Bouquet of Dill

Some time ago, we had good friends visit from the UK.  One evening, I prepared spanakopita for dinner, following my favourite SBS recipe.  I set out my ingredients — fresh filo, fresh spinach, Bulgarian feta, ricotta, kefalograviera,  spring onions and dill — while  Laurel kept me company.  I think she actually asked me what it was — the bouquet of green on the kitchen bench.  “Dill!” I said.  She told me she had never seen such a large bunch.  When she buys it, it comes as a few sprigs, as it does for me if I buy it at a supermarket.  But if I buy it at Bentleigh Fresh as I usually do, or even at other fresh fruit and vegetable markets nearby,  I get a full bouquet for the price of three sprigs.

Now, every time I make spanakopita, or use dill for any reason, I think of Laurel and Alan.  And when she makes it, she thinks of me, and their visit with us.

But what on earth, I hear you ask, do you do with all the rest of that dill?

I’ll tell you:  I plan menus around it.  So now I make Italian smoked salmon pasta with dill, beetroot and feta dip with dill and maybe I’ll pickle some cucumbers with it.

My beautiful mother-in-law calls me D.I.L.  She says it stands for daughter in law.  Now you see the real reason.

The Positivity Was Depressing

Some of you know that my husband Simon and I still read in bed every morning with our 15 year-old daughter Abby.  We are currently reading Michael Gayle‘s My Legendary Girlfriend which is a hoot.  The protagonist is a 26-year old Will Kelly, a school teacher in Birmingham who is still in love with his first real girlfriend, three years after their break-up.

The thing is, at 26 years old, Will is already bemoaning his age and thinking it’s too late to do what he wants to do with life.  Today, we read a chapter in which he’s having a  phone conversation with the girl who is trying to boost his morale:  “the positivity was depressing,” he shares with us.

Clearly he hasn’t encountered Barbara Sher.  Barbara is the author of, among other books, It’s Only Too Late If You Don’t Start Now, a book which is targeted mostly at people much further down the line, and a big detractor of the powers of positivity.  Which is one of the many reasons we love Barbara.

 

Voting with Your Feet?

You’re at a cafe.  Here in Melbourne, you order a long black or a flat white, a latte or a cappuccino.  You taste it and decide:  It’s bitter.  The milk is burned.  It’s too weak.  It’s too strong. What do you do?

I usually opt to bring it back.  I take the coffee back to the counter and gently but firmly explain what I don’t like about it. Without exception, the shop assistant offers to make me another one or asks if I would prefer something else.

I was talking with one of my Australian friends about this practice recently, who explained that he prefers just not to come back.  We call that “voting with your feet.”

Everything in me bristled.  Voices inside me screamed with righteous anger: “I’m paying $3.50 (or more) for this coffee; I should be able to enjoy it!” “But how is the shopkeeper going to know why they aren’t getting return customers if we don’t tell them?”  Never mind the possibility that other customers might actually like the coffee.

All at once, I saw clear as day my entire experience as an American  — nay, a New Yorker — living in Australia.  The Australian accepts the situation and moves on.  The American sees how things can be improved and demands the change.  Both approaches have merit.

Sure enough, my recent visit to New York showed me that mentality is actually built in to the coffee culture.  There are signs in Starbucks that actually invite you to let staff know if you aren’t happy with your coffee so they can fix it.

It is hardwired in American culture to find ways to improve things. Australia is wired differently.  It’s not that Australians never want to do better, but maybe it’s just not a compulsion.  Can it be that good enough is sometimes good enough?

What do you do if you’re not happy with your coffee or food?  Discuss.

Simply Begin Again

I began Timely Changes  to share what I notice about myself, my family relationships and the world.  At that time I was discovering the benefits of mindfulness practices and meditation for freeing myself from the chains of depression and anxiety.  The blog has been a place for me to record, much more sporadically than I’d like, observations about living and parenting with inner attention in a world where outer is better.

I have kept a journal since I was seven years old.  I’ve written in cardboard spiral notebooks from university bookstores, elegant quilted journals  and fancy diaries in the literary tradition.  But no matter what their format, they now sit in boxes, never read.  Writing itself has been how I even digest life, regardless of who else sees what I put down.  But I want to share with others the way I see the world and hear what they have to say in response.  I want to interact with other bloggers and see what wee can learn from each other.  That’s why I want to blog.

In the coming months, I look forward to writing about:

• being an apprentice in providing pastoral care to hospital patients;
• gains against my adversaries Procrastination and Perfectionism;
• continuing reflections of a New York migrant to Australia;
• observations by a mindful mother of her growing daughter;
• the value of support networks for making life changes.

I’m looking forward to connecting with other bloggers and readers on many topics including but not limited to candid disclosures about:

• spirituality;
• living with health challenges;
• experiences as migrants or refugees and the need for “home”;
• parenting and family life;
• Jewish life;
• the changing experience of women and girls.

My best blogging year would have me blogging regularly, creating stimulating content, marketing my blog to attract subscribers and visitors who comment, return and share my blog with others, cross-posting with other bloggers and exploring monetising one of my blogs.

Nap Time

There is something so much more delicious about a nap in the daytime, when the sun is bright and strong, pressing my eyes closed.  It’s as if the very fact that it is wasteful of sunlight, squandering of time on a perfect afternoon, is what gives it its glory.  Early enough in the afternoon and I can be fairly confident that I’ll wake before the story of the day is fully told, and I can still thumb my nose at effectiveness.  But there is a time when it is too late to nap, when the lazy window is closed and I won’t be able to elude the feeling of being behind.   But for now, I’ll close the curtains on the day’s demands and curl up in its shadows.

The Mind Boggles: Pinball Wizard Meets the Dictionary

I enjoy helping my daughter with her homework. It’s a way of spending time with her, sharing what I know with her,  as well as teaching her some learning strategies.  But, as most parents come to realise, there’s a big difference between helping kids with their homework, and doing it for them.  For instance, she knows better than to ask me how to spell a word,  because the only answer she ever gets, ever has gotten and ever will get is:  “How do you think it is spelled?”  What I hear instead is: “Mum, do you spell [evidence] e-v-i-d-e-n-c-e?”  or at worst “e-v-i-d-e-n-s-e?”  Sometimes I correct her if she doesn’t spell the word right.  Other times, I tell her to look up her spelling of the word in the dictionary and see where it takes her.  No, not the online dictionary, the hardcover one.  Like I grew up doing.

Why? Because I am a hopeless pedant?  Perhaps.  But also because there are some real, if subtle, benefits to using the book.  With both the book and the web dictionaries, if you look up the word “correlate,”  you encounter not only the word “correlate” and its definition as a verb, but you find its definition also as a noun.  You see that the word has derivatives such as “correlation” and “correlational.” You learn that the word originated in the mid-17^th century.  And you encounter words that can be found near the search word.

But when you  look up, say “correlate” in the New Oxford Dictionary of English (a wedding present from a friend of ours), you come across a number of interesting things.  You might notice that there are a great many words beginning with “co” that surround it.  You might begin to wonder what “co” has going for it that it introduces so many words.  You might even just notice that the book itself is very heavy [roughly 3 kilos] and contains 2176 pages and a very many words, each of which is available for use, at no additional charge.

Searching through the pages of a dictionary forces us to rehearse the alphabet – not just in searching for the first letter of a word, but in the order of the subsequent letters as well.  We are forced to actually scan many other words before settling on our target.  By not arriving immediately at an answer, we allow serendipity to enter into the game;  how many times have you looked up a word and followed your eyes along to the meaning of another word they stumbled upon along the way?

Speaking of games, our family loves to play Boggle which allows players to search for words among a collection of random letters.  One of the great features of the game is that, unlike a printed word search, there is no specified list to find.  As a result, you can bump into a series of letters that be a word, that can be made plural if you can connect it to an ‘s’, or that can also be made into another form.

I will hand it to Dictionary.com for including many valuable features.  It  includes a separate list of “nearby words” you would encounter before or after yours.  It also shows sample sentences that demonstrate how the word is used.  It includes synonyms, some word origin and history, as well as a button for hearing how the word is pronounced.  Also on offer is the ingenious  “Visual Thesaurus,” that shows  a map of your target word and its synonyms,  and a game that challenges a user to identify the correct definition of words found on standardised tests.  But your eyes will also have to fight their way through all these features as well as a dizzying array of animated ads, banners, social media gadgets and games to reach the definition you’ve set out to find.

Take pity on our children.  Their developing brains and emerging minds are bounced around like pinballs, sprung between bumpers and shooters of sights and sounds.  We need to help train our children, their minds and personalities,  to take things one step at a time, to accept learning as a process, to follow their noses, but not to be lured off anywhere someone else wants them to go.  Let’s help them to focus.  They will have the rest of their lives to tap, swipe, click and surf.

Taking Walnut to Allnut

I’ve been trying to get back on my bike again.  This might seem insignificant, except that, until last week, the last time I’d ridden it, I spent the next three months in a cast and a moon boot.  It took so little to knock me off that riding my bike seems like a much scarier undertaking than ever before.

But I rode myself, down Walnut Street, over to Allnut Park where the City of Glen Eira Party in the Park was in full swing, complete with Pet Expo, rides, multi-ethnic foods, face painting, and stalls representing all kinds of animal related organisations, as well as the Scouts, the Guides and others.   I really wished I’d brought Hugo! But I’ll know for next year.

Ladies Who (Make) Lunch

It began when Abby was in kindergarten at West Leederville Primary School (Western Australia).  All the mums were asked to bring in a few pieces of fruit for the teachers to cut up and share among the kids.  Mostly, it was apples, pear, oranges and bananas.  But not yours truly.

No, I sent Abby to school with Mangosteen, dragonfruit, starfruit and kiwis, to make sure the kids were tasting the wonders of Au stralasia.  Unbeknownst to me, there was another mum on the same mission.  She was to become one of my best friends. It turned out that many of the kids didn’t even know nectarines, peaches and plums, let alone the exotic fruits we were sending in.

But I’ve also noticed that I give Abby different lunches than the other kids get — healthy lunches that she really enjoys.  I’ve decided to share them every so often, in case they offer parents any new ideas for school lunches.  Let me know if you have any good lunch tricks up your sleeve.

So, what’s in the box?

• Two kiwis with kiwi spoon;
• a mandarin, snap peas and mini corn;
• a nut and fruit bar from Oasis (http://oasisbakery.com.au/);
• a chicken salad wrap;
• and a box of almonds and dried cranberries (also from Oasis but also available in supermarkets)

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Miscellaneous Blogging

Over the weekend, I participated in a blogging workshop at Writers Victoria taught by Karen Andrews, the Miscellaneous Mum — developing different types of content, defining an audience, search engine optimisation, marketing, monetisation, content curation (repurposing) and more.

Not only did she cover a lot of ground, but the other participants are doing great work as well.  Take Colleen, of 15 Trees.  Colleen’s mission is to reduce our carbon footprint by getting all of us to plant trees, or at least to support tree-planting through her work and the work of her affiliates, such as Planet Ark’s National Tree Day.

The first post I saw in Colleen’s blog touches on a subject near and dear to my heart:  the importance, and relative absence, of outdoor and unstructured play in the lives of our children.  I’ll take this up more in another post, but this is an area where I am proud of how Simon and I have structured our family life:  Abby has been engaged in nature play all her life. Our involvement with the WA Family Bush Walkers has meant that she’s enjoyed camping, bush walking and  all the associated mucking around since she was four years old.   It has also meant that, even as an only child, she had kids with whom she regularly climbed trees, played in mud, fondled leeches, toasted marshmallows and climbed mountains.   All children are entitled to such a childhood.  

Ear-ringing in the New Year

Abby has been bugging me since she was seven or eight to let her get her ears pierced.   Other girls had them; why couldn’t she?  I was already used to doing things differently from many of the families in our neighbourhood, but I explained my reason the best I could:  there were stages of growing up and there was no need to rush through them. For me, although clearly not for all, earrings symbolised a next stage in feminine sexuality.  It could wait.  When could she do it? she would ask.  There was already a built-in coming-of-age ritual:  I decided that she could do when she became bat mitzvah (daughter of the commandment) at 12.

Well, that seemed simple enough at the time.  Then we moved from the traditional community in Perth to Melbourne and found ourselves a home in the Progressive Jewish community where boys and girls both are deemed to become bnei mitzvah at 13.  Now what?

I hoped she wouldn’t notice.  Who was I kidding?  When the lobbying resumed, I had to think: 12?  or bat mitzvah?

Various developments have conspired to present me with a solution and we agreed that with high school beginnning in a few weeks, it was time.  Strangely, it wasn’t so easy to get it done. Jewellers don’t seem to do it, even though it would seem that they could make money selling earrings that way.  Very few pharmacies do it.  Fewer had anyone available during January.  So, when I found someone yesterday, Simon and I took her  to Bare Beauty salon where Rebecca did the honours.

It was really sweet. Abby beamed with proud excitement as Rebeccah talked her through what to expect.  She had her choice of several rows of studs with different coloured crystals.  I’d brought my first earrings to show her, and she chose the same: classic gold balls.  She looked lovely.

When we left, it was hard to tell who was more excited, Abby or me.  Next stop:  high school.