Dear New York/New Jersey, ... Love, Colorado

The umpteenth edition of "how things are different here."

(1) I'm walking through downtown to my eye doctor's for an appointment and I glance over at a man who has come out of his house to get the mail from the box. He sees me glance his way, beams, and calls out, "You have to come up here and meet my granddaughter." In his arms is a six-week-old infant. He proudly shows her off, explains to me about the hip dislocation she suffered at birth but how they're treating it with a brace and that she's going to be fine, gets choked up as he starts to tell me that he almost lost his own wife and daughter (this baby's mother) when his daughter was born, shares with me how the parents chose the baby's name, introduces himself, asks my name, then wishes me a nice day as I go on my way.

It's not that New Yorkers aren't equally friendly to strangers (plenty are)--it's just that they'd never assume you had that much free time.

(2) I'm volunteering at the local public radio station, answering calls for the winter pledge drive. There are only half a dozen calls during my weekend afternoon shift, so I'm spending the time getting to know the DJs and CC prof volunteering with me, while trying to decide whether I should switch over the full amount of our family's annual pledge from Philly's WHYY to our new local station, or whether we should split the pledge between the two stations. On the one hand, KRCC is the only public radio for hundreds of miles in some directions and I think that's critical, but on the other hand, WHYY produces "Fresh Air" and other big, nationally syndicated shows that I value.

Anyway, Tom and the girls eventually come to pick me up. At that moment the station manager is passing through the living room area (the station is in a converted Victorian house that still feels more house-like than broadcasting-studio-like), and she asks if the girls have been in the booth yet. No? Why not? She takes us upstairs, where we walk right into the room from which they broadcast. They're not on air at the moment--an afternoon show is playing--but when they cut back to the station, the guys at the mikes introduce Edith and Alice (and me and Tom) by name to everyone listening to public radio in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, asks whether we've sampled the cake in the kitchen yet, and talks about which shows we like. Then the station manager shows the girls the rest of the station, wins Edith's confidence with a story about the birds in the window-unit a/c who sing to the radio, and gives the kids each a toy fish.

I leave having matched my WHYY pledge with an equal one to KRCC.

(3) This one is especially for our Hoboken friends--though those in Chapel Hill or Cambridge or probably even Madison won't find it irrelevant. It's how I know I'm getting soft.

Imagine a college campus located downtown in the center of a large city, where at any time of day there is ample, free, legal parking for anyone along residential streets around the campus (streets about the width of Fifth Avenue but with no lanes, because they don't have much traffic). I've never had to go further than a block from my office to find plenty of spots along the curb.

Then imagine feeling guilty that you're parking in these spots, because you've heard that the local residents dislike having cars in front of their houses that don't belong to them. It's not that the cars take residents' spots--many residents have driveways, and there is plenty of room for everyone--but residents just would prefer that the aesthetic of the neighborhood (a downtown neighborhood, adjacent to the central business district in a city of half a million, mind you) not be marred by, well, strangers' cars. And so you feel bad parking there every day.

But not bad enough to pay $300 to park in a campus lot. Yet.

Cute kids and stunning neighborhood

As you can see, I still marvel at both.

If you detect a bit of two-year-old obstinacy in this look, you're right. My favorite recent quote, "No, Edith! You NOT use that voice and sing that song! That's MY voice!"

 

Impromptu kindergartner house construction

Out exploring

Pictures from a walk around the neighborhood yesterday afternoon. These days the peak is often a stunning white (especially in the morning), while everything below is dry.

 

The humdrum views... (ha!)

 

And out toward Kansas. Actually, it's Colorado Springs down there. But there's a telling local habit of gesturing toward any flat point east of where one is standing and off-handedly calling it "Kansas."

Ready to call it...

We learned in the first few years of Edith's life that many of those milestones you're awaiting eagerly don't actually happen all at once. When does a child officially start walking? With the first unassisted step? With the first stagger across the room? When they choose to walk rather than crawl on a regular basis? What's their first word? The first purposefully uttered syllable...even if it makes no sense to an outsider? The first repeated syllable? The first recognizable snippet in their native tongue?

So, too, with reading. Edith has been conversant with her letters and their sounds for a number of years now, but we haven't yet thought of her as able to read--nor has she thought of herself that way. She has been able to slowly sound out a few words here and there for about a year, and she has mastered a handful of short sight words in kindergarten. Then last week when she was sick she proved that she could, with effort and some help, sound out slightly longer words one at a time.

But today--though it's admittedly just one more step in a gradual process--I'm ready to declare that

Edith can read!

Last week while she was out sick, her class began a new reading program, in which they each choose a book to bring home for the weekend on Thursday night. As parents we're supposed to sit down with our kids, and using a sheet of recommended activities, encourage them in an effort to make their way through the book with whatever degree of assistance they need. Then we're supposed to fill out a little sheet verifying that we worked on the book with them and checking off whether we read the book to our child, we helped the child get through it, or the child read it. We're also supposed to note which of the reading activities we completed together (e.g. practicing letter sounds, finding sight words, identifying punctuation marks, etc.).

Edith missed the first round of the program last week, but today she brought home her book, a little pamphlet she had chosen about two dogs, Biscuit and Sam. Shortly after she got off the bus, we sat down outside (it was nearly 60 degrees!) and she opened the book. She then proceeded to read the whole thing to me (that is, all six sentences or so) without assistance. She hadn't seen the book before, and she had to sound out about half the words (e.g. carry, branch, help), but she did so much more rapidly and confidently than she was doing even a week ago, and she figured them all out without any glitches. 

She even managed to find this Dick & Jane-style reader funny!, chortling at the moment when the big dog looks as though he's helping the little dog straight into a bowl of water.

Edith resolved to bring the book back to school tomorrow and get a new one for the weekend. 

What a thrilling moment...

Boola boola

A nice-looking group of undergraduates, no? Wait, you think...? Don't say it. We enjoyed a lovely weekend of song, friendship, and amnesia.

I was going to borrow from a different classic school song and title this post "Friendship lasts while youth must fail." But really, nothing has made me feel as young in a long time. I know I wasn't the only one. How does one carry that energy into the daily diaper changing, tear wiping, and toddler wrestling?

Dinner with 550 of one's closest friends

 

A view (sans poster) that was central to those bright college years

Disqualified

Yesterday Tom officially removed Coloradans from his mental list of People Who Know How to Deal with Winter. Coloradans on the Front Range, at least, have shown us that they do not take winter weather in stride. Despite the fact that we've had less than 6 inches of snow this season, school has been canceled for three of the last six days and four days total so far in 2011. Yesterday's cancellation was due to a dusting of snow (no need to break out a shovel or boots) and 7-degree temps at dawn. This morning there was still a dusting of snow and 7-degree temps, but the kids went back to school, to the bafflement of my Finnish neighbor trying to figure out the logic in this system. All the kids made it onto the bus and to school without any problem this morning, just as they made it to all the other places their parents took them yesterday. My colleague who has spent time in Minnesota, and who was trying to juggle her twins with her husband while both parents were teaching, sniffed that our local school boards were just teaching kids to be weak.

And it is school boards, plural. In a city of 186 sq. miles, there are actually multiple school districts within the city, each administered separately (plus several legitimately separate municipalities, like ours), meaning that some neighborhoods had a whole day off while others had a two-hour delay. Some of us went back today, while others had another two-hour delay. A town of 186 sq. miles (by comparison my childhood hometown is 6 sq. mi, while Princeton--Borough plus Township with all outlying rural areas--is 30 sq. mi.) also means that now that Tom is in a job that requires him to be all over the city, we are spending 90 minutes in the car some afternoons, driving 50 miles round-trip, to get us all home from our respective locations.

Interestingly, today I came across a website that rates the walkability of one's home location (www.walkscore.com). For me that's a critical feature in a home--practically and environmentally, to be sure, but also psychologically--and one that I didn't realize anyone out there was measuring. I wasn't surprised when I plugged in everywhere I've lived and discovered that our current location, with its walkability rating of 23 out of 100, does not qualify for any degree of "walkable" status, earning a solid "car-dependent." By contrast all my Northeast residences scored above 50, some in the high 80s. The only place to score lower than our current home was my family's Chapel Hill neighborhood. The ratings seem to be based on the proximity of business and services in a variety of categories, and while I agree that my parents' CH home is close to even fewer businesses than our current location--not walkable to any commercial districts at all, except by my mom when she's in a Saturday-morning marathon hike mood--nevertheless, I think the rating system needs to be tweaked. What I'd like is a system that weighed not just how walkable a place is, but how much time you have to spend driving once you do get in a car (and ideally, how stressful that driving is). In Chapel Hill, you can get to all kinds of useful places in 5-10 minutes of relatively painless driving, twenty minutes if you need to go out to the box stores. In Manitou Springs, twenty minutes gets you to the interstate, which just launches you on your 45-minute trip to the malls.

My system would also weigh the relative usefulness of different businesses (maybe the individual user could weigh specific stores herself at the outset). For example, at our home in Manitou we receive credit for having a bookstore about 1.5 miles away, but the store that pops up is is a tiny New Age healing arts shop, which I'd argue shouldn't get us a higher rating than a location with a Barnes & Noble 2 miles away. (Though I would give a medium-sized, high-quality independent bookstore a higher rating than B&N, I suspect.) Meanwhile, the listed entertainment near our home is some adult erotica shop four miles away and adult cinema five miles away, while the closest clothing is a high-end baby boutique, after which you have to take the 45-minute trip to the malls.

To be fair, there's another version of walkability to consider. If there were an algorithm that weighted relative splendour of the natural sights walkable from one's home, well, Manitou would be off the charts. Some might say this is the trade-off one makes: stunning scenery or urban convenience. What's frustrating is that it doesn't have to be that way. It's not that we're in a beautiful but remote location; we're in a beautiful and highly developed location. It's just that no thought has been given to that development. As one travel writer I was recently reading put it, Colorado Springs is "an untidy, overgrown city, hell-bent on expansion." Travelers in the 19th century were equally disappointed. Take away the mountains, and we have an undistinguished, sprawling urban/suburban scar on the land, the kind at which America excels. I love to imagine what this place would be like with the natural beauty AND lovely, well-considered human planning. Where does one go to find such a combination? As long as we're here, I suspect I'll always feel a warring thrill in the mountains and depression about the daily drives.

***

Since I began this post, it was interrupted by Edith's coming home sick from school. Another day lost. Although to be fair, she has spent a good chunk of both afternoons on Starfall.com, a free phonics-oriented reading website, on which I suspect she learned more than if she had been at school. (And no, that wasn't a tiger mother maneuver--that was her choice, though I heartily endorsed it.) She's on the cusp of reading; she just needs to keep practicing to gain fluency (is that the right word?). But where she had the patience, she  made her way through just about any story or game she tried.

She also reached a milestone today: Age 5 1/2, Edith figures out what makes the world go 'round. As she told me this afternoon, "You used to say you and Daddy work for a living, and I didn't understand. But now I understand. When you work at a job, people give you money for working. And you need that money to buy food to live. Unless you live on a farm."

This evening she started to get sicker, vomiting and complaining of sore throat and stomachache. Alice was a bit off last weekend, so I'm hoping that it was she who got a milder version of this bug first and passed it to her big sister, rather than that Alice is on the verge of contracting something ickier than she already had. We haven't had much sickness at all this year, so we hardly can complain. But I'm headed east this weekend, knock on wood, and I'd rather I didn't leave Tom with two sick kids--or find myself coming down with something as I board the plane. After all, where I'm headed I can walk to a pharmacy, but here Tom would need to bundle the kids into a car to get meds...that is, if it's warm enough to risk going outside at all. :)

Pasta bowls with silver linings

I'm thinking again about Linguistics 114, that introductory exploration to wordplay that I enjoyed freshman year. One of the things we mused on was the idea of compound nouns, and how it is that we understand the implicit relationship between the combined words. The example from class: How do we know that horseshoes are shoes that go on horses, while crocodile shoes are shoes made for humans from crocodile skin? And what would you do if, in fact, you wanted to signal that someone had undertaken the amusing (and foolhardy) project of fashioning shoes for crocodiles to wear? How do you infuse your new compound noun with the right meaning?

I'm thinking about it, because I want to say that we had two snow days this week...when in fact, we had almost no snow at all. But snow day is a familiar compound that immediately signals to the initiated, "days on which school was closed." I can't say that we had two cold days, because although Tuesday and Wednesday were indeed frigid, that new compound doesn't convey the full meaning I'm intending.

But now that I've belabored the point for two paragraphs...

Tom and the girls were both stir crazy after the first day at home. On a bona fide snow day, after all, you can go out and sled and build snowmen and other such delights, whereas on a cold day the whole point is to keep kids indoors. So Wednesday Tom resolved to make it to work no matter what, Alice was raring to go back to bunny school (which was still open), and we decided Edith would accompany me to work as my helper. I have vivid memories of how special it was to go to work with my parents on snow days. Even though I don't have a commuter train trip, a big city delicatessen where my breakfast order is pre-made, and a 19th-story office view to offer Edith, I thought she might get some of the same kick out of participating in the grown-up routine even so. 

I did have the paper clips with which to make a chain. And while Edith completed a paper clip necklace, she also helped me hog out and organize my office, tackling stacks of paper I'd let accumulate since September. (On the block plan, you no sooner organize your books and photocopies and file folders for one class than you're teaching another one.) She learned the art of paper-clipping a stack of pages together (I never before appreciated how tricky this can be at first) and of stacking alternating packets of papers perpendicular to each other. She fetched items from the printer, and at the end of the day she was at first repulsed and then thrilled--in the way peeling the lint from the dryer trap is thrilling--to clean the coffee grounds out of the grinder and wash out the pot and component coffee maker pieces. 

At mid-day we had lunch in the student cafeteria, complete with soft-serve ice cream and impromptu visits with a variety of her friends, all of whose parents had brought them to work and some of whom had no connection to the college but were there eating lunch with their parents anyway because they'd heard it was the place to be.

The best part for me was having unhurried time in the middle of the day to spend with Edith, when we weren't tired or strung out or on the dinner-bath-bedtime clock. And I confess, having her there kept me on task cleaning the office without stopping to check email, in a way that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

The next morning when I told Edith that school was back in session (never mind that the temperature hadn't risen--it was supposed to rise later in the day), she rolled over in bed and wailed, "But I wanted to be your office helper!"

***

Alice also wants to help these days--except when she wants to obstruct, boss, order, defy, command, or dictate, which is ever more of the time. Two years old indeed, and rarely an awake moment that she's not talking. The other day she was testing my patience with exacting commands about how to place her dinner plate and sippy cup, or some such, and I asked, "Alice, why are you being such a bossy boots?" To which she promptly and confidently replied,

"I a pasta bowl."

(I believe she was told so by Fraulein Josephine, four governesses ago?) Impossible or not, she unwittingly earned herself a new family nickname.

***

On the other hand, she was very sweet this evening. We were enjoying a family Friday movie night on the couch, when I rubbed my eye and accidentally pushed one of my contacts out of place. I massaged my eyelid for awhile, but I couldn't get the contact to come down from somewhere up in the crease, and finally I asked Tom to pause the movie while I went up to the bathroom to take care of it. I couldn't find it--could feel it but couldn't see it or get it to move--and was trying to stave off the mild panic that that situation can cause, when with a frustrated sigh, I decided I'd give up and postpone finding it until the end of the movie, so the girls didn't wait too long.

But by that time Alice, who had been asking to watch the end of the movie and had been told they were waiting for Mommy to fix her contact, had decided to help. When I came back down, she decreed, "No! I HELP you!" We returned to the bathroom, Alice leading the way. She turned on the light and then stood there smiling happily, watching me, saying, "I help you. You fix it, and then we watch the end of the movie, Mommy. It okay. I help you." And lo and behold, the contact did slither into view, and I got it out and put it and its mate away, and Alice smiled, took my hand, and announced, "Now we watch the end of the movie." She gave me a huge hug and kiss, then led the way back downstairs.

***

The other fun thing recently has been Edith's newfound love for the Charles Lamb prose version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I'd read it to her once around Christmas, and found the language fairly sophisticated and of course, the plot turns intricate, and thought it may have been a bit much, even in prose. But this week she asked to read "that funny story about all the people in the woods running around falling in love with the wrong person," and she not only reveled in the absurdist plot, but she exactly remembered all its twists and turns, which is more than I can manage between one reading of that play and the next. She even cast a parallel version with people she knows from school and the neighborhood, stopping the story reading periodically to tell the 2011 Manitou Springs version (in which the lovers meet on Pike's Peak, of course). I wrote and cast my first retelling of a play at age 6. Maybe Edith's preparing to do the same?

Update

How might one spend a Tuesday as a family in February in Colorado? Figuring out something to do with the kids, because school was canceled due to cold. No snow here as part of our "Snowmaggedon," or whatever it's being called to the East, but apparently someone didn't want kids waiting at the busstop when it's -2 degrees. Which I guess makes sense. But I can't help thinking of all the Little House books we've been reading, children and adults trekking to school and the barn through waist-high snow in -20 degree weather, without any synthetic fabrics, to buildings without insulation or central heating. And living 90 years to write about it fondly.