The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": The Power of the Ring Ding

Monday, February 2, 2009

The Power of the Ring Ding

I am one of the annoying moms who grates organic carrots into the carob brownies and shreds winter squash into the corn bread. The above shot could be found in my kitchen.

That explains why my kids worship McDonald's and horde Smarties in their sock draw. I bake all the time, only I use fruit as a sweetner and smushed bananas instead of oil. They fell for it until they were about in the fifth grade and started going on unsupervised play dates where the mothers introduced them to the world of processed baked goods, refined flour, white bread, and the teachings of Stalin. Well, maybe not Stalin, but that's sort of how I felt.

Around that time, when my oldest was 10 and my youngest was around 4, we had a graduation breakfast at her pre-school. It was a rural Christian preschool which meant there were lots of doughnuts (in NYC, we were much more diverse and offered bagels and bialies). Emma and I contributed a fruit tray and whole wheat cranberry muffins. Upon being offered one of those sugary white doughnuts, Emma's eyes got very big and she said in an unusually loud voice, "No, thank you. Mom says doughnuts are toxic."

I turned away. I was hoping they wouldn't connect me with that kid, but since there were maybe eight kids in that preschool, the chances were slim.

So the other day while shopping in one of those giant warehouse stores, I told Emma and Philip to each pick out a treat so I could focus for five minutes on what I was buying. Emma picked out meltable chocolate and strawberries; Philip picked out Swiss rolls. The deal was I had to let them buy whatever they chose.

Then Philip's current and first girlfriend came over that afternoon. They have been "dating" (they go on myspace together while I put laundry away in his room; we occasionally all go out to walk the dog) for five months and are planning a small, but elegant, wedding. This is, remember, middle school.

This time they were playing around with the names of their future children, and discussing the likelihood of eye and hair color. Then I got this text while putting together a snack for them:

Mom, whatever you do, don't offer her the Swiss rolls. They r way 2 good 2 give away. Don't even say we have them.

I texted back: But u r going to share yr lives. Y not a Swiss roll?

Please Mom. Please. I'll read or do a chore if u just bring up the popcorn.

The amazing thing about the early teenage years is they are beginning to see irony -
in me, in their teachers, in each other, but not in themselves. Not yet.

I think that weird balance is one of the hardest nuances to capture in YA writing.

7 comments:

Adrienne said...: Cute! You'll know you're in trouble when he finds someone worth sharing the Swiss rolls with :)

I have both items in the first picture in my kitchen, but also potato chips and a boatload of candy...; Monday, 02 February, 2009
Anonymous said...: I love Swiss rolls myself, but I know what you are saying about that age group. It is very hard to get the way they are and not have it sound really dumb. I keep revising my YA manuscript and I am having themost trouble with the speaking parts. -- Barb in WV; Monday, 02 February, 2009
Marcia said...: Oh Anne, we are nutritional twins! I used to give my oldest frozen peas straight out of the freezer to snack on. He loved them. He took them outside in a little cup. I didn't find out till he was a teen that the neighborhood MOMS felt sorry for him.; Monday, 02 February, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: Anne, you -- and Marcia too -- are my SISTERS! I could have written this post, and I too am the Queen of Tofu.

I do use molasses and honey when I bake, and I have been known to use sugar too, but I make up for it by adding nutritionally dense stuff like pumpkin, carrots and even spinach. I've managed to get the kids to eat all sorts of stuff by blending it.

People feel sorry for my kids too. They grew up on carrot sticks, pumpkin and date muffins made with wholemeal flour and wheat germ, organically grown everything, wherever possible. The odd bag of M & Ms was a huge treat for which they were slavishly grateful.

Now that they're teenagers, they eat the worst crap in the world when I'm not around. All I can do is hope that they'll eventually come round. Sigh... for a while there, they were really healthy kids.

And your son's reaction to the Swiss roll had ME rolling! My kids are finally getting irony, but you're so right: when it's directed at them, they're mighty slow on the uptake.; Tuesday, 03 February, 2009
Stephanie J. Blake said...: I love Little Debbie anything. So bad. But, oh so yummy.; Wednesday, 04 February, 2009
Carrie Harris said...: I am such a dork. You know what I was thinking the whole time I was reading this?

One Ring Ding to rule them all. One Ring Ding to find them.

I think I need to get out more.; Friday, 06 February, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Mary and Marcia -- oh, where were you two when my boys were toddlers?
Frozen peas, pumpkin, spinach -- wonderful! In our old neighborhood, the kids would munch on Cracker Jacks and one mom put SevenUp in her two year old's bottle once...the horror.

Right Barbara -- teenspeak is tough. They detect it right away, too, if it's not really, really authentic. I'm around them all the time, and it's still a challenge.

Little Debbie. Yes,CW, I have a huge collection of imported chocolate (hey, it's not wine) so do as I say, not as I eat.

Carrie, lol, maybe a week in the islands and you'll be good as new.; Friday, 06 February, 2009

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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