More Maggie Sez...

... Oh, I do love seasonal place mats!

(I bought the girls some plastic place mats - that happen to be Easter themed - yesterday because they keep getting stains all over my cloth ones. I wasn't expecting them to be quite so well received.)

Maggie Sez...

... We were playing bathing suit beach picnic upstairs in our room!

Me: Great! You guys were playing so nicely while I made dinner. Thanks! But, did you make a big mess up there?

... Uh, yeah. That's what playing is.

Touché

Tu(n)esday

Brendan Benson - "Happy All The Time" from stereogum on Vimeo.


Cute video, Brendan Benson.

Here's another song from his new album, What Kind of World:

It Gets Better

And just like that, life starts to get noticeably easier. Suddenly there is more than enough parking along the side streets near Maggie's school. Suddenly the sun is up and light streams through the bathroom window when I wake up before everyone else to get in the shower. Suddenly I realize that it's been about two weeks since I've worn my enormous arctic explorer cocoon/down coat. Suddenly Maggie notices that our daffodils are starting to come up in the back yard slush pile.

I know we're still going to have to do battle with a lion or two before we finally get to lie down with lambs, but today I'm suddenly feeling like life is a little less difficult than it was yesterday.

(Apologies for the terrible pictures. Come for the words, leave for the photography!)

Notes From the Nightstand: Accordion Crimes

I have probably read this book four times now. I love all of Annie Proulx's books (The Shipping News is her most famous one, I think), but this is my favorite, and one of my favorite books ever, really. The combination of history and music and narrative takes everything I love and rolls into one nearly perfect experience for me. I return to it again and again and probably always will.

Accordion Crimes isn't exactly a novel in the traditional sense, but I feel like it's a little more than a book of short stories. When I read Olive Kitteridge, which is a series of stories about the title character told from different people's points of view which together tell Olive's life story, I was reminded of Accordion Crimes. The pieces are separate but combine in a satisfying way to tell a larger tale.

Proulx's book follows a green accordion from it's creation in Italy and immigration to America with it's Sicilian maker in the 19th century through seven other stories set in various immigrant and ethnic communities across America up to the present day. Each chapter (or short story) introduces the little two-row button accordion into a region, a culture, a musical tradition, an era of American history that, when strung all together, tells a vagabond story about us as a nation and a people - how alike we are, and how different. From Sicilians in New Orleans to Germans and Tejanos in Texas to French Canadians in Maine and French Cajuns and Black Creoles in Louisiana to Poles in Chicago to Irish-American and Basque ranchers in Montana to Norwegians in Minnesota, we Americans have a complicated set of identities, histories, habits, and tastes. Individual experiences combine to tell a common story of migration and settlement, music and food and religion, xenophobia and assimilation.

Music is one of the great treasures of American culture. In our attempt to hold on to our pasts, to maintain our identities in a New World, we have hung on to the musical traditions of our ancestral homelands, celebrating them and preserving them. But we are an amalgamation nation, and it's not surprising that the music has been combined and melted down and reshaped by Americans into new styles and new sounds: jazz, blues, zydeco, bluegrass, country, and rock. So often, the little unassuming, under appreciated accordion is at the center of it all.

The stories Proulx tells are not pretty. They are as harsh and cruel and violent and dirty and tragic as migration and homelessness are. America is rough country. The characters are not particularly lovable or genteel. They are survivors, scrabbling at the edges of civilization, determined not to be snuffed out. And if you listen to any traditional American music, you will hear their sorrow, suffering, and defeat, mixed with their joy, celebration, and perseverance. This is what it means to be American. This is our story.

Just a Typical Saturday Morning at Our House

I believe the Whos down in Whoville refer to Kate's contraption as a "great big Electro-who-cardio-shnook." She certainly makes ear-splitting noise, noise, noise, noise on it. Tomorrow we're going to try to round up teams for a Zoo-ziffer-car-zay match. Bring your roller skates.

 

***

We had the girls' yearly check-up appointment with the doctor this past week. Kate is 36.6 lbs. and 41 inches, and Maggie is 36 lbs. and 43 inches. So... yeah. Kate is in the 60-somethingth percentile for both height and weight for a four year old and Maggie is 13th percentile for height and 5th percentile for weight for a six year old. They've both always about around those numbers, so the doctor isn't all that concerned about Mags. She's just a pixie changeling. Kate had her final round of vaccinations (until boosters at 11 years old), and then we all went out for burritos to celebrate.

All is well here, if not exactly peaceful.

Tu(n)esday

Alabama Shakes brought down the house on SNL this weekend. We're sometimes amazed at how even great bands can sound really terrible on SNL, but these guys were perfect. Brittany Howard is a revelation.





I hear their music described as blues-rock and garage-rock, but I think their album sounds more like Muscle Shoals swampy 60's soul and R&B. It's more Janis Joplin than Jack White. Either way, love it!