Today, I'm Robin

Since yesterday, I've been mulling the pledge I made to donate $24 to a good cause. At first I thought about funding a bit of a classroom project, given that the whole thing came up because of back-to-school shopping.

But Charlottesville has been on my mind. And so, with the help of a Medium post by Sara Benincasa, titled "What to Do About Charlottesville", I sent my little donation to Great Expectations, a project where foster kids in Virginia get help navigating out of the foster system into adulthood, through programs at Virginia community colleges.

The current overt burbling up of the alt-right, of racists, fascists, Nazis, Klansmen, is deeply disturbing. And yet, as a middle-aged white woman in a liberal NYC suburb, what do I do? Benincasa makes an apposite point:

I believe in the Superhero Sidekick theory of helping, which is to say that if you’re trying to ally yourself with the interests of an oppressed group of which you are not a part, you pull a Robin, not a Batman. You’re not the star of the show, so you don’t direct the mission. You listen, you learn, you assist. You definitely don’t lounge around and wait for the superhero to do all the work and then take all the credit. You also don’t throw up your hands and wail, “WHAT WILL WE EVER DOOOOOOO? THIS IS HOPELESS!” when Batman is right there going, “Um, Robin? There’s like ten things you could do today that would help everybody out. You listening?”

So, here's how I did my Robin part today:

1. Little gift to Great Expectations
2. Repost/amplification of Benincasa's "What To Do" piece

How did you do your Robin part?

Back to school shopping, and how I regained my will to live

The child has been begging to go shopping. Yes, she needed new sneakers. Yes, she needed new bras. Yes, she needed new jeans. Yes, she starts high school and wanted a “first day of school outfit” and I caved in because sometimes I am nice (although I did think about invoking Thoreau's beware of all enterprises that require new clothes except that I thought she might take that to mean that high school was optional or something).

So, it was time to go to the mall. There are several malls not too far from us, but to hit all the stores one wants to hit, one needs to go to two different malls, and pay for parking at each, and paying for parking GALLS ME.

I elected to go to a farther away mall because 1) free parking and 2) everything under one roof and 3) a less crowded Trader Joe’s on the way home.

She got sneakers. We went into both Sephora and Ulta and walked out with only one hair clip, for me. We were sweet-talked by a cute young not-our-camp Spanish guy with terrific glasses, who was shilling expensive beauty products out of a kiosk; we bought nothing (hello $99 jar of goop), but he was amusing. We both got bra-fitted, at Soma, where they have wireless bras. She got an overall dress, and a sweater, and two pairs of jeans, and a tiny backpack.

And in Aeropostale, we were on line to pay for two cheap t-shirts, when the customer ahead of us at the register called to us: “I’ll pay for those shirts. I have $24 of credit that is just going away unless I spend it right now.” She had a pile of merchandise and some complicated return deal and was DONE WITH shopping. So my girl’s two shirts went into mall lady's pile, but she needed another few dollars worth of merchandise so another t-shirt and then a $4 tank top went in, and the whole total came to 63¢ due. I paid it, meaning that for 63¢, the girl got four new shirts. I told the other woman that I’d been on the verge of losing my will to live because 3 hours in the mall and that she had restored my gumption.

Today, in honor of mall lady, I’m going to donate $24 to a good cause.

But I'm not setting foot in another mall for at least a year, and the girl knows that.

Do cats eat bats?

​At 12:15, I drifted from sleep into consciousness and noticed that a light was on - the girl was in the bathroom. I sleepily muttered "go back to bed" and with that, she let out a blood-curdling scream. "BAT, BAT, there's a bat!"

There is a little closet off the bathroom - a closet that's really a part of the crawl space that runs under the dormers on the front of the house. And while she was sitting on the toilet, a bat had slipped out from under the closet door.

And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.

My husband scrambled out of bed in a haze, I grabbed the hysterical child, the cats fled, and we pondered what to do about the bat careening around the upstairs of our little house. The girl offered to find her tennis racket, except that she would have had to cross the dangerous hallway with the frantic bat. I thought about calling the police, and eventually my husband towel-snapped it to stun it. He gathered it up loosely in the towel, and took it downstairs and outside; it flew away, apparently unharmed.

Far too much drama for the middle of the night, but no one got carted off in an ambulance.

Take The Girl To Work Day

Once upon a time, the girl child went to work with me every day.

Nowadays, she only comes on special occasions; later we are going to see a show together, and she opted to spend the day with me (instead of hanging out at home and taking the train in). (Really, she was hoping I would cave and take her to DŌ, which um, no, it's a workday, and besides, I can make cookie dough perfectly well at home and there's no standing on line there.)

One thing led to another, and BOOM. Causing a traffic jam yet again.