My Mother’s Day was quiet and nice in the way that a Spring day that remains mostly sunny, hosts the fragrance of lilacs and viburnum and begins with good coffee can be. The kids planned a scavenger hunt complete with hand written clues on white pieces of paper, the edges of which G had treated with the special care of pinking shears. The sweet and loopy scrawl of her six year old hand led me from one plastic bag of gummy frogs found behind a framed photograph of her one year old self enjoying her first lollipop to another plastic bag of chocolate covered gummy bears discovered on the window sill amongst O’s owl figurine collection and back to a last bag of gummy letters tucked beneath the Cabernet colored throw blanket that was tossed carelessly along the back of the couch.

Long before six a.m., I could hear her, busy in her room, cutting and whispering and fluttering with purpose and the pride of being old enough to participate and contribute. She hurried to MBH’s side of the bed just past 6:30 to rouse him and remind him of the importance of the day. I groaned and turned over, trying to be cooperative by feigning sleep for an hour longer so that the three of them could plan and execute their gummy hunt and travel to Starbucks and back to regale me with a giant hot latte and a early a.m. rice crispie treat.

I’d like to say that I spent the rest of day reading and dozing and doing crossword puzzles but it was really just a regular day that involved jogging and laundry and yard work. It wasn’t until this afternoon, during the kids’ piano lessons that I opened The Short Stories of John Cheever for the first time and now believe I may never put it down. It was the perfect spot to find my new favorite writer, the vast and artful space of an old and flaking Victorian, the room with a piano at the back, flanked on one side by a floor to ceiling book case of poetry compilations and volumes on art history, a teasing, wanton sun peeking in and out and momentarily lingering on the east wall hung with portraits and weavings and pen-and-ink nudes - an art teacher’s collection of her favorite students’ work. Each corner, every inch of wall space the host to something visual and arresting. There I ran my hands along the aging spines and rested on the thick orange hard cover of Cheever’s life work. After reading two stories, The Seaside Houses and The Angel of the Bridge, absorbing every bit of brilliance despite the halting pluck of children striking off keys and errant chords, I am lost to his words, so taken with his descriptive aptitude that I worry I may never write again. Who needs my contribution when we’ve already got passages like the following to adore and admire:

“God knows where they all come from or where they go, this host of prosperous and well-dressed hangers-on who, in spite of the atmosphere of fraternity they generate, would not think of speaking to one another. They all have a bottle hidden behind the Literary Guild selections and another in the piano bench. I thought of introducing myself to Greenwood, and then thought better or it. I had taken his beloved house away from him and he was bound to be unfriendly. I couldn’t guess the incidents in his autobiography, but I could guess its atmosphere and drift. Daddy would have died or absconded when he was young. The absence of a male parent is not so hard to discern among the marks life leaves on our faces. He would have been raised by his mother and his aunt, have gone to the state university an have majored (my guess) in general merchandising. He would have been in charge of PX supplies during the war. Nothing had worked out after the war. He had lost his daughter, his house, the love of his wife, and his interest in business, but none of these losses would account for his pain and bewilderment. The real cause would remain concealed from him, concealed from me, concealed from us all…”

I’ll leave you with this, now excuse me while I go and worship this compilation just a little longer,

“…as she grew older her way was strewn with invisible rocks and lions and the eccentric paths she took, as the world seemed to change its boundaries and become less and less comprehensible.”

But quick update…we did win the tennis finals. Wednesday afternoon was spent working off an abundance of champagne. Last night was the Cake Walk and all went well despite the fact that the play list I had so carefully developed was on the lap top that was not working for lack of a power cord. So it’s a big sigh of relief and on to the next slough of spring time commitments. One step at a time.

Happy Mother’s Day to everyone who can claim the title. I’ll be back when I’ve got the lap top up and running.

The opposing team was twenty deep and they made up for their lack of talent by having the most over-wrought parents in the history of six year old soccer squads. There is supposed to be one coach per team on the field orchestrating play, acting as casual referees. There are no whistles. There are multiple water breaks. We are supposed to stop and wait for shoes to be tied and shin guards adjusted and every once in awhile someone cries and we stop for that too. But this squad (I’ll call them the Collies in interest of anonymity), took the field with a shockingly aggressive attitude. They had three parents on the field at all times yelling, I mean yelling at their players, not cheering or making hopeful suggestions but physically moving the girls around, harping on them when their attention wandered, herding them up and back, barking orders. The Collies didn’t stop for our four girls when we needed a cleat tied or a water break or when little Samantha got hit in the nose and needed to have a good sob.

They were fixated on the win (the Collie parents), driving their progeny towards the goal. the children responded with the energy and purpose of kids accustomed to an afternoon of parental reprisal should they lose the game. As soon as I heard one parent say, “Just throw it in, it doesn’t matter if the other team’s ready,” I knew it was time to dig in ’cause that’s what we Greyhounds do. We take the challenge and chase the bait and run our little fannies off just to deny the families of privilege their expected victory. And the Greyhounds, all four of them, took on the twenty-deep Collie squad and kicked their well groomed asses. I’ve been cruising on that sweet victory for three days now.

After the soccer game, there was a baseball game attended by normal and well balanced parents wearing layers of fleece under rain gear all of which have developed the indisputable signs of ensuing head colds, the Derby party, (which was fun and festive save for the dead horse at the finish line which cast the momentary shadow of gloom (death is good like that) and made the party guest claiming second place in the betting pool feel somehow dishonest. We polled the group as to how important it was that your horse actually trot off the race track and came to unanimous decision that Eight Belles won second place fair and square despite the fact that her life ended minutes later and therefore second place prize money should be paid out. Then we all indulged in another round of mint juleps, desperate to shake off the grim reality of that scene with the equine ambulances on the racetrack). By the time Sunday rolled around, a tennis-related conflict was merely the cherry on the cake of a strange and surreal 48 hours.

It’s a big week in tennis for me and my team mates. We have cruised through the semi-finals after winning our division and now play for the banner and cheesy little plastic trophies on Wednesday. A few of us thought it’d be a good idea to get together Sunday morning and bat the ball around. When we made these tennis plans earlier in the week, 8 a.m. didn’t sound as early as it felt the morning after a bourbon-centric dinner party. Needless to say, my goals for the morning were simple: stay upright; don’t throw up on the service line. To quote W’s hackneyed phrase - mission accomplished.

While we weren’t out there breaking records with serve speed or the velocity of our over heads, we all played decently and got some important touch on the ball before the big match. Since I was concentrating on the basics, like breathing and holding down breakfast, I wasn’t really focused on the score of the games we were playing nor was I really paying a whole lot of attention to the play strategy on the other side of the court. But after receiving a Sunday afternoon e-mail comprised of a bulleted dissection of my play that morning complete with tight analysis of my partner and I’s failure to talk on the court and the observation that we forgot to bring our power serves that morning, I was left feeling that I had missed the memo on the purpose of Sunday morning play which, I had always thought was for extra practice, but had apparently, somewhere along the way, turned into an opportunity for team mates to play professional coach and develop laundry lists of observed errors and oversights to deliver to each other’s in-boxes later in the day.

It may have been a well intentioned attempt to help us be successful in Wednesday’s match but it came off as a pedantic, scolding and obviously flawed analysis of our tennis game by someone who usually plays a lower court than we do and has no claim to professional prospective. Timing, delivery and personal claim to authority on the topic at hand are important factors to consider when playing critic.

I probably should have let it slide, let it simmer in my in-box for awhile. But then I wouldn’t be me. So I promptly fired off a passive aggressive retort designed to signify my displeasure while pointing out that until this team mate develops her own version of a pace serve instead of that marshmallow she’s currently putting in the service box, she will never understand the difficulty of firing off a ninety mile an hour missive while swallowing your own stomach bile.

I also couldn’t pass up the opportunity to point out that her greatest strength on the court is her partner, who is a lefty and therefore causes all manner of trouble for those of us who have been trained to target backhands down the middle. I congratulated her on the success they’ve enjoyed as team this year and pointed out that she should be very thankful for her alliance with someone who makes her opponents have to stop, think and completely alter all instinctual play.

Here’s how some of my reply e-mail went:

Truth be told, I took the court this morning after a long night of mint juleps and about three hours sleep - so the point for me was to have fun and get some touch on the ball before Wednesday. I was in no way expecting a dissertation on our play nor am I prepared to give a dissertation on your game…I was really just trying to stay upright and didn’t have the mental equilibrium to be taking notes.

What I will say is that I think we all have strengths and weaknesses as tennis players. One of the great advantages that you and your partner have is her left-handedness. She’ll always be an asset on the court b/c all the text book rules on where to put the ball are reversed for your opponents. A lot of thinking often leads to errors on the part of the team who has to change their instinctual play. It will always take your opponents some time to adjust to the awkwardness of the set up. That’s a huge boon for you guys.

As for my partner and I not using our big serves until late in the game - Anyone with a power serve will tell you that doubles is a difficult forum in which to rush the hard, fast serve. It takes awhile to warm up and since, in doubles, a player only serves every four games rather than every other, the pace serve is usually the weapon that doesn’t turn fully fire up until the second set. It’s just a matter of needing to be loose, relaxed and warm when going for the big serve.

The spin serve is the safety serve that players often need to use at the beginning of play, when they are feeling pressure or when they haven’t yet found their groove. Even tournament tennis players have to fight out of early match jitters and find the muscle fluidity to begin putting in ace serves (This obviously takes the ranked professional player less time than it takes those of us who play recreationally. There have been whole matches that I haven’t found my big serve. But a spin serve is better than a double fault. I suspect that as you develop the pace on your serve, you will see what I’m talking about.)

Wednesday’s a big day, but I think our entire team can be satisfied that we’ve all played a great season, no matter what happens. I won’t be presumptuous and tell you that you should change things in the last week of a thirty week season right before a final. Obviously, whatever you’ve been doing has been working for you thus far.

As with everything, some days on the tennis court are better than others. We can all hope for a good day on Wednesday but most importantly we can congratulate ourselves on a season well played, regardless of the outcome of Wednesday’s match.

It’s uber-important that we all trust ourselves, trust our partners and just go out there and play tennis this week without getting caught up in the import of the playoff moment, without trying to change our game or the dynamics we’ve established on the court already with our partners, at the last minute, in the nervous rush of pre-match jitters.

I plan to do what I do. I hope to do it well and with confidence. I plan to take it one point at a time. My partner and and I have a little mantra now…watch the seams of the ball, concentrate on breathing between points, be in the moment.

All I can hope for is that she and I leave the court feeling like we played well - win, lose or draw. I wish that for you too. Keep it light, keep it fun, don’t think too hard.

Okay, so it wasn’t quite the bitch slap I really wanted to deliver. I do have some self restraint, knowing when to avoid being un-salvageably vituperative. Even I could see that it was not a good idea to start my reply with,

Dear Team Mate And Average Tennis Player Who I Used to Call Friend But Now, After Today’s E-mail and Last Week’s Odd Decision to Begin Serving While Your Opponent Was Standing At the Sideline Having A Drink of Water, May Be More of an Acquaintance,

Who died and made you coach?

Like sands through the hour glass, those are the days of our lives and so the world turns here on Wisteria Lane where shiny happy people take their psycho-pharmaceuticals and play tennis while ignoring ethnic cleansing in Africa, the slow ravages of cancer, the high price of gasoline, the war in Iraq and the debacle which is the Democratic Primary.

To quote the Talking Heads, again, “You may ask yourself - well, how did I get here?

And then it’s home again to begin preparing for Saturday’s Derby gathering. It’s a simple menu of bourbon, lard and coconut but there is some do-ahead required not to mention the requisite house cleaning, rose purchasing and mashing of the mint leaves for Julep consumption.

Go Z Humor and Monba and Pyro and Smooth Air and Big Brown. Run your tails off while I drink my face off and please don’t stumble, I hate to see a horse fall. Leave the blundering and banging into things to me and my intoxicated guests.

Happy Friday everyone, Happy Weekend too.

Coincidentally and perfectly timed for the first day in May, I went to the mailbox this morning and found a package from my college roommate. Apparently she’d been visiting her parent’s home and agreed to clean out the attic where she stumbled upon my old English 201: Medieval and Renaissance Literature notebook. Since I have been known to actually throw out notebooks before course work is complete, before exams are even scheduled, leaving the coffee table free of intolerable clutter but myself noteless for the review of Paradise Lost, the sole reason this artifact of my sophomore spring even exists is that my roommate was, and is, somewhat of a hoarder. Back in our sophomore crash pad, at the end of the semester when we were all packing up our belongings and scattering to summer, she must have thought that someday, just someday she might be able to use my short essay on the difference between Petrarchan and English sonnets and tossed the red marbled notebook with gold-leafed university inscription in a box.

Apparently, just last week, she decided she could finally part with my brilliant dissection of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and saw fit to send me the collective meanderings of my 20 year-old brain. And normally I would just chuck the thing. But I paused and became intrigued with the former self that made those immature scribblings and doodling in a handwriting I hardly recognize as my own.

So, as any self absorbed writer would, I’ve now spent hours pouring over my exam booklet on Milton’s Paradise Lost (only a B- earned) and I’ve read my paper on The Second Shepherd’s Play and the juxtaposition of the shepherd’s disrespect for their wives and their simple adoration for the Virgin Mary (A) and I have even re-familiarized myself with the chronology of love as presented in Sir Phillip Sydney’s poem Astrophil and Stella (A-). And I’ve now come to realize that I was one great bull shit artist, quick with some big words and abstract thoughts and wicked with a closing paragraph. This skill with the written word helped me coast through college pretty much unchallenged allowing me to deal with more consuming topics like boys and keg beer and bong hits.

And just when I began to leaf through my notes on rhyme schemes because, well, one never knows when she might need to trot out some brilliance about octets and sextets and quatrains like, say, at Saturday’s dinner party, a hand written letter fell out of the stack of academic drivel and fell onto my lap. A letter I wrote in 1993, probably one of the last I ever penned to my long time boyfriend who I had been dating since 1989. Evidently it was a letter I planned to send to Nepal where he was off on an expedition to find himself, leaving me behind to date several other male contenders and eventually meet My Better Half.

It’s a slice in time, a sweet memento, a slightly yellowed notebook page filled with last words, hinting at the very end of the long-term love affair. It is the only letter that remains out of the sixty or seventy he and I must have exchanged in the five years we were together. For some reason, when I got married, I thought it best to destroy all evidence that I had ever loved another. Now I kind of wish that my college roommate would look again, unearth my freshman anthropology course work, who knows what poignant tidbit might fall from the pages.

Breasts bared in a cool dark room,
Nipples stand and swell in the glow of iniquity,
This is how he’ll remember it-
Just an outline, a vague light creeping
From beneath silken drapes, closed for privacy.
Tilted hips on a soft white bed.
The fragile trill of her laughter beneath the palm of his hand
Resting in her stomach’s soft hollow.
Where he traces the words
That threaten to escape him. The timid silence of need
Rendering him speechless.
Longing and holding in the late afternoon
Laced with impending heartbreak.

And now that school is back in session and I managed to not kill myself or my children or any of the small furry animals that reside here, it is time for me to fully panic about the damn Cake Walk which I volunteered to organize and run, again, for the third time. I’m not complaining (yet). I’m sure the PTO president in her infinite wisdom saw no issue with scheduling the school’s 50th Anniversary Party and Fundraising Bash for the week following Spring Break because apparently she’s never been away on vacation and can’t imagine why all the usual volunteers and involved mothers - just back from Florida - would be more consumed by the need to pick up the dog from the kennel and complete fifteen loads of beach towel laundry and catch up on 72 hours of e-mails than bake, frost and decorate a cake in the likeness of a pair of sandals or a dragon or a Barbie castle to donate to this year’s Cake Walk. So far I have ten responses to my Cake Walk flier. Last year we had 70 cakes donated and still ran out of cakey prizes a full half-hour before the close of the event.

Perhaps I should have chosen a color other than acid yellow for my flier paper. But Staples was having a sale. I thought the vibrant, ghastly hue of stomach bile would at the very least garner some attention and would save me four whole dollars over the calmer melon sherbet option. “A penny wise, a pound foolish,” as Ben Franklin might say when faced with making copy paper decisions for the local elementary school fundraiser.

So we’ll have ten cakes and three hours of event time which means we can allow approximately three winners per hour. That’s a winner every twenty minutes which amounts to a lot of walking around in circles to the up-tempo strains of Billboard Top Forty while waiting for me to draw the winning number from a hat. I have searched the MP3 archives for a worthy play list and was feeling good about my selections: Sexy Back by Justin, Touch My Body by Mariah, I Wanna Have Your Babies by Natasha Bedingfield and, of course, Beautiful by Snoop Dogg that is until MBH pointed out that I wasn’t MC-ing White Party on South Beach but rather a grade school version of musical chairs with cake. He thought some of the lyrics a bit inappropriate for the intended audience, taking special issue with the following chorus from Beautiful:

When I see my baby boo, shit, I get foolish
Smack a nigga that tries to pursue it (Oh-hooo!)
Homeboy, she taken, just move it
I asked you nicely, don’t make the Dogg lose it
We just blow ‘dro and keep the flow movin’
In a ‘64, me and baby boo cruisin’ (Oh-hooo!)
Body rag interior blue, and
Have them hydralics squeakin’ when we screwin’
Now she’s yellin’, hollerin’ out Snoop, and
Hootin’, hollerin’; hollerin’, hootin’ (Oh-hooo!)
Black and beautiful, you the one I’m choosin’
Hair long and black and curly like you’re Cuban
Keep groovin’, that’s what we doin’
And we gon’ be together until your moms move in… (Oh-hooo!)

I stand by my original selections and continue to insist that we can’t coddle our children forever. But in order to be accommodating and pleasantly suburban I have agreed to tame it up, and add some filler tunes like Queen’s We Will Rock You and Bust a Move.

That should make it acceptably white cake (with low fat cream cheese icing) for all those grade-school-parent-haters, don’t ya think?

All day long the pets, the kids, MBH are in and out, in and out. Leaving a wake of dirt and hair and discarded shoes throughout the first floor. If everyone could just pick one pair of shoes to wear today instead of first trying a pair of crocs and then the sneakers and then the garden boots and then the flip flops and then second string sneakers only to end up, at some point, out on the sparse lawn in previously new, white socks, if the pets could agree to stop blowing their winter coats on every piece of furniture and beneath the piano and on the bathroom rugs, if O and G could notice the filth on their hands each time they dash out and bounce the basketball a few times and dash back in to get a glass of water or use the bathroom or go pilfering in the refrigerator, leaving dirty finger trails on walls and door jambs and window panes, and if the f-ing beech trees that line the driveway could just once and for all release the dead brittle leaves of Winter and stop sort of dribbling them out on the lawn and in the garden beds that I spent four hours last Sunday raking and cleaning and preparing for spring only to find it needed raking and cleaning and preparing for spring all over again after one stiff breeze, then I might feel like embracing this early summer. But right now, it’s just feeling like gleeful freedom for most but tedious servitude for me. Have I mentioned that seasonal changes induce to-do list panic and high-level anxiety for task oriented people like myself? You may have allergies but I have mental illness. So there.

And I feel like this unseasonably warm weather has caught me with my pants down so to speak. It’s bare feet and tank top warm and I haven’t had a pedicure since last August and my summer clothes are still at the back of the cedar closet. Every morning I climb the stairs to the attic to retrieve a pair of shorts for O to wear. You’d think I’d just drag the whole box of shorts down to the second floor and arrange them in his bureau drawer but I’m afraid such a bold gesture will incite the wrath of Mother Nature. She can be so spiteful and mean, ushering in late April snow storms just to mess with over-efficient mothers who have prematurely mothballed the winter hats and mittens. So as a precaution, I take each short sleeved shirt, each flouncy spring skirt from it’s winter storage, one item at a time, until it’s safe to assume that Winter is but a distant memory. And I’m kind of missing it, the blank, boring nothingness of a winter afternoon spent sipping tea and dreaming of sunshine. Remind me of this longing next February when I bitch about the intolerable last stretch of cold. Remind me that the grass is always greener and greener grass means lime and fertilizer and mowing and leaf blowers and incredible amounts of yard maintenance.

Apparently Mark and his wife have found some sort of connubial equilibrium by,

“each keeping a notebook in which we record all the things the other does that are wrong. They plan to compare notebooks on their deathbeds to determine who was the better person.

But in the meantime, they’ve realized that they haven’t had an effective way of handing out both praise and criticism. That is, until now. From here on out, they’ve decided to issue annual spousal performance reviews.”

Hopefully Mark won’t mind that I’ve put the Madmarriage through the same corporate stress test and come up with the following performance review for myself and My Better Half:

CCE’s 2008 Spousal Performance Review

DOMESTIC SKILLS
Rating: Over Achiever.
Comments: CCE has been known to spend whole evenings organizing shoes in the mudroom and vacuuming the dog. There is no question that she sets exacting and impossible standards, unafraid to work overtime in the pursuit of cleanliness and the perfect pie crust. She must, however, continue to try and manage her own frustration that other team members often fail to reach projected cleanliness goals and will continue to incite her wrath over black finger print smudges on the door jambs and dirty socks on the bedroom floors. CCE needs to work on delegation skills, leaving at least a few household chores for Her Better Half seeing as there are only twenty four hours in a day, eight of which should be spent sleeping. She needs to trust that he can, indeed, manage to do a load of laundry without causing second floor flooding or an incremental bleed of red towels on white t-shirts.

BEDROOM ACUMEN
Rating: Meets standards.
Comments: CCE is a fit and attractive 30-ish female who strives to meet deadlines, milestones and objectives in the bedroom when she’s not too exhausted, drunk or impossibly irritated with her BH. She has recognizable trouble switching between housekeeper, mother and sex goddess roles and often fails to apply her imagination in thinking outside the 11-years-of-monogamy-box. This being said, we think that CCE’s bedroom acumen could be improved by her BH’s attentive fawning to include fresh cut flowers and the simple purchase of a some edible chocolate body paint, a swing and a healthy dose of Xanax. CCE has great potential in this department. We hate to see her fall short of her obvious ability to reign supreme and excellent in all things bedroom.

PARENTING
Rating: Achieves standards.
Comments: CCE successfully straddles the line between knowing when to be supportive and encouraging (when youngest child is streaking towards the goal in last week’s soccer game) or downright neglectful (when American Idol or tournament tennis is on television). She is not afraid to administer punishments for failure to replace the cap on the toothpaste and is not above eliciting peak performance from her children by withholding dessert for minor offenses. While subordinates complain that she can be a real “ball-buster”, we think CCE epitomizes perfection in the parental management department and has even been known to show her soft side every now and again by planning impromptu trips to the playground or the bowling alley.

PUNCTUALITY
Rating: Over Achiever.
Comments: While CCE is never ever late for anything, there is such a thing as pathologically punctual. We appreciate the inner and exacting clock by which CCE operates but would caution her that it is really not necessary to proceed scheduled play date times by twenty minutes. And we reiterate our belief that no matter how anxious she is to make a good impression, no dinner party hostess really wants her invited guests to arrive “right on time”. A fifteen minute lag is expected and appreciated and often means the difference between said hostess finishing her shower and blow drying her hair. Because the attention to detail in the punctuality department borders on excessive perhaps CCE could go and hang out for a week with her mother-in-law who has never been on-time for anything and the two could sort of rub up against each other and moderate the other’s tendencies into something more decent and acceptable.

OVERALL RATING/GOALS
Rating: Achieves or exceeds standards.
Comments: CCE continues to lead by example in all household matters (even making beds while occupants are still dozing and frequently considering driving the cats to the nearest quarry for possible abandonment if that’s what is necessary to cut down on excessive pet hair on the couch). In the coming year, she should consider cloning herself in order to save her sanity. Overall, CCE is a good wife when not being a complete “ball buster”.

CCE’s Better Half 2008 Spousal Performance Review

DOMESTIC SKILLS
Rating: Needs improvement.
Comments: CCE’s Better Half, here on in referred to as BH is still learning how to be an asset rather than a detriment to the household management program. While his instincts in this arena are good, (who doesn’t love a guy who likes to play video games and board games and allow children to play in the mud on the way to the bus stop), BH needs to commit more time to the more banal aspects of the job (i.e., dog walking, cat litter changing, planning for business trips rather than panicking the night before heading out to Cincinnati when he realizes that all his dress shirts are still in a wad at the bottom of the suitcase in the spare bedroom since his last trip to Grand Rapids0. BH could also use a week’s worth of continuing education classes on topics such as preparing healthy family meals outside of his current comfort zone which includes fried pizza and the drive-thru at BK, how to romance one’s business partner with simple gestures like spontaneous phone calls, appreciative notes and the ability to discuss financial matters without exploding into a rage.

BEDROOM ACUMEN
Rating: Satisfactory.
Comments: While BH claims to consistently meets his own deadlines, milestones and objectives, he isn’t always a team player and consistently misses obvious ways to establish bedroom business relationships such as actually entering the bedroom when CCE is still awake, sometime before 1 a.m., which would require deliberately skipping a three-hour web surfing session which seems to occupy his evening hours on most occasions.

PARENTING
Rating: Achieves standards on occasion.
Comments: BH often meets his six year old’s expectations playing court jester to her queen. She favorably and affectionately refers to her father as “a big child” and therefore expects little but laughter and unconditional love. BH’s eight year old son is a little more demanding and suffers the internet obsession acutely, often commenting on BH’s inability to peel himself away from he lure of the computer during non-business hours. BH is often unavailable for discipline, hygiene, safety, scheduling, education and appropriate outerwear selection routines and prefers to delegate these responsibilities to partners and sub-ordinates. “BH is an exceedingly loving parent, when he remembers he is one.”

PUNCTUALITY
Rating: Questionable.
Comments: Yes, BH is always on time but only because CCE is a worthy task-master.

OVERALL RATING/GOALS
Rating: Achieves standards.
Comments: BH is part of the marriage. In the coming year, he should strive to replace rotting wood on the exterior of the house, remember to call his mother and father who live in Florida on occasion, like on their birthdays, and put away the growing stack of clean clothes CCE has efficiently washed and folded and placed smack in front of his bureau. If household budget allows, he also should take a course in how to endure television programming that he may find insanely boring, (i.e., Hell’s Kitchen and pre-recorded French Open matches) in order to better spend time with his wife and appreciate just being close to her and holding her hand.

Having grown up in these parts, Patriot’s Day has always just one of those holidays that is part of a long weekend, a long weekend in which my parents always did copious amounts of yard work and rototill-ed the garden and planted spring peas. But My Better Half, never having heard of Patriot’s Day before moving to Massachusetts a few years ago, insists there must be something more than gardening to the regional affair, something that has to do with Miles Standish and Paul Revere and the Red Coats, or, at the very least, Tom Brady’s being beautiful. I just nod my head and say, “Sure, honey. You must be right,” and return to raking out the garden bed at the base of the front stoop. It’s not that I’m too lazy to google the origins of the holiday, it’s just that there are a zillion yard-related things to get accomplished before the lilacs pop and the leaves flush out on the trees. I assure him that I can properly celebrate the heroes of The Boston Tea Party and the Patriot’s Offensive Line while working the leaf blower.

And while this regionally observed holiday may strike outsiders as odd or, at least, undefined, I suspect that every area of this country has its own unique celebration noted and observed by its endemic people. It’s what makes us so diverse, these different celebratory occasions. For example, while Massachusetts has spring peas and the Boston Marathon in mid-April, Kentucky has the Derby in early May. And, because I embrace differences and appreciate a good holiday as much as the next person, I’m planning a dinner party to coincide with this year’s Run For The Roses.

And even though I am, through and through, a Yankee, I plan to mark the occasion with some good Southern cuisine. My friend and neighbor, a Louisville native who will be attending the event, has loaned me her Kentucky Heritage Recipe Book for menu planning purposes. As it turns out, within its dog eared pages is some sort of secret code to the workings of the South.

All people embrace a holiday with good old over-eating. Each regional celebration has a menu so purposeful and explicit that outsiders can’t possibly understand or fully appreciate the significance of the cuisine to the inherent importance of the event. I know this with certainty after pouring over the pages (mouth open, eyes wide, stunned and amazed), of every recipe in the Kentucky cook book; all of which contain some iteration of bourbon, cheese sauce, pecans, mayonnaise, coconut and lard. Apparently it is the unique combination of these six ingredients by which a dish earns its revered status as truly Southern fare.

And while I know that the British have Spotted Dick, which, as an adult I have come to realize has less to do with a sexually transmitted disease and everything to do with dried fruits and suet (which may be just as gross), I did not know that the South has Bishop’s Whipple which, surprisingly, is not a major surgical endeavor designed to circumnavigate a clergyman’s intestines but, rather, some sort of dessert with dates and pecans and, of course, bourbon flavored whip cream.

The Derby dessert course apparently must also include the requisite Bourbon Macaroon Mold with its layers and layers of coconut cookies doused in bourbon and served chilled with bourbon whip cream. And, just in case the guests are having trouble keeping their party on between the mint juleps and the sweets, there is the Beer Cheese spread which is made with two pounds of “rat” cheese and garlic “pods” and a forty of Pabst’s Blue Ribbon. While I think guests are encouraged to spread this Beer Cheese on crackers, the recipe leaves the exact purpose for the cheese open to interpretation. Perhaps Beer Cheese is used as sauce for the mysterious main course called Scrapple which is made by boiling an unidentified cut of pork down to a state of utter gelatinouity. The meat falls away from the bones, the fat is skimmed and cornmeal is added to the unidentified pork broth and allowed to thicken into a porridge like consistency and then is poured into a mold and allowed to congeal. Once solidified, the unidentified pork porridge is sliced and fried in lard and served hot to guests who are so freakin’ sideways with Bourbon and Beer Cheese that they fail to see this Scrapple as possibly the most disgusting culinary invention of all time.

And if the Scrapple fails to get their attention then the Scotch Eggs are sure to rock their inebriated worlds. I will let the recipe speak for itself, just as it is written on page 18 of The Kentucky Heritage Cookbook:

Boil desired number of eggs hard. Peel and cut into halves. Remove the yolks, mash and season lightly. Refill the whites and press halves together firmly. Cover tightly with country sausage meat. Roll in egg and crumbs and fry slowly in deep fat. Drain and place on rounds of toast and surround with cheese sauce. (I shit you not - deep fried sausage coated deviled eggs on toast with Beer Cheese sauce.)

And if, after all this culinary celebration, there are a few stout and hardy people still standing on two legs rather than squatting on piano benches and crawling to refill their high ball glasses, there will be a refreshing Reception Salad (involving cream cheese, pimentos, pineapple, jello, celery, pecans and, of course, bourbon whipped cream), that is sure to be the straw that broke the race horse’s drunken, lard-heavy back.