City Kids

We took the kids to the country this weekend and I learned something: I've got me some bona-fide city kids. The which is to say, we need more country time.

It wasn't like we went into the deep country or anything, just drove an hour up to the Bear Mountain area where my high school friend Miriam and her husband have a little house. Still, it had a screen door which as far as I can tell, legitimizes any country domicile. I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard that creeeak! of a screen door; makes me feel like I'm in a Eudora Welty novel.

What got the kids' attention was the diversity of bug life. Here in NYC we have roaches, flies, mosquitoes, ants and the occasional spider. In the spring you'll see butterflies every so often and the sight of them blows my kids' minds: "OH MY GOD IT'S A BUTTERFLY! LOOK!"

On Saturday, no sooner had the stepped out of the car then we were inundated with bugs. Thankfully, the kids didn't wimp out on me and get all bug-a-phobic: in fact, it was the opposite.

"WOW! Mommy! LOOK! It's a Gran' Daddy Longlegs!" Seconda gasped.

I don't know where she learned that term. Must be her Tennessee gene which afforded her the ability to identify various kinds of hopping insects.

"Can I pick it up?" she asked.

"Sure, I guess." I wouldn't know a Gran' Daddy Long Legs from a Venus Flytrap but it sounded friendly enough.

"Oooh! there's another!" shrieked Primo.

"And here's another one! And another!" Seconda chimed in.

"Yes, kids, I think the country is full of them."

In their investigations in the dirt they found all sorts of bugs, all of which were impossible for me to identify but which David determined were millipedes, beetles, roly polies and "potato bugs."

"Can I touch them?" Seconda asked.

"Yeah," I guessed, hoping none of the bugs in question were black widow spiders,  "Knock yourself out."

Then came the worms.

In community gardens here in Brooklyn, the kids look for worms and we can spend an hour digging in the dirt and find one, maybe two. These worms are priceless. You'd think, from the jubilation which breaks out when one is spotted, that we've stumbled upon a nugget of gold.

As it turns out, in the country, there are worms everywhere. And not tiny, pathetic half-dead worms which barely a wiggle left in them; thick, beefy, nasty-as-all-hell-get-out, are-you-sure-that-isn't-a-snake? 3-inch-long worms.  The kids were dumbfounded. In particular, Seconda.

"We need a way to COLLECT THEM!" she yelled. I knew she was already planning on bringing some back to Brooklyn, to repopulate the worm world here.

Miriam's husband brought her a coffee can to collect the worms. An actual tin Folger's coffee can with a plastic lid that we poked holes into.

"That is so old-school," I noted appreciatively.

Then he said, "Once you're done collecting, we can go fishing with me."

Now, I defy you to find any activity more country than fishing with worms in a tin can.  I mean, I don't know from personal experience, but I've read a lot of books about this sort of thing and let me tell you, watching the kids drop the worms into that can, I felt like I was reading The Adventures of Tom Freaking Sawyer.

They did paddle out in the lake and catch fish (I stayed behind at the house while the baby slept) and afterwards, we all took a dip in the "swimming hole." You can not imagine my delight at being able to use that term. Being a city kid myself, I seriously fetishize this shit. That there were fish in the water in which we swam blew Seconda away; she spent a good fifteen minutes trying to catch one with her bare hands.

When we got home that night, the kids sacked out like a bunch of drunks, my dream come true. And I saw to David, "We need to get to the country more often."

Little Critters, Big CIty

The summer issue of the Park Slope Reader is now out, complete with my newest Dispatch from Babyville. You can pick one up in a coffee shop near you, or, if you're living beyond the Reader's reach, you can read the essay here:

Little Critters, Big City

By Nicole Caccavo Kear

I had a pet-less childhood with nary a dog or hamster or even a goldfish to call my own. To say that my mother is not an animal lover is to put it mildly. Though a reasonably feeling woman in general, she is downright coldhearted when it comes to creatures covered in fur, feathers, or fins. Not as bad as Cruella da Ville, but close. I guess I inherited this animal aversion because it never bothered me that I didn't have a pet. I had a kid sister, and that was sort of the same thing.

My kid sister, on the other hand, pined for a pet. Melissa's pining (and whining) led to a series of what I will euphemistically call "eclectic" pets, the kind a kid can keep in the city without disturbing the domestic peace too much. The first was Slimy, a snail gifted to her by a waiter at Ko Chine Restaurant in Chinatown. The waiter was impressed by Melissa's appetite for escargot and thought she might savor a live snail as much as she did the ones she swallowed whole. My sister shared one and a half magical days with Slimy before he, for no reason whatsoever that we could discern, suddenly stopped sliming.

After that she had to content herself with taking the classroom fish home on holidays, until one day my mother accidentally (we hope) flushed him down the toilet. Guilt ridden about the fish-slaughter, she consented to buy Melissa a bird. So they went to the pet store and came back with Freddy, a one-eyed, skittish cockatoo.

My sister did not look too happy with this, her long-awaited pet.

"Why does he have only one eye?" I asked.

"He was on SALE," she replied sulkily, "because he's missing an eye from having a fight with another bird. Now he's a nervous wreck."

"We rescued him!" my mother exclaimed, like she was auditioning to play Dian Fossey in the remake of Gorillas in the Mist. But my sister and I knew better than to buy the act - my mother had bought the bird because he was a bargain.

Over time Melissa grew to love Freddy, and when he issued his last, anxious chirp, our cousins handed her down their bird, a green parrot named Captain, who was as bona-fide a pet as a child of animal-haters could hope for. So, in the end, her dreams of pet ownership were realized.

Fast forward twenty years and you will find the cycle of pet-withholding has repeated itself. Only now I'm the meanie and Primo and Seconda are the pitiful city kids without a canine sidekick.

It's not that I hate animals. I just don't want them as roommates. Little critters, no matter how smart or loving, like to roll in the mud, lick their butts, and eat garbage, and I think that's fine, that's totally cool, as long as it's not happening in my house.

There's also the fact that I can hardly manage caring for myself and my two children, who seem more like animals every day, which leads me to believe it's not a great idea to enlarge our family. Every plant we've ever had dies a slow, painful death of thirst and is left to wither for several weeks before it's disposed of. The only living things that do thrive in our apartment are the animals that live there without my permission, the endless parade of mice, not just any mice but a mutant strain of defiant super-mice who are invulnerable to death and skitter around the kitchen corners despite my unflagging efforts at hole-plugging and crumb-collecting.

Point is, I've got my hands full.

But children don't understand logical reasons such as these. Children just want. And my 4 year-old wants a creature to call his own. In his desperation, he has turned to bugs. Ants, in particular.

In the afternoon, he has taken to patrolling the stoop for stray ants that he can pluck from their happy life on the pavement and drag into our inhospitable home.

"I FOUND ONE!!!!" he shouts, like he's struck gold. Seconda runs over and bends down so that her face is a half inch from his fingertip.

"Oh you so tiny, you so coot my little Anty! I LOVE YOU, ANTY. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH!" she bellows.

"Too LOUD! You're going to scare the living daylights out of him!" Primo scolds.

Then, like he's a surgeon and I'm a nurse, he orders, "Habitat!"

I comply, handing over the plastic dome with a yellow handle, kindly manufactured by Fisher Price to satisfy the bug-capturing yen of children like my son.

"Get in there you little Anty you!" he coos, dropping the sucker inside and shutting the door, which must sound like a death knell to poor old Anty. No doubt word has gotten out in the Park Slope insect world about Primo's appetite for ants; the sight of that habitat cum torture chamber must send them running for broke.

Primo captures a bunch more, gleefully narrating to Anty that he's delivering some roommates for him so he won't be lonely in there, and then, when the habitat is full of writhing, squirming, dirty bugs, we get into the old "Can I bring them inside?" debate.

The first time this debate unfolded, I was a novice, and feeling guilty that I'd deprived the kids of a Fido or a Mittens, I agreed to letting the bugs come upstairs, provided - and this was the dealbreaker - that the habitat door remain closed.

Rookie move, I know. But Primo's my first and parenting him is full of rookie moves.

About two minutes after we brought the impromptu ant farm upstairs I heard a shriek.
I ran into the living room to find Primo holding the empty habitat, screaming, "WHERE IS ANTY?"

"Did you let him out? All of them?" I yelled back, scanning the floor for ants and spotting not a one, "I TOLD you not to!"

"But I wanted to PLAY WITH HIM!" he choked out before the bawling began, the wild, wide-eyed sobbing of a man with nothing left to lose, "ANTY! ANNNNNNNNTTTTY!"

Seconda, not quite sure what the hubbub was about, but always willing to join in on a good cry, piped up, "I WANT MY ANNNNNTY! GET HIM MOMMY!"

Primo thought this was an excellent idea. "Yes, Mommy, find him! Find Anty and his roommates, too!"

It is the lot of mothers to fix the unfixable, to do the impossible. But even we have limitations. I tried to explain that you'd have better luck keeping track of a collection of dust motes than ants on the loose. I told him it was his own fault for not listening to his mother. I told him you can't really play with an ant anyway. I suggested finding one of Anty's identical twin brothers on the stoop. There was no consoling him.

Since that fateful day, we have a strict all-bugs-left-behind policy. The kids can pick up whatever creepy crawlers they please - slugs, inchworms, millepieds, rolie polies - but they all get released back into the wild when its time to go home. And wouldn't you know, just yesterday, the wheel came full circle when Primo was poking through the dirt at his grandparents' place and found a small, sleek, black snail.

"Mommy, Mommy look!" he cried, breathless.

I had to admit, the snail was stupendous. She stuck her head with its lovely little snail horns right out in a delightfully amiable way and swayed her body this way and that, ever so slowly. I felt positively enchanted.

We named her Slimy Jr. and spent an hour or two in the garden playing with her. When it was time to go inside for lunch, I told Primo it would be OK if we kept Slimy, since she was such a special, such a one-of-a-kind snail.

"No, we better let her go free, Mommy," my son said, "So she can find her family and live a happy life in the dirt."

And that, I think, is precisely what happened.

Bugbusters: infommercial coming soon

Mosquitoes love me. They don’t mind that I’ve gained a few pounds since the birth of my second child; they don’t notice the bags under my eyes. To mosquitoes, I am the hottest piece of ass since Marilyn Monroe. My sweet scent draws them in and they succumb to the irresistible lure of my blood.

So it is that I have been waking in the middle of the night with wild, maddening itches that cannot be satisfied, having been devoured while I slept by those infernal bugs. I was telling Primo about it, and he, dear soul, devised a plan to stop them.

“The first thing you will need to do it get a booboo because I have a lot of booboos and mosquitoes never bite me. Then we will take some of the blood from that booboo and put in a net, or maybe a cup, yes that’s better, because the blood might leak through the net, so we will put it in a cup and then I will have to get an almost-invisible top to put on the cup which is really a trap. Spiders spin webs which are almost-invisible with their silk and so maybe I could get a spider to do it because, you know, I speak spider language. Spiders speak the same language as us except that they are so small you cannot hear them. So I will ask a spider to spin the almost-invisible top and then we will put your blood in there and the mosquito will be attracted to it like how a bee is attracted to honey and then BAM! We will close the top and he will be stuck! Then we will dig a hole and put the mosquito and the blood in the hole because you know mosquitoes will never be able to dig out of the deep dirt and we will call the invention Bugbusters. {Pause for breath] It’s a little bit complicated Mommy, maybe I should tell it to you again.”

A cricket by any other name . . . .

I love that my little ones are city kids. But sometimes I feel sorry for their ignorance about the great outdoors, an ignorance for which I am largely responsible.

Case in point: we were in the state park near my parents’ place in New Jersey a few weeks ago when Primo discovered an interesting insect.

“Mommy!” he yelled, “Come here! I found a CRICKET!”

I ran right over to witness his discovery. Now, I’m far from an expert, but even I can tell you that was no cricket.

It didn’t look anything like Jiminy or the cricket in Times Square or this picture of a cricket I found in Google Images, titled “Typical Cricket.” It just looked like your garden-variety fly, you know, small, shit-colored, ugly.

Did I disabuse my darling of the notion he’d found a cricket? Certainly not. I didn’t know what the hell it was anyway, could’ve been a cricket I guess, and I’m certainly not one to get hung up in the detailed classification of insects. But then he kept talking about his little cricket so lovingly, and passing along his erroneous understanding to Seconda, who was soon shouting, “Oh you coote little CICKET! I LOVE YOU CICKET!”

“Don’t yell or you’ll scare our baby cricket away!” Primo advised her.

“Okay, I gonna be ky-et!” Sec agreed. Then she rested her check on the palm of her hand and inquired of her older, her so-much-wiser brother, “What’s that cicket doin’?”

“Oh,” sighed Primo with a contented smile,” he’s just doing what crickets do.”

And they stood there, heads cocked to the side, mesmerized by the bug standing still on a branch.

This cricket- watching is part of a more global interest Primo now has in bugs. Ants, mostly. The truth is, he’s too scared to actually touch them, but he has no problem harassing me to pick them up (“GENTLY Mommy you’re being too ROUGH !”) and place them in his “bug habitat.” This bug habitat, made by Fisher Price out of cheerful yellow plastic, is nothing more than a torture chamber for ants, who starve or asphyxiate to death after being locked inside.

The good news for the ants is that I usually end up killing them instantly when I capture them, since it is pretty hard to catch one of those suckers without crushing it stone dead between your fingers.

But since Primo is not too savvy about these things, I can usually get him to believe the ant is alive for as long as he is interested in it, which is usually about five minutes. It’s Weekend at Bernie's, bug-style.

“Oh I love my little ant!” squeaks Primo, as we head up the stairs from our stoop to our apartment, “Do you love him, Mommy?”

“Of course I do,” I reply, “He’s my grandantbaby.”

We get home, and Primo wants to see his ant in action.

“Look, I built an obstacle course for little Anty to crawl over,” Primo says, “So put him on the table.”

I do. He lies there on his back, still, lifeless. dead as a doormat.

“Why isn’t Anty moving?” Primo asks.

“He’s probably exhausted from all this excitement,” I said, “Anty has never been adopted and brought to live with a little boy before.”

“Maybe he’s hungry,” Primo offers, “Let’s give him something to eat. Give him an edamame.”

I deposit the edamame on the table and check my email while Primo watches his dead ant do . . . nothing.

“He’s not eating, Mommy.”

“Why don’t you just let him rest, honey?” I offer, “And you draw a picture while he sleeps/”

So Primo starts drawing (with his fist, no fingers thank you very much) and before long, he’s onto the next thing – having giant mutant spiders knock down whole cities made of blocks – and I discretely brush dead Anty, not my first and certainly not my last grandantbaby, into the trash, without so much as a verse of Amazing Grace.

That’s how we roll in the big city.