Missy Diggs

This morning started out as many mornings do, with me feeling really groggy and already unable to keep up with the demands of one very Vivid Girl. I groaned my way out of bed, swallowed all the pills that go with the morning part of my lifestyle, brushed my teeth (wait! did I brush my teeth? um, well, I usually do brush my teeth…..), poured myself some coffee (many many thanks to Mr. B for getting up before me and making the coffee) and I put some breakfast in a bowl for the Vivid Girl, who was already barricaded on the couch with her craft supplies and her Netflix cartoons. But the Vivid Girl did not want the bowl of breakfast, even though I had carefully selected the items in the bowl to be pleasing to her. In this case, frosted organic tiny wheat cereal squares and dried apricots.
She loves these things, usually. Okay, well, actually, I can’t figure out what she loves usually, but I have seen her eat these very things before, on more than one occasion, and when I brought them home from the store she was excited, and so I foolishly thought that meant that when she was hungry she would eat them.
Because I never learn.
So, because I am the kind of parent who strives for joy more than for consistency or authority or even keeping the food budget down, I suggested that we could leave a bit early for camp today and drive through the fast food place where the Vivid Girl likes to order a breakfast that comes with a toy and that she can eat in the car. This is not something I am willing to do everyday, mind you, but somewhere along the way we came to a compromise in which we, the Worn-Out Parents of the Vivid Girl, agreed that we would do this once a week or so.
This made the Vivid Girl happy and so we quickly scrambled around pulling clothes and shoes on and off until we were both wearing what it seemed like we should wear, and we gathered up our things (my things: purse, keys, cell phone, kindle, wallet. her things: script, dancing shoes, socks, activity with many tiny pieces to do in the car), and we left the house. And we left another thing, too: we left the snack that the Vivid Girl needs for camp and that Mr. B had kindly packed while I was still pretending to be asleep this morning. We left that valuable item sitting on the kitchen counter. And we didn’t realize it until we actually got to camp, about half an hour later.
And by that time we were no longer early for camp, but right on time, which meant that there was no time to go back and get the snack. And the reason we went from being very early to having no extra time is this:
First we went to the fast food drive through that the Vivid Girl likes and she told me what to order. And what she likes to order now is actually a regular menu item, so I have to remember to also order the kids’ toy, for which they probably charge me extra even though they are already charging me full price for low quality food instead of the lower kids’ price for equally low quality food. And then the toy came and it was one that the Vivid Girl already has, from the last time she got fast food breakfast on the way to camp.
And maybe that is why when she unwrapped her food she decided she didn’t like it. She didn’t have to taste it to make this decision. She just looked at it. And she said it looked different. And she wrapped it up and set it aside and began to pout.
So I said, cheerfully and kindly,  “Well, did you taste it? maybe it looks funny but tastes okay?” Because now I was in the position of trying to encourage my child to eat food that I don’t want her to eat. Because that’s my parenting style.
So she tasted it, grudgingly, and then said it tasted pretty okay so she took two teeny tiny miniature bites of her full-sized low-quality fast-food breakfast sandwich, and then she said, petulantly, “But the meat looks kinda gray in the middle.”

She got me on that one. Even I am not going to try to convince my child to eat low-quality fast-food meat that I don’t even want her to eat in the first place if it’s GRAY. I mean, what even is it? Is it monkey or something? Why is it GRAY?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!

So I took a deep breath and drove in the direction of the Vivid Girl’s camp-of-the-week, and I asked, ever so sweetly, “Well, my darling daughter, what would you like to do about this situation?”

And the Vivid Girl threw back her head and wailed, “I DON’T KNOW!!!!”

So I said I would go to another, slightly higher-quality, fast-food drive-through on the way to camp so she could have something to eat before camp. Because you do need breakfast before camp, you know. Especially if you’re the Vivid Girl, and it’s your first ever acting camp, and you have been cast in the lead of the mini-musical, which is Annie, and which you have to be ready to perform in ONLY THREE MORE DAYS. So we went to the slightly higher-quality fast-food drive-through, which I had thought served breakfast, but it didn’t serve breakfast anymore. If ever. So finally I took the girl to a cafe where she was able to order real food. She chose a giant yogurt granola parfait with berries, of which she ate approximately three bites and then declared herself full.

By which time we were at camp, which is when we noticed that we had forgotten the snack, and she started to cry because now she was stuck either being late for camp or having no snack and what kind of terrible choice is that? So I took another deep breath, yoga-style, and pasted a smile on my tired twitchy face and said, “No, darling girl, light of my life, you go to camp on time and I will go to the nearest store and get you a snack and bring it back to camp so you will both be on time and have a snack.”

Which is what I did.

And so by 9:15 this morning, I had been to four different food sellers and had spent approximately $30 on 3 bites of food for a six-year-old. And I was exhausted. So I came home and did a few low-key things here until suddenly I noticed that it was 12:17 and I was running late for picking the Vivid Girl up from camp. Usually she wants me to have a snack all ready for her in the car when I pick her up, and today that would have been easy to do except that of course I ran out the door and left the snack that Mr. B packed sitting on the kitchen counter again.

And when I got to camp I was two minutes late, and there were three girls left, and one of them of course was the Vivid Girl. And she was crying. Because I was late. And in fact her teacher said she had just started crying, which makes sense because I had just started being late two minutes before. So I sat with the Vivid Girl and kissed her and comforted her and apologized for being late and assured her that I knew how much it upset her to be picked up late and reassured her that I will always come get her so there’s nothing to worry about. Then I dried her tears, and patted her hair, and gathered up all her stuff, including her street shoes, and her dance shoes, and her socks, and her script, and the bag that had contained the snack and which now contained a handful of soggy popcorn, an empty beef jerky package, and a half-full bottle of Vitamin Water with the cap off. The Vitamin Water spilled quickly filled the bag and the Vivid Girl sniffled and told me that when she had opened the jerky almost all the jerky had spilled out of the bag and so she hadn’t really had a very good snack at all.

And we walked out to the car and stowed all the stuff and  got buckled in. When I asked if she was ready to go, the Vivid Girl cheerfully said that she was. But as soon as I started driving, she started to sniffle and pout again. Once again I propped the corners of my mouth up into a sympathetic smile, turned my head, and said, “Oh, dearheart, lovely girl, whatever is the matter?”

And the Vivid Girl screwed up her eyes, opened her mouth wide, and howled, “I’m hungry!”

What I am doing right now is making eggplant/yellow squash parmesan using veggies from our bountiful farm box. More about the farm box some other time, and more about the vegan/not vegan issues brought up by cooking for my family in general, and making eggplant/whatever parmesan for my family in particular. Right this very minute I am sitting down to see what kind of blog update will come out of me while I am waiting for the salt to draw any potential bitterness out of the eggplant. I am not salted, so hopefully what comes out of me will be some flavor other than bitter.

I’ll tell you right now, though: I’m not promising sweet.

It’s summer here, as it is in many places, though certainly not all. Summer means no school, which in the case of our very own Vivid Girl and her schoolmates, means three long months yearning for school. In the case of the dedicated and loving mamas of this Vivid Girl and her schoolmates, it means three long months of periodic fun, punctuated by guilt, tied up together with yearning for school. Mothering seems to have a lot of guilt built in, on one side of the equation or the other, and these days it seems to be the mamas who feel guilty (rather than the mamas making the children feel guilty, which was popular for a long time), and one of the things I find myself feeling guilty about is my inability to give my child the kind of summer I used to have. But during the school year, the guilt is so much lighter and smuggier because I know for sure that I am giving the Vivid Girl a school so much better and more life-affirming than the ones I had.
But right here, at the point of summer that is farthest from school, the guilt is at a max and the smugginess (though not the mugginess) is at a seasonal low.

To counterbalance that, and also to get myself out of the house and away from certain chores such as thinking of family-friendly ways to cook the vegetables in the farm box, I took the Vivid Girl to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.
Grandma and Grandpa live in what used to be a teeny-tiny rural town north of Dallas. To get to their house from Dallas, you drive north on the highway, drive east on a road that turns into a road with the same name as the town, and turn left at the little gas station/food mart/feed store. The sign on this store says:

Bait
Sandwiches

which is why I don’t go to that store. Also, my mom says it smells funny in there, though she allows that maybe that is because of the feed store aspect of the many conveniences offered by this store.

I am sure this store was much more convenient to the few people of the small town back when it was a small town, but now they have Walgreens, Petsmart, Target, and Jimmy Johns between them and the highway. Still, the bait sandwich business seems to be good, as the store is still there, unlike the junk store across the street that also used to mark the turn. Where I also never went, despite the fact that I love nothing more than shopping for junk, because I was never really sure whether it was actually a store, or just a house with a whole lot of stuff in the yard.

Anyway, turn left at Bait Sandwiches and turn left again and there you are. If you get to the lake, you’ve gone too far.

But even though I know how to drive to my parents’ house, I usually don’t actually drive there. Me and the Vivid Girl, we like to take the train. We get on the train in Austin, ride 6 hours or so to Dallas, with all stops in between, and then get on the MetroRail and take it as far north as it goes. Then we climb into the back of Grandpa’s pickup truck and he carries us the rest of the way. The Vivid Girl likes the train because she can walk around, do crafts, practice cup stacking in the lounge, and buy snacks.  When we travel in the car, she needs to do all these things too, but we usually aren’t getting any closer to our destination while she does them.

The Vivid Girl also loves the train because she gets a whole day of my completely undivided attention. If  only for this reason, the Vivid Girl would probably ride the train every day if she could.  All day every day. Though I am pretty sure that the quality of my attention is at its very best on Day 1, and might devolve into something quite unpleasant before we reached such a distant destination as Chicago or Los Angeles. Probably it would be best to just ride the same stretch of rail between Austin and Dallas, so we could be rescued and revived by the people who love us at either end. Even so, I’m pretty sure I would get tired of it way before the Vivid Girl would. Several days and a bottle of Xanax before, most likely.

One thing about going to Grandma’s house is that sometimes there are cousins there. This time there weren’t any, but Grandma took time off work to play with us and we had a good time anyway. Grandpa doesn’t go to work, but he doesn’t really play either, so we left him home to think of ways to cook the vegetables from the garden.

I’m running out of time because I have to go pick up the Vivid Girl and her schoolmate from Gardening Camp, which is very fun but not as fun as school, which also has a garden, though school doesn’t have a pink poodle and gardening camp does. The way to get through summer is to focus on such advantages. With Grandma, we went to an amusement park where the Vivid Girl rode her first roller coaster. It was a tiny little thing called The Little Dipper, I guess because of its size and its hilliness, but after riding it I think it should have been called the WhipperSnapper, because of its size and its ability to undo months of chiropractic work in such a short ride. Whip! Snap! Ouch! Ride over.

We also rode the bumper cars, which was super excellent fun because the park was so uncrowded that we were the only two cars running, and we could really zoom around the track and also smack into each other hilariously.

And now I must zoom around the track to get to camp pick up on time. The eggplant has been rinsed and dried and breaded and is in the fridge waiting to be fried. I don’t know how bitter it will be, or whether the rest of the day will be sweet, or whether I will end up fried as well. Ah, the joys of summer!

Maybe it’s because I was thinking about high school, and reunions, that has my mind wandering around in the past, or maybe it’s because in the summer my thoughts naturally turn to what summer is like for my daughter, the Vivid Girl, compared to what summer was like for me, Missy Diggs. Or maybe it’s because the summer solstice is my birthday, and this year it was a big milestoney one. Whatever the reason, I’m thinking about the way summers used to be.

I grew up in the Midwest, as I may have mentioned, in a time when no one had air conditioning. If you’re going to be hot anyway, you may as well be hot outside, so we spent most of our time outdoors, hanging out with kids from the neighborhood, riding bikes and climbing trees, and playing Gilligan’s Island under the mulberry tree that hung down over the canoe racks at the back of our yard. In the afternoon we’d bang in through the screen door to the kitchen to find our mother and beg for ice cream truck money or a ride to the pool. Our arms and faces were tanned, our knees were skinned, and the bottoms of our feet were tough as leather. At night, we’d be forced to go to bed well before the sun went down, and we’d lie there in the stifling twilight listening to the older kids playing tag and laughing. If our cousins were visiting, or if our parents had friends over for cards, we’d stay up late and catch lightning bugs in jars, putting the glowing jar on the porch while we played Bloody Murder in the dark, and then negotiating to be allowed to keep it on the dresser overnight if we promised to release the lightning bugs, outside, in the morning.

Most of our days followed this same drowsy pattern, punctuated by trips to the library or the grocery store, and summer dragged on forever. The big event of the summer would be our family vacation, which usually involved packing up the big red Chevy Blazer, tying the canoes to the top, and driving six hours to northern Wisconsin to live in a cabin in the woods at a Boy Scout camp. There were no boys in our family, just my sister and me, but my dad had gotten involved as a volunteer with the Boy Scouts, and that is how the Boy Scouts came to have such a strong influence on my childhood. We went to every Jamboree and every festival, and my sister and I knew pretty much every Eagle Scout around. In the summers, my dad would sign up to be the camp director at a small scout camp in Wisconsin, and the whole family would go with him, and that was our vacation.

At the camp, we lived in a cozy two bedroom cottage at the top of a hill overlooking a lake. The cottage had a big picture window with a hummingbird feeder hanging outside, and a stone fireplace with some Boy Scout motto carved into the mantle. Some summers we had the cottage all to ourselves, other years we would have one or two older scouts living with us while they worked at the camp as guides to the troops who would come in for a week at a time. My favorite of these boys, and the only one I really remember at all, was a tall brown-haired boy named Melroy. In fact, he has probably taken on characteristics from all the Boy Scouts I ever knew, but no matter how well those boys embodied the scouting life, none of them ever had the sparkle and personality of Melroy. (Ah, Melroy….sigh)

Even at the time I knew that other people, especially grown ups, saw Melroy as a gawky, goofy, kind of unfortunate-looking kid, but to me he was beautiful. I thought he looked just like Robby Benson, who –along with Jodie Foster– totally made me swoon. Plus, unlike many of the boys, who for some reason had very little interest in two little girls hanging out at Boy Scout camp, Melroy actually talked to us like we were people, and he taught us about the woods, and how to build a fire in the fireplace, and how to whistle through a blade of grass, and all kinds of Boy Scouty stuff like that.

And even when he wasn’t staying in the cabin with us, we would often see Melroy in Wisconsin because we would make trips up to the big council camp and he would be there. My sister and I would drink “bug juice” (that’s what the Boy Scouts call Kool-Aid, which even at the time I thought was juvenile) from dented aluminum pitchers and explore around the edges of the camp while my dad did whatever Boy Scout business he had to do at the camp. One year, a boy (it probably wasn’t really Melroy but in my memory it is;  in my memory it is always Melroy) was raising a litter of baby raccoons in a box and we got to pet them and feed them milk with a dropper. We also would go to the big camp for the Council Fire and the Order of the Arrow ceremony, where men dressed as Indian chiefs would paddle canoes across the dark lake to deliver silent and serious boys into the firelight for some kind of solemn initiation ceremony.

All very mysterious, and holy, and so different from Girl Scouts, which my sister and I were both in and which seemed to have a lot more to do with butter cookies, knee socks, and folk dancing than Boy Scouts ever did. I also went to Girl Scout camp for a week or two every summer, and while it was a really fun and in some cases even profound experience, nothing about it ever seemed to approach the level of priestly purpose that the Boy Scouts’ firelight ceremony had. (This, even though I had it on good authority that both our fire-building technique and our canoe-paddling method were superior by far. In fact, the worst thing my dad could say about a person in a canoe was that they “paddled like a Boy Scout.” Oh, the shame!)

Although the big council camp was a sleepaway camp with a big mess hall, a camp store, and little clusters of tents or dorms or whatever (we were never allowed to go to the part of the camp where the boys actually slept, or where they swam, either, now that I think about it), the camp where we stayed was basically just  a boat house and a dock, and the boys would come with their troops and leaders and paddle out across the water to camp sites on the lake, where they would stay for a whole week doing whatever boys do in the woods. (From what I saw of them, my best guess was that they were telling fart jokes and daring each other to eat disgusting things.) Unless someone was homesick or needed to go to the hospital, we wouldn’t see the boys after they arrived until it was time for them to check in their life jackets and paddles and go home. My sister and I would sometimes help with the checking-out and checking-in of equipment, especially if there were several troops arriving or leaving at the same time, but mostly we hung out in the cabin with our mom when the scouts were around. During the week, we would canoe, or fish, or inventory the supplies in the boat house, or carry all the dutch ovens and cast iron frying pans up the long hill to the house, where we would clean them, rub them with oil, and season them in the cabin’s oven. Then we would carry them all back down the hill, inventory them, and put them on their shelves, where they would wait for scouts to come and claim them. I complained bitterly about this chore at the time, but now that I see what a great workout it was, carrying cast iron dutch ovens up and down the hill, I wish I could pay someone to let me do it again.

During the week we would go fishing early in the morning, or late at night, and eat freshly caught fish for breakfast. We would sit out after dinner and watch the stars come out and listen to the loons. Twice we went with some scout (let’s call him  “Melroy”) to a nearby lake where we could hike in and see a pair of bald eagles in their nest. My sister and I canoed (and we did not paddle like Boy Scouts, thank you very much) and swam and fought and  played in the woods. There was no tv or radio, just cards and books and the lake and the big woods and us.

This went on for many years, until I was about twelve or so. One day I was wearing shorts and a tank top and hanging out around the boat house helping my dad get a newly arrived troop set up with canoes and paddles and dutch ovens and whatnot. I remember that one of the boys came over and talked to me, and asked if I wanted a piece of gum, which I gladly accepted.  Suddenly his scout leader appeared and barked at him to get in his canoe, and the whole troop paddled off across the lake and out of sight. Sometime that week my dad told me that it had been decided that I was “too old” to hang out at the boat house and interact with the scouts and that I would have to stay in the cabin whenever there were boys around.

So I was exiled, but empowered, and I hid in the cabin glowing like a firefly in a jar and peeking out the windows whenever male voices floated up from the boathouse. Suddenly I knew there was danger, and potential, in even the most casual encounter, and I hummed with anticipation for the day Melroy would come for dinner or to go searching for an eagle’s nest. But Melroy didn’t come that summer, and my family never went back, and as far as I remember I never saw Melroy again.

And then we moved to Texas, where the Vivid Girl now lives, and where summer days come with either a heat advisory or a tornado/hurricane/flood warning. We live in the air conditioning and all the neighborhood kids are off at magic camp, or yoga camp, or math camp. We occasionally see a few lightning bugs, but not enough to fill a jar. We do have a jar of change reserved for the ice cream truck, but we’re rarely home when it comes by and we can’t usually hear it anyway, because the windows are closed, the A/C is running, and the radio or tv is on. And so far, as far as I know, my daughter has not encountered her Melroy but I’m pretty sure he’s out there. That’s the thing about Melroy; he’s always out there somewhere.

Many thanks for the photo originally uploaded to Flickr by McMillan Memorial Library Portrait Gallery and protected under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Creative Commons License.