Goldilocks

..had purple socks and a big, red bow in her hair.

According to this script, at least. Tom and Alice spent 2 hours tracking down the red bow (or bow substitute) at a local store. I spent 12 hours knitting the purple socks (most of them the wee hours of the night before, of course). Edith's class spent 6 1/2 minutes putting on the production.

It was all good fun.

Rockin' the curlers the night before

Then there's always the issue of how to keep them secure overnight

So curly is a relative concept for those with Boger-Lank genes, but at least she had enough body in her hair to let me clip it off her face. Edith had been challenging the notion that Goldilocks necessarily has curly hair and I was sympathetic--but my main goal was to make sure our increasingly shaggy sheepdog could see on the tightly packed "stage," lest she trip over one of her classmates while skipping through the forest.

Purple socks. The 12 hours were worth it when (1) Edith happily agreed to wear them, and (2) a classmate's mother approached her and threatened to steal the socks, because she liked them so much. Her husband agreed that they were just her style. The woman is probably ten years younger than I am. Chalk up some hip points to my oh-so meager total.

The show:

The cast takes a bow

Goldilocks mended fences with the bears and joined them for more porridge after the show.

While I'm continuing to think about liberal elite condescension, including my own, I should note that the parents of Edith's classmates collectively sport more missing teeth, prominent tattoos (girlfriend's name around the neck, etc.), and used clothing than any set of class parents we'd ever have met in places we lived back East. Unlike the latte liberal crowd, many parents of Edith's friends tend to be shy when I introduce myself and invite their daughters for a playdate. 

But contrary to the images of middle America propagated in places I've lived before, marginal dental care, tattoos, and blue-collar jobs go hand-in-hand here with active parent involvement in the schools and dedication to kids' education. Almost every child in the class of 28 kids had a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle who had made time on a weekday morning to come to this 7-minute production. The parent volunteers for the class are so numerous that the teacher has had to devise a complicated schedule to assure that each of them gets at least two chances to volunteer in a semester--and that's with a parent in the classroom four mornings a week.

Tom and I have been touring elite private schools in various parts of the country. They've seemed like good schools. But none of them has a curriculum appreciably different than the curriculum at Edith's school. One school had a swimming pool in the basement, and another had a code of behavior that they proudly referred to as "the Rockingford* Way." (*Not the school's real name)

And indeed, I saw two little girls at that school run smack into each other on the playground, and a boy in their class hurried over, offered each a hand, and asked if they were okay. But it's not just parents with $20,000/year to spend on their children's education who value human decency. Even schools without a fancy name for common courtesy seek to instill it in their students.

At another school an administrator, whom I liked very much, was telling me about the students' projects on the experience of war. (Note: This was not an elementary school.) Each student had to find and interview someone who personally had experienced war. Because they lived in New York City, the administrator told me proudly, they were able to find an incredible range of people: a New York Times foreign correspondent, a couple of journalists who had been embedded in Iraq, a physician with Doctors without Borders. Once upon a time I would have been similarly impressed with this list. Instead, I sat there as she numbered the interviewees, thinking about who students in Colorado Springs would interview for a similar assignment. They would start with their parents and their friends' parents and the folks at church who had been on multiple tours of Iraq and Afghanistan--that is, if they weren't already intimately familiar with the effects of multiple deployments, traumatic injuries, and PTSD. Everyone knows what's close at hand, of course, and Colorado Springs kids aren't morally superior because they live near (or on) an army base. But it was striking that the New York administrator never thought to acknowledge the glaring gap in her list: that her students, as much access as they had to certain kinds of professionals, didn't interview any active-duty military for a project on the experience of war.

Not sure where all of this musing is tending, except toward the observation that everyone has valuable insight and experience to offer, and I'm not sure many of us are good at recognizing it in people who aren't like us.

My husband is a striking exception, if I may say so. I was humbled the other day when we were walking together downtown and a man asked for change. As I prepared to shake my head apologetically and hurry past, Tom stopped, got out his wallet, handed the man as many small bills as he had, introduced himself and asked the man's name, then began a friendly conversation. It was only two or three minutes, but the man was soon talking about his alcoholism and the daughter he missed, while Tom listened actively, without embarrassment, as if he were meeting yet one more new neighbor out on a dog walk. 

Tom can tell you just how much that kind of human decency is worth to those who control the institutional structures in our society: exactly $0 a year. But I think working harder to cultivate such openness to others may be the only thing that will give us half a chance of surviving many more generations as a society and a species. We all say as much; we plaster such sentiments on our bumpers and embed them in our email auto-signatures. But the rapidity with which we then walk out the door and throw up defenses against the subtlest of differences, using those differences to justify our own indifference to injustice or pain, makes a mockery of our platitudes.

...

I'm trying to bring this back around to Goldilocks and failing. So.

***

Plenty of other stuff happening around here. Posts to come about the fun spring break visit from frequent blog comment author RLB and about Alice's delight at a 36-hour sisterless trip to the Big Apple with Mom and Dad. More visitors coming soon, too, and who knows when we'll next be traveling ourselves. Perhaps we'll soon offer a survey inviting reader comment: Where on the planet should our family live next?