Counting Down

There is an air of sadness overhanging the bubble household and it’s because our bubble is about to burst.  We’re counting down in days rather than weeks until our return to the UK and the teenager is stamping her feet and having a hissy fit and saying she doesn’t want to go.  I tell her we’re going home and she tells me this is her home. And its true – she’s been here since she was 13 and now she’s 16½ and driving a car and has boyfriends and girlfriends and is planning a leaving party that apparently is going to last for the next two weeks.  I’m not totally heartless and I do sympathesize.

There will be things here that I too will miss – not the Starbucks and the fast food, or the crass TV and the traffic.  It’s good riddance to all that.  What I will miss will be the people, and that eternal air of optimism and positivity that they all have.  Yes I know I’ve complained in the past about the childlike cheerfulness a lot of Americans possess, and how it smacks of insincerity, but I’ve acclimatized – how will I cope when I go to a supermarket back in the UK and complete my transaction in a complete silence – never having to speak a word; no-one wishing me a nice a day?  Even the car park attendant at my local Fresh n’ Easy told me he’d missed me when I hadn’t been for a couple of weeks.  How will he cope when I don’t go at all? How will I cope when I have to pack my own shopping bags?  

My gardening friends were the first friends I made in the US – I took up volunteering as soon as I arrived before I had the opportunity to procastinize and talk myself out of it.  It was the one sound piece of advice our re-locator gave us. This week as I walked to the Rose Garden through the plethora of peacocks which wander freely through the flowerbeds, past the ducks and the geese, I realized I wasn’t looking forward to the thought of returning to the UK at all.  I’d have to find a proper job.  How could I go back to work in an office after this?  One morning a week pruning and weeding in the sunshine wins hands down over four days a week working for local government – which is what I did in my former life.  Do I want to go back to that? No way!!  Just before I packed away my tools a native Californian red tailed hawk, the size of a small eagle, flew overhead, swooped down low in an attempt to snatch a lizard, and landed with an ungainly thud in a clump of irises.  Slightly disorientated – irises are more sturdy than they look - it then took flight and perched on a nearby arbour whilst it recovered.  It’s come to say goodbye, one of my fellow volunteers suggested. How did it know? Was this a sign? Do the natives like me after all?!

When people here ask me what I will miss most about California when I leave, I’ll tell them the weather.  But that’s not really true.  I can cope with the British weather, I really don’t mind the grey and the damp, and the odd "phew what a scorcher" three day wonder heat wave. 

When I first arrived in the US, I felt lonely and isolated. I wished I could have picked up all my friends and family and brought them with me.  Now I just want to take everyone home.

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The big clear out has begun.  As I dragged four bags of grocery shopping across the car park to the lift up to the fifth floor I thought, only 4 more weeks of doing this.  Our departure is  imminent so why am I even grocery shopping anyway? It’s time to start eating up all the surplus food in the house. 

A quick look in the kitchen cupboard  and a whole half litre bottle of Worcestershire sauce stares back at me.  It was the smallest size I could buy.  I thought I couldn’t live without Worcestershire sauce but looking at the large volume of liquid I have left, obviously I could. I’ve also two nearly full bottles of Balsamic vinegar – one I purchased and one inherited from a departing ex-pat wife, together with two jars of Branston Pickle. 

I hate waste but who can I donate my remaining store cupboard ingredients to? Most of my British friends have now returned to the UK – we’re just hanging on until the teenager finishes school in June. Could I convince my American friends to try a salad tossed in that good olde British traditional vinaigrette of Balsamic infused with Worcestershire sauce and Branston pickle? I doubt it.  

I’ve two hundred and fifty odd Sainsbury’s tea bags to get through –  even at four cups a day seven days a week, I’m going to have a fair few left over when we leave.  Have I over-stocked?  I demanded packets of teabags from every visitor; I stashed hundreds of  them  in my suitcase every time I visited the UK, panic buying in the extreme.

There’s the usual array of half used herbs and spices – bought for one recipe and never used again. I don’t think I have ever got through a full jar of nutmeg before the end of the sell-by date.  What do I do with these? Donate them to the homeless begging on the streets of Pasadena? Hey guys I know you really want money for crystal meth but could you use a jar of ground ginger instead?

What else have I got lurking in my cupboards that is totally surplus to requirement? Paracetamol . Yes I’ve enough packets of those to start up my own pharmacy.  Spray deodorant -another example of over-zealous importation from the UK.  I realize I still have three cans to get through. I can hardly go around  donating these to my friends with a casual would you like some anti-perspirant? What kind of response would that provoke??

I’ve already taken four bin bags of various clothes, shoes and books to Goodwill and the teenager hasn’t even started on her room yet.  Why do we accumulate so much stuff??  Even though we’ve only lived in our apartment for two years I still have a kitchen drawer full of those useless odd buttons, wall plugs, pieces of wire, replacement light bulbs for Christmas lights we no longer have and spare keys – to what?? 

And what about the four unused sheets of return address labels? In the US you are required to put your home address on any mail you send so I ordered a handy supply of printed labels on the internet – they were very cheap and if I ordered 250 I got another 250 free, but now of course I have at least 250 left.  How many letters can I write in the next four weeks? Perhaps the answer is  to kill two birds with one stone and distribute my unwanted jars of spice in the post….

The Food Chain

A couple of days ago the local morning LA news reported that in a few years time it is predicted that  42% of American adults will be obese.  I’m not surprised. 

The next item on the “news” was a feature on the introduction of three new flavours of Girl Scout cookies – double whipped peanut butter, extra creamy coconut and mega chocco-chocolate. Must nip out and stock up on those straight away.  

Subliminal messaging or in your face advertising? Either way it was hardly going to encourage the viewer to lose a bit of weight – not with all those tasty new flavours to try. 

America is a breeding a nation of people programmed to believe they need a constant supply of cheap, sugary, fast food.  Everywhere I go, at the mall, in the supermarket, on the street, I see kids with their hands on auto pilot dipping into a bucket of popcorn or a packet of chips.  Parents seem to have this fear that their kids will faint on the spot if they don’t top-up their calorie intake on a continuous loop.  Strollers these days have special food trays – if my kids ever wanted to eat whilst they were out in their pram they had to wait until we went home and had a meal. These days it’s food on the go.  As nobody ever walks anywhere over here these toddlers will only be strapped into their stroller for a maximum of about 15 minutes – surely they can last that long without food?

I regularly drive past the local In and Out Burger when it opens at ten in the morning and there’s a line of cars eagerly waiting outside.  What meal of the day is that? It’s not even elevenses and anyway, elevenses back home used to be a cup of tea and hob nob biscuit. Here it’s a double whammy bacon cheeseburger. 

I don’t think you have to have a degree in food nutrition to work out this is a recipe for a serious health problem.

But surely not in California you might think, all that fresh air, kids outdoors playing sport. Yes moms take their kids in their car to Little League Baseball every Saturday morning and then reward them with a KFC on the way home. And don’t forget your average frappe-latte or whatever from Starbucks contains about 4000 calories – they’ll  have had one of those before they even start.

People drive to the gym, park their car as close to the entrance as they can and run five miles on a treadmill.  It doesn’t appear to occur to them that if they ran to the gym and back they wouldn’t even need to go in. But of course modern American cities aren’t designed for pedestrians – running or walking anywhere is a major no-no and not just because of the hazards of traffic, there's all the other nasties out there lurking  on the street - germs, Al Qaeda and alien abductors to name but three. It’s a lot safer just to stay in your car.

Yes you can go to Santa Monica and Venice Beach and see all those muscular fit young men swinging on the monkey bars and the blonde and the beautiful jogging along the beach.  But if you can afford to live in Santa Monica you can also afford to go to Wholefoods and stock up on your alfalfa beans.  For the rest of us – when it’s for 99c for a hot dog and an apple costs $1.50, as they say over here, do the Math.

Super School Mom Me

In a past life I was an ordinary every day mum, working part-time and doing my bit to occasionally help out in school.  I’d assist with  paper mache construction or be an extra pair of hand on  trips; it didn’t take an awful lot of effort and when your kids are little they like having you around.  I later joined the Parent Teacher Association  and helped to organise the school disco and handed out refreshments at the Christmas raffle. In a school of 300 or so children we were lucky if we could ever muster up more than about a dozen other mums to volunteer, and the biggest donation for the raffle prize would be  a family sized tin of Quality Street or a bottle of wine. Everything was very low key and by the time my kids were in senior school the last thing either of them wanted was for mum to be constantly hanging around, so somewhat relieved, I took a back seat.

But then I came to Pasadena and met Super School Mom and I realized that parenting in America is a completely different kettle of fish. On the teenager’s very first day in middle school I visited the school office,  handed over her vaccination certificates as if I was registering my new puppy, and wrote a couple of cheques – one which of which was my membership fee for the PTA. Great I thought, good way to meet people and make some new friends, so I sat back and waited for calls to roll in begging for my help. To my surprise I heard nothing. Then I looked through the school handbook and discovered the PTA already consisted of about six different committees and 100 contact names. No wonder they didn't need me.

When the teenager moved up to High School, I became determined to try again.  Pasadena has one of the highest percentages of children in private education than any other city in America, and school places  are won and lost on the size of the parental contribution. Naturally most moms want to keep in the school’s good books, especially if they have younger children waiting to come through.   One way of doing this, besides inviting the Principal over for afternoon tea or offering to donate the contents of the entire library, is to work voluntary service hours above and beyond the compulsory  commitment necessary to avoid the penalty fine.  There is a vast calendar of competitive sports games, concerts, award ceremonies and open evenings requiring parental assistance; plenty of opportunity to bring out your inner CEO. 

Last year I struggled to complete my service hours – one attendance at the first PTA of the year and I vowed never to go again. These moms weren’t planning a simple musical concert, they were mounting a military campaign.

This year, the term is slipping away and once again my service hours are not complete. Seeing an opportunity to earn double time helping to set up for the schools mega fund raising event of the year, the  $170 a dollar a head annual parents' ball, I put my name down to volunteer. An afternoon of napkin folding – how difficult could that be? A morning of putting up decorations in the luxurious surroundings of Pasadena’s poshest hotel? No sweat.  

Yes it was slightly different from hanging up a few balloons in the school hall, and I knew I was in another league as soon as I made my way through the army of volunteers and encountered super-school-dad asking when he could start ironing the 40 odd table-cloths. As I admired the dazzling display of 100 or so donated raffle prizes and items for silent auction, one fellow napkin-folding mom remarked she had yet to find the time to take up the African Safari she had outbid everyone else for two years ago, whilst another confessed still hadn’t used  her prize winning week at the Florida beach house.

And to think I used to get excited at the thought of winning that super sized tin of chocolates. It really is a different world.