Las Vegas, when seen from outer space, is the brightest spot on Earth.

(I’m not bragging.)

(here, of all places, until July 5.)

When we were in Paris this January, we couldn’t wait to see fireworks for New Year’s. The clock struck midnight and there were no fireworks. It turns out they had banned them in 2003. All those images I’d seen of fireworks going off around the Eiffel Tower were from years past. At the Champs Elysees on January 1, someone stole my English-French dictionary out of my pocket, and my lip balm, too. When we got in the taxi in Las Vegas this morning, we asked about the fireworks. It turns out that because of the recession, they won’t be having fireworks this year. The whole city is a firework all night long, I’m not complaining. But my best memories of these two holidays are in small towns, small fireworks going off on my side of the mountain and then on the other side of the mountain in someone else’s small town, and fireworks reflecting in water and snow.

July 2nd, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

I am a dependent on Steve’s health insurance, which he pays for as an individual because he is self-employed. When we first started IVF, we called Aetna, our provider, to see if they covered it. They replied that they did not, which didn’t surprise us because it’s a voluntary procedure. They ended up covering over half of each procedure — they paid $6,000 each time. We won’t ever question that.

When the procedure worked, I called to see if it would be possible to get a midwife for prenatal care and delivery. They informed me that, though they had paid for me to get pregnant, they did not cover maternity care at all. I called the doctor’s office to schedule an appointment anyway; they told me they had never heard of a health insurance policy that doesn’t cover pregnancy. They called Aetna for me just to check, and Aetna told them that yes! maternity was covered! Whew. So I had three ultrasounds and one prenatal checkup and then got the bills, $400 per ultrasound. Aetna did not cover a penny. At this point another person at the doctor’s office called Aetna and they told them that no, they wouldn’t cover maternity. I went online and logged into my Aetna account, found my name and clicked on the “plan guide” under my name. It was a pdf with information about what was covered, and it showed pictures of pregnant women and women looking at ultrasound images. I called Aetna to tell them that my plan guide says that maternity is covered. They said that wasn’t true. I asked where in my Aetna online dashboard could I read that it wasn’t covered. They said nowhere. It wasn’t written online anywhere. They said I had to call to find out.

At this point, pregnancy is a pre-existing condition and I can find health insurance through almost no one. The only one who will accept me is Blue Cross Blue Shield group health insurance — the individual plans have a six-month waiting period for pre-existing conditions. I would not be accepted for Medicaid or WIC or any other low-income insurance. And the bill for my appointments and delivery uninsured, if all goes well and I accept no epidural and stay at the hospital no longer than one day, is $16,000.

We are lucky that through Steve’s business we will most likely be accepted for group health insurance with the only company that won’t deny my pre-existing condition — though the plan, because we’re desperate, is not cheap. If not, I don’t know what we would have done, and it infuriates me that the health care system in this country would permit me, who has gone to college and owns a home and pays my taxes and has health insurance that costs us $700 a month already and does not abuse the system, to suffer. And as I suffer, the baby suffers, the future of the country suffers through me and my child and everyone similar to me. Currently 13% of women in the U.S. who become pregnant are uninsured and therefore have to accept poor prenatal care. I have never been a victim of our health care system until now, and now I see how awful it is. When I was in E.R. and in pain I could not sufficiently breathe through, I considered saying no to pain medication because I didn’t know if my insurance would cover it. I considered requesting only the MRI and not the CAT scans because I knew they would cost us a lot of money. When I found myself pregnant and learned the cost of delivery, I considered having my baby at home, and I understood that at the very least under no circumstance would I permit myself any medication to temper the pain. We are lucky that we found a loophole that we wouldn’t have without Steve’s business, but it doesn’t ease my frustration: to have a body in the United States is a liability.

July 1st, 2009 | Category: happening, the baby thing | Leave a comment

I had read the first story in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth and then put the book down for almost half a year while my life knotted and unknotted. The pace of the story and the detachment of tone didn’t work with my temporary roller coaster. But I returned to it this week and read the stories quickly and fluidly, requesting that everyone stop asking anything of me, that the plane stay up in the air, until I finished one story and then the next.

I fell instantly in love with Jhumpa Lahiri’s first short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies. I remember reading almost the whole thing in a bookstore, transfixed by the seeming simplicity and clearness of tone and the necessity of each tiny detail. At the risk of sounding stereotypical, because really I don’t know as much about literature as I wish I did, a lot of women of Indian descent writing in English today have the most lyrical, poetic style of writing that I’ve seen. If I had to read one book on repeat, it might be Arundahti Roy’s God of Small Things. It makes me wish that I had in my brain both poetry and plot. It makes me want to write. Same with Preeta Samarasan’s Evening is the Whole Day and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss.

But Jhumpa Lahiri is the opposite. She is cool, calm, sparse. I found this to not work for me in her book The Namesake, her first novel. Something about the form of the novel — all that room, abundance, that mess — didn’t allow her to focus on the symbolism in everyday details like her short stories do. I felt bored when I read it. But the short story that led her to that novel, which appeared first in a New Yorker, was gorgeous and whole enough without unraveling into the novel form. In Unaccustomed Earth, I was glad to see her return to short stories. And a new form: the second half of the book had a string of short stories that together connected into one whole. (But why only the second half? It made the form of the collection feel patched.)  The book feels necessary, though I didn’t love it. It filled a cultural space: to understand more the complications of transplanting from one country to another, and the pain between two generations — one born in American and one born in India, and the need to both attach to the past and free oneself from it.

July 1st, 2009 | Category: book | Leave a comment

Corn grows in our yard like a flower this year. Pink tassels for blooms.

June 25th, 2009 | Category: house | Comments (1)

Me and my siblings don’t have much of a connection to our roots. When I asked my maternal grandmother once what ethnicity she is, she said that she’s American. I pushed further but that was the only answer she wanted to give. But on my father’s side, people immigrated from the Ukraine not that many generations ago. I don’t think many fathers keep their ethnicity alive as well as mothers, aside from the gift of their last name: my father doesn’t cook, and in food we see what we’re made of.

But once a year we would visit his mother, and on those days we’d get our Ukranian food. What we probably all remember most is pedaheh: Ukranian pierogies, often filled with cheese and dill. When I smell dill, it propels all of me toward my grandmother, not just my stomach but all of my senses. I don’t think that any other smell does that quite as strongly. Maybe that’s the pull of ethnicity, forming a memory in my bones while I’m being made. We never got the recipe from my grandmother — she wouldn’t offer it up, she wanted it to be solely our memory with her, she was stubborn. But last week I asked her daughter, my aunt, who offered it without question.

My first batch didn’t turn out so well, but the second batch is exactly what I remember. I love serving them to Rosie and Steve, and feeding a growing baby with them. It keeps something in my heritage alive that I didn’t know I even cared about until now.

Pedaheh

1. make dough

2. pull off a piece and press it with your fist into the size of a flat peach or orange

3. put a tablespoon of a mix of dill, feta, and egg in the middle

4. pull the sides up and press together until it resembles a small football

5. wipe the outside with sour cream

6. bake a bunch of these at 350 for 20 minutes

June 25th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

He wanted to stop at the paint store on the way home. When I asked why he said it was none of my business. Conversations can get roundabout around here. I asked again and he said he needed the paint to paint trees. I didn’t believe him. I understand being private about artmaking. There’s a pink one in the woods somewhere, too.

June 25th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle as my summer fun book. I didn’t expect it to be rigorous and I didn’t think I would enjoy the writing, but I was wrong. I read it in just a couple of days, immersed in her life as a small family trying to eat only the food they grow for one year. I am a sucker for books about food — I could probably read Michael Pollan daily — and this book was no exception: I was inspired to make my own bread and cheese and eat everything from our garden.

But what made the book more difficult for me was their insularity and its contrast to our life’s porousness. Their family of four has their own unique rules that start with food but encompass a lifestyle: living with enough land to grow food means they don’t live in the city; working to grow everything on their own means that everyone pitches in with growing, weeding, canning, and cooking; eating only local food means there’s no room for sugar and prepackaged items. With summer’s schedule we have Rosie this week, and I’m reminded too strongly how little control either house has. While last week she lived like a vagabond, crashing at one friend or another’s house each night, in our house I want her to have a good night’s sleep and I can’t tolerate friends in our basement each night — not because I don’t like them, because I do really like her friends, but because it means teenagers want food at midnight and want fancy breakfast in the morning, and Rosie doesn’t get a good night’s sleep. Rosie is mad at me for my rule: two sleepovers a week at our house sounds more than fair to me but she wants more. She comes to our house with money her mother gave her, then it’s gone and there are Pringles and soda in the downstairs trash. I watch her walk out the door wearing my jacket without asking, and I know this rule about privacy and clothes-sharing is different at her mother’s, but I am not so kind — it was in folded my bedroom on my dresser and it comes back smelling like perfume I wouldn’t wear with a movie ticket in a pocket (I am especially rigid, I’m afraid, because much more than once a shirt of mine never came back). Jack comes over and almost immediately turns on the computer to watch a re-run of a show called Family Guy, then he’s singing a song from the show about a bag of weed. He knows the rules, no television before it’s dark outside, and certainly not that show, but he also doesn’t know, he tests, just to see, because life between two houses is unstable.

When we have a kid that’s just ours… I have said in my head for six years. But I don’t give up on these kids who didn’t ask to teeter-totter between two worlds. And I also try not to let the rules of my house alter by a world I am not a part of. I want this house to be completely ours, no compromises. At her mother’s Rosie doesn’t have to pick up her own towel because her mother is good enough to pick it up for her, but at our house I make her because I’m not her maid and because these small details help keep her connected to reality and responsibility and that’s that.

I know that the outside world is always going to intrude, even when I raise a child all in one house. I know that I prefer to live close enough to town that we can walk to the farmer’s market, and I know that that means we’re close enough to town to also buy a soda. But this week I can grieve for all I can’t choreograph that I wish I could. I am sad to build a family culture in this way, part-time, that often doesn’t feel whole.

June 24th, 2009 | Category: house | Leave a comment

“Streets with No Name” is a beautiful post in the blog Sweet Juniper about Detroit’s chemins du desir, the pathways of desire: where people have voted with their feet in spite of where the concrete instructs them to walk.

June 24th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

June 22nd, 2009 | Category: happening, inward, written | Leave a comment