Sarita of the Riches

April is National Poetry Month. I finally decided to celebrate with “poem in your pocket day.” But backspace to a few months ago.

We have this friend named Christian. He’s six and he LOVES wearing pajamas. He hates wearing socks, a man after Albert Einstein's heart.

He came over to Jesse’s birthday party in January and apparently really enjoys our hallway and the big blue exercise ball.

In February, I went with his mom to see where the bishop's storehouse was and he asked where she was going and who she was going with:

Mom: “I’m going to the bishop’s storehouse with Sister Rich.”

Christian: “What’s the bishop’s store?"

Mom: “It’s a place where you go if you need help getting groceries.”

Christian: “You mean Sarita? Of the Riches? Is she poor? Can she not afford groceries”?

Later that month, his mom told me that before she came to pick me up to visit a sister in the ward, he asked where she was going. She told him she was going to our house:

Christian: “Wait, am I going?”

Mom: “No, why?”

Christian: “Cause their house is AWESOME.”

A few weeks ago, Christian told me that he does not like his mean teachers who yell at him all the time because he doesn’t write his name the way they want him to, or some stupid reason or another. Since he knows I’m a teacher, he suggested that I find a job at his school. I said I’d like that a lot more than teaching boring college students and that I’d make all the mean kids sit with their noses against the wall. He approved of that idea. 

He came over for dinner recently and all he ate was french fries with a small mountain of salt on top.

Then, last night, his mom informed me that Christian said the following after looking at our blog picture of us on the railroad tracks:

Christian: "Jesse and Sarita are doing something very dangerous!" 

She also told me that Christian hates his gym teacher. I don’t know why he hates her, but he’s smart, so he must have a good reason. The gym teacher hasn’t been to school in a while and people are hoping she won’t be returning.

Christian: “I hope Sarita Rich is a gym teacher!" 

Then later that night when he was in the bathroom brushing his teeth:

Christian: “Do Jesse and Sarita have a baby?”

Mom: "No, why do you ask?”

Christian: "I just want to meet him and say 'sup muchacho' because muchacho is another way to say bro."

So after I heard about “poem in your pocket day” for National Poetry Month, I wrote this for him:

 Idea adapted from John Grandits' Technically, It's Not My Fault

And this note:

Dear Christian, I heard your gym teacher is missing...sorry I can’t be your teacher. I hate pushups and running laps. I think I'm allergic to exercise. But you can sleep over any time you want.

P.S. Happy National Poetry Month! Today is “poem in your pocket day,” which means that if you carry this poem in your pocket, you’ll have at least 5 minutes of good luck.

I was told he wanted to save his poem and write me a letter back that said, “You don’t have to do push ups! If you’re the teacher you can do whatever you want!”

Happy Easter!

A word about Easter Sunday.

I invited half the ward over for dinner the Thursday before Easter. Due to the busy weekend, only a few of our friends were able to come. Which worked out perfectly because: a) what was I thinking?, b) I had papers to grade that I didn’t even look at all weekend, c) I’ve never made Easter dinner before, d) what was I thinking?

In classic me fashion, I attempted three mismatched recipes that I'd never tried before, which is dumb, but oh well, it works for me: spinach and berry salad with pomegranate dressing; creamy mushroom soup; pork chops with caramelized apples and onions. And our marvelous friends brought potato salad, green beans, strawberry napoleons (with diplomat cream!), raspberry turnovers, birds’ nests, and Cadbury Eggs.

We all ate too much and had to sit at the table playing Wits and Wagers until we could move again. This is a game in which the answer to every question is a number, and you score points by betting on what you think the closest answers are without going over the real numbers.  The questions ask about incredibly useful information that everyone should know, but for some reason doesn’t. For example:

In years, how old was the oldest woman in recorded medical history? 

In degrees Fahrenheit, what is the lowest temperature ever recorded in Hawaii? 

How many pairs of shoes were found in Imelda Marcos’ closet after she fled the Philippines in 1986? 

It was seriously so fun! 

Our dinner party.

While rearranging our furniture to accommodate three tables, we found this little green man taking a lint bath under our couch. He ate all our Easter candy and made too many messes, so we had to take him home to his dad.

Lucas is four. He missed his little green man and was glad to have him back.

But I admit, I missed the point of the whole day. I'm really good at that. I worried about how the pork chops looked after cooking in the oven all day—they looked like they’d been soaking in the rain for months instead of golden brown like in the pictures on the recipe blog—more than I thought about Easter Sunday ten years ago. That was the first Sunday I went to an LDS sacrament meeting service. I heard my high school guidance counselor, then the branch president, talk about the atonement and wondered why tears shone in his eyes as he spoke.

Now I know. Those were tears of gratitude for our Savior’s incomprehensible sacrifice in Gethsemane. Tears of relief at knowing that, after the atonement, there is no pain we cannot bear. Tears of joy for a divine plan that makes us infinite.

I didn’t think about this as much on Easter. But I’ve been thinking about it since.  

Better late, than never?

Does this even make sense?

I'm applying for a job that I think I really want. This school in Providence needs English teachers to teach arts integrated curriculum, which means they want people to use music, drama, film, and dance to teach language arts content. I have to write essays to convince the principal that I'm worth hiring. Talking about it is kind of a big deal, of the counting-your-chickens-before-they-hatch variety. Or it's like when Kyoko Mori talks about why her grandmothers lived so long: "The moral of their story was that you shouldn't wish for too much. The greatest virtue was in being content with less." By talking about it before anything has actually happened, I feel like Mori did at one point in her memoir: "No matter what I was doing, I became terrified of bad luck when I openly wished for too much."

But on the other hand, who cares? Normally, I wouldn't even say anything until I found out whether or not I was accepted,  and I would feel sort of mortified if I were rejected. But this is the first time I've let people in on my "secret." The first time I don't care if I don't get the job, because I know I'm qualified. And if they don't like me, boo hoo for them. Their loss! Did I really just say that? 

This is one of the essay prompts: "Tell me about yourself as an artist." 

I'm not sure I'm the kind of "artist" they're looking for, because this is a performing arts school, and there are a lot of things I don't do: 

monologues (I was Dorothy in my 5th grade school play, couldn't take myself seriously)

play instruments (doesn't count if I played flute in high school but was never in tune)

compose song lyrics (I don't like rhyming poetry)

sing ("Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was WAY off key)

dance (I can't even bend over and touch my toes)

But I can do other things. I can make ugly sweaters. I can draw cartoons with no facial features. And I can write. And wouldn't it be nice to hire a teacher who could teach kids to write?

The application is due on March 31st. If my response doesn't make sense, there's still time to tell me what's wrong with it.

Why do I write?

I write to remember who I am. Our lives are galaxies of moments like so many stars blinking on and off. Some of these minutes and hours aren’t worth recollection; forgetting them is no great loss. But the defining moments that show others where we’ve come from should be trusted to the care of more than memory alone. Memory is too fragile, and only temporarily preserves what is worth remembering.

I write to speak new life into my own forgotten moments. The time I found a pair of tiny red rubber boots I never knew I had, but accidentally discovered on a recent trip home. My dad told me I inherited them from a cousin when I was two. My cousin skipped along the cobbled paths of Camden Market in those boots; I marched them through blueberry brush on the tundra of Northwest Arctic Alaska. Now, the boots live in Rhode Island, sitting their life on a shelf in limbo. Waiting for new feet and new landscapes, the boots will be my first family heirloom. But even when the boots trade hands among my posterity, they’ll still be mine, because I wrote their first story. Such things have to be written, because someday someone besides me will need to know what they mean.

I write to preserve moments I know well. The summer I studied illustration at the Pratt Institute. The oldest, but most inexperienced artist in the class. Perpetually in awe of my younger peers’ more refined technical skills. Conceptualized this news story in illustration:

Man in Florida raises alligators in basement (over 20!). Wife is aware of this, but forgets one day when she’s having friends over for sewing club—leaves basement door open—sounds of sewing machines arouse gators and they stampede the living room/sewing area!    

My picture. In pen, colored pencil, and pastels tacked to the wall, in line with all the others. Donn Albright, our teacher, surveying the wall, pausing at mine. Singling it out, saying, “Look at this one. Look at all the details!”

Later, Donn watched over my shoulder as I sketched another assignment, one that asked us to illustrate a twentieth-century inventor with his or her invention. I chose Hedy Lamarr, the bombshell Austrian-American actress of the 40s who helped devise the wireless communication method of frequency hopping. Donn looked at the outline of Hedy’s leg on my paper and said, “Her ankles are too thick. They look like salamis. Trim them down a bit, make them sexy.” Both of these illustrations turned out beautifully. But without the voice in the words I used to tell the story of the moments that made these pictures real, one simply looks at the images without ever knowing the truth: that despite how much the specters of the white canvas, the blank page, the empty computer screen scare me when I don’t know how to start to get the job done, I eventually find the way out of my trouble. If I don't write these things, I'll forget that I am stronger than I think I am.

I am so many moments like this. One day, those moments I’ve recovered from my past and the ones I remember so vividly today will hardly seem real years from now. But with every sentence carefully constructed, each word thoughtfully chosen, I’ll leave enough of me scattered through time for the able reader to piece together an idea of what I was, and what I am. And if I do this with words that keep company as good friends, making people laugh or cry or think better of the world, are there greater gifts to leave behind?

And so I write. It's my best gift to give, a safeguard against inevitable, transitory passing.

Dilbert

Life in the corporate world at CVS Caremark is a bit different than in consulting. One of the main adjustments has been working with so many different groups within the company. I regularly interact with marketing, sales, operations, finance, legal, and on and on. Lately I've gone back to read through some of my old Dilbert books and the jokes seem even funnier now that I can relate a little more to some of Dilbert's pain. 

While I have a new found appreciation for the office humor in Dilbert, my favorite strip of all time relies on the classic punch-to-the-groin with a new twist.

Nano Replacement

As a connoisseur of fine music, I have been a fan of mp3 players since they first started coming out. The first mp3 player I owned was a Rio Karma 20GB. It was great for running and held pretty much all of the music that I owned, but the 20GB storage came from a hard drive so wasn't the most stable player in the world with a lot of jostling around.

A while later, Apple came out with the iPod Nano that had a solid-state drive that is more impervious to shocks. I wanted one but couldn't justify the expense given that I already had a player. Shortly after Sarita and I got married there was a deal with KeyBank where if you opened a new account you would get a new 1GB iPod Nano.The economist in me was shouting "NOTHING IS FREE!!" But the geek in me wasn't paying attention. I ended up signing up for an account and got a free white iPod Nano 1 GB. It wasn't anything fancy but worked like a charm. The KeyBank account, unfortunately, did not work out so well and we ended up cancelling the account a short while later.

I'd been enjoying the Nano for quite a number of years when recently I came across a recall for the 1st generation Nano (see Apple's official notice). While the Nano had worked out great, apparently I was at risk for having my arm blown off while running if the battery exploded. While I enjoy the use of both arms, word on the street was that Apple had a stash of old 1st generation Nano's sans deadly batteries that they were going to ship out as replacements. The replacements were projected to take at least six weeks too so I was still a bit hesitant to send mine in for replacement.

The strategy that I came up with was to go ahead and request the packaging to ship my Nano back and then wait a while before sending it in. That way they might run out of old Nanos and send me a new one. When I got my box back the other day I was pleasantly surprised to find that my strategy had worked beautifully and I ended up getting back a new Nano.

Recent Adventures

Prepare yourself for a deluge of photos from our fun adventures! In the past few weeks Sarita and I have been busy getting around to see the sites and immerse ourselves in the Rhody culture. It's been especially nice with the uncharacteristically warm weather we've been having this winter. We've visited a few places right around where we live like Warwick City Park, Salter Grove, and Conimicut Point Park as well as places a little further away such as Aquidneck Lobster Company (Newport), Save The Bay Seal Watch Tour (Newport), Beavertail Lighthouse and Park (Jamestown), and Crazy Burger (Narragansett). By "a little further away" I mean maybe half an hour or so. Everything is so close here that it's easy to get out for a quick little trip to break up the monotony of the rest of the week.

City Park
City Park is a strange little smorgasbord of dog parks, basketball courts, baseball fields, beaches, playgrounds, bike paths, and parking lots. There is even the Warwick Asylum (Poor Farm) Cemetery.

The Poor Farm Cemetery.

Pine cones posing on a fence post.

 The fancy boardwalk.

The view out towards Narragansett Bay.

Salter Grove 

It's a good thing that pictures don't share smells. Not the cleanest little cove, but it has a strange beauty to it.

 The barrier that protects the cove.

 Jesse looking stylish.

Looking back over Warwick.

Conimicut Point

Conimicut Point is a little park on a stretch of land that sticks out into Narragansett Bay. There is a lighthouse a little ways off shore to mark a sand bar that runs out even further into the bay. It was pretty windy when we were there. Sarita lost her hat and we saw a chihuahua get blown out to sea.

Looking up a hill.

 Sarita on the sand. (It was really windy.)

 Conimicut Lighthouse with the nuclear power plant across the bay.

 The sandbar by the lighthouse.

Providence!

Aquidneck Lobster Co.

We decided to celebrate with an early Valentine's Day dinner the weekend before Valentine's Day. The lobsters were both close to 4 lbs. So it turns out you CAN have too much lobster. We were pretty stuffed afterwards. The claws on Jesse's lobster were indestructible so he had to get creative and use a hand saw, among other things...

Sarita by the entertainer statue.

 An old church.

 Where's Sarita?

 Bowen's Wharf.

 Where the deals go down.

 Some of the lobsters looked like prehistoric sea monsters.

 And this is the small one!

 We used cookie sheets to contain the mess.

One of the tails. The claws were incredibly difficult to crack since they were so big.

Seal Watching

The tour was a little shorter than we had anticipated, but the money all went to a good cause. Save The Bay does a lot to help educate the public as well as work on other efforts that help improve Narragansett Bay.

 Sarita, Julie, and Adam on the Save the Bay boat.

 The bridge into Newport.

 Lovely banana poses all around.

 Another view of the seals.

 Seals with the Rose Island Lighthouse.

Better view of the Rose Island Lighthouse.

Beavertail

The lighthouse is on the southernmost point of the island where Jamestown is located.

 Sarita in front of the Beavertail Lighthouse.

 Sarita on the rocks.

Jesse and Sarita by the lighthouse.

Crazy Burger!

Crazy Burger's claim to fame is that it was once featured on "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives." The food was great. The burgers were a little crazy so Jesse got a crazy pizza instead.

Sarita and Jesse in front of Crazy Burger.

29 and counting

So the day Jesse turned 29, this happened:

1.  Jesse mopes around the house. I promise him I’ll celebrate his birthday next week because it’s the first day of classes at URI on Monday and I haven’t finished writing my syllabus.

2.  He gets a call from Josh at 6:00 p.m. on Sunday night. Josh is the Relief Society president’s son. Josh says, “Hi brother Rich, I need your help. I have an economics paper I have to write and I was wondering if you have any economics books. And the paper is due tomorrow.”   

3.  Big surprise. Josh procrastinates everything; he’s in 8^th grade and his prefontal cortex won’t allow him to plan ahead, make decisions, express emotions and control impulses in a way that makes any sense whatsoever for at least another eight years. Jesse scans the bookshelf and selects A Brief History of Economics: Artful Approaches to the Dismal Science (only 530 pages!), More Money than God (a good Sunday read), and Winnie the Pooh on Management (just for fun), plus five other books.

4.  As soon as Jesse leaves I do a little happy dance in the kitchen. Jesse totally fell for it. By the time he gets back, all the guests will have arrived and the lights will be turned off so we can all jump out from our hiding places and surprise him. 

5.  It’s 6:30. I have half an hour before people are supposed to start showing up. I have to make fancy red slushy punch, set the table, rearrange the furniture, clean the house, find all the presents I wrapped because I forgot where I put them all… According to our calculations—meaning, my and Jenni’s (Josh’s mom, who was in on the plan from the beginning)—Jesse is supposed to be on his way home after 7 pm. 

6.  It’s 6:45 and everything is ready when the door opens. It’s Jesse. Crap. Luckily, when you walk into our apartment, you’re downstairs and can’t see the living room/dining area, where in his wildest dreams Jesse cannot imagine the marvelous surprises that await him.

7.   Me: WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!

      Jesse: Um, I live here?

      Me: YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HOME YET. GET OUT!

      Jesse: Where am I going to go?

      Me: I DON’T KNOW! GO CALL YOUR MOM! GO TO THE LIBRARY!

      Jesse: What? The library is closed.

      Me: DON’T CARE. LEAVE. NOW. AND NEVER COME BACK. AT LEAST NOT FOR ANOTHER HALF HOUR. I’LL CALL YOU.

Jesse’s suspicions are confirmed: he married someone who’s a few pecans short of a fruitcake. But he leaves anyway.

Right after he leaves, everyone starts trickling in and wants to know where Jesse is. I have no idea where he is. Everyone just entertains themselves in the meantime. Our two-person space is suddenly filled with the buzzing conversations and laughter of twenty people—including two four-year-old boys who have discovered the giant exercise ball and are bouncing it up and down the hall, and an almost-two-year-old who has found my box of crayons and is eating the tips off the orange ones. 

Jesse opens the door around 7:15 and probably feels really awkward. But happy. 

This is indisputable evidence of Murphy's Law. I made three cakes. None of them turned out. Not sure why. They all had a big humps in the middle with caved in sides. I salvaged the least humpy of the cakes and tried frosting it. My decorator tip jammed every two seconds. This all happened on Sunday between 3 pm-5 pm. The cake tasted like potting soil, but people were nice and ate it anyway. And we didn't have any "9" candles, so Jesse was 27. Or 72.

This gift is from Josh, who by the way, now aspires to making a living as a con artist.

Artwork by Lucas and Samuel, my new best friends.

The big pot. For lobsters. Or naughty children.

Thanks Joey and Katie! Jesse won't let me touch this toy.

I think I'm going to steal this and use it myself.

I would have taken more pictures, but I was busy making balloon animals for the kids.