Last week I posed a completely rhetorical hypothetical question about whether or not you would donate money to a starving family on the condition that you would have to give the same amount of money to someone who would use it to buy crack. Contrary to what some people have argued, this was not a question I was going to use to pin people into a corner, nor was it a way to preach my political views. In fact, it wasn't even a metaphor for the bail out, I hadn't even thought about that until someone suggested it in the comments. But I can completely see how you could view it as such.

I was genuinely interested in what I knew were going to be a wide variety of responses and the reasons behind those responses. I didn't give my opinion at first because I didn't want that in any way to affect your honest answers, but now that so many have weighed in with thoughtful reasons why they would or would not (and some not so thoughtful), I'll go ahead: I absolutely would give the money. No questions. Not a second thought.

That does not mean that I think you are an evil monster if you disagree with me, and perhaps I should explain my reasons for asking it in the first place. I'm sure you'll be surprised to know that it has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with my older brother, Ranger.

I am the youngest of three children. My sister September is five years older than I am, my brother three. My sister and I were somewhat close growing up, but she was already in love with the man who would become her husband by the time I had reached an age where we had anything in common. I was much closer to my brother, and he was my hero. I thought he was the brightest and funniest person alive, and in high school I was proud whenever I got a teacher who had taught Ranger before me. They always gave me special treatment as Ranger's little sister because he was charming, hard-working, and a total smart aleck. I remember sitting in my Freshman Biology class hearing Ranger and his physics teacher next door screaming jokes at each other to see who could out wit their opponent, and since my Biology teacher had taught Ranger three years before SHE TOTALLY KNEW what was going on. Several times she stopped class to laugh into her sleeve, and to my horror she would announce to everyone, "That's Heather's brother you hear. I love that guy."

I loved that guy, too, and when he left for college the next year it broke my heart. I was the only child left in the house, and I didn't have my brother there to tell me stories or to make me laugh. The first semester of my sophomore year was lonely, but when he returned home for Christmas vacation it was as if he had never left, perhaps even better than when he'd left because now he had all these stories about his roommates at BYU and the adventures they got themselves into to distract themselves from wanting to have sex. Even 18 years later when he mentions one of those roommates I can remember exactly who he's referring to and whether or not he was the one who dressed up as Condom Man for Halloween.

But something happened during that Christmas vacation that changed a fundamental part of me, and I bet you he doesn't even remember this. I'd forgotten about it until last week when my brother and I met for lunch, and sitting there across from him at that sushi restaurant and listening to his stories I remembered what a profound effect his influence has had on me.

It was Christmas 1990, and he and I went shopping at a local mall to find gifts for the family. It was bitterly cold outside made worse by a cutting wet breeze, winters in Memphis are like that, and as we pulled out of the parking lot at the mall we passed a man standing on the median of the road selling single stem roses for $2. He was wearily disheveled, not dressed at all for the weather, and looked like he hadn't eaten in days. He could have been starving, but he also could have been a drug addict. I'll never know.

We'd always been taught that you ignore these people, they'll take your money and use it to buy booze, or they're somehow scamming you. Better to keep your money and do something more productive with it. Except Ranger pulled right up to the man, handed him a twenty dollar bill and said, "I'd like a rose for my sister," and he pointed toward the passenger seat. "I haven't seen her in months."

The man looked down at the bill as if he were holding a fragile newborn animal, and his hands started to shake.

"Aw man," he said. "I ain't got no change for this. You got something smaller?"

"No," said Ranger, and then as he shifted the car into drive he continued, "Please keep it."

The window was still down as the car pulled away, and I'll never forget how he called after us, "YOU'LL NEVER KNOW, MAN! YOU'LL NEVER KNOW!"

As we pulled up to a stop light in silence Ranger finally spoke up. "I saw him when we first drove into the parking lot hours ago. No telling how long he's been out there, and he doesn't have change for a twenty? LET HIM HAVE MY TWENTY."

I asked Ranger if he cared what that man did with the extra money and he said he hadn't even thought about that. It was just evident that the man selling roses needed those extra eighteen dollars more than he did. It felt like the right thing to do.

Does this mean that I give money to every homeless person or beggar I encounter? No, but I have frequently, and am inclined to err on the side of charity because of my brother's example. (And yes, this can be extended to all sorts of volunteer work and charity) And there have been many instances when I've ignored the homeless because of the very thought that they would use the money I gave them to do something stupid, and without fail I regret that impulse. And then I wonder why I had that impulse in the first place, and then struggle with myself when I experience that impulse again. Because I have to believe that even if only one of the hundreds of people uses that money to feed themselves or their dog or their hidden, desperate children, or even if they use it to have a more comfortable night than the one they had last night, then we will have done right in every instance by fighting that impulse.

During the first few months of Chuck's life he had a habit of chewing on anything that would fit in his mouth: the remote control, Jon's flip-flops, my underwear. We hired a trainer who taught us how to make him stop, and the technique worked, but that doesn't mean I'm going to share that technique here with you NO SIREE. People get all weird when your dog training techniques don't match up with their dog training techniques, and next thing you know someone's brain has exploded all over their monitor. But not before they've sent off an email to tell me I'm doing it wrong.

We remembered this technique vividly and used it to make Chuck wary of curbs, and thus wary of running into the street. It's a proven technique, totally humane except for the occasional beating and emotional abuse, HA HA JUST KIDDING. Dog's have no emotions, SILLY! So we thought we'd use the same strategy if Coco ever developed a habit of chewing on things that ought not to be chewed on. Except, I don't know if I've ever pointed this out or not, but Coco has a screw loose. I'm not kidding. There is something wrong in her head. Her brain is not intact. And a technique that made Chuck never want to look at a remote control ever again, made him run in the other room and go, DUDE, I BELIEVE YOU, this technique has zero effect on Coco. In fact, when we employ this technique you can almost hear the lone cricket inside her head crawling up to her ear to yell out: THERE'S NOTHING IN HERE. LET ME SLEEP.

So she's got this problem, this really annoying problem, and it goes like this: MUST CHEW TISSUE ALWAYS. It's not a separation anxiety issue because she does it when we're in the room. She does it in the five seconds we've taken our eyes off of her, in the two seconds it takes me to turn around and shut the door after letting her inside. If Coco is not in the room, it's a pretty rock solid assumption that she's doing this:

Or this:

Or this:

Maybe this:

Or perhaps:

This one is my favorite. It almost looks like she mistook it for an apple:

And then tonight she claimed victory on a battle she has been waging since the afternoon we brought home a dog bed from Costco several months ago. She penetrated the bed's outer core, grabbed hold of its internal organs, and systematically gutted it:

Jon has thrown up his hands and has instead embraced the beauty of Coco's obvious artwork. She's an installation artist, and toilet paper is her medium. And I don't know, if you've read my website for more than a couple of years you'll totally know what I mean when I say that this pretty much means she was sent here directly from God.

Last night I sent Jon on a walk with the dogs while I gave Leta a warm bath, and after successfully washing and rinsing her hair, a feat on par with giving a manicure to a bucking bronco, we spelled words on the side of the bathtub with a set of letters made out of sponge. She recognized HAT and CAT and SAT, and then we moved on to POT, NOT, and LOT. I then spelled BUT, and when she sounded it out in her head she grinned from ear to ear, pointed out first that it was a silly word, and then she whispered it with her wet hands cupped around her mouth: "BUT." I said, no, it's not that kind of but. It's a different kind of but. And before I could explain she screamed, "YOU SAID BUT!" Causing a fit of laughter that lasted a good five minutes. You thought common conjunctions were funny before you had kids? YOU JUST WAIT.

After the bath I wrapped her in a towel, took her to her room, and started the nighttime routine which involves lathering her body in moisturizer. The dry air in Utah is brutal on the skin, so I make sure to douse every inch of her body, something that she LOATHES, and as I was rubbing it into her forehead she complained that I was taking too long. I said, look, one day when you're much older and everyone else has wrinkles and uneven spots all over their faces, you're going to thank me for teaching you how to moisturize. In the name of the Avon World Sales Leader, amen.

"But... but..." she sputtered, her shoulders inching up to her ears in a desperate shrug. "But I'm not even good at putting on my own pants."

Yeah, MOTHER. HOW ABOUT WE START THERE? Wrinkles? WRINKLES?! HOW ABOUT PUBLIC NUDITY.

Dear Leta,

Last week you turned fifty-six months old. Have I ever told you about some of the email I get from people who are angry at me because I'm counting your age in months? People who point out that no one else counts ages in months, why am I going around screwing with people's heads? You would think that someone who has read my website for more than oh, two minutes? three? would have figured out that I am so depraved that I'm pretty much capable of anything. First I'm counting ages in months, and next thing you know I'm raping kittens because of the endorphin rush. YOU JUST NEVER KNOW.

So, Leta, YOU'RE FIFTY-SIX MONTHS OLD. And I'm not even going to help you do the math on that.

This month we've seen a huge change in your physical development, and once where you were tentative about jumping or climbing you're now aggressively curious. Last week you climbed the rock wall on the swing set in the back yard for the first time, just hopped right onto it, seized one of the grips and starting pulling yourself up. Both your father and I looked at each other like, when did you teach her how to do that? And then immediately realized this was something you thought up by yourself. Which is a whole new development in another area as well: risking death for the thrill of it. Next you're going to figure out how to drive your tricycle down steep driveways. Then you're going to steal your father's pipe lighter and try to set your farts on fire. This will continue throughout your life until one day you're at a Fourth of July party, and two glasses of wine into dinner you decide that life wouldn't be complete without trying to do a back flip on the trampoline. Some people call this stupidity, Leta. But not me. I just call it Learning The Hard Way.

Your hand-eye coordination has also seen some improvement, at least enough that your father will now let you play Super Mario Galaxy with him. For a while you were very bad at collecting the Star Bits, and he would say mean things to you and make you cry. Granted, any time we tell you something that you don't want to hear you tell us we're being mean. Leta, it's time to go to bed. YOU'RE SO MEEAAAAN! Leta, pick up that mess. SO MEAN! I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW MEAN YOU ARE! Leta, you overcooked my hot dog. YOU DON'T LOVE MEEEEEEE!

Last week I had to give a lecture to a group of local business women, and I left your father in charge of putting you to bed. That's nothing out of the ordinary as he and I take turns putting you to bed or taking the dogs for a walk, but when I got home an hour and a half after your bedtime your father was standing at the door nearly out of breath. I asked him what was wrong, and he goes, oh this? Yeah, I just put her to bed five minutes ago. EXCUSE ME FIVE MINUTES AGO? And then he explains that you guys had lost track of time playing Super Mario Galaxy, and he acknowledges that he used to say hurtful things, but something happened! You are really good at it now, and with you on his team he's able to advance farther than he ever has! You could see the possibilities going off like bombs behind his eyes, a geek having given life to a fellow geek, and he asked, "Is it too early to introduce her to Dungeons and Dragons?"

I can't decide which would be worse: a teenager who plays with fictional elves or one who knows the names of every Dallas Cowboy cheerleader.

Recently we stopped giving you any treats whatsoever, not to punish you necessarily, but because I was tired of all the ridiculous negotiating over the number of bites of a meal you had to eat before dessert. So I took away dessert. Done. And it's been a lot easier than I thought it would be, except you're now a lot hungrier for normal food and are always wandering around going, "I want something in my mouth." It's not, "I'm hungry," or "I would like something to eat," it's "PUT SOMETHING IN MY MOUTH." It's funny only because this is not a phrase that any adult would say out loud in mixed company. In fact, I think there are rules that say the presence of this phrase in the dialogue of a movie automatically qualifies it for an X rating. But that's how you communicate to us your need for food, and yesterday you walked up to me with a wad of gum in your mouth and said it — "I WANT SOMETHING IN MY MOUTH" — and when I pointed out that you already had something in your mouth you spit the gum into your hand, opened up your empty maw to show me your tonsils and said, "I WANT SOMETHING IN MY MOUTH NOW." It was such an exasperated gesture, too, as if you were saying ARE YOU REALLY THAT DUMB?

A few weeks ago I started a new routine with you when I put you to bed. After we read books I now talk to you about your day instead of telling princess stories, and at first you were really reluctant to this idea because it didn't seem reasonable. Hadn't I seen what you'd done during the day? Why do we now have to talk about it? OMG WTF? But you soon warmed to the idea, and now we talk at length about every little detail of your life: what you had for breakfast, the outfit you wore, what games you played at school, which friend has a new Dora bike, the game of hide and seek we played before dinner. At this point in the routine I've turned off the light and I'm lying next to you as you recount your day, and most of the time you're accidentally hitting me in the face as you swing your arms wide to show JUST. HOW. MUCH. you loved that game of hide and seek. I guess you could say I started this routine with the hope that we could continue to talk this way throughout your life, or that it at least wouldn't be foreign to you to share such details with me later on. Maybe this is my way of letting you know as early as I can that this is the type of relationship I want to cultivate with you, and that I will always be interested in the highs and lows, the exciting and the mundane, all of it. You will always be one of the most interesting people in the world to me.

Even when you're in a mood like the one you were in last night, when you finished telling me about the silly faces you'd made at Dad over dinner and then said, "I'm tired, can you please leave?" ESPECIALLY THEN.

Love,
Mama

Turn up your volume and wait for her to smack the pole.

(thanks, April)

Indulge me for a second and consider this scenario: let's say you're given the opportunity to donate some money to a desperate family who would use it to feed their children, but were only able to do so if you donated the same amount of money to someone you knew would use it to buy crack. Would you do it?

When Jon and I were at the Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco in August we got to celebrate our anniversary by taking photos of one of the bands that serenaded our first year together, The Walkmen, in particular with this song, "We've Been Had" from 2001:

They have a new album out and opened their set at the festival with "In the New year" from that album:

And what I love about this song is the fact that it's really noisy and out of control, but at the same time totally controlled. Also, watching the lead singer Hamilton Leithauser hit some of those high notes on stage was like witnessing someone being struck by lightning:

Also, his name is Hamilton. HAMILTON. It is required by law for me to adore him.

The rest of the band isn't too bad either:

Also, since I'm posting videos I thought I'd include this one that was forwarded to me by more than a dozen people. This dog just may be more talented than Chuck:

Leta has recently entered another phase of Let's Kill Mom and Dad Through Sleep Deprivation, a behavior she perfected in the first six months of her life. Now it's less about crying because she's hungry or mean (don't let anyone tell you they're crying for any other reason, those babies, those mean, mean babies), and more about fearing some unknown entity in her room, sneaking stealthily into our room, and crawling into bed beside me without me knowing. Okay, maybe it's not an unknown entity. Maybe it's that giant rubber tarantula I tried to scare Jon with, the one I put under his pillow thinking he'd discover it as he crawled into bed, except he didn't notice it and slept with it next to his face all night, and when Leta came into our room the next morning she saw it sitting there next to his forehead, and wouldn't you know, my alarm clock that AM was a four-year-old screaming about Daddy being dead. OOPS!

For the rest of the morning she brought up the subject of that rubber spider, professed that she did not like it, not at all, could I please throw it away. And the whole time she rambled on and on about the spider she made a recoiling motion with her whole body and covered her eyes as if confronted once again with the gory image of a tarantula eating Jon's face. And I didn't think much of this because she has the same reaction to banana peels. You cannot peel a banana with her in the room, don't even think about it, not if you would like to have a civilized breakfast free of a preschooler clawing at her own face. On mornings when we don't mind Jon will eat a banana and set the peel next to Leta's bowl of Cheerios. To get her back for being such a mean, mean baby.

Turns out that this preschooler, although obviously not afraid of monster banana peels hiding in her closet, is now very afraid of spiders. And she thinks they are in her room at night ready to eat her face. I'm sympathetic to this phobia, I don't care for spiders myself, but I cannot sleep if she is sleeping next to me. Maybe it's the way both her arms and legs seem to detach from her body and relocate themselves onto my head, or the way she wakes up every ten minutes to ask for water or an episode of Spongebob. I just cannot do it, and if we catch her coming into our room in the middle of the night we'll walk her back to her bed and calm her down. Let her know that spiders only eat faces in daylight.

She has this figured out now, and even though I'm normally a light sleeper she has snuck into our room for the past three nights without us knowing. I'll just turn over and be face to face with her sleeping butt not knowing when or how she got in there. The logical thing to do would be to carry her back to her own bed, except she is more of a light sleeper than I am and has been known to wake up because someone next door dropped a cotton ball on the floor. It will eventually come to that, probably tonight when I go four nights in a row without sleeping and, shit, I'm already awake, might as well be useful and walk her back to her bed 12 times. The last time she went through this phase we had to do just that, keep walking her back to her bed until she finally realized that we weren't giving in, but like all recurring parental battles, there are those moments or days of hesitation where you go, oh God, not this again, do I have the stamina? Maybe if we ignore it? It will just go away? And then BOOM. PRESCHOOLER BUTT IN FACE. AGAIN.

This afternoon Leta and I were playing with the toy doctor set we got her for Christmas one year, taking turns being the doctor, and when she was the patient she claimed to have a stomach ache from eating too many snowballs. And I was all, dude, you've got to lay off the snowballs, haven't we talked about this already? So I took her blood pressure, listened to her heartbeat and then pretended to remove the snowballs with some tweezers. When it was her turn to be the doctor she asked me what was wrong, and I said, doctor, it's urgent. I haven't slept in three days because my daughter refuses to sleep in her own bed. What do you prescribe?

"What's your daughter's name?" she asked.

"Leta. Her name is LETA," I shot back.

"Hmm..." she said. "... I don't think it's Leta. I think it's all those stop signs you've been eating."

"The Cab Ride I’ll Never Forget" by Kent Nerburn

For the next two hours, we drove through the city. She showed me the building where she had once worked as an elevator operator. We drove through the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived when they were newlyweds. She had me pull up in front of a furniture warehouse that had once been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl. Sometimes she’d ask me to slow in front of a particular building or corner and would sit staring into the darkness, saying nothing.

The last three paragraphs just about killed me. If you read only one thing this week let it be this.

Opening comments because this might spark some discussion.

(via MeFi)

I know in some circles it would be totally inappropriate to post this link so soon after a heavy political post, but dammit, this couldn't wait, especially for those so closely related to me who were worried that they themselves might be sent to prison for such conduct:

Charge dropped against man accused of passing gas:

"A West Virginia man accused of passing gas and fanning it toward a police officer no longer faces a battery charge. The Kanawha County prosecutor's office requested that the charge be dropped against 34-year-old Jose Cruz."