Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

One of the freaky things about being pregnant was how unfreaky the whole thing was. I expected to feel weirded out, especially once the little creature - let’s call him Busyfetus - started visibly tumbling around in there like a puppy under a blanket. But nope, never a moment of “Holy fuck, there’s an alien in my belly!”

The closest I came was around the fourth month or so, when -- according to the pregnancy books I consulted with the religious obedience of a first-time tourist in the kingdom of the fertile - the baby’s genitals were in the process of being formed.

“Good lord. Quite possibly I’m growing a penis,” I said to myself and anyone who would listen.

And as it turned out, I was. A nicely formed little one, if I do say so myself.

It’s now -- still -- attached to one of the most loquacious two and a half year olds on the planet. Just last night, while sitting pensively on the lavvy, Busytot asked me some long and involved question about the properties of the penis, its current and future size, and its propensities for hiding itself and then popping out again (he's auditioning for that puppetry show again).

I found it hard to answer, not having regular access to a penis myself. Well, when I say regular access, I mean to one of my own. Well, when I say - look, you know what I mean.

So I prevaricated.

Me: “Hmmm, I don’t know, actually, because I don’t have one. We’ll have to ask Daddy.”

Busytot: “You could get a penis. You go buy one.”

Me (knowing the answer in advance but unable not to ask the question): “Now where would I do that?”

Busytot: “At the penis shop!” (Helpfully, in a confiding whisper) “It’s in New Haven.”

Item duly added to the shopping list. Milk, bread, paper towels, detachable penis.

The boy is gradually getting the hang of the notion that girls have girl-parts and boys have boy-parts, although his grip on the technical aspects tends to be a bit wobbly. As it were.

He knows Daddy is a boy, for example. “So, does Daddy have a penis?” I asked one day -- trick question -- and the world’s youngest gender theorist firmly replied “No. He doesn’t.” Which, I can tell you without betraying too many family secrets, is not in fact the case. (More worryingly, given that we often all shower together and the fast-growing Busytot is at eye level with the subject at hand, his confidence on the matter demonstrates either incipient myopia or a shocking lack of attention to detail.)

So, in the course of reading a cheerful little library book about bodies and how they work, I attempted to right this misconception in a low key, conversational way. “You know girls have a vulva and a vagina, right? So, what do boys have that girls don’t have?"

Busytot: “Um… um… um…”

A long silence while he rolled his eyes to the ceiling and thought very hard, and then he brightened up. “An excavator! Oh, anna dumptruck, anna bulldozer, anna car carrier…”

The thing is, he’s half right. Now, I was a bit of a car geek myself back in the day (1952 Morris Minor, my pride and joy), but to my unscientific eye, it appears that the gene for the more fervent and indiscriminate vehicle fetish is indeed carried on the Y chromosome.

My angelic little androgyne has rapidly, over the last few months, turned into a fully fledged baby bogan with a personal fleet of cars and trucks in varying states of repair, an ability to distinguish a front-loader from a back-hoe at fifty paces, and an uncanny familiarity with the different logos of several brands of car.

There must be an evolutionary advantage in this tendency (even once you subtract the ones who get squashed while too closely observing diggers at their task) but I'm buggered if I know what it is. Still, at the very least it’s helping Busytot with learning the alphabet; every shopping trip is brought to us by the letters V and W.

And every trip to a toy shop brings home yet another small wheeled vehicle to step on in the night, stuff into a pocket before we go out, or stumble across posed in carefully choreographed construction tableaux on the bathroom vanity, under the table, or inside the pot cupboard.

And pretty much all our conversations these days are one long chorus of "Baby, you can drive my car."

Men. Can't live with 'em, can't singlehandedly grow their car-lovin' genitalia for them while they're the size of a tadpole... Oh. All right. I guess I started it.

There’s nothing nicer than sitting in Tompkins Square Park on a sunny weekday afternoon, dandling a friend’s fat little baby on your knee. Actually, there is: you’re doing this, when suddenly a guy turns up on a bike and offers you a chilly-bin full of delicious meat pies, genuine hand-made New Zealand style ones. And his name isn’t Sweeney Todd, either.

He’s Gareth Hughes, and since December 2003 he’s been baking his heart out under the name Dub Pies. He's on a mission to bring down under pies to the discerning American consumer and the homesick antipodean. I bravely volunteered to taste-test the product -- y’know, just to make sure it met the exacting Public Address standard. Hey, someone had to do it.

Mmmmmmm, pies.

Meat pies.

It was a marathon gustatory weekend. I assembled three separate test panels, carefully mixed by gender, nationality, age, and previous meat pie experience, ranging from complete pie virgins to those who inhaled a steaming Big Ben every single day of fifth form.

I’m happy to report that reviews were uniformly positive, consisting mainly of munching noises, moans of nostalgia, and the muffled words “Are there any more?” According to my pie-stained notes, the cosmopolitan Americans thought the steak and mushroom topped anything they’d had in Britain, and a laconic Kiwi pronounced the potato top pie “standout!” Busytot cleaned up the sausage rolls, or as he called them in honour of himself, silly sausages.

I’d probably have to test another dozen or so to be absolutely sure, but I think I preferred the plain old steak pie, with and without cheese. The mince version was also deemed excellent, thankfully lacking in both gristle and what the astrophysicist in the family describes as “gelatinosity.” (The latter dubious quality can be ascertained, apparently, by stripping off the pastry and seeing if what’s left retains its shape. Gareth’s pies don’t, which is, in gourmet terms, a very good thing.)

About that pastry. The secret ingredient is shipped in from New Zealand, where Gareth – who has a background in corporate recruiting, but turned to pies to salve a broken heart -- spent several months last year observing top pie-makers and learning the ancient arts of the guild. Everything else is locally obtained, most of the filling coming from the friendly butcher over the road from baking HQ.

The pies are assembled and baked under impeccably grungy (but fully sanitary) conditions -- in the shining kitchen of a gloomy nightclub on the Lower East Side, the sort of place that has tattered vinyl booths, Keith Haring-esque doodles on the walls, and handy mirrors set into the counter-tops in the loos.

Why does a nightclub need a kitchen, you ask? It doesn’t, really, which is why they rent it out to Gareth by night. He sleeps all day and then zips into Essex St on a sturdy bike with a delivery basket on the front, fastens it to a lamp-post with a fuck-off big chain and padlock, and then bakes all night to the sound of throbbing techno and giddy conversations about i-Pods and NYU film school.

It’s a hard life, but then without it we wouldn’t have the pies, and as Gareth puts it, whatever the question, “Pies are the answer.” For a one-man shoestring operation, Gareth and his pies get around: his pies were served at the NZ Consulate's Anzac Day morning tea this year, and the man himself and his pie-warmers were a hit at the NY Magpies Anzac Day event, which was packed to the gunwales with Australians and New Zealanders and the people who love them. He also supplies a couple of restaurants, and home-delivers frozen pies (by the dozen) within the New York area.

I have to say, the business plan looks good. He hasn’t drawn up the pie-charts yet (sorry) but he has the market segments pretty well sussed: break into the gourmet sector first with his fabulous range of flavours, and then explore tempting sidelines like, say, lamingtons, before eventually expanding into mass-market pies for the huddled masses yearning to have a mouthful of pastry and flavoursome beef for a buck fifty.

It’s not half-baked at all. Ka pai, in fact. Now pass the tomato sauce, would ya? I’ve got another half dozen to see to before breakfast.

Spring really is the word for it. After a long hard winter, with snow and sleet playing practical jokes on us well into April, suddenly – sproing! – everything bursts into life. The lawns are green, the blossom blushing cheekily into existence on trees that just last week were bare ruined choirs where late etc, and in every corner a brilliant forsythia bush, yellow as a stray blob from Van Gogh’s mad brush. The air is warm and the birds are back. Time to go exploring.

Connecticut is a curious state, home to domestic diva Martha Stewart (who is about to swap her sprawling estate for some striped sunlight), the fictional Stepford Wives (soon to be revisited on film with Nicole Kidman in the lead role), and what seems to be the largest collection of decaying and abandoned factories you’ll find anywhere. It also boasts small towns that are the epitome of New England picturesque, town greens, church steeples, and all. Now that it’s warm enough to expose ourselves without risking frostbite, we’ve been venturing abroad, trying to get the measure of our new home.

On Saturday we drove out to a little town not far from here. Classic small town Americana: a stately village green criss-crossed by paths linking church to ice-cream shop, library to antique dealer. People walking dogs and babies of impeccable breeding. Outside the café, the regulation posse of disaffected teenagers of all genders, pierced, tattooed, good looking and truculently polite in the sweet way of good kids trying to look bad. Behind a restaurant, we found a sculpture garden with a pond and a gazebo (Busytot, in full Open House mode, said "Ooh, I think we buy this house!" despite its lack of mod cons, walls, and even a proper roof), and in a neighbouring back yard, two fat and happy sheep grazed next to a swimming pool.

It seemed so spookily beautiful, and as we followed our small ice-cream-powered steam train ("Woo-woo! Choo-choo!") as he chugged his way around the streets, we saw several houses we wouldn’t mind living in. Only later did we investigate prices and discover they can’t be had for less than half a million, which pricked our real estate bubble but good. Plus, everyone we saw was white; it made me nervous. Even Norman Rockwell painted the occasional person of colour, dammit.

A short drive from town is a respectable beach, where we stopped to sample the sea air and watch small boys flying - or rather, repeatedly and joyously crash-landing - a large dragon kite. As we sat in the parking lot waiting for Busytot to wake up from a back-seat nap, a cop car cruised into view. Uh-oh, we thought. The dark side of paradise. He’s going to ask us for our parking permit and kick us out of the private beach. But no – the officer hailed a man and his kid who were skipping stones and horsing about. "Sir, excuse me, sir?"

Here we go, I thought; young dad, slightly scruffy, not exactly black but certainly tanned, about to be run out of town by the fuzz. But no, my rampant cynicism was misplaced. "Sir, did you lose a puppy?" Turned out he hadn’t, but a passing local recognized the dog by description and offered to drop it home -- a job the not particularly busy policeman was happy to undertake as soon as he ascertained exactly which house the lost dog belonged to. "Oh, the yellow one with the white shutters? Sure, I know it."

Ah, Pleasantville.

And then yesterday, Busytot and I ventured out to the farm of a new friend, in another small town not far from gritty downtown New Haven. It was a slice of heaven: not just sheep but lambs leaping about on the lawn, and daffodils everywhere, and a swing-set and paddling pool for the kids. A motley crew of country children awaited Busytot, including a similarly aged boy who was running around in the nuddy. Busytot thought this an excellent idea, and announced his membership of the tribe by immediately stripping off all his clothes too. The two of them romped naked the whole day long like cherubs in a naughty Renaissance painting.

Not only were there sheep, but three sheepdogs and a pond for them to splash in and fetch sticks and balls from. We're talking real sheepdogs, black and white Footrot Flats ones (except for the matronly Stella who was a pleasing brown and white).

Quivering, hyper-alert bundles of herding instinct, they spent the whole afternoon trying -- and failing -- to ignore the small flock of sheep nibbling the lawn. Low to the ground, ears cocked, haunches poised, awaiting the word and never getting it, they exhibited the mighty self-restraint of recovering alcoholics at an open-bar function, only occasionally forgetting themselves and surreptitiously taking a wee sip, sneaking in just one teeny tiny little round-up under the willow tree before being called off by the boss.

They let off steam by playing with a tennis ball, which Stella quietly and unobtrusively placed between my knees with the admirable stealth of a master pickpocket while I was pushing kiddies on the swings. Once I finally noticed the ball, I hurled it for the dogs till my arm was tired, then returned to swing duty for a while. But the dogs hadn't clocked off yet: they carefully triangulated their now immobile and very muddy quarry, sank to the ground, and fixed their target with a look so intense I was surprised the damn ball didn’t levitate.

The canine intensity was balanced nicely by the blissful freedom of the kids and the relaxation of the mums. I’ve never been so happy to have sheep poo between my toes. I’d forgotten how much more deeply you breathe in such a wide-open space, and now Busytot knows the special thrill of eating an ice-cream in the nude, then rinsing off in the pool.

To his immense delight, the crowning touch to our day on the farm was the train at the bottom of the garden. It was the Boston to New York express, which zipped across the far end of the property every half an hour; a herald of the machine age, hailed by naked boys, ignored by grazing sheep and working dogs. I wonder what the city-bound passengers saw as they raced past -- a fleeting glimpse of spring on a stick. An ice-cream stick, or maybe a pogo stick, what with all those stotting lambs and leaping children. Sproing!

To my amazement, we bid on a house... and to my disappointment, we didn’t get it. All’s fair in love and real estate, but I’m slowly working through the official stages of grief, which are just as relevant to property as any other realm of life. You start with Denial, for which Busytot is of course my role model (“NOOOOO! You NOT take things off people like dat!”). This is followed by Anger, which in my case amounted to a week of inchoate grumpiness about the homebirth I’ll never have in that unexpectedly snazzy spa-bath in the upstairs bathroom.

Next comes Bargaining; alas, the other bidders had slightly deeper pockets, so no luck there. Then, according to the official model, Depression gradually gives way to Acceptance. Or, as I experienced it, a prematurely frustrated nesting instinct shading into a determination to be zen about the whole thing. There will be other houses, and there has to be a first lost house (and maybe others), just like there has to be a first boyfriend or girlfriend. You know, like one day I’ll walk past and think “Jeez, what did I ever see in that one?” or “Sigh. We could have been so good together.” I promise I won't idly google it, just to see what might have been.

It is pretty soon to be buying houses, as people keep reminding me. This one was not perfect, but it had personality, and something else you don’t often get in old houses in old neighbourhoods, especially in the American northeast, but that we’ve come to take for granted in Aotearoa – a smooth connection between inside and outside. The whole kitchen-deck-backyard nexus that means you can have your morning cuppa with bare feet on the grass, or shoo the kids outside while you get dinner ready, or sit out on the deck with the grownups as the sky grows dark, ducking back inside to replenish the snacks.

To tell the truth, it was the garden I hankered after at least as much as the house. There’s a difference between a yard and a garden, and this was a real garden, one to get lost in. People don’t really garden hereabouts, or rather, they don’t tend to design gardens that work year-round. The summers are short, the winters long, and deciduous trees predominate. So for a good four or five months of the year, the space out the back of the house is a big blank rectangle with snow on it, distinguished, if you’re lucky, by a stately tree or two. The bare branches are beautiful in against the winter sky, but there’s not much in the way of lush tangle and blurred edges. It’s not what you’d call cosy.

So when we saw this house, I fell hard for the hedges, the big old fruit trees, the shrubs and the dark mossy corners, the shed, the dilapidated birdbath. The back yard wasn’t a quarter acre -- more like a tenth -- but it looked like a place a city-bred two and a half year old could get in touch with his inner wolfboy. (All the while unobtrusively observed by the parental anthropologists through the kitchen window.)

The more I think about what felt good about the house that got away, the more I realize I’m trying to give Busytot a New Zealand childhood. More specifically, I want to give him the childhood I had in New Zealand: supervised access to wilderness; a place to run wild under the collective eye of the neighbourhood. It was a long time ago, in another country, and besides, the wench is grown-up. But it was an especially privileged combination of time and place. The places I grew up were indisputably alive. They had, for want of a better word, spirit. Mauri.

Both of the houses I lived in while young were what you’d call suburban, with other houses just over the fence, but both places had creeks running along the edge of the property. “Water hazard! Fence it off!” shrieks the modern mind, but we only ever lost a heavily pregnant cat and never any neighbourhood children to either creek. The creeks were alive – not just with plant life, but with koura (which we called crawlies) and eels too muddy to eat, which didn't stop my brother and his friends trying to sell them to the fish and chip shop one time.

I have no idea if there were taniwha. I suspect not; taniwha are rumoured to prefer deep pools in the bends of large slow rivers, whereas these were narrow, trickly streams, barely knee deep. Except during floods, when the water came up over the lawn, in a muddy, churning broth, which left the banks strewn with creek weed, rain-soaked debris, and the occasional eel gasping and flopping about like a fish out of, you know.

Running water brings a place to life, and trees hold it together. In Naenae we had a small grassy section but we were lucky enough to be right up near the edge of the bush. Pretty manuka and punga mingled with pines of various kinds, spreading back up over the hills like a big green blanket with ochre stripes where the fire-breaks were. Tui clonked and hiccuped cheerfully all day long, and kereru the size and approximate shape of small helicopters weighed down the branches of the big pine out the back. Always magpies, too, divebombing the cats and -- as a cleverer poet than me once put it -- glovering needlessly in the macrocarpa. Next to the vege garden, Mum and Dad planted a fast-growing gum-tree that was as tall as us one year, and as tall as the house the next.

Then in Papatoetoe, in the improbable heart of suburbia, we lived down a long driveway in the middle of the block. Native flora and fauna were not as visible, but all that land... it was like being on a farm in town. We had a vege garden again, down next to the creek, in which the four of us kids toiled like navvies, moaning and groaning about it the whole time. Now, of course (are you reading this, Mum and Dad?), I’m grateful that I know where food comes from, how to gently dig up potatoes, when to put the beans in, how to thin the radishes, when to plant garlic. I'm going to sound like an old codger -- by hokey, you youngsters don't know the half of it, when I was a lass, etc etc -- but that’s knowledge money can’t buy nowadays.

The back yard in Papatoetoe – maybe half an acre – also boasted a huge and wily willow that had grown enormous, as willows do, by wrapping its naughty roots around any water pipes it could find and crushing them slowly to death. We loved that tree and the treehouse Dad built in it, but eventually it had to come down for the sake of the local water supply.

Still, there were massive sheltering poplars on an adjacent property that snowed pollen every spring, and we had a row of prodigious fruit trees. Plum, lemon, grapefruit, and feijoa, with a passionfruit vine growing over the hurricane-wire fence behind. It’s a lovesome thing, god wot, to sit in your own back yard and eat warm fruit straight off a living tree.

Sigh. The house that got away had a pear tree.

Still, in the way of small towns, it turns out that the happy purchasers are friends of friends with a wee one of their own, so Busytot will likely get to romp in that very garden on play-dates. Now I fantasize about buying the neighbouring house so he can crawl through a hole in the hedge, Secret Garden-style, and visit the kid next door and the pear tree.

And, maybe it’s too much to ask for in cheek-by-jowl downtown New Haven, but if there were a nearby swimming pool into which to naughtily heft under-ripe fruit, causing expletive-laden consternation among nude medallion-wearing swinging midnight swimmers, the replication of my exhilarating 70s Aotearoa childhood in the garden of good and evil would be blissfully complete...

Just another fantasy Friday in the life of a bored housewife: you make a quick phone-call, the doorbell rings, and there they are: three burly firemen, well-hung with utility belts and wearing fetching braces-and-T-shirt ensembles. Followed by a pair of hunky paramedics in those slightly too-tight uniforms that handily emphasise pectorals and biceps honed by years of hefting stretchers. Phwoar. They stride into your bedroom and murmur “You just lie there, sweetheart, and we’ll do all the work” while you sprawl half-clad across the mattress, moaning with...

Well, agony, to tell the truth. I had somehow managed to put my back out and was unable to get out of bed. Or even roll over. It wasn’t even that I’d fallen and couldn’t get up. I just couldn’t get up. No particular precipitating event; no car accident, no overly enthusiastic show-shovelling, no tumble down the stairs. Mind you, when I eventually mentioned to the emergency room doctor that I am the mother of a forty-pound two year old, I think I saw her nod sagely and tick the “killer toddler” box on the admission form. Actually, maybe I hallucinated that bit, courtesy of the morphine that finally nixed the most debilitating pain it’s ever been my misfortune to endure.

Morphine! I’d never imagined myself as an opium-eater. I did try toughing it out. Normally I’m stoic to the point of stupidity, with an astronomically high pain threshold (giving birth was fun!) and an almost Christian Scientist aversion to taking aspirins for all but the most brain-melting headaches. So I attempted mind over matter techniques for five long hours, alternately shrieking and whimpering while my partner consulted the doctor by phone and administered monster doses of ibuprofen. Which had about as much effect as a handful of smarties. It eventually became clear that I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, at least under my own steam.

Cue fire engine, ambulance, and the above-mentioned rescue personnel who fancied themselves more as off-duty comedians than dial-a-hunks (I laughed, but it hurt). Three strong men manouevred me gently off the bed and ferried me out of the house on something called a contour stretcher which sounds all very modern and was indeed extraordinarily comfy. The line-up of emergency vehicles was a bit of a thrill for the neighbours in this usually quiet street. And it was all the more exciting for Busytot, who, thanks to the pre-arranged playdate over the road, had a front-row seat of a drama that looked to him like “Mummy driving a ambulance while fire engine go wee-oo-wee-oo!” He’d had no idea there was such a thing as a 1-800-FIRE-ENGINE fetish line, and that it only had three digits.

And it got even better for him over the weekend. I was prescribed bed-rest and a diet of valium and painkillers off the top shelf, a combination that left me feeling half Judy Garland, half Keith Richards. For two days, I lolled around in a dreamy mascara-smeared stupor, falling asleep over trashy magazines and trashier TV, and calling weakly (and sometimes irritably) for reheated hotties and refrozen ice-packs and drinks with straws in them. The noble man of the house waited on me hand and foot while simultaneously wrangling our little weapon of lumbar destruction, each of which is a full-time job in itself. When it all got a bit much, he caved in and plugged Busytot into the neglectomatic.

Like all first children of high-minded bourgeois bohemians (benevolent utopian fascists), he’s only on the most nodding acquaintance with the big-name furry stars of stage and screen. Buzz Lightyear is the strange guy who occupies the codpiece position on his daytime nappies, and Big Duck (you know, the yellow fellow who lives on the street flavoured with sesame) is the night-time equivalent.

Blue Dog is a more familiar hound, since she comes along with Steve, the edgily wholesome stealth rock-star who definitely qualifies as Something For the Mums. As a consequence we have a whole Blue’s Clues DVD, which is the cheapest babysitter ever invented. And a couple of weeks ago we watched Finding Nemo all the way through -- this led to a few days of getting around the house by swimming along the East Australia Current, which, naturally, runs along the grubbiest paths of the floor.

Other than Nemo and Blue, though, Busytot is basically a youth-market virgin. He thinks that big golden M all over town is in honour of his best friend Micah.

But desperate times call for desperate measures, and a trip to the video shop yielded some kiddie drugs almost as powerful -- and patently as effective -- as the ones I was taking for my back. First we had to steer the wee lad past the horror section, where he pounced on something called Piranha on the apparent assumption that it was a sequel to his beloved Nemo (“Why that fish eating the man? He hungry?”).

I hobbled over to the new releases, where right at ground level were a bunch of classic Muppets compilations and, astoundingly, those gentle eco-warriors The Wombles -- but no dice. “I want a digger video,” came the urgent cry. “I neeeeed it. Let’s find a digger video, OK? Let’s find it RIGHT NOW!” Clearly he didn’t mean Gallipoli or a documentary about agrarian communists. A more experienced parent pointed us to the children’s section, where we found the motherlode of digger videos.

A whole genre of hot hard-core digger action, in fact, packaged in handy thirty minute volumes that cut straight to the chase. Massive machinery, excavating building sites and constructing towering skyscrapers for your viewing pleasure. Watch huge powerful cranes, erecting iron-hard girders! Get a load of giant dump-trucks, dumping load after load, doing it again and again. Curvaceous concrete-mixers with extra grinding action pouring their cement all over heavily reinforced foundations! Muscled men with hard, hard hats, working it all day and all night just for you. And you won’t believe what these front-loaders can do, with BOTH ENDS!

You think I’m exaggerating? Next time you’re dithering at the video shop, check out some of the barely legal big-rig and construction site tapes, with their come-on cover copy, cheesy wokka-wokka-twannnng soundtracks, and laconically tantalizing narration, and see if they don’t oil your engine, baby. Blimey. All I can say is, it was a very satisfying weekend, and at the end of it I wasn’t the only one lying on the couch with a glazed expression.

Everything’s fine now. We’re all gradually weaning ourselves off our respective drugs, and I’m walking around again. Normal blog transmission will be resumed as soon as possible, when I’ll post a review of the "Paradise Now?" exhibition in NYC, and more thoughts about being pakeha abroad (my last post struck quite a chord and there’s plenty more to say on the subject).

So watch this space. And parents of toddlers the size and shape of monster trucks, watch your backs!