For the first time in many a year, we got to travel as an intact family of four on Saturday. Usually, Lindsay leaves early or joins us later, making me feel a little bit more than usual like a 50s hausfrau, starring in my own South Texas version of "The Best of Everything."
So as soon as the dates were set and the tickets booked ,naturally my thoughts turned to... who would sit between the children in the three-seater and who would fly solo on the aisle? Who would still be involved peripherally with all mid-flight parenting decisions but mostly get to stay above the fray? I dream of that seat, of flying for three and a half hours and just reading, reading. Would I work my way through a stack of New Yorkers and New York magazines? Would i bring a few hefty fashion mags for idle flipping while listening to my ipod? Or would I read the seventh of the Sookie Stackhouses novels, easily cover to cover, with time left over for the latest US Weekly and maybe a little conversation across the aisle, with my darling family, so close and yet so, so far away...
I spent a lot of time turning this over in my mind. Since Lindsay would be with us both ways, we would have to take turns. It was only fair. Would it be better to fly with the kids on the flight to Newark, when they were super-excited and wired? Or wouldn't that be worse, since the flight was scheduled to take off right at about Lark's naptime? So maybe it would be better to sit with them on the flight back, early in the morning, exhausted, a little depleted, a little sad, but ready to go home. Hmm..maybe that would be better.
As it turned out, I needn't have spent so much time luxuriating in this decision-making process since the airline gods cruelly seated us two and two, one parent and daughter sat in front of the other. (Praise Lindsay for crazily stuffing his backpack with not only my laptop but our portable DVD player, so there'd be screens for all.)
Though my one-way solo flying fantasy had been dashed, at first it seemed as though I had drawn the longer of the two straws: Dale. A six-year-old is infinitely easier to fly with than a two-year-old. I mean, she reads. She does puzzle books, becomes terribly engrossed in some art project. So I was ready to make the best of it—I was pretty sure I could plow through most of that Charlaine Harris opus—until I saw who was going to be filling the empty seat to my left. The very last person to be escorted onto the plane, escorted by a flight attendant and wearing a bracelet: an 8-year-old boy flying solo.
I was going to be flying with two kids after all.
Do the airlines put much thought into seating for unaccompanied children? Like, this person is a parent, she's already got a kid to entertain--why not another one?
This sounds harsh. I don't mean to be--he was a sweet, owlish little guy, though at first he studiously ignored me and the fascinated goggle-eyed Dale ("Mommy, where is that boy's parents???"). He unzipped and re-zipped his backpack several times, impatiently pushing aside the stuffed puppy Mom had obviously packed for him. Eventually he settled on a book, titled something along the lines of "The Little Boys' Book of Devotion." It was a hardcover volume, crisp and clean and obviously spanking new with a tasseled bookmark at Chapter one. He opened it, he closed it. He put it in his backpack and never took it out again.
While we waited for take-off, I watched him go through the same motions with another brand-new hardcover, book #30 in the Magic Treehouse series. Who buys those things new and in hardcover? I wondered before turning back to Dale and working on our Highlights book of Hidden Pictures. We were pretty stymied by a number of missing items in the picture we working on--was that really a hairbrush lurking in the pizza oven the elves were slaving over? I could tell the boy was dying to weigh in--Highlights hidden pictures definitely trumps the Little Boys' book of devotions.
Once he was in the mix, there was no turning back. He went from doing the puzzle with us to taking over the puzzle book himself. His intense focus seemed to be a coping mechanism as I learned pretty quickly that he was one hell of a nervous flier. He informed me as the train began to taxi down the runway that he was going "to freak out" during takeoff. He kept saying "I hope they know what they're doing... This is the part where they really need to know what they're doing.. This is where all the accidents happen."
Now Dale has a lot of fears and phobias, mostly unfounded, so the last thing I need is for her to acquire this legitimate anxiety. I did my best to distract her and talk over our new friend, after I gave him our Highlights and showed him a few other activity books he could choose from our very well-stocked carry-on bags.
At cruising altitude he regained his composure and Dale started watching Sleeping Beauty. He put down his tray table and got two action figures out of his bag (Power Rangers maybe?). He muttered under his breath and seemed to engage them in conversation. That diverted him for about a minute. He put the figures back in his backpack and returned to the Hidden Pictures, occasionally interrupting my reading with news that he'd discovered the missing flashlight, the candlestick, the fishing pole. He refused the beverage service and the lunch (a sloppy joe and tossed salad that Dale wolfed down), and while I was poking at mine (and reading), he asked me plaintively if I would do a puzzle with him when I finished eating. Ummmm... you mean more hidden pictures? I asked, as I folded my book's cover back so he wouldn't notice the sexy vampires on it. No, he meant a jigsaw puzzle. A Spiderman jigsaw puzzle good old Mom had packed for him to do with his seatmate. Seriously, who packs puzzles for a flight? Turbulence? Hello?
I managed to kind of weasel out of it by giving him more activity books. He also got more interested in what Dale was watching when she switched from Sleeping Beauty less than a third of the way through and started watching her favorite DVD, a collection of Pixar shorts. Sadly, I did not have a spare pair of headphones to give him, but he was cool. He watched the movie and occasionally proffered a stat or two or three about the dangers of flying, which I agreed with wholeheartedly. I also told him every ten minutes or so that we wouldn't be in Newark for at least two more hours, which he strongly disagreed with every time. We experienced some turbulence (aka "light chop") which prompted the captain to put on the seatbelt sign, which prompted Dale to suddenly have to go to the bathroom really, really badly. While she and I argued about whether she could hold it when the captain had expressly asked that passengers return to their seats, our seatmate buzzed a flight attendant, informing him of the situation, much to Dale's consternation.
Happily, we caught some special wind that got us to Newark a good twenty minutes early. As soon as the initial descent was announced, my seat buddy made extra sure that all of our electronic devices were turned off because the second most dangerous time on an airplane is the landing. Didn't I know that? I sure did. Forty-five minutes later we took our leave of the kid, who was wiggling desperately, having refused to use the bathroom during the whole flight--too dangerous. Dale remarked that she had "become really good friends with that boy" though she never actually uttered a word in his direction. I wondered if there was still a chance that we'd get to sit four across on the flight back...
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Monday, November 02, 2009
Finally, the payoff
Here in South Texas we bore ourselves silly with talk of the weather. We bitch about the infernal heat, the skin-ravaging sun, the droughts, the flash floods. For a good chunk of the six months of high summer, we hunker down in our air-conditioned houses and hibernate, basically. But then, always after Halloween—this year, literally the day after Halloween—the beauty part begins. And the allergies, but no matter, the 700 times I sneezed at 6 this morning were a small price to pay for a glorious day at Cibolo park in Boerne, TX, a place I always imagine myself moving to whenever I visit because one of the things I really miss, living in my 50s subdivision amid the sprawl, is having a downtown, a center, a square, a place you can walk, a sense of community beyond the shopping center and strip mall. I realize community amounts to something more than architecture, but sometimes (oftentimes) I have trouble seeing beyond the drab not-quite-ugliness of my surroundings, no matter how much I love my house/velvet prison.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Rainy day women
I know it's heresy to say this during a time of drought, but damn, enough with the rain already! Piss off!
Yes, that was me, two posts ago, asking "how now brown lawn?" Well, as of today my yard is verdant—seemingly overnight it has transformed into a rolling hillside of undistinguished weeds. From a distance, and if you blur your eyes a bit, it almost looks as though I have a suburban lawn, the kind people keep alive through arduous irrigation and sprinkler systems and chemicals and frequent applications of mulch and fertilizer, and very dedicated hand-watering during times of stage two drought restrictions. Okay, maybe it doesn't look like it so much in this leafy-brown picture, but this was taken two weeks ago, when the rains began and they were a novel bit of excitement and not the irritating inconvenience into which they've evolved.
Rain is inconvenient because I can't let the dog out (our grass-free back yard would be well-suitd for motorcross or monster truck rallies, perhaps some mass mud wrestling), and walking a dog is not something that I can work into my schedule. So the dog is staring morosely at me all the time, and shadowing me, and shaming me and guilting me and enough already, dog! Do you see what it's doing outside?
Our newest pets, the finches, are also affected by the rain. They pass most of their days outside, in a shady spot on the patio, and they seem to enjoy it immensely. I, too, enjoy it because as much as I might miss their squeaky-toy chirruping, at least I don't have to clean the bird shit, seed and feathers they spray all over everything. So for the past two weeks they've been chirruping and crapping all over the damn place.
Really, I know these are minor inconveniences, ones which pale in comparison to the state of our aquifer. And I can live with them, for sure. But the thing that bums me most royally about this weather is that a little bit of sun deprivation gives me Seasonal Affective Disorder (aka, SAD). Oy. I was discussing this with a fellow Texas transplant; you get so accustomed to shiny happy (blazing, infernal) sunshine all the time that a touch of grey sends your spirits plummeting. This fellow New Texan confided that she turns to coffee for a little liquid sunshine, and doubtless her children suffer the consequences. (At some point I think Dale and Lark will wise up to the Nespresso machine and chuck it the way kids I knew back in my youth would flush their parents' cigarettes down the toilet.)
I do feel an intolerable longing for the San Antonio winter, those cool (50s, 60s) days suffused in that weird white light. Sweaters, sunglasses. I'm easy to please (ha). Screw the aquifer—bring it on.
Yes, that was me, two posts ago, asking "how now brown lawn?" Well, as of today my yard is verdant—seemingly overnight it has transformed into a rolling hillside of undistinguished weeds. From a distance, and if you blur your eyes a bit, it almost looks as though I have a suburban lawn, the kind people keep alive through arduous irrigation and sprinkler systems and chemicals and frequent applications of mulch and fertilizer, and very dedicated hand-watering during times of stage two drought restrictions. Okay, maybe it doesn't look like it so much in this leafy-brown picture, but this was taken two weeks ago, when the rains began and they were a novel bit of excitement and not the irritating inconvenience into which they've evolved.
Rain is inconvenient because I can't let the dog out (our grass-free back yard would be well-suitd for motorcross or monster truck rallies, perhaps some mass mud wrestling), and walking a dog is not something that I can work into my schedule. So the dog is staring morosely at me all the time, and shadowing me, and shaming me and guilting me and enough already, dog! Do you see what it's doing outside?
Our newest pets, the finches, are also affected by the rain. They pass most of their days outside, in a shady spot on the patio, and they seem to enjoy it immensely. I, too, enjoy it because as much as I might miss their squeaky-toy chirruping, at least I don't have to clean the bird shit, seed and feathers they spray all over everything. So for the past two weeks they've been chirruping and crapping all over the damn place.
Really, I know these are minor inconveniences, ones which pale in comparison to the state of our aquifer. And I can live with them, for sure. But the thing that bums me most royally about this weather is that a little bit of sun deprivation gives me Seasonal Affective Disorder (aka, SAD). Oy. I was discussing this with a fellow Texas transplant; you get so accustomed to shiny happy (blazing, infernal) sunshine all the time that a touch of grey sends your spirits plummeting. This fellow New Texan confided that she turns to coffee for a little liquid sunshine, and doubtless her children suffer the consequences. (At some point I think Dale and Lark will wise up to the Nespresso machine and chuck it the way kids I knew back in my youth would flush their parents' cigarettes down the toilet.)
I do feel an intolerable longing for the San Antonio winter, those cool (50s, 60s) days suffused in that weird white light. Sweaters, sunglasses. I'm easy to please (ha). Screw the aquifer—bring it on.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Yes! This is where I want to be! The circus is the place for me.
So another milestone has been achieved: Dale and Lark have attended their first circus. (Funny how it mattered so much to wait till Dale was just the right age to appreciate these rites of passage—first movie, etc—but with Lark, it's like, okay, how old are you again? Oh, whatever—you can come too!)
I always loved the circus even though I know I'm not supposed to, for the sake of the animals, especially the elephants (trained or tortured?) and the lions and tigers (it was only a matter of time, zigfried and roy!). But it would be a lot easier for me to turn my back on the zoo than it would the circus. I mean, zoos look like jails. Most of them, anyway. But the circus...oh, it's so wonderfully weird and shimmery and color-y and musical. It's a spectacle, and I do love a spectacle, especially one that hails from when? Ancient Rome?
My first circus was Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey at Madison Square Garden (come to think of it, my first Broadway show was Barnum). I saw it several times. I don't know how old I was, certainly older than Dale. I had posters of Gunther Gebel Williams in my room. Can you imagine a "tween" girl today having a poster of a lion tamer in her room?
Well, maybe—if that girl is Dale. Her favorite part of the Shriner Circus was the "tiger tamer"—a middle-aged Polish fellow by the name of Bruno Blaszak, who wore painted-on leather pants that squished his bare torso in a way that nicely accentuated his man-boobs. He intentionally worked a Sammy Hagar look, and it was fantastic. A lof of air guitar, Van Halen-esque music blaring, and a half dozen bored-looking tigers. Though this was touted as a three-ring circus, only one ring was used at a time—not like the RRBB circus at MSG, but this was on a way smaller scale, which was nice.
Bruno didn't have a lot of competition on the morning we attended. This circus has about 20 acts, but they don't show them all at once (gotta keep you coming back for more, right?). So we didn't see the horses, which was kind of unacceptable, nor did we see the elephants, which was totally acceptable. We missed the human cannonball, and that kind of sucked. Lark singled out the "somersaulters," old-school tumblers from Romania (the girls wore go-go boots), as her favorite act, while Lindsay and I were partial to the motorcycle high-wire act, which was pretty much indescribable, but I will attempt it: While totally scary Romanian death metal chanty music throbbed, two guys decked out kind of like Gene Simmons rode big shiny motorcycles up and down a wire. This in itself did not seem too death-defying, since I've seen similar feats performed by nervey kids at our local children's museum. More amazing were the "molls" of these two motorcycle guys; resplendent in hair extensions and stripper gear, they hung by their teeth? Their necks? upside down beneath the motorcycles and you know, spun around and stuff. WTF? This is how the program described the act:
Drama and excitement reach new heights as they ride the whirling steel monster. They ignore gravity as they execute fantastic feats on the inside and outside of the wheel while making the audience feel the same suspense and adrenaline rush that they feel as they fly through the air.
At least, I think that's the right description—can't be certain as all the copy in the program has a certain ESL quality. And speaking of English as a second language, I'm posting the only snapshots I took at the last circus I attended, back in 1995 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Now that, friends, was a circus. Yes, those are goats, wild boars and lynxes doing tricks. I wish I had photographed the poodle wedding and the clown act with hedgehogs. But sometimes you don't need a camera to remember something so singular, so surreal, and that's what the circus is all about, right?
Friday, September 04, 2009
Thursday, September 03, 2009
White teeth
Two things you don't want to hear from the hygienist when you take your six-year-old to her twice-annual dentist appointment:
1. "Does she drink a lot of soda?"
2. "Do you think next time you could give her a dose of Benadryl before you bring her in?"
The answer to the first question is nein, non, nyet, no way jose, the foul stuff has never passed her lips. As for the second, please—that shit does not work. Benadryl will not calm Dale's jitters; what would I give her to calm her down before administering the Benadryl?
Anyway, the problem is twofold. One, my kid has a tartar (wait, is that spelled like steak tartar or tarter sauce? Mmmm two of my favorite things, one of which also means something so unpleasant). This despite her really quite good (and soda- and juice-free) diet. The hygienist could offer no explanation for the problem—she only encouraged us to brush Dale's teeth ourselves (if she'd let us) and set a timer for two minutes to make sure she was brushing long enough. Which just sucks, because when your kid is six it is convenient to cede some control over that kind of thing. It's especially nice for your six-year-old to be a little bit independent when you're busy potty-training your two-year-old and the school bell rings at 7:40am.
The other issue, the anxiety issue, I don't know what to do about. I told the hygienist to be happy she isn't one of the unfortunate pediatric nurses who've had to wrestle Dale to the ground for vaccinations (even that flu nasal spray you can get as a substitute for the shot sends her into complete meltdown mode). I can't figure out whence this springs; I've always been more the stoic Scandinavian type so I find it weird. She's had no particularly awful medical experience. No stitches, no broken bones, no scary stuff. When I was a kid, I suffered in silence when my prehistoric dentist drilled and filled some six to ten cavities (see, my diet wasn't half as good as Dale's) without any novacaine, or any anesthetic whatsoever. Until I saw Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man, I thought that was normal (then I found out it was torture). My European mother thought that was just typical dental care too. I'm not sure what my dad's excuse was. Anyway, the point is I'm a little impatient with Dale's terror of dentists and doctors and needles and blood, but I really try not to show it—because obviously this is about something else, right? It's always about something else. I wonder what.
1. "Does she drink a lot of soda?"
2. "Do you think next time you could give her a dose of Benadryl before you bring her in?"
The answer to the first question is nein, non, nyet, no way jose, the foul stuff has never passed her lips. As for the second, please—that shit does not work. Benadryl will not calm Dale's jitters; what would I give her to calm her down before administering the Benadryl?
Anyway, the problem is twofold. One, my kid has a tartar (wait, is that spelled like steak tartar or tarter sauce? Mmmm two of my favorite things, one of which also means something so unpleasant). This despite her really quite good (and soda- and juice-free) diet. The hygienist could offer no explanation for the problem—she only encouraged us to brush Dale's teeth ourselves (if she'd let us) and set a timer for two minutes to make sure she was brushing long enough. Which just sucks, because when your kid is six it is convenient to cede some control over that kind of thing. It's especially nice for your six-year-old to be a little bit independent when you're busy potty-training your two-year-old and the school bell rings at 7:40am.
The other issue, the anxiety issue, I don't know what to do about. I told the hygienist to be happy she isn't one of the unfortunate pediatric nurses who've had to wrestle Dale to the ground for vaccinations (even that flu nasal spray you can get as a substitute for the shot sends her into complete meltdown mode). I can't figure out whence this springs; I've always been more the stoic Scandinavian type so I find it weird. She's had no particularly awful medical experience. No stitches, no broken bones, no scary stuff. When I was a kid, I suffered in silence when my prehistoric dentist drilled and filled some six to ten cavities (see, my diet wasn't half as good as Dale's) without any novacaine, or any anesthetic whatsoever. Until I saw Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man, I thought that was normal (then I found out it was torture). My European mother thought that was just typical dental care too. I'm not sure what my dad's excuse was. Anyway, the point is I'm a little impatient with Dale's terror of dentists and doctors and needles and blood, but I really try not to show it—because obviously this is about something else, right? It's always about something else. I wonder what.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Culture
Speaking of museums, I've been meaning to bring everyone up to date on the goings-on at my local shopping center, because when you live in the exburbs, what's going on in your shopping center is rather important. I ranted about the loss of my Barnes & Noble, the slow cannibalization of my older shopping center for newer ones that unnecessarily sprout all around us, offering the same services, just in newer buildings, all at the expense of that very finite commodity: land. (Yes, even in Texas, a whole 'nother country, land is a limited resource.)
So, right, our Barnes & Noble closed because two shinier shopping centers were built that required a bookstore. The closest approximation to a cultural community center that we've got around here. I was annoyed, especially because I thought the adjacent Starbucks wouldalso be closing (mon dieu!); as it turns out, the Starbucks remains—they've just sort of half-assedly walled off the doorway between the two stores. I didn't think anything would ever move in, but, lo and behold, something did—an outlet store for a homegrown furniture retailer. The kind that I imagine (I've never been inside) specializes in big hulking leather sofas and imposing desks of cherry and brass. And, as it turns out, extremely expensive paintings. I mean, seriously, they've got these oil paintings propped in the window with $2,000 price tags! This is so inconceivable to me—I've never spent 2 grand on art, though I would dearly love to, but this stuff... What is it? Who painted it? Who's buying it? It's extremely mysterious.
I guess I should just go in and ask. I'm going to have to go in soon enough. When I took Dale and Lark to the Starbucks for the first time since the bookstore was replaced, they were peering through the windows between the stores (that's what I mean by half-assed—who wants to sit in Starbucks and gaze into a furniture outlet, unless that outlet is Ikea?) and they were like,
Them: Mommy, mommy, guess what! guess what!?!
Me: Don't stand on the furniture or they're going to throw us out of here. What is it?
Them: The bookstore is GONE, mom, and now there's a MUSEUM next door! Can we go? Huh? Please!
Ugh.
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