Re-gifting as fast as I can

20 Dec

I am taking my son to his tutor in a half hour, through a foot of snow, and realized I didn’t buy a Hannukah gift for Eva and she had one for us last year.

So….would it be awful to give her a big bag of gourmet holiday coffee–cranberry flavored? Someone at work gave it to me but I don’t like flavored coffee except for cinammon. It’s got a Santa on it…sigh.

I feel like a heel.

Snowy morning

20 Dec

We have at least a foot of snow on the ground, very rare for NYC. I told the kids to try to sleep later, and not to come out of their room until 8 am at the earliest. I can hear them in there at 7:35, tapping at the window, oohing and aaahing over the blizzard.

I will open their door…

My wonton soup kicks ass

3 May

I am a wistful chef. I can’t cook much of anything despite reading cooking magazines, owning cookbooks, and worshipping various highstrung Manhattan chefs. I can roast a chicken. Toss a salad. Scramble eggs. More difficult tasks have a way of disappointing.

I’ve been wanting to try Chinese cooking for years. I bought some dumpling wrappers four years ago, put them in the freezer, and never had the nerve to attempt them.

But my son has taken up the quest of food and cooking. Or rather sitting on the kitchen counter beaming while I cook what he wants. He put in his request for wonton soup made at home and my stomach clenched with dread.

This morning I made the chicken broth from scratch, trudged over to Forest Hill’s only high-end grocery market and finally found some wontop wrappers in the freezer section. I also bought the sesame oil, the spinach and scallions, the ginger and garlic. I searched epicurious and found a recipe but it just had all the earmarks of disaster.

On a hunch, I tried youtube and found a blurry, amateurish four-minute video hosted by an extremely patient and supportive moustachioed Chinese gentleman on how to make wonton soup. I watched it twice. Alex watched it once.

I followed what he said to the very letter….and we are celebrating my greatest culinary triumph. Even Nora, world’s pickiest eater, digs it.

I can do it!!! I can make wonton soup from scratch!!

Come to Pappa

20 Apr

That’s the cover headline of the NY Post about the visit of Pope Benedict to New York City. (My love for the Post and all of its tacky shamelessness is unshakeable)

I’ve read the Post and the Times today about Pope Benedict and I have to say:

The Pope rocks.

He’s meeting with victims of priest molestation and repeatedly saying we have to clean up the priesthood; he’s telling Bush that torturing prisoners is wrong; he’s blessing disabled kids; he went to a synagogue; he’s praying at the site of World Trade Center and giving a little consolation to all the people still suffering from 9/11. Next stop: Yankee STadium. And he’s doing it all in this halting German accent.

I didn’t expect this to happen, but I feel incredible respect for him. It’s not an emotion I feel for that many humans.

Safe travels, Benedict!

 

Moses

20 Apr

So last night was Passover first night, and Max decided to finally do what he’s been muttering about for more than nine years and get going with the Jewish education. (Fine with me; I grew up with little religion, or, rather, confused religion. My position: Go for it.)

But in our family, I am the one who calls places and schedules things and investigates programs and creates kid rituals. This is one area I can’t take the lead role. Therefore, we’ve seen fits and starts.

Until last night. Max put together the plate–a boiled egg, parsley, a roasted bone and a “haroset”, a mix of apples and nuts and honey–he assembled the yarmukles, he bought a book to read the service from that was (somewhat) geared toward kids. The only thing he forgot was candles; we found one skinny candle, too slender for a holder, so he fashioned a ball of old crusty playdoh and stuck the candle in it.

Alex paid close attention to Max’s words. Nora just kept griping about the fact that she doesn’t do grape juice, thank you very much. (Kids drink grape juice whenever adults have to sip the wine) At the end of the dinner, when we opened the door for Elijah to come in and drink the wine, she freaked out over inviting a ghost into the apartment as if we were trying to reenact “Saw II.”

But when Max read the Passover history, the story of Moses and freeing himself and the Israelite slaves–it hit me. This stuff is OLD. I mean, obviously Jewish traditions are old. But here we are, commemorating an escape from Egyptian slavery that historians believe occurred in some form about the year 1800 BC.

Christianity took off some two milleniums later. And the big Christian holidays are a bit of a patchwork. Christmas is about the birth of Jesus, but the tree comes from German pagan tradition. Easter is about Jesus rising from the dead, but the eggs being painted and hidden comes from a bizarre mix of Roman and Celtic celebrations. I researched Easter when I was in charge of the food section at a women’s magazine (not the recipes, I hasten to add, just the writing about the food and the holidays). I came up with this (I thought) fascinating sidebar box on the history of the Easter egg hunt but my editor in chief had it mangled and cut because her born-again Christian readers could be offended. (“Jesus didn’t decorate Eggs? I’m canceling the subscription, Henry!”)

The Passover story and the sipping of the wine and the dipping herbs in salty water and leaving the door open for Elijah….no, there aren’t little bits picked up along the way from some Viking tribes in 400 AD. It seems pretty pure to me. Talk about antiquity.

And in our candle-in-the-playdoh way, we tried yesterday to keep moving it forward.

The Nicholl

19 Apr

I tried twice and didn’t get anywhere. The third year, Greg Beal (or someone) wrote “Top 15 percent!” on top of my ding letter. Most people would toss it in with this script. Move on.

But I’m back and ready to try one more time. I have a karmic feeling that things have been so tough for me the past six months that I could be ready for a big break. The universe is tired of messing with me. It’s Nancy time.

Nicholl, here I come!

Girls

17 Apr

My son is in his third week of public school, a LD (learning disabled) class within a large elementary near our apartment building. He loves it. Mostly.

“The girls don’t want to be my friend.” Alex wants to be friends with everyone. He likes everyone. At his former school there were a lot of problems and drawbacks and I was pissed off at them all the time, but they did somehow get all the kids in these little classes of 12 to like one another. Now Alex is in the big leagues and the kids are more “typical,” and guess what? Nine-year-old girls don’t really like nine-year-old boys.

He’s hurt. And confused. I reassure him. And I remember in my elementary school in Livonia Michigan how it wasn’t so much that I didn’t like the boys as I feared them. I was bully bait until I turned about 15. Now there are three girls–Mona, Bianca and Alaa–who have their girl clique going and they’ve decided they don’t like my Alex.

How could someone not like my sweet, beautiful, funny, bright, kind boy?

But I’m not going to make too much of it.

Expelled

16 Apr

Do you want to know how it feels when your child is expelled?

Bad

And how about when your child is expelled from a special-ed school?

Horrific.

“Expelled” has a weird connotation with me, of James Dean and bad girls smoking cigarettes and someone telling terrible lies. For some reason I go to 1958.

Today you can be expelled when the director of a private school just can’t stand your child.

That’s why we’re heading for the public schools.

The Quest, Part 2

16 Apr

OK, so according to the elaborate family tree I’ve created on ancestry.com, I’m directly descended from Pierre Billiou, a Frenchman who didn’t actually discover Staten Island, New York City’s fifth borough–Henry Hudson did that in 1609 when he sailed past the island and named it after the Dutch parliament (not too catchy). Billiou was the first European to build a house on the island and, according to an obscure little biography I tracked down and had summoned up from the bowels of the New York Public Library, he was successful in “pacifying” the Native Americans who had lived on the island for centuries. I have something of a chill imagining what form the pacifying took.

But what am I do with this information? The house belongs to the Staten Island Historical Society. No one has heard of Pierre, except for a smattering of people interested in the history of New York City before the English took possession and it was named New Amsterdam.

I am not from an “old New York family.” That is usually taken to mean one of the 19th century merchant barons like Vanderbilt or Rockefeller or Astor. Fabulously wealthy aristocrats with block-long mansions on Fifth Avenue. Pierre left a solid inheritance for his children when he died peacefully of old age, but it was gone by the time of the American Revolution.

It’s not as if Pierre was a founding father or anything.

Like … John Hancock?

My mother’s side of the family has had one big family reunion in the last 20 years. It was in
Wisconsin, when I was 33 years old and I brought my boyfriend, Max Epstein, who I was madly in love with and hugged and kissed all the time, even in front of my parents and sister. All of my relatives were very nice to him–I am fairly certain that some of them hadn’t had long conversations with a Jew before that day. There was a second cousin who made an anti-Semitic joke but I don’t think he had yet met Max, it was just part of his repertoire. I was mad and my mother got even madder on my behalf.

At the reunion my Uncle Frank pulled out an old clipping that said we were descended from John Hancock, the famous signer of the Declaration of Independence, through my grandmother, Hazel Hancock, who had been dead about 14 years by the time of the reunion. She was pretty much unmourned except perhaps by my Aunt Peggy, a schizophrenic who had spent most of her life in mental institutions.

I was 19 when my grandmother died and I felt terrible at the time, I even fainted at her wake. She died in July in Phoenix, Arizona, and I still remember how hot it was outside, and then when we walked in the funeral home, the temperature plunged at least 30 degrees. It was cool and dark and there my grandmother lay in her coffin, open casket, as mandated by Irish Catholics. (My grandfather was the family’s powerful patriarch, Francis O’Neill, and although before they died my grandparents spent a lot of time watching evangelists on television, he was a Catholic and so was my grandmother after she married him.)

The priest started saying the Rosary, which I was totally unfamilar with, my parents being agnostic and sometime Unitarians. It was so repetitive and yet hypnotic and I was tired and hungry and jet-lagged and upset and unnerved about having to look at my dead grandmother who had a lot of makeup on in her coffin. The room shifted a bit. I turned and looked at my father because there were spots everywhere and said, “I don’t feel good.”

Next thing I knew I was in the funeral director’s office and he was giving me smelling salts. Those work, by the way. It’s not a gentle whiff of something, it’s like a jet stream of formaldehyde shooting into your nasal canal. Someone said later the only people who were upset at the funeral were me and my insane Aunt Peggy. My grandmother had been a very critical person, she didn’t go to any of her children’s weddings because she didn’t approve of their choices. She didn’t think much of my father, a struggling artist/sign painter from a working class Protestant family. But she and my grandfather planned a big wedding for my mother in Chicago. My grandfather had made a lot of money by then and was a prominent businessman in the “Irish mafia” surrounding Mayor Richard Daley. His sister, my great-aunt, was one of the first women lawyers who practiced for the city. His slow-witted brother, my great-uncle, got a patronage job, hitting a switch that lifted a bridge or something. When my father and mother were dating and went somewhere to park, and a policeman came upon them and gave them a ticket, he tore it up when he found out who my mother’s father was.

Anyway, my mother, always a shy, quiet person, hating pressure, couldn’t face the big wedding, and she and my father eloped. I was born less than two years later.

I loved my grandmother, though. I was the oldest of her grandchildren, and she fussed over me and gave me presents. She sent me cans of pitted black olives, which when I was five years old I craved all the time. I thought she had soft skin that smelled like lillies. I liked to hug her. I named her “Maw Maw,” and my grandfather, the feared businessman, “Paw Paw,” because to me he was gentle and kind. He had a bad heart for many years and was told by his doctor to take walks, and we would walk together, slowly, in the Phoenix sunshine when I visited during the winters. He drove a dusty black Cadillac and always forgot to turn off the turn blinkers. We would go for miles, with the “click-click-click” of the turn signal going, and he didn’t hear it and I didn’t want to say anything because maybe he would be embarrassed.

My grandmother was often unkind to her children because she too was damaged, I think. Her father, Jesse Oliver Hancock, was a man worse than John Bilyeu, which seems unbelievable, but it is true. My great-grandfather Hancock was an Indiana farmer’s son and a terrible drunk who divorced his wife and left her and the children with absolutely nothing in the middle of nowhere when she was pregnant with their child. He filed divorce papers and at once enlisted in the army to serve his country in World War I. That’s how much he wanted to get away from his family. When he came back, he lived in rooming houses and drank and never had anything to do with his children and somehow lived for a long time, dying in 1941.

My mother knows little about her grandfather except she heard that when her mother was a child and wanted a doll for Christmas, her father took the money that her mother Anna, a German immigrant, had saved to buy a doll with. He took it away from her and spent it on drink.

And this man is descended from John Hancock?

The famous signer of the Declaration of Independence did not leave any legitimate children. He was very wealthy–he basically funded the Boston part of the American Revolution– and married a woman from one of Boston’s best families, Dorothy Quincy. They had two children, a daughter who died in infancy, and a son who died at the age of eight after a fall during ice skating.

In 1890, in Indiana, Micajah Hancock was a person of note for having lived so long. He was born in 1788 and so was 102 years old. He’d had eight children (one of them, George, was the father of Jesse Oliver) and two wives and one summer day a reporter for a small newspaper interviewed Micajah, who told him he was the grandson of John Hancock. The reporter took it at face value. There was no Internet to quickly check the Wikipedia entry on John Hancock and the reporter perhaps didn’t have time for a quick trip to the local library. I have a copy of the story, written in flowery late 19th century language.

Was Micajah losing his mind? Was he a lonely old man looking for some attention? Was he having a quiet chuckle at a small town reporter’s gullibility? Or was his father, who according to my research was named Caleb, the illegitimate son of John Hancock, born from a young man’s dalliance?

This is the strange quest that I find myself on now. For reasons I don’t quite understand myself, I want to know if I am descended from John Hancock.

The Quest

15 Apr

When I came back to my office, the red voicemail light shone on my big gray phone. It was 3:40 pm, so it couldn’t be my husband yet. Max was supposed to have a meeting with the director of our son’s private school at 3:30 pm, a meeting I couldn’t face going to because I knew it would be tense and difficult, and I’d just been dealing with so much negativity from this school, I needed a break. Max had no problem with my absence—“Let me do this,” he’d said. “I can handle it. You’ve been dealing with them for so long, it’s my turn.”

But it feel odd to abstain. I’d gone to every parent-teacher conference for both of my children, every curriculum night and parent association meeting. As many field trips and class parties as I could manage and still do my job.

I tapped through the elaborate passwords and command codes required every time I access a message. My husband’s voice came up, barely audible against the traffic noise. “It’s over; it went really badly. He’s going to be expelled. She threw me out of her office after maybe five minutes. Call me.”

A dizzying wave rippled through me. I grabbed the phone, dialed his cell and got the report. Yes, after months of complaining about Alex’s behavior problems, the school insisted we either pay for a private aide to control him (on top of $37,500 tuition) or pick him up at noon every day for early dismissal. Perhaps both. Max argued with her, she lost her temper, waved our contract at him, saying, “I can expel him!” It kept deteriorating until the word “lawsuit” was dropped and my husband’s final words, before being given the heave, were “When I’m done, this school will be bankrupt and you’ll be selling pencils on the street!” We would talk it through when I got home.

After I hung up the phone, I went down the hall and made a cup of English Breakfast tea, poured in the skim milk. As upsetting and horrifying as this was, I had to finish my work for the day. I had to get through my edit of “Her Best Ever: Sarah Jessica Parker’s 10 favorite looks.”

I set the tea down and was getting ready to access the Sarah Jessica Parker file onscreen, when I spotted the words “Ancestry.com” peeking out from a stack of papers. It was my DNA kit envelope, all ready to go. I’d done my bit with the swabs: left side of the mouth, right side of the mouth, and “front center” of the mouth, which I wasn’t too certain about.

In the last few months, busy with work, consumed with worry about the children’s struggles in their respective schools and paying bills and my mother’s deepening forgetfulness and everything else, I’d found myself sucked into a bizarre family-history research project of my own creation. I’d joined ancestor.com (a fun free trial is followed by steep annual dues, BTW) and created my Nancy Bilyeau Family Tree, feeling rather ridiculous.

It all began about 10 years ago, when my sister told she had met a distant cousin of ours in Washington DC, an older woman, genteel and refined, who said the Bilyeaus had a restored house in New York City, that they were a very old settler family. And she was correct. Which shouldn’t surprise me, because my sister has a master’s in library science and passed rigorous security checks to become a librarian at the White House. She did very well at the White House until 9/11 traumatized her and she quit right before the one-year anniversary because she was sure the White House would be bombed again or at the very least feel the effects of a dirty bomb set off in suburban Virginia. But enough about my sister.

Actually to say the Bilyeaus are an old family is incorrect. They are a very new family. My father was born Everett Wallace Bilyeu. He added the “a” before he married my mother, in the early 1950s, to distance himself from his relatives, who were I gather a collection of deadbeats and minor crooks and losers to whom the term “underachiever” would be an understatement. My father hated his father. Just hated him. Never talked about him. My grandfather John Bilyeu died before I was born and was an abusive alcoholic who could barely read and made moonshine in the backwoods of Tennessee. When he was a World War I veteran he married a beautiful black-haired 16-year-old girl, my grandmother, Amanda van Hooten, and condemned her to a life of misery, first in Tennesse and then in Detroit, where he worked on the assembly line for Ford Motor Co. He beat my father regularly, and I heard he was particularly vicious because my father wanted to be an artist and so was not a “real man.”

And yet, John Bilyeu is directly descended from Pierre Billiou, who sailed across the Atlantic in 1661 with his family–his wife gave birth to my ancestor, Isaac, on the boat, the St. John Baptiste–and arrived at New Amsterdam, controlled by the Dutch. Pierre, a French Hugenot, built the first stone house on Staten Island, the third oldest house in New York State, which I visited for the first time in 2007, and met the sweet, erudite caretaker who lives in the heated part of the house as an employee of the Staten Island Historical Society.

This is pretty wild stuff for someone who grew up in a small tract house in a bland suburb of Detroit named Livonia. My father did become an artist and painted hundreds of watercolor landscapes that he sold for small amounts of money at art fairs. When I was a child he worked as a sign painter in Detroit. Before computers there were people trained in calligraphy and they painted the better signs for businesses. He would come home tired, smelling of paintbrush-cleaning fluids, and right after dinner head downstairs and paint his watercolors in his tidy basement studio and talk to himself. I would stand at the top of the basement steps where he couldn’t see me and listen to him talking to imaginary people about his art. He was a creative man and extremely funny but a damaged man too who never ever drank alcohol and held in all this anger that would at unexpected times ricochet out, a few times at me. Bam, a blow to the side of the head. Whack, and I’m on the ground because he slapped me so hard. It didn’t happen more than a dozen times in my childhood, but it scared the hell out of me, that sudden switch from funny, friendly Dad into a man with a red face and bulging eyes and a hard fist.

My dad died at the age of 73 in 1998, having never smoked or drank or spent much time in the sun. He got eight hours of sleep and ate oatmeal and yogurt and lots of vegetables and flossed twice a day for at least 10 minutes. Didn’t stop the cancer. He never knew a thing about Pierre Billiou, a man who when the Dutch briefly took back the area from the British rose as high as attorney general of New York State. It’s hard to connect that man to John Bilyeu, the drunk who beat his family.

On the way home from work, to deal with the painful mess that was my son’s education, I dropped my DNA kit into the mail slot in the Time Inc. lobby.

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