Amalia Wraps Up Halloween and the Marathon

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By guest blogger Amalia

 Halloween weekend was awesome.  On Thursday Yiayia and I made trick or treat bags for everybody in my pre-K class.  Nicolas helped.

 

 My costume was Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.  I even had ruby slippers and a basket to carry Toto, my dog, in.

On Friday I went to two Halloween parties—in the morning in my classroom and my teachers gave us goodie bags, and in the afternoon Yiayia came and we went to the whole school’s Halloween party where I danced a lot and had a sword fight with inflatable swords and the DJ said I won over a bunch of older kids who were sword-fighting with me.

 

Yiayia looked really funny in her Scarecrow costume. She even did a Scarecrow dance.

On the way to school we passed lots of scary decorated houses, but now that I’m four, they didn’t scare me, even the ones where the monsters lit up and moaned and one where a giant spider jumps out at you.

My favorite was the one where the witch’s legs peeked out of the ground—sort of like in the Wizard of Oz when a house falls on her.

On Saturday, which was Halloween, we all dressed up like the Wizard of Oz characters and went to a huge party at the Natural History Museum called “Fright at the Museum.”  Mommy was Glinda the good witch, Papi was  the Tin Man, Yiayia was the Scarecrow, and Papi’s friend Arshad was the cowardly Lion.  Little brother Nicholas was supposed to be a Munchkin but he wouldn't wear his pointed hat and beard. There were a million kids at the Museum in different costumes, and I even saw two other Dorothy’s.

Saturday night Yiayia and Mommy and I went Trick or Treating around the Upper East Side, even to former Mayor Bloomberg’s house where people dressed as Minions handed out treats.

Papi had to go to bed early because the next day, Sunday, he was running in his first Marathon.  He had been training all summer.

He got up at six am. and took the Staten Island Ferry to the start of the race.  I had made signs saying “Go Papi Go” and we went to watch him pass by on First Avenue and 79^th Street near our apartment, but there were so many people there that we couldn’t get close enough to see him.  Mommy was tracking his position on her phone.  He stopped and looked for us but we couldn’t get where he could see us.  Then he went on running up and across Central Park.

I started crying because I didn’t see Papi so Mommy took me with her across town to find him at the finish line.  We got worried when she saw on her phone that he had stopped running in Central Park, but then he started again.  Later he said that he got muscle cramps and had to stop and someone massaged his legs.

Papi had hoped to break four hours in his first marathon, but his time was 4 hours and 18 minutes, which is really good for 26.2 miles.  We found him after the finish line and he got this awesome medal and a really cool cape to keep.

Papi says he thinks he’s going to run the Marathon again in two years.  In the meantime he’s going to do a 100-mile bike ride next year. 

Now that Halloween and the Marathon are over, I’m going to start planning what I’m going to cook for Thanksgiving.  Cookies and pies are my speciality.

The holiday season is awesome, but it’s also exhausting because there’s so much to do when you’re four years old.

Halloween Ghouls in Manhattan

 Strolling yesterday on Manhattan's Upper East Side after dropping Amalia at preschool, I discovered the truly terrifying lengths some New Yorkers will go to decorate their brownstones and apartment entrances for Halloween.  (Is that an Obama ghoul on the lower right above?)

 Walking on 74th Street from Lexington toward Fifth, I noticed a low-flying witch had been crushed by a giant pumpkin.

This brownstone included life-sized figures that could sing and/or move.

While this man's dog was investigating the singing skeleton and he was admiring the moving witch, he told us to go over to 72nd Street between Madison and Park to see another spooky brownstone.

A female zombie welcomed us.

A skull-lined staircase with an old woman at the top, flanked by a witch...

...and a zombie bride.

Four floors of ghouls beckoned us to come in.

The front courtyard hosted a dragon and a lot of spooky folks...

 

....including this head in a glass globe.

Someone told us that this house becomes a haunted house open to visitors at night, but I think we'll skip that on Halloween, and go trick-or-treating instead with Amalia on 76th Street, which will be closed to traffic for the little costumed ghouls who come in droves to each brownstone, including the home of former Mayor Bloomberg.

Amalia Accessorizes

Always precocious, Granddaughter Amalía, almost 15 months old, announced her early entrance into the Terrible Twos with a complete melt-down screaming tantrum while riding in rush-hour traffic through downtown Miami several nights ago.  The reason for the tantrum: she hated the shoes her Mommy had put on her (black Mary Janes.)  The only solution was to hide the offending shoes and let her go barefoot for the rest of the night, since alternate shoes were not available.

After three children and one grandchild, I realize that a baby’s personality is the result of nature, not nurture.  Just as my daughter Eleni got blue eyes from her mother and the won’t-eat-cream-sauces-but-loves-spicy-foods gene from her father, Amalía was born with the expert-at-accessorizing, crazy-about-shoes gene from her Mommy. 

 As soon as she started walking, around ten months old, she insisted on having a purse slung over her arm every time she went out.  If there was no purse handy that coordinated with her outfit, anything that resembled a purse—say a spare shopping bag with handles—would be drafted into use.

 Another essential accessory, one that didn’t even exist when my kids were young, was the cell phone.  Toy cell phones didn’t entertain Amalía for long—she quickly learned how to snatch Mommy’s phone when she wasn’t looking to call Yiayia and Papou.  If they didn’t answer, she’d leave a voice mail (“Hola!  Hola!”)

 But THE accessory, the one that fascinates Amalía wherever she goes, is shoes (which she calls “patos” for “zapatos” since she’s speaking more Spanish than English at the moment.) Even at eleven months old, as we sat in the airport to fly to Greece for summer vacation, Amalia walked around to fellow passengers checking out everyone’s footwear.  This man on the left below offered to trade shoes with her, but she realized her shoes wouldn’t fit him.  The silver pair in the middle photo served well throughout Greece and the pink ones with flowers are the ones she wanted to wear in Florida instead of the solemn black ones that brought on the fearful tantrum,

 Below you see her in the late, lamented “Hello Kitty” sparkly silver shoes that were such a hit in Nicaragua, but one of the pair went AWOL in the new H&M store in South Beach Miami.  The lone survivor will be decking my “shoe tree” come Christmas.

 Halloween, when she wore a ladybug costume, posed a perplexing accessorizing challenge.  You can see that she’s not sure the black cat purse was the right thing for a ladybug ensemble, but the ladybug shoes (sent by her honorary Yiayia Eleni)  were perfect.  The distressed look on Amalía’s face is because  she HATED the antennae on the ladybug costume, (Why do my parents want to dress me like a bug?), but her cooperation was won when baby-sitter Maria José bribed her with a cookie.

 One day in Miami Beach, when one of her Mommy’s strappy green flowered espadrilles broke,  there was an emergency stop at a Parade of Shoes store and Amalía thought she’d died and gone to heaven.  Aisles of shoes, and most of them within reach!  She raced up and down, dragging shoes to show Mommy, sure she would buy them all, but in the end, everything was returned to its spot in the display.

At Thanksgiving at Yiayia and Papou’s house in Grafton, MA, Amalia got her first taste of frosty days and Mommy-and-me knitted dresses and tights from Hanna Andersson.  She made up for the lack of a matching bag with a little yoyo that came out of her holiday cracker, and she even  seemed happy with the afore-mentioned black Mary Jane shoes, because they looked like Mommy’s. 

 Next accessorizing challenge: Christmas.  I have a feeling she’s not going to agree to the reindeer horns.  But she did see some gold, fur-lined boots at Target...

A Great Pumpkin Carved by Woodchucks

Every year when I realize it’s really Fall, I head over to Houlden Farms on Old Westboro Road in North Grafton to get an assortment of pumpkins, gourds,  squashes and mums to decorate our front yard.

They always have a variety of colors and shapes that would make Martha Stewart swoon.  

One year I scored a pair of “Swan” squashes that were  joined at the stem, so they looked like two birds kissing.  Houlden Farms had white pumpkins before they became fashionable with great names like “Cinderella” and “Gray Ghost.”

But this year, as I came around the farm stand, headed for the greenhouse in back, this is what I saw in a place of honor:

It was a frowning Jack’o’Lantern carved, as Ruth Houlden told me, by a “very artistic” woodchuck.  She said the talented  groundhog nibbled on the pumpkin when it was green and it healed over and grew into a good-sized orange pumpkin with a ready-made face.

This struck me as a bit of a miracle, sort of on a par with the proverbial infinite number of monkeys tapping away on typewriters until one of them writes the complete works of Shakespeare.

After admiring the work of the groundhog (and another pumpkin which he had decorated with “maple leaves”) I headed into the greenhouse to pick out my prizes for this year’s display.

Ruth told me the names of each one—there was a “Fairytale Pumpkin” (the green one) and the flat peach-colored  “Cheese Squash”, which she said is the tastiest squash of all. “Just cook it like a baked potato”.  I also got one Swan Squash this year and a purple Kale.

My orange pumpkin weighed nearly 35 pounds. Ruth’s grandson Nicholas helped me carry the heavy load to the car, towing it on  a dolly.   

By Halloween I’m going to carve the biggest pumpkin in a design incorporating our family name—I got the idea in a pattern that came with my new pumpkin-carving kit.  Then we’ll toast the pumpkin seeds and eat them, and maybe I’ll bake the Cheese Squash to see how it tastes.

WHAT IS A CRONE, ANYWAY?

Almost a year ago, in October ‘08, I launched this blog, saying: “I will try to address issues and events that are of interest to crones over sixty, who are definitely under-served in the media. Yet we are, as a friend remarked, the pig in the python—the huge population of women who are still tuned in and creating despite (or because of) our age.”

It was daughter Eleni who came up with the inspired name “A Rolling Crone” for the blog after I had discovered that “Crone Chronicles” was already taken.

I e-mailed my friends and colleagues announcing the blog, and was surprised when I heard from several friends that they found the word “Crone” offensive and insulting to women. (Some of them added that they also were offended by being referred to as “Ladies”, when they were, in fact, women, not ladies.)

I noticed that most of the objections to the word “Crone” came from the Midwestern states—where I grew up—while friends on both coasts, in Europe and in Israel generally loved the blog’s title.

One reason I used the word “crone” was that, when I lived in Manhattan, about five of us, er, women friends, started calling ourselves the Crones back when we were in our early fifties. (Our husbands, naturally, were the Geezers.) The Crones did fun things --some athletic, like hiking or kayaking, but most of which involved sitting in a restaurant laughing so loudly that we were sometimes asked to leave.

The most fun thing we did, in my opinion was a Crone Walk from the top of Manhattan (Fort Tryon Park) to the bottom (Battery Park). Husbands were allowed to meet us for dinner on the last day. The walk took three days and involved staying in hotels (where martinis were consumed) eating in restaurants, and visiting stores, art exhibits and historic spots. Our first lunch—in Spanish Harlem—was in a restaurant where no one spoke English, only Spanish. Our last lunch was in a dim sum restaurant in Chinatown, where no one spoke English, only Chinese. (Just one of the reasons why Manhattan is my favorite city ever.)

After hearing complaints from my friends about the word Crone, I decided to research it. I was vaguely aware that some indigenous peoples considered Cronehood to be the honorable third stage of a woman’s life (Maiden, Mother, Crone) and that entry into cronehood—and menopause—was celebrated with rituals, because the crones were revered as wise women who could impart their knowledge to the tribe.

When I started researching “Crone” and “What is a crone?” on Google, I quickly realized that this is a topic for a Phd. thesis, not a single blog posting.

If you would like academic insights into the various historic personifications of the wise crone, check out a site by Kathleen Jenks, PhD, called “mythinglinks.org”, especially an essay called “Common Themes, East & West: Crones & Sages”.
She refers to Eve, the Mother of All, (holding in her hands an opened pomegranate, whose Hebrew name, rimmon, comes from the word rim, to bear a child.) She also mentions Hecate, Baba Yaga, native American rituals , tales from India’s Crone shamans—it’s a treasure chest of crone facts including a bibliography.

That led me to a lyrical and eloquent essay by a woman called “Z Budapest”-- “Crone Genesis” --that begins, “I am in my first year of Cronehood. In my sixtieth year.” Near the end of her essay she writes “We are one block of herstory, one savvy chain of generations, one strong and active generation that is going to continue to change the world. When we are done, being old will be fashionable, stories and movies about old people will be normal, and we will live a long time.”

I also discovered that women who celebrate their cronehood, especially with rituals, are often Wiccans—followers of paganism as a religion. This is not true of me and the Manhattan crones—who each probably have our own brand of religion or spirituality, although we’ve never discussed it. What joins us, I think is laughter, not a particular political or religious agenda.

But there is, I quickly learned, a growing Crone movement in this country —probably multiplying in strength as more and more women reach cronehood.

If you look up cronescounsel.org, you will see that the upcoming Fall 2009 Gathering, Crones Counsel XVII is happening Oct. 21-25 in Atlanta, GA.

That site says that the mythological Crone comes from the mists of ancient times, in the Middle East, Greece and the Balkans (30,000-10,000 BCE)… “The goddess was revered as one all-encompassing mother goddess who controlled birth, death and rebirth. This concept began to change as women themselves became increasingly under the dominion of men…Crone, hag and witch once were positive words for old women. Crone comes from Crown, indicating wisdom emanating from the head; hag comes from hagio meaning holy; and witch comes from wit meaning wise. The Crone began re-emerging into our consciousness in the early 1980’s and today many older women are embracing this connection. We are tapping into the ancient crone’s attributes of wisdom, compassion, transformation, healing laughter and bawdiness.”

So I submit that calling myself a crone and my blog “A Rolling Crone” is not insulting to my age group.

I’ve noticed, among my friends, that when a woman turns sixty, she often throws a birthday that basically is a celebration of herself, although previous birthdays and most of her party-giving efforts might have been devoted to celebrating her husband or children or parents.

I think at sixty a woman tends to step back and think “I’ve done pretty well so far, so I’m going to give myself something I’ve always wanted—a trip to Europe-- or enroll in a class to learn tap dancing or piano—or just throw a party that’s all about me and invite all my friends. (One of the New York crones rented a chateau in Tuscany and invited her friends.)

Here are some thoughts I came across from Linda Lowen who writes a blog about women’s issues. In an essay called “The Crone Movement -- Empowering Older Women”, she quotes a past member of the Crones Counsel Board who said “A Crone is a woman who has moved past mid-life and who acknowledges her survivorship, embraces her age, learns from the examined experience of her life, and, most likely, appreciates the wrinkles on her face…A Crone is a woman who is comfortable with her spiritual self, her intuition, and her creative power.”

Linda Lowen comments: “Wonderful qualities for a woman to possess at any age, but especially significant for a demographic that often feels bypassed by a society that has little use for women once they reach menopause. This Halloween, if you’re a woman 45 or older, instead of feeling tricked by the process of aging, consider the treat of making peace with yourself as you appreciate this phase of your life. Embrace your inner Crone.”

(That’s easy—Every Halloween as I wait on the porch for the influx of trick-or-treaters, I’m always dressed as a witch!)

I would like to hear from you how you feel about the word “Crone”.