal amount of the same pattern; pooling our resources we could host a formal dinner for an entire classroom of kindergartners. I doubt we will do that, but we could.

Additionally I have 15 place settings of an old English china that I bought years ago at, oh dear, another antique auction (I'm drawn) because I liked it, and it reminded me very much of my grandmothers pattern, Autumn by Lenox. She collected and added to the pieces given to her at her wedding so that when it was time to share she had enough to stock the cabinets of several granddaughters. Many happy family dinners were served, and spilled, on those beautiful old plates. I trust that the tradition continues. My inheritance on the grandmother dining front came in the form of utensil, not dish, and for that I am quite pleased. But the china, and the vast quantity of it, always intrigued me. It was there for Sunday dinner, and Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, but when else was it dirtied? What would I do with all these dishes? I was barely beyond microwave popcorn for dinner when she explained, "my dear, you have china so that when your husband brings home business associates you can serve a proper meal for them". She was serious, I'm not kidding.

You're thinking about all those last minute phone calls when Darren called Sam to tell her that he and Larry were on their way with very important clients, right? And of course then Endora appeared with Uncle Arthur just as Sam pulled out a pork roast and Tabitha made a circus tent with baby elephants appear on the front lawn, and Mrs. Kravitz ran to tell her husband about all she saw just as Larry and Darren pulled up with their guests and... yes, I know, me too. But Jack has not once called late in the day to tell me that he was on the way with Sean and very important clients, and it turns out that Jack is not the only one with a job so there's that poop in the oatmeal.

Unwrapping years and years of bubble wrap and placing my precious pieces in their new home I made a decision. We will host a last minute but carefully planned dinner. There will be no very important clients (my clients tend to be, average, about 10 years old) nor baby elephants but there will be colleagues and conversation and wine and lovely dishes. Jack is none to certain about this mixing of bankers and teachers but I'm confident we can pull it off. Do you work with either one of us? Want to come to dinner? Mimi would be so pleased.

The Sky is Falling

On Saturday I broke a plate. Nothing valuable, but a nice plate, one we liked. About one hour later I broke an old tile, acquired from my post college days at Laura Ashley, now used as a trivet. But we knew, that wasn't bad luck. Not when Friday night we walked into this,

which, when you come home to find your living room ceiling on your living room floor, gives you a little perspective on the subject of bad luck.

Kate was the first one in, "um Mom...Dad! What happened?".

What was once our lovely living room in our little Michigan home was now a soggy mess of drywall, standing water and yuck. We all stood and stared until I panicked and realized that, like the Titanic, this ship was not yet sunk. Jack just stared.

What we found was an overflowing toilet in an upstairs bath, one that had been allowed to gurgle over for the two weeks that we were away. In the coldest  winter that I can remember, we were flooded not by snow but by toilet. So fitting.

Thankfully we are quite deep in architect friends, one by one they were called, messaged and mailed, until one, home on Friday night with sick children said yes, yes we could stay. No Chicken Little, the sky was not falling, you are safe upstairs. When I woke up Saturday morning in my bed on the second floor I believed him.

The experts came on Saturday. A total loss we were told, everything in the room destroyed.

On the inherited table we had painted white, a pile of books meant for sharing: a guest book, a gift from my friend Brenda on her first visit; the Aspen book, a nod to my childhood summers, given to me by my oldest friend in the world, who spent those summers with me; a book of pictures from our trip to France last summer; a book of alliterations made by Mary and Kate's class, purchased as a school fundraiser, all soaked and ruined. Two decorating books, now needed more than ever, full of water.

The furniture, not ours long enough to develop emotional attachments, all destroyed. The one exception, a wonderful old trunk we found last summer at a sale in an abandoned church, once an antique store that hadn't been open in years. The contents, papers and photographs belonging to the previous owner, ironically safely housed in a waterproof plastic tub in the basement, waiting for a rainy day for me to sort and discover. The trunk now a warped disaster, having lived for so long to be felled by a over eager toilet.

Two rugs, one easy to replace, the other belonging once to my father, a nasty old field blanket used to cover the ground on many a Boy Scout camping trip, worth saving. It will be cleaned and dried, and loved again, now with the wear of not just my father but of this family also.

Two paintings on the walls, plus one large photograph of the girls, all spared thanks to their location on the dry side of the room. But the pictures, those kept in the wooden box Uncle Kenny gave me, pictures from every point in our lives, ones that I wander through and love to share, all sitting in water. Jack and I were up too late, peeling them from one another, covering sheets of newspaper with pictures taken by cameras that required film, pictures I have been meaning to scan for years but never did.

The ceiling can be rebuilt, the walls can be saved. All the original trim and details still in place; the one great loss, so difficult to replace, these 130 year old pine floors. They are soaked and now warping, deep valleys appearing all over the room as they dry. We'd like to save what we can, have a table made from those planks that are salvageable. Someday I hope to have floors so clean you could eat off them, at a table, in the dining room.
  
 
By Saturday night we had looked at this long enough, the incessant hum and droll of the fans and dehumidifiers too loud to enjoy the Olympic ice skating showing in the next room. We went out to dinner. Jack pulled into the roundabout, and immediately red flashing lights appeared behind us. The State Trooper inspected the car thoroughly and then, after asking for Jack's license, announced that we had a headlight out. A headlight out? That we can fix, we can deal with that kind of bad luck.

Home, Where I Want To Be

After almost eight hours of driving, through Missouri and Illinois, eight hours of distance from a place that I had once called home, the Chicago skyline appeared on the horizon.

"First one to see the Sears Tower gets a kiss from Mom!", and the girls laughed, being similarly motivated to orient themselves one week earlier by spying Royals Stadium on the outskirts of Kansas City.

The music that had been looping through the CD player for hours was now suddenly very clear, the voices from the back seat singing along with Lucy Kaplansky,  "this is home, where I want to be" and I realized; somewhere several hours back we started driving towards, rather than away from, home.

Welcome home Chicago.

Full House

"Where will we all sit?"

Just two days before the question was "will there be light?".

While Thanksgiving dinner by candlelight might sound appealing, in reality one, in Chicago in 2009, needs light to prepare a Thanksgiving meal for 15 friends and family. Handy Jack thought that more than just light, we needed dining room appropriate light, and so, 36 hours before our first guest arrived, while I was deep into the culinary preparations, he set up a ladder in the middle of our lovely new dining room. That alone was enough to make me drop the turkey, but then he started working. Ceiling fan down, successfully. Chandelier down, successfully. Chandelier up in new dining room, holiday dinner disaster. There were sparks, there was shaking, there were countless phone calls to Bill the architect (who also had decided that the hours leading up to house stuffing dinner parties were just right for major home improvement efforts). Bill's wife told me she knew it was Jack on the phone when she heard her husband say things like "really? smoke? how many sparks? did you shake?". Most of my evening was spent in the basement, flipping the power on and off at the direction of my sister, via telephone from upstairs. Thus, my vision of what was going on above me was limited to Ashley's play by play "uhoh, fire!" and "Jack, JACK, did that burn?". From my post down below there was screaming "MY CHILDREN ARE ASLEEP IN THE NEXT ROOM FOR GOD'S SAKE!".

For five hours Jack labored on, up and down the ladder while I went up and down the stairs, nothing was cooked, save a few quick jolts to my husband, and at the end of the very long night the old place gave up, as did we. Our last effort resulted in no lights at all, a complete blackout, save the hall bath and the kitchen.

Don the electrician was able to come around one the next day. Jack cancelled his afternoon meeting, Ashley arrived to begin the cooking while I picked up last minute items, including the children from school. At home we found light, a beautiful chandelier hung in the dining room, and assurances from Don that Jack had done everything right, old wiring was to blame for our
day before Thanksgiving black out.

Add Don to my list this year, and a husband who tries, and friends who answer the phone late at night, and good friends and family who chose to spend their holidays with us. For all this I am thankful, and for the wonderful new dining room that did in fact fit fifteen.

Lost in Communication

Whose bright idea was this? You see the problem, right? No cord. Nothing to connect these things to anything, no sense of permanence, no responsibility.

Digital Enhanced Cordless Communications technology lets you move freely around your home with long range and amazingly clear sound, allowing you to spend hours, hours upon hours of your free time searching for lost handsets.

We have three of these things. Jack knows where all three are at all times. I spend my days chasing the paging sound about our small apartment, Eleanor Roosevelt cowering from the incessant beep beep beep of the call of the lost phone. Here's where I found one today:


Did you see it? Let's zoom:

Apparently the paging sound is quite muffled and indiscernible when coming from inside the refrigerator. Given that I had already devoted a good deal of time looking for the silly thing I gave up and moved on. I made lunch, in and out of the refrigerator at least three times, the phone sitting smartly next to the milk that I removed and replaced twice. I caught it on the last pass.

Let's leave this one for Super Jack the Telephone Man to find.

Cleaning and Entering

Last night, just as I was dozing off, I heard a sound, a familiar sound coming from what I thought was our kitchen. I sat up and listened, yes, plates, I heard plates hitting plates. I woke up Jack, "I think someone is in our apartment, I heard a sound in the kitchen." Groggy mumblings. "Jack, get up, it sounds like plates, did you hear that?".
He sat up and listened, "yes, right, someone has broken into our apartment to help clean the dishes. I'm certainly not going to disturb them". I went to sleep.

Are We Sinking?

My mother is a hoarder. Her home is full, to the roof, with books and silver and magazines and furniture and antiques and wonderful things and scary things and every kind of thing you could imagine. Every once in a while we go in, make sure she can walk around, and creep out, disturbing nothing. I like to announce, to anyone who might hear, that I am nothing like my mother. And this is true in various respects, but ooh yes we have quite a bit of stuff. Now, I love garbage day. I relish going through things and tossing, making big huge piles of things we have outgrown, outlasted or simply no longer like. But my friend Jeffy, who has known me for a very long time, calls our apartment the Rubik's cube, and that is a teeny bit appropriate. The things that never make it to the toss pile? Books. The husband is convinced that we are sinking further and further into the ground every year, much like the Library of Congress. He seems convinced that one morning, quite soon, we might wake up on top of the lovely French family who lives downstairs. This is, of course, just silly. The Library of Congress has not yet sunk, we are years away from that happening.
Pictured here, the bottom two shelves of a four shelf bookcase in our family room. The lower shelf belongs to the girls: Golden Books on the left, then paperbacks and finally, hardbacks. I love children's books. I buy all the books I remember from my childhood: Frog and Toad, Eloise Wilkin Golden Books, Harry the Dirty Dog, Paddington Bear, Babar, Eloise, Madeline, Lyle the Crocodile...the list is extensive. Then I wander into any of my three favorite bookstores in Chicago (Women and Children First, The Unabridged Bookstore and The Book Cellar) and find that people are still out there writing wonderful children's books. Today, while out shopping for an addition to their dollhouse, a birthday gift, I bought Adele and Simon in America (Barbara McClintock) because they love the original Adele and Simon, and President Pennybaker (Kate Feiffer) because the convention starts today, celebrate the season, cheers!

We've outgrown our book capacity. The shelves in the living room are stacked two deep, the bookcase in the girls room is stuffed and overflowing. I've removed all decorative objects in lieu of books, how terribly utilitarian. Clearly we cannot help my mother, cannot encourage her to "de hoard"; what if she decides to part with some of those books? I would have to take them in and give them a good home. Sorry Mom.