Author: NouveauSoileau

Optimistic mother, devoted lover, careful writer

I burn for you

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For every couple, there is a story. Ask your parents, your grandparents, your co-workers, your friends. Whether they’re newly married, long wed, dating around or wistfully remembering relationships of the past, I’ll bet there’s an abundance of good stories about How We Met.

In the case of my parents, we’re back to McDonald’s.

Golden arches!

The time: the late 1950s. The place: Hike’s Point, Louisville, Ky. The cast of characters: my father, the French Fry Boy; my Uncle Bruce, future McDonald’s baron of Northern Kentucky, and my mother, She Who Would be Fixed Up.

Back then, as now, mostly, the house that Kroc built was staffed by young people; in those halcyon days, though, the staff was exclusively teenage boys. You’ve seen the photos, probably; crew-cuts topped by paper hats. Think Goldie Wilson, aspiring mayor, from Back to the Future.

I grew up listening to stories about this old-timey french-fryer my father manned; here no fancy newfangled timer was available to dear old Dad. No, he stationed himself there at this antiquated beast, all senses keenly attuned to the condition of the spuds bathing dangerously in animal fat. Poised and ready to — the moment they reached golden perfection —  snatch them from their tallowized inferno, shake, rattle ‘n’ roll them, ultimately flinging them into the drainer where they would acquire the exact level of salty goodness required to create The Perfect Fry.

Just what Uncle Bruce saw in this man, this teenage potato czar, that made him think my dad would be a good match for his sister, I suppose I’ll never know. Was it the dedication he brought to his fryer, the patience he mustered to turn out the crispy goldens on the basis of his skill and knowledge alone? Was it the fact that he was Catholic, attending Bellarmine College and a serious young man — a perfect match for his bookish and bespeckled sister?

Perhaps one day I’ll grill Mom about it. Grill. Ha!

At any rate, I love to think back on the innocence of the time period, the poodle skirts my mother wore, the appalling shortness of my dad’s crew cut. As I grew older, so McDonald’s grew in popularity and at some point, became firmly entrenched in the American psyche. How lovely it was to know that it was the McDonald’s French fry, that most tasty and desired of treats, that brought my parents together — and me into the world.

What brought my husband, Tras, and I together was a bit more complex, nuanced and sprinkled with, instead of salt, humor and pathos. Not unlike many steam-soaked tales of Southern decadence, or maybe accounts of Southern politics a la All the King’s Men (what is it with me and Robert Penn Warren lately?) our joining can be traced back to the Kentucky State Capitol, election night and live television.

I work at a public television station, and until a couple of years ago, I was a writer and associate producer in our production division. These days I toil in the marketing vineyard, squeezing the juice from our agency and fermenting it, as it were, for the masses.

But then, as was the case for most everyone in Production, Election Night found us in one of a number of locations around the state, up to and including the Capitol itself.

It’s an unlikely setting for the birth of a romance and frankly it took another several years for the two of us to even know that’s where it all began. Because it began not with doe-eyes across the tabulated election returns, but with some coolness and insults and a touch of embarrassment — it’s a story worth telling, considering how low-key and in sync we are with one another today, nearly six years hence.

It’s a story I’ll have to tell you one day. Tomorrow good for you?

There’s really nothing like a good love story. Pioneer Woman wrote one — and it took her 40 chapters and nearly a year to complete. I promise you, this won’t take nearly as long.

Monsters lead such interesting lives

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Sometimes, I still have the dream. You know the one; it’s universal, ubiquitous and unerring in its ability to strike terror into our hearts — even at these great distances of time, geographic location and experience. And although the details vary from person to person, the overall theme is the same: unrelenting terror. For many people it involves underwear, which is the case for me. Standing in front of the class, expected to give an oral report and there you are with your tightie-whities or Monday-Tuesdays visible for all the world to see.

How frequently people mentioning having this dream  is, I think, a clear indication of how very much with us our childhoods always are. During the sunny light of day, our memories and daydreams are of childhood’s carefree existence. No worries. No bills. No drama, no money woes. Very little demands upon your time, apart from an occasional chore or two. Time to dream. All sweetness, peace and light.

More lately, though, instead of  standing stricken before Sister Mary Roberta, the St. John’s third graders, God and everybody, I dream that I am in college. It’s not the usual Final Exam and I Haven’t Gone to a Single Class! type of horror. Instead, mine centers on the terror that is furnishing a dorm room. How is this sectional sofa going to fit in here, for God’s sake? Where am I going to put this king-size sleigh bed? How do you expect me to cook for five people without an oven? It probably says a lot about me that I have this particular fear, but then again I’m also someone who occasionally dreams about vacuuming, or packing a suitcase.

But the point is, our memories surround us, shape us, make us who we are. Occasionally a scene or situation from my childhood will pop up on its own, surprise me, and send me wool-gathering down memory lane. It’s a nice trip.

I grew up in a small Kentucky town; just 2,500 people in Carrollton and what, three times that many in the whole of Carroll County. For us all I think, the places of our childhood are the center of the world — and while I certainly knew about and visited larger cities, they were relegated the periphery. Everything that happened surrounded 315 Ninth Street. It was my world, and that world, truth be told, it was defined, circumscribed and delineated by sidewalks.

Sidewalks. What a thing to catch hold of me, but surprise me a sidewalk did, one afternoon not long ago, as I meandered down the street in my old neighborhood, the house-before-last in which I lived. I’m now in a newer subdivision, but my old neighborhood was more mature, more idiosyncratic. The sidewalks there, like those of my youth, are a patchwork collection of old and gray, new and white, lifted and bumped with tree roots. Sidewalks with character.

Up and down sidewalks such as these we ran, with bare feet, flying to a friend’s house, or walked, poking along on a summer’s day with nothing to do and all day to do it. Three houses down, the sidewalk in front of the Day’s house wasn’t lined off with horizontal lines every three feet or so, like God intended sidewalks, but instead doodled fancifully, like children’s scribble drawings that are then colored in. Interestingly, I never asked, or wondered, really why that patch of sidewalk was different. It just how things were.

So walking along, a few years back, I caught sight of a patch of sidewalk that was fairly unremarkable. In fact, I can’t even say what it looked like, physically, that caused me to return in my memory, barefoot and age 8, on a Ninth Street sidewalk. But return I did, and I could smell the chalk of our hopscotch games, feel the sting of a stubbed toe. It set me to ruminating on how much of my life, back then, was spent walking, squatting, sitting, dreaming on those concrete pathways that adults laid down for ease of walking. But for the young, it was where we lived.

Today, such a visit, even in memory, is a pretty alien experience. It’s like a visit to another country, the country of childhood. Where paintings on your dad’s office wall are scrutinized. Well, I guess I do that still.

Yes, the world of sidewalks is an alien country, these days. But it’s nice to visit it, once in a while, in memory. Quite often, I’ll take a trip there too, as I watch my three little monsters jumping on the trampoline, riding bikes, laying on their backs and dreaming.

It’s a fun place to visit, but, you know — I don’t think it’s a place I could stay. I have enough trouble figuring out where to put the furniture as it is.

A place to come to

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For lots of reasons, the arrival of my youngest child has been a different experience for me. First of all, and let’s get this right out front to begin with, I was old when he was born, nearly 41. Not that this is anything unusual for my family, of course; my mother was pushin’ 40 when my twin sisters were born, and my sister-in-law Donna recently carried on the tradition by bringing Elias into the world right around the 40 mark. And just for fun, we can also mention my dad’s youngest sister, born when I was around 5 years old. So we’ve got that going for us in the Baker family: Extreme Reproduction. I can see it as the latest reality show. Honestly, are there many more obscure niches of human behavior left to exploit?

Its his birthday!
It's his birthday!

Probably the most obvious, however, is that Trassie is the child my husband, Tras, and I have together. It’s the first time ’round the parenting block for Tras and he hopped on this particular tricycle at the awe-inspiring age of 51. And, God bless us, it’s been a very, very good thing.

Have you ever seen a look of more pure happiness, I ask you?

On a less dramatic level, operationally speaking, having him around is a lot different than when Claire and Christopher were young. They’re just two and a half years apart, while Claire’s a full decade older than Trassie. So basically I was simultaneously lactating and wrangling middle-schoolers, though of course not at the same time.

So we’ve got being married to someone different, being older and wiser (and achier) — and that rather undefinable factor of being a little more relaxed when your third kid rolls around. Add to that logistics — how your day runs has a lot to do with where your kids have to be and when, and it happens, at least in my case, that you wind up eating at McDonald’s every morning with the Old Codgers Coffee Clatch.

(They look a little surprised, don’t they? I did ask them permission, but they were more interested in asking me if I was an investigative reporter tracking down the latest ACORN scandal. Consequently no one was composed when I started snapping. Ha!)

Its such a happy place!
It's such a happy place!

So anyway, back to logistics, we have about 15 minutes to spare in the morning before we can drop Trassie off to preschool, so we while away some time at the happy place while The Master consumes a Cinnamon Melt, hash brown and a juice box, mostly while we look on hungrily and look forward to the homemade Irish oatmeal I’ve got waiting in the fridge for us at work. I know, it’s hard to compete with sugar, lard and cinnamon, but we do, in fact, like it.

Actually, I’m doing my familial duty by going to McDonald’s this frequently. Growing up, it was practically part of our religion to eat at McDonald’s — at least when we were in Louisville, because Carrollton didn’t get one until I had grown up and moved away. The nerve. But we always ate there, not because my Uncle Bruce owned a McDonald’s in Newport but because, as it gradually dawned on me as I aged, Pappy owned stock in McDonald’s and if we were eating out, by golly, that’s where we ATE.

Not that anyone complained, of course. Back in the innocent ’60s and ’70s, McDonald’s wasn’t nearly the all-consuming marketing force of nature it is today — but it did have that undeniable hamburger-and-fry pull children of all ages find it difficult to resist. And the Hamburgler.

When Christopher was this age, I was commanded to procure a Hershey bar for him from the SuperAmerica every day between kindergarten and daycare. The fact that delicious mocha lattes were also available is beside the point. And when Claire was a wee preschooler, she required a serving of pancakes and juice while she sat in the miniature Boston rocker (the very same rocker upon which I perched at that same age) and consumed her morning helping of Barney & Friends while we chatted and I got ready for work.

Such sweet, fleeting memories. And in just a few months, our morning stop at McDonald’s will also be just such a memory. But like the last forkful of Cinnamon Melt or nibble of hash brown Tras and I sometimes sneak when Trassie proclaims, “I’m full!” — these McDonald’s mornings are experiences we’re savoring. We’re old enough to know they’re memories to last a lifetime.

It’s up to you, New York

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There’s nothing particularly special about making a trip to New York. We rubes in the hinterlands do it all the time; just watch Good Morning America or whatever and you’ll see us grinning and wooooo-ing all morning long.

But I, of course, am no rube, and I am, after all, me — therefore the trip I took to New York City this summer is special and unique and interesting, unlike any other.

Now that I’m wasting time with my own blog, it seems remiss to not mention this trip in some way because frankly, I never go anywhere. That’s mostly by choice, mainly by circumstance, and 100% the way I want it. I generally like to take family-togetherness type vacations and trips to my husband’s family’s home (which is, more or less, a mountain vacation paradise) punctuated by Big Vacations every few years, just to do my part keeping the economy sound.

Yes. Yes of course.

But really, the trip was exciting and unusual, mainly because I’d never been there before and was perfectly prepared to be as stunned and amazed as only a rube can be when confronted with the cosmopolitan ways of the city.

The thing was, though: I really wasn’t.

It was fun, of course, to drink in the sights that every American child has grown up with: the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, even Times Square. I looked over the big mess that is Ground Zero, I stared at Macy’s and Tiffany’s, drooled at the purses displayed on Fifth Avenue, and bought my own knockoff on Canal Street in Chinatown.

Of course it was only a visit, but I think what I was waiting for was for New York, in some way to change me. I kept looking at myself in the mirror for clues, half-anticipating the person I’d be when I returned to Kentucky. Who would I be? A Broadway Baby, marked forever by the Wicked stars in my eyes? Knocked senseless by the rich, opulent pervasiveness of fashion? (If you know me, you know I’ve got definite ideas about how I should be shod and, for the most part, dressed.) Where would the strong sense of self, the image I presented to the world, go — when consumed and spit out by the excesses of the city?

Nowhere, it seems. I’m still the same person and it’s a mild disappointment. But I was looking for outward changes, really, and it has become clear that I thought that directly connected to inner changes, too. I look in the mirror and see me, the person I’ve spent my life becoming, the person I like, not in small part because the people I love seem to like it too.

It would have been nice to come home a walking cliché, wearing giant sunglasses and calling everyone “babe.” It would have made for a more interesting, self-deprecating story, at the very least. But no. I’ve returned home with a big trunkful of interesting memories … experience with the subway, the smell of Chinatown fish markets, the taste of dinner in Little Italy, the breathtaking experience of the Van Goghs and Rembrandts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There was some change, I think, in the little group I left behind. Though I never thought once about it beforehand, my six-day absence performed a small feat of minor magic: wow, Mom sure does a lot around here! Ahem.

Being apart from my family was indeed the roughest aspect of the trip; worse even than the turbulence that had me groping for my Rosary somewhere over Ohio. Though throughout the entire adventure, I had the company of my mother and sisters, my tightest bonds are with the own nuclear nest I founded, feathered and now feed. They missed me. They told me so. And I was so glad to return to them.

So really, New York, you had your chance. For a short while, I was part of it, New York, New York. I made it there, but more importantly, I made it back. I didn’t turn into Paris Hilton while I was gone, thank the Lord God above. I just found a little bit more of the Essential Ellen that was there all along.

I couldnt agree more
I couldn't agree more