ever-fixed mark

1. Hair bows. Remember those big bows we used to use to tie back ponytails in the eighties? Like in Heathers? I can’t believe I saw someone sporting one. She was my age, too. I hope she hasn’t been wearing it for the last twenty years.

2. High leather boots. In California. In June. On multiple people. Why?! No time for a pedicure? Are your feet in purdah? There are many closed-toe options that are perfectly appropriate for summer. Please look into them; my feet are sweaty just contemplating this.

3. Three words: Man in skirt. Not a Scott or a tranny, just a dude in a utility kilt. He was rocking it, too.

Aitch’s school is required to calculate each child’s body mass index (BMI) and then notify parents of the result, presumably to help parents of children at risk for obesity to take action early. We got a letter today saying that Aitch’s BMI was in the “86 - 90th percentile” for kids his age, and thus he is at risk for being overweight.

I had to laugh, because this is what Aitch looks like these days:

His BMI is high because the kid is ripped. His upper body is a slab of muscle. He tries to scale every vertical surface he encounters, and I’m constantly telling him to stop climbing on the cabinets, the fences, the fountains, DUDE, do you think you’re Spiderman? He has this trick of dangling from the monkey bars with one hand while he susses out his next move. He has a fierce set of calluses to go with his triceps, but the nurse didn’t even notice those.

The first thing I noticed about my high school boyfriend was the tortured posture he adopted while writing. I sat next to him in Latin class, and when he took notes, he hunched over in his seat, right arm curled over the top of his paper, approaching the left side of the page almost upside-down. Later when I got to know him I asked him why he sat like that, and he told me that he had been a natural lefty, but his parents forced him to switch to dextro from sinistro, because, you know. The left hand is the devil’s hand.

Unfortunately, this coercion was not uncommon practice in the rural parts of that Pennsylvania county, fifty miles northeast of Philadelphia, just down the road from Medieval Times (the period, not the theme restaurant). Since my boyfriend’s parents were already correcting his toddler self for the grave fault of being differently-handed, you can imagine how they reacted later on to his atheism and recreational drug use. Good times!

I think of that sometimes when I see Aitch writing his letters. He’s been left-handed ever since he learned to hold a spoon. The doctor told us that children often switch hands, but his left-preference has never wavered. That didn’t surprise me, though, because somehow he just feels like a lefty. He’s never been a traditional learner. He’s never hit a cognitive milestone on time: he didn’t wave bye-bye, play “so-big,” use signs, put two words together, use pronouns, etc. at the designated timepoints. He’s not a typical visual learner, and he isn’t necessarily auditory either; his style is more social/experiential. He dislikes being taught and really has to arrive at a solution in his own way. His approach has always been oblique, but it gets him there. What other five-year-old is so accomplished at complimenting women on their pedicures?

Minor, on the other hand, was completely neurotypical. It wasn’t until we had him that I realized how oddl Aitch had been. Minor learns by observing and imitating, like most kids. He doesn’t plug up his ears if he suspects you’re trying to teach him something; he loves to try new things. So I was surprised when he, too, turned out to be a lefty. His preference never seemed to be as marked as his brother’s. Minor would, for example, hold his fork with his left hand, but pick up odd bits of food with his right. We called him “Ambrosedextrous,” but whether it was that or pure slovenliness, I can’t say. For awhile I was convinced that he was just using his left hand in imitation of Aitch. But now he seems to be favoring his left the majority of the time, and when he plays soccer he naturally kicks left.

Husband and I are tickled at the thought of having two lefties. I’m not sure why. I suppose we’ve bought into the notion that lefties are more intellectual and artistic. Maybe we just appreciate the slim odds of two southpaws, especially since they aren’t even genetically related. I mean, how lucky are we? Two kids with the devil in ‘em!

BTW, if the post title reminds you of a certain television story arc circa 1980, I offer my kudos on your misspent youth.

I can’t get over how empty this hotel is. All day long, I’ve seen no one but my 20-odd colleagues from work, and twice as many bored hotel employees whose actually seem relieved when we pop our heads out the door to ask for something. I’ve sat alone in the pool, the coffeeshop, the lobby. I haven’t seen anyone in my hall, the gift shop, or the elevators.

After work, I went out for a walk along the three-mile route recommended by the concierge. The resort is nestled among a number of gated communities and condo complexes, hundreds of Italianate buildings all jumbled on top of one another, including a hideous reproduction of the Ponte Vecchio over Lake Las Vegas. During a three-mile walk, I saw almost no one. No one playing golf, sitting on a balcony, going for a walk. No boats on the lake, no swimmers on the beach, no one on the volleyball court. No one at the Ponte Vecchio, the restaurant, or Celine Dionne’s house. In 45 minutes, about 15 cars passed me on the street. I actually started to get a little frightened, because if someone had jumped out of the shrubbery, I’m not sure if anyone would have heard me scream.

The only experience I’ve had that’s every come close to that sense of desolation was in Tunisia during Ramadhan. During that month, Muslims are permitted to break their fast at sunset, so at the close of day everyone is at home, sitting at the table, waiting for the cannon to go off to signal that it’s time to eat. If you happen to be out on the street, it feels like the whole city closed down.

But…it’s not Ramadhan or Christmas morning or Super Bowl Sunday. It’s not wartime or a science fiction film or winter at the Overlook Hotel.

I swear for a moment I was convinced that the Rapture must have transpired, but I doubt that event would make much of an impact on the population density in Las Vegas.

In April, I was in Miami. This month, it’s Vegas. We must be working with the CSI-themed meeting planners.

I am actually only nominally in Vegas. The resort where the meeting is held is outside of the city, in a place called Henderson, on a largish body of water called “Lake Las Vegas.” Celine Dionne, I’m told, has a home here.

The resort is nice enough, but it is its own raison d’etre, rather like Disney World. One comes to this resort to visit the resort; there’s no other there there. It’s eerily empty, a victim of the economy and its distance from the Strip. The weather is gorgeous, though, and I’m currently enjoying my 17th uninterrupted hour of sunlight, so I’m not complaining.

Business trips can be disorienting, even a little depressing, so I always try to get out and explore a little bit, just so that every destination doesn’t feel like room-service-and-network-TV. I noticed that the hotel rents out kayaks and paddle boats so guests can “explore Lake Las Vegas,” so I thought it would be fun to do a little kayaking.

Do you know how weird it is to kayak in a man-made lake? In the desert? Past Celine Dionne’s house? The water was so clear and clean; the bare hills in the distance, so incongruous; the sudden appearance of golfers, so intrusive; the wildlife, so scarce. It was like kayaking in the world’s biggest water hazard.

I have always thought that listening to a book is like being fed through an NG tube: aces in an emergency, but not the preferred content delivery method.

The boredom accruing to a year’s worth of commuting, though, has come to seem like an emergency crying out for some audio relief. I looked into audiobooks; they were quite expensive, though, for something I wasn’t entirely sure I would enjoy. I wondered if there were any free audiobooks, much like free podcasts.

There are. Librivox.org records books in the public domain — old books, but that’s mostly what I enjoy anyway. I downloaded an English translation of a French nineteenth-century detective story, The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux. To my astonishment, I was completely captivated. It was pure police procedural, and I had to listen carefully to take in all the clues. The miles flew by.

Oddly, to my ear, different chapters were read by different narrators, and some of the narrators were clearly not native English speakers, although that was an advantage for some with all the French names in Yellow Room. I logged on to librivox.org to see if I could divine the reason, and as it turns out, all the readers are volunteers. Anyone with a pulse, a computer, and a microphone can contribute one or more chapters to the public domain audiobook of his or her choice.

Upon learning this, I had a crazy idea. What if I read a chapter? One the one hand, I’ve always loved reading out loud. On the other hand, I have something of a tortured voice. I can enunciate clearly and read fluently, but the sound, due to some biomechanical fault, is distinctly unmelodious.

But, hell. I don’t have to listen to it!

So the next time you’re on a long road trip, and the kids are clamoring for the next installment of the Palliser series (”Mommy! We’re dying to know…does Phineas Finn get back into Parliament?”) note that Chapter 12 of Phineas Redux is yours truly.

At 4:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, I was jolted from sleep by a smoke detector. We had already been through one round of Musical Beds; thus I was confused both by the sound and by finding myself in our guest room. Husband and I met in the hall, and he took a quick tour to sniff for smoke while I stayed with the kids. We couldn’t smell anything, but I called the fire department anyway, knowing I wouldn’t be able to go happily back to sleep while suspecting that a fire was smoldering in the basement or behind the walls.

The dispatcher told me to get everyone out of the house and wait for the fire truck. We grabbed blankets for the kids and took them outside on the porch.

That’s when they woke up.

See, we usually cook dinner for ourselves after the boys go to bed at night. About once every two weeks, this activity sets off the fire alarm. The boys have become so habituated to the sound that they now sleep right through it.

I always thought this was a good thing, but now I realize that when they move out and live on their own, they’ll have to install the kind of smoke detectors that flash lights and shake the bed.

The parking garage at work is five blocks away from my office building, but there’s a really terrific coffee shop between points A and B. The proprietors are Moroccan, and because their dialect and demeanor are so close to Tunisian I feel very much at home there.

I usually stop for a hot coffee on my way into work in the morning and for an iced latte on my way home. I always get one of those cardboard jacket thingies for the cup because I don’t want to burn my hand as I walk to the office, or freeze it as I walk to the car.

Suddenly, today, that seemed so absurd. I thought about drinking coffee in Tunisia, where a cup was a sit-down affair, not a perambulatory accessory. I always had my direkt in a small glass, and on a cold day I would have wrapped my hands around it to draw out the warmth, storing it up against an evening in an unheated apartment. On hot days, if I ordered a Fanta from the refrigerator, I would have held the bottle against my wrist to cool the maximum amount of blood before drinking it and going out into the sun-parched streets.

I’m not discounting the wonders of modern HVAC, but sometimes I do feel my life has become a little too insulated.

During the kindergarten run the other day, I caught a snippet of an NPR segment that had me in stitches. The topic was the Catholic priesthood, and there was the usual discussion about the decline in numbers and the effect that rescinding the celibacy requirement might have upon the ministry.

One poor misguided soul maintained, though, that celibacy was NOT the thing keeping the young lads away in droves. The problem, he said, was that the Catholic church had grown too liberal, and this was scaring off men who might otherwise have a vocation.

Yes, you can just imagine that thought process: “Poverty, chastity, obedience….hmmm, not nearly medieval enough for me.”

This morning, when I walked out of the parking garage at work, I was confronted by a mother duck and eight ducklings, just hanging out together on in the middle of Cambridge.

I called Husband and told him of my find. “Are they named Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack?” he asked.

“They’re standing on a curb, and I’m afraid they’re going to waddle into the street and get run over,” I said.

“Why don’t you call Officer Clancy?” he said oh so helpfully.

The mama duck looked very confused, as though she had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque. The funny thing is that the ducks were only about half a mile from the island near the Longfellow Bridge where the ducklings in the book make their original home. They had traveled in the opposite direction from the Public Garden, though.

Am I the only person in the Boston area who is not that fond of Make Way for Ducklings? I find the back-ing and forth-ing of the ducks kind of confusing. They visit and reject the Public Garden, then end up at some nameless island in the river, and then…why did they go back to the Public Garden again? Why not just set the whole thing at the Public Garden and contrive some other reason for the ducklings to cross the street?

Apparently I’m not the only one.