Off to the Races

My husband now owns a race car. As will not surprise anyone who knows him personally, it is cobbled together out of several other, lesser, cars into a single frankensteinian contraption sporting four cylinders and an internal combustion engine. I think.

It is a Mustang, 92? I hesitate to admit that I don't actually know the year but then again he has admitted he doesn't read my blog - or anything else I write - so I guess we're even.

Anyway. This is his latest hobby. His other hobbies are a Nissan Pathfinder, a Ford F-250 (more of a hobby-transport than an actual hobby, and a ridiculous Toyota pick up with 35" tires.
Our daughters are real dressy-up doll-toting princess-envy girly-girls, so of course they react in a rather predicatable fashion to his hobbies. They LOVE them. Specifically, they love the race car and all it embodies. They begged me to take them to a race. But the race is anywhere between 7 and 10 p.m. on Wednesday nights, and the track doesn't actually release (or, as near as I can tell, MAKE) the schedule in advance, so I never know what I will be committing to in terms of crabby sleep-deprived children if I take them.

But once the school year was out (late June, thank you very much snow days), I no longer had any excuses. So to celebrate the elder daughter's graduation from Kindergarten, we made a night out of going to the races. I called ahead and threw myself on the mercy of the woman working there:

"I have two little girls who would love to see their Daddy race but if he's in a later heat it would be WAY past their bedtimes so could you please tell me when he'll be racing?"

"Well," she paused. This is obviously a closely guarded secret. "It's still tentative, but his division is scheduled to race... first."

Oh, bless you lovely speedway woman.

We got to the speedbowl in time to park about a mile away and then haggle with younger daughter that Yellow Bear Bear had to stay in the car. Then we hauled ourselves up to the box office and bought our tickets and discovered, at Younger Daughter's prompting, that there were no ATM's in the area and Mommy was therefore devoid of Cash With Which To Buy Popcorn.

I also had no way of reaching my husband, because although he is constitutionally incapable of saying "no" to the latest automobile modification, he remains convinced that CELLULAR TELEPHONES are useless. I walked toward one of the two pits (on opposite ends of the field) carrying Younger Daughter on my head and holding Older Daughter's hand. I apporached a young man clad in Nomex.

"Excuse me, whta division do you race?"
"X-cars."
Daughter on my head: popcorn popcorn popcorn popcorn popcorn popcorn
"Thank you Jesus. Do you know where car 12 is? It's a blue and yellow mustang?"
"He's here, but I don't know in which pit."
"Great! Hey, by the way, what heat are you racing?"
"We're dead last."

Oh god. Oh curse you, demon speedway woman.

popcornpopcornpopcornpopcornpopcornpopcorn!

I apporached the entry to the pit.

"Can I go back and look for my husband?"
"Not without a pit pass."
"How much is a pit pass?"
"$15 for you and $8 for each kid."
"Even if she rides on my head?"

POPCORN! Mommy buy POPCORN! Momy buy POPCORN!

I approached a young man wearing a pit pass.

"Can you go back in the pit and look for my husband?"
"I can show you how to sneak in the pit."
"Ummm, that's OK. I was just wondering if you could look for my husband and let him know I'm out here?"
"Well, if you follow the fence along the back there, eventually it just ends. And you can sneak in."
I note that he is, himself, wearing a legitimate pit pass.
"That's really helpful, but I don't think I'm going to gate crash." I gestured to the child on my head.

POPCORN! POPCORN! POPCORN!

He rolled his eyes, clearly unimpressed with my gumption.

"Well, even if the fence is closed up, they just wire tire it together and you can cut the tie and sneak in."

"Right. Look. He drives X-Car number twelve. Could you just see if he's back there?"

He sighs. He ambles off. He returns.

"Well, he's here, but he's in the other pit."

SIGH. No popcorn respite yet. We shuffle off to the other side of the track and ask an older, sympathetic-looking woman wearing a pit pass to find teh driver of X-car 12 and tell him his wife and kids are hear, and willing to stay to see him race in the LAST HEAT but not without popcorn and therefore cash.

She conveys the message. He appears, bearing a bucket of popcorn. The girls are thrilled. He watches a couple of heats with us and then leaves to prep for his own heat. The younger daughter, now stuffed full of popcorn and up way past curfew, is fading fast.

"I need go home," she says. "I all done."

Me, too. As an aside, I hate all things auto-racing.

But Older Daughter is steadfast:

"I'm not tired, Mama! Not one drop! Please, please, can we stay? I won't be grumpy at all!"

And she is so earnest and sweet and this is after all her Kindergarten graduation celebration and I have to hand it to her: She is being really good.

So we stay. After another heat, the only thing that will entertain the younger one is standign on the bleacher in front of me and then leaping onto my lap. Practicing, she notes, to jump into the pool.

Finally, it's our turn. X-car 12 is on teh track, warming up. The girls are screaming "Daddy Daddy Daddy!" The air, I tell you, is electric. Older Daughter looks at me.

"I feel a drop of rain."

"Oh no you don't."

"Oh yes, we do!" said the assembled crowd as they all left the stands, lemming-style.

Heh! I chuckle. Sissies! We are ready. We have rain jackets with hoods. The clouds open. it's a deluge, but only 5 seconds' worth. We are smug inside our rain gear and ready to watch a race.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the announcer crackles to the few remaining in the stands, "We're sorry but with this rain we'll ahve to call the race. But be sure to come back next week, when X-cars will race first!"

I've heard that before. I'm not buying it. But the kids are, and they're clamoring, "Oh please can we come next week? Daddy's gets to race first!"

And we've been back, nearly every week since. Much to my chagrin, my daughter's squabbles now sound like this:

"When I grow up and I'm a race care driver, I get to race number 12!"
"No I do!"
"No I DO!"
"I said it first!"

So here I sit, praying for rain. And for a "no" vote on that recently proposed indoor race track...

An Update on Jill...

By which, of course, I mean Chris's sheep. Chris offed her. And brought me loin chops. My karma is so very screwed.

Update on the Mint-Killer

By which I mean, of course, my father.

He is now growing MULTIFLORA ROSES. On purpose. There is not enough gasoline in the world to kill them.

Which is not to say he won't try.

The Funniest Thing I've Ever Been Called....

My friend Katy has a large and gregarious extended family, and that extended family has a compund of rustic but meticulously appointed cabins on an island in Maine. And my friend Katy was kind enough to invite two of us - the previously mentioned Chris and I - to stay with her sans children in her cottage for 4 consecutive days of New England-Style debauchery.

Which, of course, we did. And on the first night in the cabin we were introduced to that most gracious of Katy's Extended Family's many traditions, Cocktail Hour. Coming from a small family wherein all drinking was done in fiercely guarded privacy - if not abject denial - I was unfamiliar with the pleasantry of Cocktail Hour, in which all of Katy's relations and (lucky for us) friends gather on the deck of The Big House (yes, really) for drinks and conversation.

And since Chris and I were the novitiates, the conversation went something like this:

Katy's Cousin 1: So what do you two do?
Me (gesturing, cocktail in hand, to Chris): She's a farmer, I'm a writer.
[Brief conversation during which Chris explains yes, she really is a farmer. A sheep farmer.]
Katy's Cousin 1: And you're a writer?
Me, Demurely: Yep.
Katy's Cousin 2: What do you write?
Me: Anything they pay me for.
Katy's Cousin 1: You're a PROFESSIONAL writer?
Me: Yep.
Katy's Cousin 2: You MAKE A LIVING writing?
Me: Well, wait a minute, let's define "make a living..."
Katy's Cousin 1's Wife, herself a wildlife biologist, happening upon the conversation late and clearly awed by my profession: Really?
Me, trying hard to be modest: Yep.
Katy's Cousin 1's Wife: You're really a professional wrestler?

Ummmm, no. Although some days it does feel like that, as I thrash about on the floor with my cross-dressing thesarus, all to find the perfect word.

Me: OH! ha-ha! I am in fact a WRITER. Time for another cocktail.

Those *&^(*^% Slugs.

I used to have a thing for slugs. I mean, not that I ever really LIKED them - no gardener can claim to like slugs. They kick you out of the gardening club, sort of like being the one vegetarian who doesn't like tofu. But I thought they were fascinating, and fairly low on the scale of garden pests. This was due largely to the banana slug, which I liked so much after finding out it could fuck for days on end - really - that I made it the topic of an earlier essay. And yes, incidentally, that is one of the many joys of having a blog read by so few. It really frees me up, language-wise.

Anyway, a-hem. So I used to live in the Pacific NW, and of all of my gardening sites, that should have been the most beset by slugs. And I thought it had it bad. I mean, I would set out a beer trap every night and find maybe a dozen slugs in it the next morning. In my whole garden. Which is not to say they weren't destructive - they were. I mean, my NW slugs were large - typically 4-5" - and they ate like a teenage boy at a cruise-ship buffet.

But here I am in Connecticut, where I have these tiny little nothings of mollusks sliming about my garden. A big one is maybe 2.5", and that's stretching it. Literally. But I have thousands of them.

Not to bring you into the middle of a story, but here's the last installment of the artichoke saga (the others will be following, Star-Wars-Prequel-Style, when I get around to it). My kind and generous friend Frank Anastasio gave me four artichoke plants. I was moved. I carried them home. I planted them carefully into my garden along with a heap of organic fertilizer and some compost and lavish amounts of tepid water. The next morning about 80% of their leaf mass was gone.

Slugs.

Blah.

I set out 12 cucumber plants this year, tenderly arrayed along a trellis. I had started them in my tiny greenhouse and hardened them off carefully and they were lush and robust and BEAUTIFUL. And these were not just any cucmbers - they were DIVAS, and I treated them like such.

One week later, I am down to 3. Yes, three. Slugs. I set out two beer traps on either side of the cucmbers. Later that same night, I took a body count. 60 slugs, head-down in the beer. Culled from an area about 24 square feet. At this rate, they are their own biomass. It's a shame you can't use them as fuel or food or something other than my own fiendish cosmic torture.

I called my friend Wayne. Of Wayne's Organic Garden fame. "Erica," he said, "You sound like someone's *died*. You sound distraught."

Well, yes. Because after they took out my Divas, they moved on.

To...

my....

STRAWBERRIES. Oh, strawberries, the whole raison d'etre (quick, is there a French spell-checker in the house? NO? Good.) of home agriculture. I mean really. Because store-bought organic strawberries cost about $3/cup, and my children will eat exactly a week's income-worth in a sitting, and the conventionally raised ones will give you cancer.

So I put in 50 strawberry plants, everbearers, which keep me in berries nicely from June-September. Or they should when they aren't being done in by mollusks too stupid to carry their own shell. Too stupid to not slip head-down into a saucer of beer. But smart enough to realize that life's too short to eat anything less than a perfectly-ripened, organically-grown strawberry.

The Bastards.

I am now reduced to picking my strawberries before they are totally ripe and serving them with sugar and stewing the entire time over how much better they would be if they could just actually RIPEN but NO because the second they are ripe the slugs will move in and leave an opalescent crispy film all over the pathetic stump of a berry I try to pick the next morning.

I even resorted to salting them. When you sprinkle salt on a slug, it turns bright orange and writhes around and eventually dissolves like the witch on the Wizard of Oz (the colorized version) into a slimy puddle of mollusk agony. I did this with a grimace, picturing myself turning on some karmic spit, being sprinkled with caustic granules while my skin peeled off.

There is a reason I am a writer, and the official diagnosis is Overactive Imagination. It was either this or my own personal file with the FBI.

"Ashes," Wayne said, after hearing that I had already tried the beer thing. "God, you're not using good beer, are you?" Wayne sounded a little distraught himself. (For the record, I am using Piels, a beer I had never even heard of before, which was pronounced "disgusting" by the liquor store employee who sold it to me.) "They don't like to cross ashes."

So now I am sprinkling ashes hither and yon, and setting out so many beer traps the Opinionated Liquor Store Employee no longer believes I am not actually quaffing the disgusting Piels by the case, perhaps while gnawing on an uncut block of Velveeta.

To add insult to plant injury, I have realized the source of my slug woes: My compost pile. My compost pile is mostly leaf mold, the coveted stuff that results when you ask your New England neighbors to give you all of their fall leaves and they look at you like you are crazy and perhaps have no taste in beer but they go along with your request because it is easier than bagging them.
And then the leaves break down, forming a lovely crumbly mess of organic matter just perfect for your garden, and haven to millions of beneficial earthworms (also hermaphrodites. Go figure.) And apparently also the Playboy Mansion of Slugdom, where they all go to hang out and cavort and eat too much.

And drink.

Because now I have placed gigantic bowls of beer in and around my compost pile. Within an hour or two, I had scads of slugs face-down at the edges. I flicked them in with a stick, and counted upwards of forty. And in a three-foot radius around the bowls, there were dozens more, radiating inward toward the beer, eyestalks all a-quiver, like the spokes on a giant wheel of mucous all pointing inward to the hub of alcoholic death.

My karma may be toast but my body will feast on cucumbers and strawberries.