Reading aloud a children’s book with an arch nemesis!

I recently bought a new book to read to my little one: Dexter Bexley and the Big Blue Beastie by Joel Stewart. The artful synopsis on the back is what sold me: a big, blue (my favorite color!!!) beast-like giant eyeing a little boy on a scooter, pointedly telling him “I’m bored. I think I’ll eat you.” Resistance was futile.

Reading to my son is an interesting exercise. I love to read aloud to him, especially at night when he’s curled up in our bed with his bottle, staring avidly at the My Kitty illustrations I read to him every night. It is one of the few times he’ll be still enough for me to be able to point out the words; every other time he’s too busy grabbing it from me and trying to turn the pages. I believe it’s because he thinks of books as little doors – a legitimate way to view a book as a doorway to a new world I guess. Daytime reading is usually me reading to him while he plays around so he can hear the story and see me enjoy the book.

Which is why I love Dexter Bexley and the Big Blue Beastie; reading this book aloud is pure enjoyment. I probably have as much fun, if not more, as my son, reading the hard “D’s” and booming “B’s” in their rolling alterations with a faux English accent (I’m compelled! It makes me sound cultured and evil). The Big Blue Beastie is in a perpetual state of boredom and constantly threatening to “eat” our intrepid young hero. Each time, Dexter counters with “Hold on, I have a much better idea” and comes up with various schemes that give him a few moments more (or many moons in storyland time). Thus we have the two frenemies scooting around on scooters, running a successful flower delivery business (complete with shares and the stock market), becoming famed private detectives called “Bexley & Beastie” (solving the case of the “The Rubber Glove Affair” and capturing arch nemesis Professor Horten Zoar, “although he later escaped”), creating the largest beast-iest yogurt sundae, and (finally) sharing lollipops.

When reading to a child, especially at night, I find there are certain rules that make it an enjoyable experience for both parties.

1. There needs to by a rhythm to the writing, otherwise what’s the point of reading aloud? Alliterations, assonance, consonance, rhymes and repetition are great stylistic devices, and are wonderful to the ears.
2. The book should be a reasonable length. The My Kitty book is only 5 pages long (remember, my child is only 1!), which is perfect as the final book for the day. It is to wind him down and lull him to sleep. Dexter Bexley is 36 pages which is why I read it to him during the day.
3. The illustrations should be vibrant. When you leave the books lying around, and when you pause during your recitation, you want your child to want to look at the pictures.
4. Enjoy The Book. Enjoy Reading Aloud.

- manals

Banana Bread

With the slew of foodie/recipe-yee themed movies/blogs/articles/books that are inundating the planet, I thought it would be fun to join the bandwagon.

I have decided to share with you all my very special banana bread recipe – a recipe that is so fool-proof, so quick, so edible that can con a wolf into abject humility (I don’t know why I wrote that. It had sounded so cool when I thought of it), and so yummy that your in-laws will hand of the diamond heirlooms. Trust me, its that good. This recipe is  my pot-luck standard: continually requested and easily delivered.

So, ’nuff said. Onto my incomparable recipe! You will need eggs, unsalted butter, flour, salt, baking soda, baking powder, sugar and bananas. You can add in the walnuts if you want – I don’t.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 81/2 x 41/2 inch loaf pan.

Now for the fun stuff:

Mix together in your main, big mixing bowl
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
¾ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon baking powder

In another bowl, beat for about 2 minutes
5 1/3 tablespoons unsalted butter
2/3 cup sugar
Keep beating until the color is lightened and thoroughly mixed. Note: I’m sure there are a lot of you that might be tempted to skimp on the sugar. While I don’t know the repercussions on the baking procedure (remember in baking measurements matter), I will say that it isn’t as sugary as you’d think; the bananas also add a large amount of sweetness. Use this amount first before deciding on your sugar quantity.

Add the sugar mixture to the flour until well blended, and then
Add in 2 large eggs, already beaten. Blend.
Fold in 1 cup mashed ripe bananas, approximately 2.
(Optional: ½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans).

Combine everything.

Scrape the batter into the loaf pan and make it is spread evenly; I gently bang the pan against the kitchen counter to help level it a little. Bake it for 50 to 60 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Once done, let it cool for 5 to 10 minutes then dig in!

Bon appétit!

-manals

Perceived Pain vs. Referred Pain

So I go to the dentist on Monday at 7pm after work for the final set of fillings on the top two left molars. I have bad teeth. Actually, I have good looking teeth (because my mom told me), they’re just in very bad condition due to a combination of bad genes and personal negligence.

My dentist, Dr Brooks is a chirpy gentleman of average height and sardonic sense of humor. He is always smiling and maintains a pleasant disposition (I say “maintain” because a couple of times I have heard his voice harden slightly when repeating a request to his nurses. I approve – it usually happens when his instruments are deep in my mouth). He’s also very sweet. He has this trick of injecting Novocain where he gently jostles the area near the incision so you don’t feel the needle’s pin-prick. Blissfully distracting!

What happens during every visit to the dentists chair is that I tense up and am convinced that I will be mercilessly tortured and feel acute, distressing mind-boggling pain. It doesn’t happen, but after 20 plus odd years, I doubt I’ll change. Perceived pain is almost crippling, and it is a very big factor on why I don’t “regularly” go to the dentist. The last visit before I started going to Dr Brooks was 5 years ago.

What made this visit a tad bit different was the pain: this was the first time it smarted while he was working on my teeth. Usually I have an aching jaw, as a result of a gaping mouth, held open by some sort of rubber wedge – a thoroughly tiring experience. I felt pain along my lower left teeth; the dental work was being done on my upper left teeth. My hand shot up (the universal signal for “Stop This NOW!”) and the good doctor asked if I felt something cold.

Yes
Okay – more Novocain.
It was on the bottom teeth, not the top.
Oh. It must be the lower filling (side note: I have plenty of those!). We’ll try to cover it.

Back to drilling and scrapping and pulling and filing my teeth. It started to hurt within 2 seconds. My hand shot up again.

It’s the lower teeth?
Yes.
No, its being referred, its your top teeth, you need more Novocain.
Huh?
The pain from the top is being referred to the bottom it happens.
How do you know? (Yes, I can be rather curt!)
I know. It can’t be the lower teeth because there is no work being done on them.
How can you be sure.
I’m sure. And you won’t feel the needle this time because you’re still pretty numb.

He was right! I didn’t feel the needle. I didn’t feel the painful, cold sensation on my bottom teeth. It was referred pain. Real enough, regardless of location, but not acutely, distressingly mind-boggling! Hmmm…

- manals

A Wedding Custom

Wedding customs are the coolest. They can be a pain-in-the-butt to organize; they can be embarrassingly out-dated, out-moded, out-fashioned or just plain garish to look at. They can be chauvinistic, xenophobic, silly or, based on our modern, liberal, worldly sensibilities, simply wrong. But they can be a ton of fun!

My brother recently got married to a wonderful woman of Serbian decent, an extremely intelligent, witty, pretty, modern and nutty (c’mon, she’s marrying my brother!) woman that I am glad and proud to call my sis-in-law. Their wedding was in Burlington ON, a town midway between Toronto (where the newly-weds live) and Stony Creek, the town that she grew up in. Stony Creek has a large (and very family oriented) Serbian community, many of whom are related to one another, so much so that when my sis-in-law’s aunt (whose home used to be down the street) moved away 1 block, her family went into withdrawal mode. Of course I exaggerate, but simply to make a point.

I digress. So my brother, who is of Pakistani decent, married this lovely lady of Serbian decent. The wedding was by and large secular in order to accommodate 2 very different cultures and everyone’s (especially the couple’s) religious sensibilities.

But little bits of culture crept in here and there. The golden couple was a splendor in traditional Pakistani outfits, arrayed in reds, golds and ivorys. (They sparkled actually.) My brother actually wore those sultan shoes with the curly tips – very propah! During the reception they toned it down a tad bit for the sake of comfort & function – a champagne gown and suit to accommodate the Rumba they had practiced for a full 2 weeks.

 

Clothes didn’t provide the only variety; music and dancing were a melting pot as well: a bhangra troupe was hired to jolt the festivities, hubby sang Elvis’s Surrender to the couple’s aforementioned rollicking Rumba (the practice had a lot to do with the rollicking bit), the unifying polskos & the kolos (I hope to high heaven I have spelled these properly – my apologies if I haven’t!) and obviously the free-for-all desi jhatkas to the Bollywood beats where everyone jumped onto the dance floor and jumped, flailed and twirled to their hearts content. Fun times.

My favorite incorporation was at start of the festivities. The Serbians have a custom where the groom’s brother must “buy” the bride from her family, and the final “bride price” dollars are given to the bridal couple (possibly an enhancement to an outdated custom). It has since then become an entertaining “play-acting” part of the proceedings (at least in Canada – I do not claim to know what goes on in the old country): both sides plan the “bargaining dialogue” and then perform it when the groom’s party goes to the brides house to get married (in Pakistan this is known as the barat, but by then the Pakistani negotiations, if there had been any, would already have occurred). Needless to say my younger brother and the bride’s uncle milked this scenario for all its worth: baby-bro sauntered to the house banging 2 makeshift cymbals (pot lids actually) shouting “I seek a bride for my brother! Preferably blond, but anyone will do!” Uncle paraded old men in white wedding veils. Both bargained the pros and cons of wives and women good enough for my brother-the-groom. Everyone pitched in their two-cents. In the end she was bought for 20,000 Rials since that was the largest numbered denomination currency my brother had with which to show-off the bride price (in reality they couple were given a CAN dollar amount, but not 20,000).

When I first heard about this “show”, I couldn’t fathom my feminist sis-in-law-to-be participating in a custom so outdated and chauvinistic-sounding. Why should she be “bought” from her family, and on top of that be bargained over. And why would – in my opinion – a western culture that deemed itself “civilized” keep such a practice alive? You see, I had made the mistake of assuming Europe was Western, as if those two words encompassed all the ideologies associated with modernity and equality (I’m not saying that the West really is all those things, I’m just saying that it is perceived to be so, as opposed to the “backward East & Africa” where the custom of dowry has reached vicious and barbaric levels).

I did not take into account that Europe is made of up many countries, many of them close to the Asian border, and once ruled by the Moors and Ottomans. I also did not take into account that traditions and customs can grow and adapt to fit the modern context. They exist, but hopefully to fulfill the spirit of their original intent – uniting and creating families and accepting that while the wedding may be a fairy-tale event, the marriage is very much steeped in the real world. The money that was exchanged at my brother’s wedding is a contribution to the couple’s new life, a helping-hand to set-up their home. I hope that was the original intent of the tradition, but if it had once been used to fill the pockets of greedy parents, I’m proud to say I saw a tradition distilled to its humorous and generous essence.

What is a pocketbook?

On Wikipedia, dictionary.com and in The Oxford Dicitionary, a pocketbook is defined by way of being a “purse”, which is “a bag for carrying possessions and/or money, sometimes known in American English as a pocketbook.”

Note the trailing “…sometimes known in American English as a pocketbook,” as if it was a lackadaisical addendum, so to speak. So no one (at least no one outside of the America) can be surprised that I have never heard the word. A Pakistani woman who grew up in the Middle East speaking the Queen’s English, with the second highest score in TOEFL in 1998, who only passed her SAT’s because of her English skills.  So when I say I haven’t heard of the word, its not because I am in the habit of being ignorant, it is because the word “pocketbook” never really came up.

So it came as a cultural shock when I married a Cambridge-boy (Massachusetts, not England) and moved down to Winthrop (comma U S of A), little words  started to crop up. And when I say little words, I mean “petrol pump” as opposed to “gas-station”, “dust-bin” instead if “trash can” or “garbage” (which incidentally existed, but only when my husband spouted nonsense), “trousers” are pants, and an automobile’s trunk is a “trunck”, not a “boot” (which, again, is not how us Canadians say “about”) or a “dickie” (though to be honest, I think that word might have been a hangover from Urdu, but I’m not sure). You know, the usual differences. Massive amounts of literature, sociological papers, dissertations, talk-shows, etc have been devoted to this stuff. It was funny; hubby & I sometimes stumbled over our words, but we laughed at the confusion and learned each other’s language.  But nothing could compare to the confusion, the irritation and the snapping as it did when the word “pocketbook” was used.

When I first heard it, I thought it was a synonym for a messenger bag or a school bag, also known as a book bag. So whenever I used to ask him for my purse, or bag (short for handbag, obviously), he had no clue what I was talking about and asked if I wanted my pocketbook. I thought he meant my schoolbag. What the hell was he talking about – not my school bag, my purse. We’re on our way out, I want my purse, the thing with my wallet, keys, lipstick, etc. We are not going to university so why would I want my school bag / book bag / pocketbook. Verbatim, I kid you not. Uttered many, many times over.

So then I thought it was because he was a guy and he didn’t know what a purse was, which was ridiculous because EVERY woman I know has a purse so he’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb to miss those things. They’re like shoes, how do you not know shoes. And it’s not as if I haven’t used the word with other people in the west. So I tried using handbag, or bag, which is what my mother sometimes used when she was in a hurry. Nope – it was still, “do you mean your pocketbook?” Agghhhh!!!!

A couple of months later, I heard his mother ask for her pocketbook. My ears pricked up – aha! So the origin of the word was explained. But I still didn’t understand why (1) they insisted on calling a purse a pocketbook when it clearly wasn’t a pocketbook (remember, I thought it was a school bag) and (2) why the hell they didn’t know what a purse was.

Point 1 was explained when my father-in-law caught me bitching “no, give me that bag in front of you! There!” He laughed, grabbed a dictionary and defined the word pocketbook: “a wallet, purse, or handbag.”

Point 2 is subtler and it stems from an observation I made that could be attributed to a sociological factor. Hubby grew up in the North Shore (aka north of Boston) and we live in the North Shore. My mother-in-law grew up in the South Shore (aka south of Boston). I used to work in Quincy, which is in the South Shore. I got to know a young lady who was born, brought up, lived, worked and married in the South Shore area. (For all I know, she’s die there too!) She was a fanatic of Coach purses – came in with a new one every other month. Each time she came in, she would always excitedly ask “how do you like my pocketbook!?!”, “I love pocketbooks!”, “Oh that’s a nice pocketbook.” Only people in the South Shore used that word. I say “in” rather than “from” because I wasn’t sure if everyone who used that word in Quincy lived there. I know I didn’t. I’m not a socialogist - this is just a personal observation from an observant woman (I notice things like purses) who has never taken a formal sociology or anthropology class. But it is interesting in the context of the the never-ending one-upmanship between the North and South Shores.

Five years and one child later, we’ve compromised on the word “pocketbook”: we say “bag”. I still refuse to say pocketbook. Yes, it certainly is a technically correct word. After all, it was in the Oxford dictionary & Wikipedia, that bastion of all information.  But I just don’t like the word “pocketbook.” MFor heavn’s sake – my Coach purse is not a pocketbook, it is a purse that cost enough money to be a purse damn it!

Drawn Blood

My 9 month old had his blood drawn to check for anemia and lead poisoning. Apparently this is going to be done once every year for the next 3 years to make sure there my child is not inhaling lead dust.

I wonder what it is like for this little child whose mother is holding him so tight that he cannot move his head while 2 strange women are sticking a needle into his little arm. How betrayed does he feel that his father is standing in front of him singing itsy-bitsy spider while red stuff is being taken out of him?

Right after the needle was taken out, he calmed down to a sniffle, and by the time we were in the lobby he had stopped completely. There was only the subdued look while his father held him. I was later told by a coworker that he was processing the betrayal. A friend added that he was also plotting his revenge.

I hope our babies have short term memories.

The Idea of Altered Books

Here’s an ingenious example of creativity knowing no bounds: Altered Books. A set of artists cut off the bindings of used books found at a used book store and find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration. They put pages in the mail and send them all around the world. My only question is, are we bastardizing one form of artwork for the sake of another? Or am I making too much of it? Before I digress, see below for my favorite piece, Entranced Poem  27.