growing up. or not.

I suppose I've been moony about the bullet-train passage of these wonderful summer days in part because of my current reading material.

Recently, Mom gave me a copy of Bill Bryson's "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid" -- his memoir about growing up in Des Moines in the late 1950s. Bryson's laugh-out-loud reminiscences about kidhood really resonate with me; it strikes me that the difference between my growing-up in the 1970s and his in the '50s is much narrower than the difference between my childhood and today's kids'.

The book, plus these late-spring days (today is picture-perfect) have got me thinking a ton about growing up on Coventry Way, and about all the experiences that made up my childhood. Especially, all of our outdoor summer activities in the neighborhood. Which, frankly, I'd just as soon be doing still.

So let me paint a picture:

When we moved into our house at 3754 Coventry Way in, I think it was 1972, the street was still under construction. Most of the houses on our west side of the street were finished or nearly so; across the street there were several vacant lots and half-built houses that offered tempting play options, provided we could sneak over there without our moms knowing we were messing around on a potentially hazardous construction site. Most likely, someone stepped on a nail, and that was the end of our navigating shaky stairways and exploring open basements.

Our house had the first flat backyard at the crest of a hill. To our north lived the Hugheys (my classmate Debbie and her younger twin brothers). Beyond them on the cul-de-sac were the Webers, Todd, who was a year younger than me, and Tammy, who was Bill's age. I thought the Webers were a bit odd. Todd and Tammy were allowed to watch cartoons after school, which wasn't an option in our house. And Mrs. Weber made the WORST PB&J sandwiches: Jif peanut butter (we were a Peter Pan family) and Welch's grape jelly on Wonder bread. They were mushy and I thought they tasted sort of low-budget.

From our house going south down the street, you'd run next into the Chris Crowder's yard. Then on downhill to the McEneany's house, clad in blue siding. Tricia McEneany was a year or two older than me, and she was the first kid I knew to have her own record player in her bedroom, upon which we spun the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night" until the needle broke. "S-A-TUR-DAY NIGHT!" The McEneany's lived there when we moved in, but the dad was transferred and the family moved away a year or two later. Then in moved the Joneses, with daughter Erin who was Bill's age.

Chris Crowder and Erin Jones were the only only children on the street; we thought either their parents couldn't have any more kids or, after Chris and Erin, didn't want to.

Next down the hill were the Grimms. Kirsten Grimm remains my oldest friend, and we're in fairly regular touch both in person and via email. Her brother, Adam, was the youngest kid on the block, and we hazed him for it. In addition to having a finished basement (including a very exotic-seeming wet bar and a square of linoleum tile that became the defacto dance floor), Grimms' house had a root cellar, which was accessible by a huge door on the back of the house. It was a sort of appealing and yet scary place, and it smelled damp and earthy and dark. I don't recall what was stored there; we'd open the door and go in for a few minutes before getting a bit creeped out and running back out into the yard.

Then came Eric Stevens's house. The Stevenses were by far the richest family on the street, as evidenced by a) the deep-pile white shag carpet in their sunken living room; b) the fact that they gave out full-size Hershey bars at Halloween; and c) the fact that they were probably the first family in the neighborhood to have cable, and most definitely the first to have HBO. I caught more than an eyeful of some R-rated movies (most memorably a bizarre scene from "Last Tango in Paris" that I still can't quite get past) late-night when I was babysitting Eric.

From our house down to the Stevenses', our backyards all connected in this sloping stripe of green playspace, edged all along the west side by a deep and wonderful woods.

About which I'll post more soon.

hmph.

(a clandestine at-work post, because I just have to get this out of my head)

To my dismay, I'm finding that I'm spending a lot of time when I'm not at work stewing about work. So it feels like I'm almost always working. Which in turn feels like time is just flying by.

One of my biggest causes of stress in life -- and you can ask Rob what I'm like when I feel rushed -- is not having enough time to do all the things that I want or need to do. That, plus the fact that my to-do list tends, even on weekends, to be quite long. My list of chores and tasks to do last Saturday morning before Dad and Ellen arrived for a Father's Day visit was really quite ridiculous, and I spent the first hour after they got here scurrying around trying to finish things up.

When I took the Predictive Index personality-type study a couple of years ago, I came out as a "High C" among the four drives: A=to dominate; B=to induce positive response; C=for stability; D= for certainty. Here are the likely behaviors of a High C: to be methodical, to do one thing at a time, to finish a task before moving on, to be patient, to be process-driven, to be persistent, to be a creature of habit, to be focused, to fare less well under pressure, to be reactive.

Yep, that's me.

So this constant fretting about work, plus a full calendar in the coming months (meetings and big projects for work, vacation, not to mention the things I want to do, like taking an afternoon by the pool and spending a weekend with Bill) are making my heart race and my shoulders crunch. My deep and abiding fear is that I don't have time for the things I want to do, and that these next few months -- summer, my very favorite time of year -- will slip out from underneath me.

This makes me extremely sad.

a terrific dinner.

Tonight, we made a dinner out of side dishes, and it was wonderful, the perfect thing for a warm evening. Both of the recipes came from Williams-Sonoma's "Grilling: New Healthy Kitchen," which Mom gave Rob last summer. Nothing we've made from that book has disappointed. Here's what was on tap:

Mushroom Bruschetta
1 lb. portobello mushrooms, cleaned and stemmed and sliced into 1/4-in slices
tossed with a couple of cloves of garlic, crushed
olive oil
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
salt and pepper

2 slices of country wheat bread (per person), drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt

Marinate the mushrooms up to 1 hour before dinner. Grill over medium-high heat for about 3 minutes per side. Grill bread slices for about a minute per side.

Arrange grilled mushroom slices on grilled bread; top with crumbled Feta and slivered basil.


Chickpeas with Baby Spinach
In a baking dish, toss a can of chickpeas (drained and rinsed), 1 thinly sliced tomato, a good glug of olive oil and salt + pepper. Broil about 8-9 minutes until browned on top. Remove from the oven and immediately toss with a big handful of sliced fresh baby spinach and the juice of a lemon.

Plus, I made a quick lemon-olive oil salad dressing and tossed that with greens just picked from the garden. It all tasted fresh, light and healthy. Delish!

yum.

In addition to 101Cookbooks, which I love, I've run across another terrific food blog called Smitten Kitchen. Mom, you gotta check this out! I think the potato pizza is on deck for this weekend.

a wager.

We're frighteningly fond of the 70s XM radio station. Aside from rebroadcasts of vintage Casey Kasem AT40 shows from the 70s (what's not to love?), we've started listening to "70s on 7" with alarming frequency.

For me, this music is totally nostalgic, reminding me especially of rides in Mom's Olds Cutlass Convertible, particularly up Keystone Avenue from Grandma's to home, or from the Brookshire pool. It's a total time warp for me. Rob, however, missed that whole era of music, since that sort of music wasn't deemed particularly appropriate listening in his church-going household.

So tonight, a bottle and some change into the evening, ELO's "Don't Bring Me Down" comes on. I've always been convinced that the chorus goes, "Don't bring me down, Bruce." Rob was convinced that it was "Don't bring me down, Groos." Whatever.

We bet $20.

I lost.

Turns out, this is a prime example of my new favorite word, mondegreen. A mondegreen is a commonly misheard word or phrase. Like in "Blinded By the Light." You know what I'm talking about.

Crap. Now I owe Rob twenty bucks. And I'll never hear the end of it.

Oh, and by the way, these are like crack:

recharging.

I came back from a super-dee-awesome HOW Conference with an empty gas tank, both mentally and physically. Which made conditions ripe for a cold to develop. Which it did.

I paid a quick visit to Carmel on my day off Friday for lunch with Grandma and Mom. It was great seeing both of them, and Mom's lunch was, natch, perfect.

We've made the most of this Memorial Day weekend, in spite of low energy and a scruffy throat on my part. Rob washed windows on Saturday (which no doubt foretold today's bit of rain). I sort of helped, but not really. But we put the screens in the front and side doors, and now the house is wide open to the warm humidity, which feels terrific. I hung in there for 9 holes today and put up a rather decent (for me) score of 41. We've made two morning trips to the Coffee Emporium, during both of which Wrigley scored dog biscuits. So it's all good.

We've been creative in the kitchen: Saturday, we did barbeque chicken and lime/thyme potato salad (my absolute fave), then finished with a slice of homemade pound cake topped with fresh local strawberries that'd spent some quality time in a bath of Cointreau. Last night, we marinated some scallops from Findlay Market in some fresh herbs, garlic and olive oil, then broiled them topped with buttered breadcrumbs. I reduced some orange juice, added chopped tomato and swirled in a bit of butter for a nice sauce. Yum. Tonight it's steak sandwiches and fresh asparagus.

who knew?

Turns out, Grandma has a Wikipedia entry

pick your dinner.

First salad picked from the garden, last weekend when Mom was here.

spring.

Cool, rainy weather this spring has lengthened the season; things bloomed in succession, like a parade of flowering trees and shrubs over the past several weeks. Here's from our yard:

can't wait for this.

Wow. I really need to get off my @ss and post all the photos of our spring-glorious yard that I took specifically to share here.

In the meantime, I totally can't wait for this show on PBS coming this fall: