At the Airport

In older days a man would go from home to market

Seated on a trotting horse, its hoofs a'clopping

Shod with iron shoes and man in motion tossing,

A noble beast with which to make one's stopping.

But I press my own feet upon the faded carpet

And make my journey in a metal flying cage

And wonder whether any soul could make a rhyme

While going on his travels in the airplane age

Curious James Visits the RPO

This is James. He lived with his Mommy and his Daddy. He was a good little boy, but always very curious.

One day his Daddy had a surprise for him. "James, today I am going to play a concert with the RPO, and I would like you to come with me and listen."

James had never been to the RPO before, so he was excited to hear the orchestra.

On the way there, he saw many yellow school buses driving along the streets. James was curious what they were doing.

Mommy said "The buses are full of students who are coming to listen to the RPO." James liked to watch the buses, and he pointed at each one.

When Daddy drove to the parking garage, the car broke down again! James was not curious about this, because that's what Daddy's car is supposed to do.

As Mommy and Daddy walked with James inside the theater, James could hear the noises of the orchestra warming up onstage. Somewhere there was a loud trombone playing. James was curious. Could he make loud noises too?

Once they climbed up to their seats, James saw how very full the theater was. There were so many children there to listen to the concert, and every one of them was being loud! James' seat was up very high, even higher than a monkey can climb, and yet still there was a big chandelier over everyone's heads. James was scared.

The orchestra began playing their music, but James did not watch or listen. He snuggled close to Mommy and tried not to think about the loud noises or how high he was. Mommy told James to look at the conductor, but James remembered what Daddy always said: "Don't watch the conductor or else you'll screw up."

After the concert was over, Mommy and Daddy took James out to Wegmans, where he got to eat a cookie.

"You did a good job behaving at the orchestra concert, James," said Daddy "and even though the other kids were noisy, you were completely silent. Thanks to you, the concert was a success!"

James was so happy he asked for another cookie.

An Update

Of course I'm back to write about how the pizza turned out. But first, here's how the "ginky" stalemate turned out.

As I mentioned earlier, James staged a standoff when he woke up from his nap this afternoon by refusing to leave the neutral territory of his crib because it would mean surrendering his binky (or as he calls it, "ginky") for the very last time. He woke up at 3:30 at sat there for an hour, staring into space and refusing all offers of George books and animal crackers. I would peek in on him periodically and confirm that he hadn't violated the neutral boundaries of his bed. I used the time to write my first blog of the day, and to make pizza dough in the bread machine. Anyone who follows my blog knows that I don't have much luck with cooking ventures, so I was very careful to follow the recipe exactly. At 4:30 I looked in again and he was sitting in the same position, but with a basketball under his right arm.

"James," I asked "did you get out of bed."

He looked up at me with an expression of profound guilt and whispered through his binky "...no..."

He was out of bed and the binky surrendered shortly thereafter.

I wasn't looking forward to taking the binky away tonight. It doesn't really bother me, and I thought it was a bit of a raw deal that I should be the one to enforce the policy on a night when J was going to be away. It's been a long time, though, since I've had to deal with any major tantrums, and J generally has to be the disciplinarian while I waltz in at the end of the day with treats and retain Most Favored Parent status. I asked "Is this the right night to be doing this?" but in the end I agreed to be the one who would suffer James' displeasure and take the binky away.

Once he gave the binky up I attempted to do my practicing for the day, which was spectacularly unsuccessful. Between James knocking over all of the music on my stand twice and insisting that he play along with his own trumpet ("I wanna practice TOO!") I didn't get much done. Oh, well. It's hard to practice and be the sole childwatcher at the same time. I had a student coming at 6, so I wanted to make sure that I could time my practicing, dinner prep, and the necessary cleanup all right. We read a few books while I took breaks, and I even got a big container of pizza sauce made. I was practicing again when James came in with J's recipe box and dumped the entire stack of index cards onto the floor, after which he began sorting through the brightly colored green ones.

Oh well, I thought, I'll have to clean that up afterwards. A few minutes later, he came up to me and tugged my arm. "Daddy, wanna make GOOkies." And sure enough, he had the recipe card for chocolate chip cookies. I'm not quite sure how he did that. Maybe he learned to read while he was in the tent.

Just then the timer went off for the pizza dough, and I went to check the bread machine. This is what I found.

I have no idea how a recipe so closely followed could turn out quite badly, but if we've learned anything in this blog over the years, it is certain that I am completely incapable of making a pizza.

I decided to order a pizza and wings. I would have $25 coming in from my student and I had coupons. I printed a coupon off, and told J what I was going to do. It was now nearly 6:00, and my student was going to be arriving soon. I needed to clean up, get the pizza ordered as close to 6 as possible (so that it would still be hot when we picked it up after 6:30) and get the tent torn down. James protested the tent going down, but when he laid down in the middle of it I just kept on taking the tents down, and I think he could tell that I meant business.

I called Pontillo's at 5:50 and ordered a large cheese pizza and a dozen wings, and they said it would be about 25 minutes. I told them they could hold off on putting that in since I couldn't pick it up till 6:35. Then I stopped, thought for a moment, and looked at the calendar on the white board. My student wasn't coming at 6, they were coming at 6:30.

"Hello, this is Pontillo's Brighton."

"Hi, I called just a second ago and ordered a large pizza and asked you to wait to put it in?"

"Yes?"

"Sorry, please put that in as soon as possible. Can it still be ready in 25 minutes?"

"Yeah, that's no problem. I'll have them get started on it."

I figured that since it was less than a block away, I could get down there with James and at least get him set up with some dinner before my student got there at 6:30, even if I had to wait until after the lesson to eat. He certainly wasn't going to make it much longer before he needed dinner, and I didn't want to have to go out again once it was dark and freezing out.

We finished cleaning up the living room, and at 6:10 we put on shoes and coat and made our way out to the car. The traffic where we live is really terrible from 5-7 pm every day, and it took us about 5 minutes just to get halfway up the block to where the pizza place is. It's easy walking distance, but I didn't think I could carry back a pizza and James and make it back in time for the lesson.

We went into the store and I told them I was there for a pick-up. They asked for my name, and the clerk said he didn't have anything under Roy. They asked for my phone number, and they didn't have anything under that either. They asked whether I'd called the right location, and I confirmed that I'd called the Brighton location on Monroe Avenue. They asked what I'd ordered and I told them I had a coupon for a large cheese pizza and a dozen wings.

"We don't sell wings by the dozen."

"No, I have it on the coupon right here."

I pulled out the Pontillo's coupon. And at that exact moment I realized I was in a Salvatore's.

It was now 6:25, and James and I raced back to the car to drive home, him begging the entire way "Daddy, I wanna EAT. Wanna EAT, Daddy. Wanna EAT."

We got into the house about 30 seconds before my student, and I was just finishing up a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for James when they came in the door. James got it all over his face and talked animatedly to my student's father (mostly about Curious George) while my student played duets, and then I felt the back of my chair being pushed repeatedly. I waited for my student to finish his etude, excused myself, and put on Curious George Christmas on the laptop in James' bedroom. I heard him laughing a few times, but he didn't come out and bother my student's father anymore. (He'd wanted him to come back to his bedroom and read George books while they were at the table.)

When my student left, I finally had the $25 in my pocket and the coupon ready, and James and I put on shoes and coats again and drove down to the 12 Corner Plaza in Brighton, to get our pizza from Pontillo's. I was sure I remembered where it was, so I didn't get directions before we left. We turned around once, and then turned around twice, and then I looked up direction on my phone. The directions led us to a pizza place, but it wasn't Pontillo's. At 7:35 we finally showed up at Pontillo's, picked up our pizza, and drove home.

James read a George book to himself at the table while we ate, and I didn't even try to take it away. That pizza was DELICIOUS.

At 8:00, I let him finish watching the last 10 minutes of Curious George Christmas and sat with him beside his bed as he sang along with the songs. We changed his diaper, brushed teeth, and he got into bed. And then the maelstrom hit.

I WAN' GINKY!!! I WAN' GINKY!!!

"No, James, tonight you're going to be a big boy and sleep without your binky, just like we talked about earlier."

"NO, GINKY!!! I WAN' GINKY!!!"

It was maybe 10 minutes of this before J arrived back from work. She listened in the hall for a few seconds, then shook her head and said "Are we sure this is the right night to do this?" I don't remember quite what I said to that, but the long and the short of it is that James is sleeping peacefully with his binky, we are all full of pizza, and we now know that it is a Salvatore's, and not a Pontillo's across the road from us.

And I still am yet to successfully make a pizza on my own.

The Tent

The tent is up today, much to James' delight. When we put it up two days ago he was cautious and cranky-looking. I'd arrived home from work about an hour earlier carrying a bag full of hot dogs, buns, s'more materials, and then the tent bag. The tent had lain forgotten in our storage unit for months, packed away in an inaccessible cranny as the solution to the problem of "what can I throw back in this unreachable hole that I know we aren't likely to need for the entire time our residence in Brighton?" The tent was buried before that under mounds of boxes in the laundry room in Spencerport, and in the basement at St. Vivian's before that.

The tent was originally a gift from the former head of the Roberts music department. A decidedly single and pessimistic woman, she'd given it to us on our wedding day so that "we'd at least never be completely homeless." It was quite touching that she came, actually, although the seven hour trip to our wedding and back again has become a legendary tale of patience to the friend of ours who shared her car. Her left-handed blessing has been a reminder from time to time of just how good we have it. Going on seven years married we've always had jobs, and we're going on our fourth year now of making a comfortable living doing nothing except performing and teaching. Today has been a day when I've been a little blue about practicing and paying bills and taking auditions, and it's good to have a visible reminder in the living room that we've actually done a pretty good job of music as a career, at least so far.

REAL LIFE UPDATE:
I was writing this blog in the living room when I heard James bounce up from his nap and pitter-patter into the living room, asking through the binky in his mouth to "read oo-ah." He's been told several times today that the age of the binky is now drawn to an end, and this will be his first night sleeping without it. When I told him that we could read oo-ah when gave me the binky, he retreated back to his room and got into his bed again. That was 30 minutes ago. He's been sitting back there the entire time, looking straight ahead, sucking on that binky. I tried to lure him out with animal crackers at one point, but he just said "No, ginky." Maybe he thinks that if he stays in his bed until 7:30 he'll just be able to keep it for another night. It wouldn't be his first use of this tactic, as will be discussed below.

Anyhow, J remembers that we set up the tent once in North Carolina, but I have no memory of this. My first memory of the tent is the summer that we lived with my parents. (Yes, we are very successful musicians.) We took the tent back to Grandpa's pond and camped out with Lux, Calvus, and Martha. Most of my childhood camping experiences were with Pax, and they never really involved setting up a tent. We would just drag out a tarp and two sleeping bags, and if it rained (and it always did rain) we would wake up in a start and go flying back to the house, sometimes remembering to bring the sleeping bags. Those were glorious summer nights, with a dark country sky full of bright stars and early mornings with the smell of dewy grass. Also, we would argue a lot.

Arguing was theme for our camping experience at Grandpa's pond. We swore by the end that our tent, which is supposed to be a two-person tent, couldn't be set up without at least three people. Lux ended up being the unlucky third, and I'm afraid we might have scared him out of ever getting married. When we laughed about it later with Mom, she said that painting a room together is the other true test of marriage, which we still haven't attempted.

We couldn't make heads or tails of the instructions, but by trial and error and a certain amount of luck we managed to get the tent erected. We had a lovely campfire that night, put out lanterns, sang songs, and went for some early morning fishing in the canoe. And that was the entire usage of our tent up until this week.

I try to have interesting dates for us every Tuesday evening, and this week it was the camping theme. When J opened the door for me and saw the tent, she exclaimed "Cool, what a great idea!" And the night just got better from there. We woke James up to watch, and the whole process went smoothly. As noted above, he was a little wary of the big canvas on the living room floor at first, and we didn't know what he was thinking when we started to lift up the tent poles. As soon as they went into the air, he took off running for his bedroom and I figured that he was scared again. A minute later he came back carrying all the stuffed animals he could imagine, which he promptly deposited inside the tent before going back for a load of trains and cars.

He played in there all afternoon, fiddled with the lantern, and did constant laps in and out through the entrance. (He made J zip it almost all the way down so that he'd have to crawl through a small hole.) We took a brief break to make dinner, which was roasted andouille sausages (James, these are like hot dogs but way better) sweet potato fries and roasted brussel sprouts. When I got back from a church meeting, we did s'mores in the microwave, and when we put him to sleep in his bed he was completely exhausted from the fun of it all.

J and I slept in the tent on top of our old futon mattress, and while it wasn't quite like waking up to the smell of the dew, we did both sleep very deeply. I had rehearsal the next morning, and received periodic updates about what they were doing together. (Having breakfast in the tent, reading books in the tent, playing iPad in the tent, practicing running in and out of the tent.)

J had to take the tent down to teach a lesson in the afternoon, and James staged his first lie-in protest. He gathered all his animals, spread-eagled on the mattress, and wouldn't move until he was promised that we'd put the tent up again later. We did that night, and it went up in just a few minutes. J remarked that we'd made a lot of progress in our marriage. It was a shame Lux wasn't there to see it.

And now, I need to take the tent down for good. And I need to take the binky away for good. I put some pizza dough in the bread machine for dinner (stay tuned for a follow-up blog entry if that goes as well as it usually does) and I have a student coming in a few hours. James has been awake now for an hour, and all good things must come to an end. But don't worry...if he still doesn't want animal crackers I may offer him a s'more.