Scene: Hamilton Fish Library, after school, Monday.

A boy, maybe in 3rd grade, and an older man, probably his father. A worksheet in front of the boy has a few penciled markings on it, and a paperback copy of The Enormous Egg sits next to the boy’s elbow.

Man: Just write. You know the answers.

Boy, head down: I do not. I need a kleenex. Help me.

Man: I tried and you made faces and so now you just have to do it. It’s not my homework.

Boy is silent.

Man: Wipe that look off your face or I’ll smack it off you.

Boy, snuffling: I need a kleenex.

Man: You need this, you need that, what you need is to do your work. Just shut up.

Boy is silent, head down.

Man: Pick up the pencil and start.

The pencil stays on the table. The boy’s head stays down.

Man: Stop it. Just stop it. Don’t make me smack you. Answer the question. You’re supposed to say how your character changes during the story.

Boy: I don’t know.

Man: You’re the one who read it. Did you read it?

Boy: Yes. But I don’t understand.

Man: It’s easy. The answer is in the book. Don’t be stupid. Just write it down. Stop whining or I’ll smack you.

Boy puts his head back on the table, snuffles.

Step 2:

Step 3:

Caleb spent Tuesday before dinner designing an alien. And this is why even though I spend at least an hour a day stepping on, over, and through various piles of legos, I still think they may be the best toy ever invented.

One of New York’s chief pleasures, for me at least, is what I see while I walk around, and today on my way to an eight AM yoga class (let me say that again: EIGHT AM YOGA, people), I had two of those New York moments that aren’t “aha” moments but  “hmm” moments.

The first is a sign for Vitamin Water, part of their new ad campaign, which I imagine some newly graduated media studies major pitched as edgy and urban. I’m not sure this particular sign is either of those things. In fact, if I lived in Chelsea, it might just piss me off:

The other puzzlement wasn’t an ad, wasn’t edgy at all, really, but was definitely urban. Could become a prop in one of those continuing ed creative writing courses, you know, write the story of how this photo came to be:

After I took this picture, I wondered if I was myself being photographed, if someone had perhaps set these shoes just so on the snowbank to see if anyone would stop. Maybe the whole thing was a setup.

But maybe not. Maybe clown shoes in the snow were just to remind me that the city’s gifts can be found in unexpected places.

Today, the day after the snowicane? It’s like a hangover:

Yesterday, when Liam came home from school, he was sure there would be a snow day on Friday. “It’s going to snow for twenty hours, mom,” he said, channeling his inner Sam Champion.

Visions of two boys trapped inside all day danced in my head–I could almost hear the bickering, the endless loops of “stop it, no you stop it, no you stop it, MOM!”

Without really thinking about it, I opened my mouth and out came a bet: “If you two are home all day, Liam, I bet you twenty bucks you can’t spend the whole day without getting angry at Caleb.”

“Not getting angry? At all? What about just once? What if I just used one angry word?”

“Nope. Not for twenty bucks. For twenty bucks, not one angry word.”  I couldn’t imagine that the schools would close–New York City schools almost never close, right?

Wrong. This morning…still snowing. Snowed all day. Still snowing now. And when I tiptoed into the boy’s  room this morning at 6:53 to tell them there was no school, Liam smiled and whispered, “you’re gonna owe me twenty dollars tonight, mommy.”

I didn’t believe him, but I wildly underestimated the power of his greed.

Not one crabby word came out of his mouth. True, we were outside playing for a big part of the day, and true, Liam spent a bunch of time running in the snow with his friends while Caleb went sledding with daddy, so it’s not like they were on top of each other all day. But they did play legos all morning, play together in the snow–and have a snowball fight–without bloodshed–later this afternoon, and then resumed their lego adventures together tonight after dinner.

At dinner, Caleb announced that if Liam was getting twenty dollars, then he should get something too. He wanted five tokens (we use foreign coins as his “payment” for his little chores).  Not five dollars, five tokens. Kid drives a hard bargain.

It’s almost bedtime and I think I’m going to have to fork over twenty bucks and five euros or pence or whatever’s in the coin jar.

Funny. I don’t remember reading in any of my parenting books about the importance of “monetizing” good behavior.  And yeah, probably I shouldn’t do this on a regular basis (of course, I can’t afford to, either).

But for today? For today, I’m all about Gordon Gekko. Greed is good.

I don’t like doughnuts. I’ve never fully understood the allure of Krispy Kreme and as for runnin on Dunkin? Nope. Doughnuts are usually too sugary, too puffy, and they sit in my tummy like a big ball, which really needs no extra roundness these days, thanks.

But. But then…there’s the Doughnut Plant. Their doughnuts have actual tastes and textures, unlike DD doughnuts, which taste like deep-fried 7-up. If there’s a heaven, they’re serving Doughnut Plant doughnuts up there.

The Plant is a few blocks from where one of Liam’s best friends lives and when Grandma was here last week, we all rode downtown to that friend’s house to pick up Liam after a sleepover. We stopped for doughnuts afterwards to ease the trauma of leaving “the most fun sleepover ever” and the little-brother trauma of “why do I always have to gooooo with to pick him up?”  

Caleb, ever the traditionalist, went for the double chocolate and although I forced him to share a bite of it with all of us, I understood his reluctance to part with even one velvety crumb. Grandma wasn’t going to have anything — just too many calories, she said, with smidge of self-righteousness in her voice.  Liam got my favorite flavor, tres leches, and after one bite of that, darned if Grandma didn’t march right up to the counter and get one for her and one for me. Calories and ever-rounder tummies be damned: tres leches is a glazed doughnut, sort of, except under the first layer of glaze is a thin layer of a sort of carmel, and then there’s the densely fluffy doughnut itself.  A little ring o’bliss, that’s what it is.

The Plant is something of an institution, so perhaps it’s no news to you that they’re serving manna on the LES. And if you didn’t know, well, you can thank me later.  A dozen doughnuts would do nicely.

What do we think about this display? Apparently if you buy this bag from Ralph Lauren’s Rugby shop, for $35, 50 meals will be provided to Haitian schoolchildren through the UN World Food Program. This display should make me happy, yes? Feeding schoolchildren is good; Haitian relief effort, also good; targeting affluent college kids (this store is on University Place, just from the NYU campus), that’s gotta be good.

Somehow, though, despite all good intentions of the part of the store, this display irked me. Perhaps it’s the wild disparity between what it costs to feed a Haitian kid (50 meals for 35 bucks? that’s not very much food), and what the outfits on the mannequin cost:  the “Ashlin X Rugby” is 89.50; the fleece shorts are 59.50; the “pointelle cotton ruffle dress” is $178; god only knows what you’d pay for those leg-warmers that look like they cut the arms of an old-fashioned tennis sweater (and we won’t ask why you’d wear leg-warmers and shorts. If you’re cold, put on pants). Those outfits, cashed in, would buy a lot of lunches for little kids.

If you dig around on the Rugby Ralph Lauren website, you find that the store is also selling a Haiti Relief t-shirt designed by CFDA for $25, with the entire proceeds going to Haitian relief through the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund (Bubba and Dubya doing good works togetha).  And that’s a good thing too, that money from these t-shirt sales will continue to fund relief efforts, long after all the movie stars have stopped answering phones at the telethon.

What is it, then, that bugs me, aside from a case of late February misanthrope-itis? Maybe it’s my populist streak coming out again, along with those gray roots I keep forgetting to get touched up? Couldn’t Ralph Lauren just give, outright, a big huge freaking check to the World Food Program, or the Bubba Dubya foundation, or Doctors Without Borders, or whichever organization suits his sensibility? Does he (and others like him) really need to shill a canvas bag–use the bag, in fact, as bait to lure shoppers into the shore? Come in to buy a bag, walk out with weird tennis sweaters for your legs?

I gave money to Haiti, I will continue to give money to Haiti, I hope we all continue to help re-build that country. But the Feed Haiti bag reminds me that all too often, “good works” are accompanied by a sense of self-aggrandizement: look at me! I’m helping!

That self-aggrandizement shouldn’t matter, right? What should matter–what does matter–is that money keeps funneling to those who are on the ground in Haiti. That’s the big picture.  So if Rugby Ralph needs to flog a bag and a t-shirt on his website so that everyone knows what a mensch he is, fine, I guess. But there’s no way I’m buying those leg warmers.

This morning, Liam and I were talking about what it meant to be “passionate,” which is the word that his pediatrician has used to describe him since he was a little boy (she suggested passionate as an alternative to some of the other, far less flattering words I was using to describe my then toddler-aged son). 

Liam asked what passionate meant, exactly, and I said that it meant having strong feelings about things–positive or negative.

“You mean how I want to win all the time?”

“Yes, that’s part of it. But you’re passionate about karate, soccer, school work…”

“And when Caleb makes me mad, I’m really mad?”

“That’s part of it too. You’re a passionate person, so you’re passionate about everything.”

“Not everything, mommy.”

“Really? What aren’t you passionate about?”

Liam thought a minute. “Luge.”

The SV Mom Bloggers Network had an opportunity a few weeks ago to join a conference call with Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack about Michele Obama’s new initiative against childhood obesity, Let’s Move.  These two things, plus Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve children’s diets, has me thinking (again, still) about the lunchboxes I pack every morning.

I don’t know about your kids, but mine have a devotion to routine that makes me think they’ve got futures in the military, and their lunchbox contents, as a result, are pretty much the same every day: each kid gets a juicebox, a small handful of pretzels or goldfish crackers, a yogurt or applesauce, and a sandwich: son #1 gets half a peanut-butter-and-honey, son #2 gets a pbj with no crusts. If there are crusts, EVERYTHING IS RUINED FOREVER.

These aren’t great lunches but they’re…okay. The peanut butter is organic and has no added sugar, the bread is whole-grain, the honey comes from the farmer’s market. Sometimes I dole out granola bars or maybe some other sweet treat, if I’ve got something in the cupboard, but that’s not a regular thing. The juice boxes started as a concession to the length of time the boys stood in the lunch line to buy milk, but when I discovered that the chocolate milk they were buying was primarily high fructose corn syrup, I decided juice boxes were actually the better bet.

One of the downsides of the conversation with Secretary Vilsack, unfortunately, was that when a blogger asked him about whether the administration would be mandating a lower HFCS content in school lunches, he couldn’t quite commit. But perhaps it’s too much to expect for an Iowa politician to come out against one of the primary cash crops for midwestern farmers: the corn that gets processed into HFCS. (Click here to see how the School Nutrition Association responds—sort of—to concerns about HFCS).

Now don’t get me wrong. Sometimes I toss store-made, store-bought Rice Krispies treats into those lunch boxes, and our family trips to the farmer’s market are never complete without  chocolate-chocolate chip cookies from our favorite stand. We are a sugar eating, butter-using household—I’m not a total food nazi (as Husband lovingly calls me sometimes. At least, I think it’s lovingly). Maybe it is a little nuts that I think so much about what we eat, and that I keep relatively close watch on what goes in those lunchboxes–although, truth be told, I started packing lunches for son #1 not out of some political agenda but because he refused to eat anything that came out of the school cafeteria. Now that I’m paying more attention to what comes out of the cafeteria on that styrofoam tray, I am happy to slap those sandwiches together.

I applaud the Let’s Move initiative, and any other efforts that can be made to help resolve the health issues plaguing the next generation; there is a horrible irony that those children who most need dietary and nutritional help are those being served by school lunch programs. Mayor Mike, of course got on the healthy-food bandwagon by banning bake sales during lunch time, and now there is another resolution pending that lists what “approved foods” can be sold for fund-raisers at any time and relegates PTA “non-approved food” bake sales to once a month and never in the cafeteria. Hmm. Doritos are on that approved foods list, so you mean that the theater club can sell Doritos for a fund-raiser but the PTA has to sell home-made cupcakes after school in a back hallway? This is how we’re going to make our kids healthier? (And let’s not even talk about the money that PTAs stand to lose as a result–money that, in this era of massive budget-cuts, they can’t afford to lose.)

In my son’s kindergarten classroom is a huge mural of the food pyramid that the kids made by bringing in magazine pictures of items from the various food groups. Around the pyramid are little signs describing healthy habits, including “30-60 minutes of activity a day.” Let’s think about that: these kids go to school from 8:20-3:10. The kids who stay for afterschool programs are often in school until 5.  But looking just at that 6 1/2 hour schoolday, how much time per day would you say the elementary school kids spend moving their bodies? On a non-gym day? About 20 minutes, right after lunch. And that twenty-minute period includes lining up to go outside and then lining up to come inside, so it’s probably closer to 15 minutes of actual play.  That’s it.

So instead of banning bake sales, what if schools were mandated to give their kids more aactive time and less time learning how to prepare for standardized tests? Or what if school cafeteria kitchens were actually equipped to make food and not just heat it up? Or what if school food were regulated more closely, so that if/when there is a problem with the food, it’s easier to find out where the food came from and where it went? Or what if—ok, I know, now I’m in fantasyland—what if the ingredients for school lunches came from premium suppliers and not the chicken-parts remainder bin? Aren’t there incentives or tax breaks or something that could be offered to places like Niman Ranch (or its local equivalent) if they helped supply the school lunch program? (Click here for another lunch-room wish list)

It’s a huge job, this school lunch program, I know. But as a society, aren’t we supposed to put the welfare of the next generation before our own? Are we really content to be a society in which kids whose parents can afford private schools get fed well and everyone else has to scrounge around for themselves?  The Lets Move website itself declares that if we don’t address these nutritional issues now, we will spend much more money down the road, on health-care issues, on unemployment, on an unskilled and unemployable workforce.

I know that everyone is broke—schools, cities, states, the fed—everyone, just about, except Goldman Sachs. So maybe that’s the solution. Maybe Goldman Sachs would like to become the corporate sponsors for the School Lunch Program.

I don’t know if it’s art, but it makes me happy. Could you walk past these without smiling?

And today, waiting and waiting for the A train,  were Caleb and I bored? Was he restless and crabby? Not at all.  Because we had company down there, underground:

These sculptures dot the A train platform and create an entire narrative about life underground (the name, not uncoincidentally, of the installation).  Little people sweep up fallen coins, creatures with moneybag heads swing from the subway beams–and there is, of course, an alligator coming out of a sewer:

Apparently the artist who designed the installation went a little crazy with the world he’d created and while maybe it’s not Picasso’s Daley Plaza sculpture, these little creatures make the subway a happier place.