Tony, who’s easier with numbers than anyone I know, likes to quote thirtysomething’s Miles Drentell: “the decimalization of time is so arbitrary.”

Indeed.

And yet, with Eli having just learned to count to 10, and Ben interested in Really Big Numbers (“What’s a trillion times a billion?”), and of course my recent milestone birthday, I’m thinking a lot about numbers lately. So here I go:

30: I throw a party for myself with a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cake (yum).
40: Tony organizes cocktails at the Top of the Mark and dinner at the Slanted Door with 7 other couples (some of whom, I’m happy to note, were at that 30th birthday party). I’m amazed we can all get babysitting. On my actual birthday, my sister makes me a delicious chocolate layer cake (the ganache alone uses nearly a pound of chocolate).

30: I’ve just met Tony (who meets most of my friends at that birthday party).
40: We’ve been married 7 years.

30: I’m just starting to write my dissertation.
40: I’ve just received the contract for my first book.

30: I haven’t any publications (but do have increasing anxiety about that as I wind up graduate school).
40: I’ve got my PhD (and no academic job), a regular column, one publication and a couple more forthcoming.

30: I have a niece (my goddaughter), a newborn nephew, and two close friends with kids.
40: I have Ben, Eli, and the more than dozen kids in our babysitting co-op, plus the niece and nephew, whom we visit as often as possible.

30: I’m renting a comfortable 2-bedroom apartment in North Berkeley with a grad school colleague.
40: I co-own a comfortable 4-bedroom home in San Francisco.

30: I’ve just started running.
40: No marathons or big running achievements, just the knowledge that running keeps me healthy, so I get out there two or three times a week for a run toward the ocean, into the park, or through the neighborhood.

30: I count my many blessings, happy to be out of my messy twenties.
40: I’m still counting my blessings, looking forward to what this next decade will bring.

At JetBlue’s terminal in JFK:

• 1 bottle of water $1.95
• 1 bottle of lemonade $2.99
• 1 tub of cut-up apples (with caramel sauce that I dumped in the trash before Ben noticed): $3.95
• 1 tub of strawberries and blueberries: $3.95
• 2 chunks of cheese: $.99 each
• 1 JetBlue airplane set: $19.95
• 1 bigger bottle of water: $3.95
• 1 copy of Lolly Winston’s Good Grief (which I have yet to open): $6.99
• 2 raspberry yogurts: $1.89
• 2 tubs of cold cereal: $3.50 each
• 2 bottles of milk: $2 each
• 1 package of barbecued tofu: $6.95
• 1 package of tofu cesar salad: $6.95
• 1 bottle of Advil: $6.95

Total elapsed flight delay: 6 hours
Total financial cost: $81.34
Summer vacation with family, despite everything: priceless!

This month: letter-writing and pie baking in Adrienne Shelly’s lovely film, Waitress:

According to family history, when my aunt claimed, at a picnic, that her pie crust was better than her mother’s, grandma threatened to throw the pie at her head. My mom kept quiet, just grateful that grandma had already imparted her pie crust secrets to her.

People take fierce pride in a fine, flaky pie crust, and in fact my mom’s is so good that for years, I was too intimidated to attempt it myself. Pie crust isn’t complicated, but unlike bread or cake, it is finicky and unforgiving. Handle it too much, or add too many drops of ice water, and it turns tough instead of toothsome. The best way to learn pie crust is to watch at someone’s elbow (preferably of course a mother or a grandmother, who can tell you family stories while you bake) and then practice until you get the touch of it.

Jenna Hunterson (Keri Russell, expressing little of her Felicity-era perkiness) learned about pie-making from her mother, who’d bake Car Radio Pie or Jenna’s First Kiss Pie while singing to her daughter. Now Jenna, the Waitress of Adrienne Shelly’s nuanced and surprisingly funny film (2007), is stuck in a bad marriage to a childish husband and unhappily pregnant. Although she keeps baking the popular Marshmallow Mermaid and Chocolate Strawberry Oasis pies for the diner where she works, she’s hoping to bake her way out of town and into a new life. Meanwhile, she can’t stop imagining new pies, like Pregnant, Miserable, Self-pitying Loser Pie (“oatmeal and crumbled fruitcake, flambé of course”) or Baby Screaming Its Head Off In the Middle of the Night and Ruining My Life Pie (a brandy-soaked cheesecake); her pies tell stories, but right now, they aren’t such happy ones.

Read the rest at Literary Mama!

This is the best recipe I’ve made yet for pizza that you grill; try it out!

1 1/4 oz envelope yeast (or 2 1/4 t)
3/4 c warm water
1 3/4 c flour
1 1/2 t salt
1 1/2 t olive oil

Stir the yeast, 1 T flour, and 1/4 c warm water together in a small bowl and let sit until it’s bubbled up and creamy-looking, about 5 minutes.

In a large bowl, stir together 1 1/4 c flour and the salt; then add the yeast, oil and remaining 1/2 c water. Stir until smooth.

Stir in enough additional flour (about 1/2c) so that the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl, then turn it onto a floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 8 minutes.

Let rise on a generously floured surface until doubled in bulk, about 1 1/4 hours (or stick it in the fridge, in a bowl, and let rise all day; bring to room temperature before shaping).

When you’re ready to shape the dough, don’t punch it down but dredge it in flour and then hold it up with both hands moving around the circle of dough like a steering wheel, letting gravity pull the dough down. Once it’s stretched to about 7″ around, lay it on a well-floured board or pizza peel and stretch it out to about 9″.

Let the dough rest 10-20 minutes before grilling.

When you’re ready to make pizza, preheat the grill on high for 5-10 minutes, then oil well. Slide the dough onto the grill and bake until browned on the bottom (about 5 minutes). Remove from the grill, turn the dough over, and put your toppings on the grilled side. Now turn the grill down to medium, slide the topped pizza dough back on to the grill, and close the grill to cook the pizza. Check after 5 minutes, and continue grilling till the cheese is bubbly and the bottom of the crust is browned.

A Wrung Sponge tagged me for this ages ago (she got it from Literary Teacher, who got it from HipWriterMama,
who got it from The Simple and the Ordinary; go read them, too!) and and I’ve been letting my post simmer on the back burner while other writing deadlines insisted on my attention.

So here are my personal policies, a mix (as my mom would say) of the sublime and the ridiculous:

We don’t wear shoes in the house. I don’t like to clean (more on that next) and this helps keep the dirt level down.

I try to clean while I’m doing something else. I’ll sweep or mop while I’m talking on the phone, I’ll clean the bathroom mirror while I’m brushing my teeth, I fold laundry while the boys are playing trains. This is partly the necessary multi-tasking of a part-time working-from-home mom, but it also lets me get things done while I’m focused on something more pleasant. The house stays relatively clean, and I don’t feel like I’ve spent lots of time on it.

I tell my guys I love them, a lot.

I get up before the kids to write every day, and I write again after they are sleeping.

I compost, recycle, turn off lights when I leave the room, carry canvas bags to the grocery store, shop locally, and do whatever else I can to keep this world clean (and cool) for my children’s children’s children.

I read to the kids every day, and eat dinner with the family every night.

I try to pass on the good that’s come to me, whether that’s financial (making charitable donations) or professional (connecting writers with editors; reading friends’ drafts) or personal (taking good care of my friends with babysitting, meals, other favors).

I pray.

I tag anyone else who wants to ponder their personal policies!

This month at Literary Mama, Jennifer Ruden’s essay about her writing home:

When I moved to Oregon to attend graduate school, I managed to blow most of my savings just getting from Baltimore to Eugene; the trip, if I recall correctly, involved a lot of national forests and a lot of beer. By the time I arrived in Oregon, I could barely pay rent. Like most graduate students, I found some place cheap, bought all my furniture used, and ate a lot of Top Ramen. I did manage to luxuriate in one purchase: A desk. After all, I took writing pretty seriously in those days.

The one I chose was enormous, a Mack truck of a desk with a marble slab on the top, filing cabinets, drawers, the whole enchilada. If this desk had a voice, it would have been a deep baritone like James Earl Jones and would have said, “This is where you write. You hear?” And of course, I listened.

Head over to Literary Mama to read more about Jennifer’s desk and where she writes now that she’s a mother.

Inspired? Check out our writing prompt and send us a piece about your own writing space! Responses received by July 15th will get personal feedback from Literary Reflections editorial assistant, Kathy Moran.

When Ben was about three, he started calling me Caroline. It didn’t bother me, really, and particularly since we were in the midst of a move, and he was about to become a big brother, I wasn’t going to quibble over it. Sometimes he called me Mama, sometimes he called me Caroline; I always answered.

“Caroline” has come and gone the past couple years, with no discernible pattern, though he definitely uses it more than Mama these days. Lately he’s started to call Tony (up till now always Dada) by his first name, too.

Now Eli’s gotten into the act, alternating his regular Dada with a new and emphatic “Da-deee” and calling me what he can manage of my first name: “Kay-rah” (sounds like a radio station, doesn’t it? “You’re listening to K-Rah: All Mama, All the Time…”) Maybe replacing Da-dee with To-neee is next?

This may seem very 70s and very California of us, that we let our kids use our first names, but it doesn’t really feel like that to me. This is far from how Tony and I were raised, far from what I expected of our family life, but turns out to be one of those surprises that I’m just fine with. I love my kids to call me Mama, but they say my first name with love, too, and that’s all that really matters to me.

After a perfectly fine but very long week, it was time to go to the movies. Paris, Je T’aime recommended itself as one a) that I probably wouldn’t need to write a column about and 2) set in Paris. It’s a collection of eighteen 5-minute films from a range of directors (the Coen brothers, Gus Van Sant, Wes Craven, Alexander Payne, Isabel Coixet, Alfonso Cuaron — a total all-star list) and starring a range of actors from around the world.

Now, I love to read anthologies (so much that now I’m editing one!). The first that really made an impact on me was Twenty Under Thirty, edited by Debra Spark (which I read when I was, in fact, under thirty). This is the book that introduced me to Lorrie Moore; I read her story “Amahl and the Night Visitors: A Guide to the Tenor of Love” over and over (I can still quote it) and tried (unsuccessfully) to steal from it in a recent essay (ah, she’s still the master). Lately, there’s been a fabulous run of parenting anthologies, from the excellent Toddler to It’s A Boy, and of course the Literary Mama anthology. Then there are the food anthologies, the Best Food Writing books and my new favorite (which is really too heavy to read in bed but I do anyway), Molly O’Neill’s American Food Writing (an anthology with recipes; my dream come true!)

The appeal of the literary anthology, of course, is the range of voices. But it works, for me, because you can put it down. Pick it up, read a selection, put it down, reflect. Lovely. Perfect for bedtime reading. But you know, the anthology of movies, it’s a tricky thing. The putting down and reflecting moment isn’t available to the viewer, you just have to let the whole thing wash over you and hope that you retain something when it’s over.

So while on the one hand, you could just let Paris Je T’aime wash over you — it’s a series of love stories set in Paris, after all — a couple of the stories are just trying so hard that they’re irritating. And then they start to blend together a bit. After the sixth, I confess, I checked my watch, because that one had been so annoying (and the fifth one so perfect) that I wanted to leave and just remember the beautifully sad face of Catalina Sandino Moreno singing to her baby in the fifth story, Loin du 16e. But I stuck it out to the end (because I’m optimistic enough to rarely walk out on a movie; Scoop and Wild at Heart are the only two I can remember every leaving) and I’m glad I did, because Alexander Payne’s contribution, 14e arrondissement is also perfect. (Hmm, the two I really liked feature a single actress and hardly any direct dialogue.) So 2 for 18 is not great, perhaps, but only two were truly annoying, and the rest, like most movies, were just fine.

I am all about encouraging kids to cook, to experiment with food, to hang out in the kitchen with me as much as possible. This often means creating a big mess, but I think the long-term gains (kids with healthy attitudes about food) are worth it. At the moment, my boys eat well, have strong opinions about food, and are happy to watch the Food Network with me when we fly on JetBlue. So far, so good.

So I was happy to learn about Spatulatta, a cooking show by and for kids. It’s not on network tv yet, just on the web, but they’re aiming more broadly. It’s a sweet show, with recipes and videos demonstrating essential kitchen skills, from separating an egg to arranging a Mother’s Day breakfast tray! If you agree that the show offers good, educational entertainment for kids, click on the survey at the website; the results may help them get their own PBS show!

Here’s another chance to see what your favorite Literary Mama editors and columnists are reading these days; take a look! Me, I’m off to update my Amazon wish list…