It Takes a Village

February has come to Brooklyn with a flurry of teensy hard, penetrating, freezing objects and a hungry wind. From my window I watch a teenager wearing a leather jacket and no scarf bursts out of his apartment across the street, squinting hard and shouting "whoooooooo!" and he and his rebel yell disappear up toward 5th Avenue. I hope he doesn't have far to go.

The first line of defense against the cold - I learned this growing up in Wisconsin, though maybe not as well as you'd think - is to not go out.

This can be a dubious tactic in our apartment. The one radiator which operates "normally" is in the far corner of the place, in the kitchen. The one in the living room has never worked at all, and the one in the bedroom is turned either all ON or all OFF with a wrench, and only a wrench. (I cursed Colin out load when he borrowed that wrench for a the load-in of a show last week and didn't bring it back for a whole day and a half.)

Then sometimes, to get your core temperature up above 75 or so, you just have to take a bath. You know what I mean. You get that kind of cold at the cellular level, the same cold you feel in that shank of pork when you grab it out of the freezer, and the only way to get it warm enough to cook is to defrost it slowly in hot water. My arm feels like that today.

So I need a soak, but it takes planning. A bath in our apartment begins with boiling water on the stove - as many pots as you can find clean. Then you open the tap in the bathroom about half way, let it run until it's warm. Then you start with the tub. Fill it until the water turns cold, or about 1/4 way. Then you wait.

In about ten minutes, if you're lucky, there will be another spot of hot water. Sometimes we sit around with our neighbors and argue about whether the best way to get at this next "layer" of hot water is to continue running water into the bathroom sink, or turn it off completely for ten minutes and turn it on again. But in the period of about ten minutes, by some miracle, out comes warm water again. Usually.

The trouble is you have to be there when it hits, or you may miss it, so I sit on the toilet with my finger under the tap and protect the bathroom like it's a cave and I'm a mother grizzly looking after her young. I fill the bath until it runs cold again, wait.

Now the trick is to get the third fill in before the first two are cold. Again, the dilemma of whether to run the water, or turn it off.? Either way it must be checked every few minutes. After all, now I'm really invested and I'll cry if I don't get my bath. Have cried.

On the third fill one can usually get the tub almost brimming with warm water. But to get it truly hot enough for a real bath? Well, that's where your boiling water comes in. I learned about that after crying the first couple times, about the third time Colin said, "why don't you jsut boil some water?" I guess it was some primal need to feel too sophisticated, at arms length from the elements.

This time of year you can almost feel Mother Earth waddling with the weight of spring not yet ready to come. Even in New York City, the city of lights, everything is laden with cold and dark.

I wonder if it's my mission teach these people something. Why are they wearing jeans in 20 degree weather? Is it because they are a mostly indoor- dwelling people? Where are their Turtle Furs? (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=apparel-index&field-keywords=turtle%20fur%20neck&results-process=bin&dispatch=search/ref=pd_sl_aw_tops-1_apparel-index_29143143_2&results-process=default)

If my personal heating and cooling systems were powered by oil, we'd have outgrown our foreign dependence long ago. My systems can hardly be bothered to hicchough out a little heat in a snowstorm, or break out a few beads of sweat to cool me down in the citified heat of August. So, as they say in Colorado ...It's all about the "pro" (a.k.a. "protection," as climbers call weather gear.)

I got hypothermic in a pool once. It was the last class of my diver's certification training, the last time I'd be in the "comfort" of a pool before being led into the murky depths of the 45 degree Racine quarry with no one but my instructor. John sent me to the showers when he swears he saw my lips turn blue. I remember standing in the showers of the high school gym when the warm water hit by chest, trying desperately not to pee before I managed to peel off my gear with numb fingers and run to the toilet . But as it's said in the diver world, there are two kinds of divers: Those who pee in their wetsuits and those who say they don't pee in their wetsuits.

So I don't go out in this kind of weather without "the works": My winter coat weighs maybe 5 pounds by itself. Add boots, a Wind Stopper hat (http://www.rei.com/product/703274) and - my neck gaiter, and honestly? I am toasty-comfy. I feel like I'm pregnant, too - in tandem with the entire Northern Hemisphere.

Our friend Tania, who with her partner, Dave, really is pregnant, had her big baby shower last night. I was a little apprehensive about going. It wasn't the cold, exactly, more like it was largely a family affair and Colin was too wrapped up in tech for yet another show to come. But in the end I thought, here is an unhealthy element in my relationship with Colin which I can address by taking action tonight: I rely on him for social back-up, (which is a bad idea because he's never home) and he relies on me for financial back- up (an equally bad idea since I have no money.) I should just go on -and out- without him.

So I was pleased to discover it was really a solidly welcoming affair. For the first hour or so I stood in the corner like a ravenous wallflower, eating marvelous Thai food and admiring the masks and paintings on the wall.

Then a couple people I know showed up, and atmosphere began to warm up for me. The love in the room was palpable and without pretense. Tania's mom and step mom got up and sang an original song called Two Grandma's from Jersey City, using a tune I can only say resembled the children's tune, Four Chartruse Buzzards and singularly brought the house down, some in tears..

Tanias mom and her wife, (neither a professional singer, but making up for anything lacking in artfulness with sheer gusto,) alternated singing about a litany of things the two of them would contribute to the life of little Henry/Max/Olan/whatever. And they played on their respective racial stereotypes, which made it even more of a hoot. "I'll take him hiking," "I'll teach him bargaining," "I'll take him biking," "I'll teach him B-ball," and they invited the third Grandma to join them in the final chorus.

"Three Grandmas from Jersey City" still rings in my head as I, leaving my car with them to help transport a motherload of presents, board the train and come home with a tummyful of warm food and a headful of little reflections.

Like, standing there, for a moment I thought I could almost feel Pat Robertson breathing between my shoulder blades. The notion of anyone having children out of wedlock...and oh! my goodness T has two mommies! It seems so normal to me now I almost forgot to look over my shoulder for the Rush Limbaughs and the Ann Coulters and the - oh, this whole gathering could stand a lot of people's hair on end, I suppose.

But wouldn't it be cool to invite a few of them in here, out of the cold, to throw one back with forty whole-hearted attitudes of welcome, filling a spectrum of shades, all waiting and eager to catch this baby gently with open arms, and become little aunties and Tee-tees and mentors and friends?

But never say "It Takes a Village," even if you think a whole community should behave in a nurturing way to a child. Because then they'll call you a communist, for sure.

Oh, you haven't heard that one? Hillary Clinton is a communist because she spoke about -using different words, albeit - what conservatives have been talking about all along - family values. Never mind that people throw around the word C'ommunist and Socialist as if they knew what they mean.

What Christian Church wouldn't say it takes the whole community of the church to raise a child? (Isn't that what baptism is all about?) Don't most people - liberal and conservative - generally agree that each community, town, county, state, city, and nation must form concentric rings of support for the next generation?

They disagree upon the details, but that's the jist of it. I mean, call it family, village, circle of friends, church, school, extended family, city street, community center, space ship full of aliens, I may not be a parent, but it's clear to me that SOMEbody has to come together to raise a child; it can't be done alone (well, it can, but we've all seen how grumpy bears can be.)

My head is full of thoughts, like whether vegetarianism is the new morality, and whether T is comfortable standing there or whether she'd rather be sitting, and like whether it's like your family or not, this is family in America today.

I think we may disagree as to who and how, and how much to help a teen in trouble or kids who don't have health insurance, but I don't see anyone proposing we make a parent bake their kid from start to finish on their own. And I don't see that this is a problem faced by only one kind of family.

For my part, since I don't have kids, I make sure Colin doesn't go out on cold days without a hat.