OK, I realize I’ve been ignoring the blog a bit lately, but it’s been a busy time spreading the news about Mama, PhD. So I’m delighted to stop talking about that book (just for a moment) to announce the publication of my essay, “Wonderful Life,” in the new anthology, The Ultimate Christmas (Health Communications, Inc). The book is one-stop Christmas shopping, with essays, stories, recipes, pictures and advice on how to get through what can be a stressful holiday without losing sight of the magic. I’ve never shared space in a book with a martini recipe before, and I am well pleased. My piece is based on my Literary Column on It’s A Wonderful Life; here’s an excerpt:

Christmas Eve, 2002

It’s my first Christmas as a mom, and I as sit rocking infant Ben to sleep in the darkened room, I realize that the ubiquitous Christmas telecast of It’s A Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) is flickering on the ancient television. The sound is muted, but I remember the dialogue. George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) has just learned that Uncle Billy misplaced the day’s deposit, and despite sacrificing his whole life for the Building & Loan, George is ruined. He can’t listen to his wife Mary cheerfully prattle on about their daughter Zuzu’s cold. He rages about the money spent on the doctor, their money-pit of a drafty house: “I don’t know why we don’t all have pneumonia!”

Ben stirs in his sleep and cries out. I hold my breath as I adjust his IV, which has tangled around my arm and pulled taut. I touch my lips to his sweaty head and he relaxes back into sleep. I exhale, relieved to have avoided another cycle of the anguished cries that raise his fever and bring the nurses running with another round of invasions.

We have pneumonia.

Go pick up a copy of The Ultimate Christmas to read the rest!

It’s always gratifying to update Literary Mama on Sundays and see pieces–some of which I first read several months ago–find their broad audience. I try to give each just a quick final read–they’ve all been through a couple rounds of editing and copyediting, but sometimes I might catch a stray typo–still, inevitably I forget myself and get drawn into the essay or story or poem as if for the first time.

This week, there’s Hilary Meyerson’s beautiful Voice: A Study in the Writer’s Art, which begins with a nightmare like one I’ve had myself:

The night before my daughter started kindergarten, I had a nightmare. . .that I was nine months pregnant with a third child. Not just pregnant, but in labor. In typical dream-reality, I had missed the pregnancy signs until labor was imminent. My dream voice broke as I told my husband that this child would be born September third, two days after the crucial September first enrollment cut-off date. Didn’t he understand? It meant that it would be almost six more years before this third child started kindergarten. Six more years before I’d have all the kids in school, before I could finally begin my new life as a writer. I woke in a sweat, grasping my belly, relieved to find it still less firm than I’d like, but not in fact, housing a third child.

In Children’s Lit Book Group, Libby writes about a different transition, as kids finish school and move away from home:

It’s back to school time around here. Four of my friends have packed sons or daughters off to college for the first time and are learning how to reconfigure patterns set over the last eighteen years of parenthood. As my friends face their new version of parenthood, their children have the gift of an extended transition, a prolonged adolescence as they negotiate the four years of college.

This month’s poems focus on a place dear to my heart: the kitchen! In Elizabeth Bruno’s Kitchen Daffodils: “their necks tilt Vincent-gold toward the glass.” In Cookie Bakers, Lois Parker Edstrom listens to “radio tuned to Queen for a Day”. I empathize with Yvonne Pearson who writes, in Eaten Alive, “All day I feed and I feed.” And finally Ann Walters notes, In the Kitchen, “A gingham tablecloth makes a fine parachute.”

And finally, I confess I got as caught up as the next girl in the gossip and hoopla surrounding Sarah Palin’s nomination as VP on the Republican ticket: I was up late reading blogs, looking at pictures, wondering what to make of the story, all the while feeling increasingly queasy about the way she and her family were being portrayed — and all my reading about it. So, since I’m in the fortunate position of knowing lots of good and thoughtful writers, I suggested to LM’s columns editors that we put put out a call for some op-eds on the topic, and I’m delighted with the pieces we received this week.

First, we have our own Subarctic Mama, Nicole Stellon O’Donnell, unpacking “The Sarah Myth:”

I never voted for Sarah Palin. Politically, we don’t get along… But I did like her. I’ve never liked any politician so unlike myself so much. Many of my liberal pro-choice mom friends liked her too. She was an Alaskan after all–a mom like me, bundling babies in snowsuits and dragging them around in sleds. She nursed and governed. She seemed real, someone who, despite our differences, I could talk to. Like everyone else in this giant, small state, I was on a first name basis with her. “Sarah,” I’d say if I ever ran into her at the airport, “Hello.”

And in a terrific complement to her piece, Mama, PhD contributor Rebecca Steinitz writes about “Sarah Palin’s Kids, Our Kids:”

On the third night of the Republican National Convention, Sarah Palin finally spoke up. The next morning I woke up to a front-page article in The Boston Globe, announcing that Sarah Palin has reignited the mommy wars.

No kidding. Birth plans, breastfeeding, working moms, teenagers and sex: it’s like the national conversation has become one big mommy kaffeklatsch. Or one big mommy driveby, as women across the country wonder how Palin does it–when they’re not condemning her for doing it.

I couldn’t be prouder of all this writing if I’d written it myself; click on over to Literary Mama to check it out!

Libby’s recent column over at Literary Mama brought me back to one of my favorite series, the Bunny Planet books by Rosemary Wells. In each one, a bunny is having a pretty lousy day until the Bunny Queen, Janet, whisks the animal off to the Bunny Planet for “the day that should have been.”

I’ve always identified most with the hapless Claire, who doesn’t get a good breakfast and whose shoes fill with snow on the way to school; she has to sit through two hours of math at school (no matter how long the math lesson was, it always felt like two hours to me), is served baloney sandwiches for lunch, and then is the only girl in her gym class who can’t do a cartwheel: this sounds like any number of bad days in my childhood!

Luckily, in the Bunny Planet, it’s summer and Claire is home, where she can pick vegetables from her garden and then hang out in the kitchen watching her mother cook — this, in turn, sounds like any number of good days from my childhood.

Claire’s mother makes her soup from the summer’s first tomato, but I think my mother would agree that the best thing to do with the very first tomato is a sandwich, and that’s what I made today: just one sliced tomato, on toast, with some mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Yum.

I ate mine too fast to take a picture; this image is from Out of the Garden

One of the unexpected pleasures of moving up the masthead to Senior Editor of Literary Mama has been getting to correspond with all the other department editors about pieces they’re considering for publication. It’s been particularly enlightening for me to work with our poetry editor, Sharon Kraus, since my formal poetry education is limited–aside from the odd 2-week unit on poetry in one class or another–to one college seminar on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, plus reading my dad’s work. I still remember how he responded when I wrote him about an English class in which we were studying e.e. cummings: he wrote me a sonnet about how he would teach poetry!

So when Maria Scala, one of Literary Mama’s columns editors, said she was interested in exchanging reviews of recent publications, I jumped at the chance, though I had to warn her — and now caution you readers –that I can’t write very knowledgeably about the form. I respond to what I like, pause to admire unexpectedly effective word choices, remember images that resonate with me. I read her chapbook, Between O and V, straight through over lunch the other day, which is not at all how one should read poetry, I think, but speaks to the appeal of Maria’s writing. Reading these poems felt rather like sitting down with a beautiful bowl of ripe cherries, not wanting to stop consuming them till they were gone, and then sitting still, satisfied, for a time at the end.

There’s a mood of concern in some of these pieces, a sense of worry about the future, which speaks to me (I’m the one who’s got a fortune which reads “You are worrying about something that is not going to happen” taped to her laptop, remember?). “I’m not long for this world / if I don’t have you” goes one stanza; or in a poem titled “Nonna,” in which a mother tries to busy herself away from thoughts of grief, “I fear for the day / when I have to make myself / forget this way.” Deep sigh.

The perspective in these pieces feels familiar to me; it’s a voice old enough to see her parents clearly, as people apart from being parents, and now starting to reconsider some of the impressions and ideas of her childhood. These are moving poems about relationships and writing, particularly interested in family, but there’s a light touch to them, in pieces like “House Rules,” which begins simply “Stick together.” Or the sweetly funny “Now I Am Married,” in which the narrator, her husband away on business, “awakens[s] in the middle of the night / cold and surprised / heartbroken too: / remembering how good it is / to accidentally elbow you in the head / so that I can kiss it better.” I loved “My Friend Is Left-Handed,” which made me laugh, in the context of these carefully-observed pieces, with its opening line: “After all this time, / I never noticed.”

But my favorite is perhaps “My Literary Uncle,” which ends, “I pare down each experience / hoping to leave / a lovely mess of shavings / behind.” This collection is a lovely mess of shavings indeed, and then some.

Saturday started like any other day. Eli came thumping down the hall at first light and climbed into bed with his patch blanket and blue bear for a wriggly cuddle. “Is it a school day?” he asked after a bit. “No, sweetie, it’s not,” I answered. “That means I can watch a show!” he crowed. So he jumped and I hauled myself out of bed and downstairs we went, where he settled on to the couch with his “show snack” of dry cereal and a sippy cup of milk. I turned on the TV, ready to read him the titles of the 26 episodes of Oswald we’ve recorded for him to choose from for his weekend morning’s entertainment.

But before I could get to the Tivo screen, there was Hillary Clinton, bowing out of the race for president, and I sat back down on the couch, momentarily deflated.

“Mama?” Eli asked after a moment, puzzled that his beloved blue octopus wasn’t yet on screen. “Mama, please tell me the choices?”

“Just a minute, sweetheart; I want to watch this. This is very important.”

Soon Ben and Tony were downstairs, too, and we all watched the speech: Eli, bored and impatient, Tony providing running commentary to Ben (who’s been an easy Obama supporter ever since his kindergarten teacher put a campaign sign on the classroom door), and me with surprised tears in my eyes. Because despite my ambivalence about Clinton as a candidate, I found myself profoundly sad to see her candidacy end. Her candidacy – despite the terribly sexist coverage it attracted – put an end, finally, to the question of whether, as Gail Collins put it, “it’s possible for a woman to go toe-to-toe with the toughest male candidate in a race for president of the United States. Or whether a woman could be strong enough to serve as commander in chief.” Her candidacy made it clear that a women, indeed a mother, could govern the United States, and it inspired me.

Happily, I have plenty left to be inspired by. I can support an exciting candidate for president, and I can dive into lots of terrific reading in the wonderfully timely and engaging The Maternal Is Political. Now, I should admit that I am a completely subjective reader: many of the contributions in this anthology are by excellent writers whom I consider friends, women I know from my work at Literary Mama. And the book is edited by my fabulous partner in the work of managing the site, Shari MacDonald Strong. But, despite my subjectivity, I’m still a very critical reader; I’ve probably read over a dozen anthologies in the last year alone, and having now edited one myself, I’ve formed strong opinions on aspects ranging from cover design to essay length to a book’s organization.

You can all judge for yourselves what a great cover The Maternal Is Political has; the book gets other little things right, too. It offers reader-friendly sections, titled Believe, Teach and Act – words that move me, that get me thinking about the ways that I believe, teach and act just by reading them. It offers a reader-friendly variety of essay length and tone, from the 2 ½ page day-in-the-life account from Benazir Bhutto (reading how competently she moved through a day of governing and mothering made me mourn her all over again) or Cindy Sheehan’s sharp critique of the progressive left in “Good Riddance, Attention Whore,” to the more leisured reflection of Shari MacDonald Strong’s thoughtful “Raising Small Boys in a Time of War” or Barbara Kingsolver’s funny, smart “A Letter to My Daughter at Thirteen.”

And with all this writing, The Maternal Is Political gets the big thing right, too. It’s great writing, cover to cover. It’s all here–gender politics, sexual politics, school politics, adoption politics, religious politics, body politics, community politics, family politics, social politics—but with a mix of tone and approach that makes the book a real pleasure to read. Rather than weighing you down with the utter importance of it all, these writers make you want to think critically, get up off the couch, make a phone call, sign a petition. Do good in the world, and teach your children how to do good, also.

And that part’s not so hard, really. These essays remind us that our children are our constant witnesses, and so why not take subtle advantage of that while they’re young, as in Gayle Brandeis’ “Trying Out,” or in Jennifer Graf Groneberg’s quietly forceful “Politics of the Heart,” which relates moving through a regular day with her three children while following the news of a state assembly bill that would affect her ability to home school them:

At noon, another email update from MCHE arrived, explaining that the crowd had moved to the Capitol. I fed Carter a grilled cheese sandwich, and I fed the babies pears and green beans and bits of Ritz crackers in their high chairs, thinking about how flimsy my position felt—I was fighting for the right to educate my son, but I had nothing to go on but a mother’s intuition, a mother’s love.

In some of the essays, the children taught are sometimes older, and sometimes not the writer’s own. Amy L. Jenkins, in “One Hundred and Twenty-Five Miles,” describes how she took advantage of the confined space of a road trip to work on a young man’s views of gender roles. In Gigi Rosenberg’s “Signora,” she speaks up, in halting Italian, to break up a charged moment on a bus, and Anne Lamott wonders briefly if she’s gone too far, but is then reassured: “During the reception, an old woman came up to me and said, “If you hadn’t spoken out, I would have spit,” and then raised her fist in the power salute. We huddled for a while and ate M&Ms; to give us strength. It was a communion for those of us who continue to believe that civil rights and equality, and even common sense, may somehow be sovereign one day.”

All of these women write about families, but I was especially moved by stories of creating families, or asserting them in the face of challenges. I teared up at the end of Kathy Briccetti’s wonderfully rich detailing of her family’s complicated adoption history, which culminates in one of California’s first second-parent adoptions. And Ona Gritz, who writes a gorgeous monthly column for Literary Mama, writes matter-of-factly about the casual discrimination she faces every day:

Here is what I want to believe. That Lois didn’t think blond, blue-eyed Ethan and I were related because of my dark hair and eyes. Or that I look too young to be the mother of a two-year-old (even though I’m thirty-six). But there is another, more likely explanation, and I can feel myself squelch it down. To Lois’s mind, a disabled woman can’t be a mother. The disable are dependent and asexual. They are like children themselves.

I cannot stop thinking about the striking image of street children in Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s poetic yet also clear-eyed account of a trip to Guatemala to adopt her first child:

I don’t expect the street children to whisper. I don’t expect them to approach us like they do, bumping against each other somnolently, like fish. Opening and closing their hands instead of their mouths. Some of them hold hands with a smaller
sibling, tethering themselves together to make sure they don’t get separated in the crowd. They try out a handful of English words on us—”hello,” “please”—before they learn I speak Spanish. Then they ask for money for milk, for medicine. Their skin is dull, inflamed in places, their lips chapped, hair tangled and matted; their feet are bare. They don’t swarm but quietly press against us with their soft por favores and gracias.

And finally, I come back again and again to the strong and simple words of Shari MacDonald Strong’s introduction: “…If my life as a mother of three children has taught me one thing, it’s that there is no more powerful act than mothering. There is no greater reason than my children for me to become politically involved, and there is no more important work to put my efforts to than those things that will make this world a better, safer place for my kids.” “Vote Mother,” Shari writes; indeed. Share this with the mothers you know, and their partners, friends, and children, and remind them: it’s time to get political.

For more reviews, plus an interview with Shari MacDonald Strong, check out MotherTalk this week.

Eli and I have been reading Else Holmelund Minarik’s A Kiss for Little Bear quite a bit lately; also, for the most part unrelated, we have been talking about ways to solve conflicts. Hence the following dialogue:

Me: Eli, can I have a kiss?
Eli: No.
Me: No? Why not?
Eli: Let’s talk about it.
Me: OK, let’s talk about what’s nice and not nice about giving kisses. What’s nice?
Eli: It’s sweet.
Me: Yeah, and it make a person feel loved.
Eli: And it’s bee-tiful.
Me: Yes, and …
Eli: And it’s happy! And houses!
Me (momentarily stymied by that one, so moving on): So what’s not nice about giving a kiss?
Eli: I don’t know! Here a kiss!

This week, check out Children’s Lit Book Group for recommendations of two excellent picture books — for older readers :

“Sometimes a child’s sense of wonder can refresh my own. While I can get annoyed with the constant echo of “did you know?” and the “Mom, look at this!” I try to remind myself that for Nick, at ten, there’s still a lot of the world that’s new and unknown, that he has a lot to learn, and that I should be grateful when he shares it, even if it’s not new to me.”

In Doing It Differently, a lovely tribute to her mother:

“When I read a book I think my mother would like, I sometimes find myself making a mental note to tell her about it. My mother was what she herself would call a real people person. Everyone she met confided in her. A man behind her in line at the grocery store would tell her of his son’s drinking problem. A young waitress would slip into her booth at a coffee shop and share her sadness about a recent miscarriage. She was a good listener and a terrible gossip. She loved human drama.”

And finally, read Violeta Garcia-Mendoza’s review of the new poetry collection by Julia Lisella, Terrain:

“Becoming a mother has awakened a profound hunger for narration in me. I seek the connection, the promise of life, and the epiphanies that reading about the experiences of others offer me. Now that I am tethered so intimately to another human life, I open more fully to the lives of others. I feel initiated into a network of witnesses — the women who know the terrain of motherhood.”

All of this, plus more poetry, short stories, essays and columns, every week at LiteraryMama.

Part of my wonderful Mother’s Day this year involved attending a reading/writing workshop with Lisa Garrigues, with whom I’ve corresponded since I reviewed her book, Writing Motherhood, for MotherTalk. She was in town to celebrate the paperback release of her book, and so a friend and I drove out to the event, where everyone got a chance to write a bit, share their work if they liked, and offer feedback. Somehow within just a few minutes, under Lisa’s guidance, small groups of strangers were offering thoughtful feedback on each other’s work. It was a great way to spend the afternoon.

Today, when I got home from collecting Ben at school, I found the paperback in the mail, courtesy of Lisa’s publisher. Now it’s a beautiful book, and if I didn’t already own the hardcover (now signed!) I’d keep it, too. But that just seems greedy. So, lovely readers, I’m hosting a giveaway. Leave a comment on this post by the end of the week and I will pick a winner at random.

And in case you missed my earlier review, here it is again; it still holds up–though now my copy of Lisa’s book is a bit battered from use. (I’ve updated the final paragraph to reflect changes at Literary Mama.)

Very early on the morning of July 4th, 2001, I climbed out of bed and took a pregnancy test. As I waited for the result, I left the stick resting on the edge of the bathroom sink and sat down at my desk to write a few lines on my computer. A few minutes later, I went back and added some more thoughts, trying to absorb the fact that I was pregnant.

That was the start of my mothering journal.

I’d kept journals sporadically in the past: a small, cream- colored book my aunt gave me before a high school month in England; a cloth-bound book I bought before my junior year at Oxford University. But when I didn’t have a discrete period of time to document, I could never keep a journal going. I’d get fed up with myself for using it as a dumping ground for my complaints about adolescent life, or I’d get hung up with worry about someone finding it.

But this time was different. I’d just started a new job, I was pregnant, Tony and I bought a house: my life was changing fast, changing permanently, and I wanted to keep track of my thoughts.

That January, my computer crashed and took my journal with it. I lost teaching notes, syllabi, years’ worth of emails, but it was the journal’s loss that made me cry. It took me a few days to regain perspective (I hadn’t lost the baby, I kept having to remind myself, only the writing about the baby), but when I did, I took myself to a good art supply store and bought a nice journal with lined pages and an elastic strap to keep it closed.

And now I have a neat pile of six on the bottom shelf of my bedside table, with the current one, a pen in the middle holding my place, on the top shelf next to my lip balm, the current New Yorker, and a water glass.

I’ve kept it going.

The problem, though, was that before long the journal was not enough. I’d start something, jot down a funny thing Ben did or make an observation about my new life, and then it would sit there, undeveloped. I didn’t have any compelling reason to develop my thoughts into an essay. And after years of steady writing in graduate school, culminating in a nearly 300-page dissertation, I didn’t really even know how to write an essay about myself. I cast about for a year or so, writing unfinished essays during Ben’s naps, not knowing what to do with them. Eventually I lucked into a writing group and from there landed a position at Literary Mama and, between the gentle pressure of my monthly turn to present at writing group and the inspiration of the essays I edit, I found my way to a regular writing gig, a book, and a new life as a writer.

But it all would have been much simpler if I’d had Lisa Garrigues book, Writing Motherhood, back then.

I confess, I haven’t read any other writing books, so I have nothing to compare this to. Well, that’s not even quite right; I haven’t finished any other writing books. I’ve poked around Bird by Bird (and found it quite useful when I do), read a few lines of Writing Down the Bones, but I’ve always gotten a little impatient with the books, always had a moment when I realized, “Wait… no one’s asking me for snack, no one needs a dry diaper, I should be writing!” and put them down. So one of the things I like most about Garrigues’ book is that she invites you to do just that. It is not a book to read cover to cover (although I did, for this review, and it holds up perfectly well to that sustained attention), but one to pick up and read for twenty minutes when you have an hour free, or five minutes when you have ten: pick it up, find your inspiration, put the book down, and write. Because just as no one learns to parent by reading parenting books, no one learns to write without writing.

I like the bold orange cover of this book, which won’t get lost on my desk; that bright flash will always peek out from under the messy pile of drafts, bills, and Ben’s latest train drawings, and remind me to write. I like her tone, which is encouraging and friendly throughout; she leaves behind any kind of authoritative teacher voice and comes across as a woman you’d happily share a coffee with. Garrigues calls her writing prompts “invitations,” another subtle way that she manages to lighten up the task of setting down to write. And I like that she gives you lots and lots of good stuff to read, because the most important work in becoming a writer, after writing, is, of course, reading. Garrigues gives you her own short essays (on topics ranging from copying other writers, to marriage, to mama playdates); some of the little essays are hardly about writing at all, but about mothering, and then as she comes to the end and crystallizes the feeling that she’s expressed in the essay, she neatly raises a question for your own writing. She provides sample “mother’s pages” (essays written by her students), and she offers loads of great quotations from other writers. She also offers concrete advice on everything from buying a writer’s notebook to setting up a productive workspace. I have both of those things, but I still picked up a couple good ideas from her. She closes the book with an entire section on moving from new writer to a writer seeking connection and publication, with ideas on setting up and maintaining writing groups and taking one’s writing public. And then, in case there weren’t already enough ideas to keep you going in the text of the book, she offers a list of 99 writing starts and a bibliography.

I am keeping this review short because, inspired by Garrigues book, I want to get back to my writing! But I want to leave you with a couple quotations. The first, from Annie Dillard, resonated with me right now as I struggle to clear
space in my days to write:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.

And now here’s Garrigues:

This book is, in part, a story of growing up and into a role I claimed for myself.

Is she talking about mothering or writing?! The point, as she claims throughout the book, is that the two are not mutually exclusive but complimentary roles that feed and develop each other. We should take advantage of that fact, and make time to write our lives.

Garrigues teaches writing classes, and those of you in the NY/NJ area should check them out. For anyone looking for on-line writing classes, I highly recommend Susan Ito’s parent lit workshop (which I have taken) and the poetry workshops led by Violeta Garcia-Mendoza (an editor at LiteraryMama). Literary Mama is now offering monthly writing prompts, with personal feedback from the Literary Reflections editorial staff, as well as listings of workshops and other resources for writers. So get writing!

Two of my favorite columnists have new pieces up at Literary Mama!

First, Libby Gruner’s Children’s Lit Book Group feels a rare twinge of nostalgia as she contemplates sending her daughter off to college:

“Three of my favorite read-alouds are Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day. These three wouldn’t seem to tell me much about a child going off to college, and indeed they don’t. But they do tell about the power of the imagination, the appeal of the unknown, and the comforts of home, in ways I’m finding helpful right now.”

And in Me and My House, Elrena Evans is way too tired for nostalgia:

“As a Christian mother I sometimes feel like I can’t turn around without stubbing my toe on the God-as-parent metaphor, hand in hand with its twin, you-are-your-child’s-first-image-of-God. I love the idea of being God’s image for her, being his hands and feet on this earth, and I want more than anything to show that kind of love to my daughter. But it’s hard, at 3:07 a.m.”

When Eli outgrew his crib, we moved him into a big-boy bed in a now shared room with Ben and I–for the first time in my life–got an office. One small room with a desk and, well, yes, a pull-out couch because it’s our guest room, too. But mostly it is my office, with a tall bookshelf stacked with my old grad student books (the ones I wasn’t so sick of that I sold back), and my favorite novels, and tons of anthologies, and one little picture book about food that never made it down to the kitchen, where it belongs. It’s a collection of Andy Warhol’s comments about food, illustrated with his drawings, and now everyday after his nap, Eli comes bombing down the hall with his blanket and his bear and his bunny and his two doggies and his ball (because ever since our trip east last month he is a dog, he says, who needs to sleep with a ball), and he pulls the book off the shelf and says, “Mama, let’s read Yum Yum!” So we do.

Some of the lines are profound:
“Progress is very important and exciting in everything except food.”

And some of them are not so profound:
“Tab is Tab, and no matter how rich you are, you can’t get a better one.”

Some are sweet truisms:
“It’s nice to have a little breakfast made for you.”

And some make excellent points:
“When you want an orange, you don’t want someone asking you, ‘An orange what?'”

This is my favorite line:
“I love the way the smell of each fruit gets into the rough wood of the crates and into the tissue-paper wrappings.”

And this is Eli’s:
My only regret was that I didn’t have an ice cream scoop in my pocket.

I don’t remember how the book came to us, but I’m glad we have it. As Eli says, “I’m great fond of this book!”