ever-fixed mark

The Route 51 bus circulates between our town and two others. In Port City, the end of the line, it loops a figure eight before starting the return route, which makes it seem like you encounter the bus everywhere you turn. For this reason, Husband calls it the “Ghost Bus.” When we see it around town, we shriek, “Yikes! It’s the Ghost Bus,” in true Scooby-Doo fashion.

Recently I was casting about for something to do with the boys and thought it would be fun to take a ride on the Ghost Bus. When I told Minor of my plan, the first thing he said was, “It’s not too scary for me?” My heart sank a bit, because he is sensitive to things that are potentially frightening, and I didn’t want him to panic aboard the Ghost Bus. We jollied him over it and, after missing the bus once and having to run a quarter-mile for it on the second try (they had changed the route), he enjoyed the ride immensely.

In general I try to avoid talk of monsters and ghosts. I figure, they already have a hundred and one reasons why they don’t sleep; there’s no need to add “fear of things that go bump in the night” to that list. Aitch is not afraid of ghosts and monsters, but he likes to play ghosts and consequently Minor is terrified. Minor frequently claims to see ghosts in our living room, and then we have to help him battle them with magic swords (sound effects: “Ching, ching, BLEAAAAAH”–that’s the ghost dying).

If this were a movie, Minor’s ghost sightings would be followed by strange disturbances that would eventually become too blatant to be denied by even the adults, but we are non-believers so in this house the dead remain at rest. Since the house is over a hundred years old and used to be a nursing home, there have probably been a few deaths on the premises, but until I have evidence to the contrary I’m going to assume that it’s the living-room wallpaper giving Minor the heebie-jeebies, and not specters of the walking dead.

I have lived in Massachusetts for eight years, which means I’m now coming up on the third presidential election since moving here.

Here in Port City, around election time, there’s always a bit of an awkward moment during social gatherings when someone brings up the subject of politics. Eventually, everyone lets on that they’re on the same page, politically speaking, and then we move on to talk happily about murdering babies, requiring kindergarteners to recite the Gay Agenda instead of the Pledge of Allegiance, and inviting the Muslims (all of whom are terrorists) to attack us repeatedly without fear of reprisal. You know, as we liberals are wont.

So I was curious…what about those of you who live in areas that are NOT so politically homogeneous, where blood runs both red and blue? Do you avoid political discussions altogether in mixed company? Do book club meetings and playgroups degenerate into political brawls? Something in between? Discuss.

This morning, as I was completing my run, I was forced to go around three cars (lights on, engines running) parked in the bike lane in a no-parking zone. About ten feet down the street was a clump of parents and children waiting for the bus.

Thought #1: Who DRIVES to the bus stop? (Note: this is not a rural area where someone would have to walk two miles from his or her farm to R.R.#3 or similar.)

Thought #2: If you’re willing to take the trouble of driving two tenths of a mile to the bus stop, why not travel the extra 1.2 miles and drop your kid off at school?

Thought #3: Even if you’re so lazy that you would only drive two blocks and no farther, couldn’t you park about 20 yards down the street from the bus stop in one of the many spots that are open on 7:00 a.m. and WALK THE REST OF THE WAY?

I had three goals for the big ten-mile race this year:

Let’s see how I did, shall we?

We started off slowly enough, thanks to the crowd. I had vowed to try to stay with my friends for at least a few miles, with a stretch goal of running at their 10-minute mile pace for the whole thing. So when they picked up the pace, so did I. I was feeling a bit winded already by the half-mile mark, when I told them I wanted to run on the right side of the street for a bit so I could wave to the kids as we passed my house. I moved to the right: no kids. I moved to the left: no friends. I picked up the pace even more, hoping to catch up with them, but they were nowhere to be found in the crowd. At the one-mile point I marked the split time with my watch and goggled when I saw 9:17:59 — much, much faster than I wanted to be.

I slowed down a bit but felt pressured by all the runners passing me. I knew from experience that by mile 7 many of them would be walking, while I would still be running, but I still didn’t feel like I could slow down to a comfortable pace. For mile 2, my pace was 9:30; mile 3, 10:11. I felt the worst between mile markers 3 and 4, just like last year, and finally decided I was going to have to slow way down or I wouldn’t be able to finish. I was hot and thirsty and rubber-legged and felt just generally weak and awful. I was cheered here and there by the appearance of my friend C., the one who said to me in April 2007, “We’re doing the 10-mile race this year,” who had run the race with me last year but damaged her ankle so badly during the race she hadn’t been able to run since. She was dashing around on her bike intercepting the runners here and there, shouting encouragement. I ran mile 4 at 11:09 and started to feel more of a rhythm. I finished mile 5 at 11:50 and panicked a bit — too slow! — but by then I was rounding the corner to The Hill and my only concern was getting up without stopping.

Hills have never bothered me; I grew up running hills, and I always treat them as something to get over as quickly as possible. I felt physically awful going up that hill, but I didn’t feel intimidated. When I got to the top, this sense of relief washed over me, but at the same time I felt like quitting. I wasn’t having fun. Running alone was not exhilarating; it seemed pointless. By now I had learned, through C., that one of my running buddies was about five minutes ahead of me, and the other about five minutes behind. At this point I thought seriously about running back to meet my friend. I turned around to see if I could spot her winding around the course, but my body recoiled at the thought of retracing a step.

My splits were getting slower and slower, but I still felt like I was working hard. My left foot and leg started cramping, something that had never happened to me in 25 years of running. Suddenly, I remembered that I had given up bananas that week in an effort to cut some calories. Now, I’ve eaten a banana almost every day for most of my life, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized that the potassium was the only thing preventing my muscles from knotting up into big painful charleyhorses. Idiot!

I had reached the cool, shady part of the course where last year I had gotten a second wind. It was about this point that C. caught up with me again. She could see that I was hurting, and she rode alongside me for the remaining four miles, keeping up a steady stream of conversation and organizing all the people she recognized along the race route to cheer for me, personally, by name. Might I have finished without her? Maybe. Would I have had any fun without her? Definitely not. She totally got me through it, and I was grateful that I got a chance to “run” it with her again.

I finished in 1:50 and change, an eleven-minute pace. When I got home and looked up the results, I saw that this year I was not dead last in the Middle Aged Fat Lady division; I was 88th out of 91. Whoo-hoo! Also, I beat one of the deputies that C. and I smoked during the Frigid Fiver two years ago, and this year I had the pleasure of beating the county sheriff as well.

I may be a Middle Aged Fat Lady, but I can still outrun the Law.

When you run, you get to know the quirks and features of all the houses on your routes. Occasionally, you get curious to match a face with a home, and even more rarely, you run by when one of the owners is on the porch or in the yard. (For the record, the guy whose pickup truck has the Confederate flag painted on his tailgate looks exactly like I expected him to.)

Yesterday, I ran by a particular house and saw the door open. “Ooh, I’ve been wondering who lives there,” I thought, “because —” Then I couldn’t remember what was so interesting about that house. Something political?

Then I spotted it: a bumper sticker that read, “This is America: Speak English.”

What is it with Americans and their foreign language phobia? Were we all so traumatized by our high school language requirement? I myself suffered for three years at the hands of Frau “Eva” Braun, but I can hear German spoken on the street without turning into a raving lunatic.

Alas, it happened so quickly that I totally lost the opportunity to greet my neighbor with a friendly “Salem w’aleikum!”

Next time.

But me, I’m thinking “slush,” because the predominant weather pattern (snow, rain, freeze, lather, rinse, repeat) has left us with that as our only constant.

Yesterday, though, the scheduled Port City Winter Carnival coincided with the only six-hour stretch in the last six weeks where it was cold enough to have frozen the pond but yet warm and dry enough to enjoy it. And here we are:

I am now officially the kind of woman who can wrangle two children under five backwards, on ice skates. See if you can spot my bad athletic self, “Where’s Waldo” style.

Edited to add: It’s 61 degrees today. I could go kayaking on that pond.

I had scheduled a mandatory classroom observation at the Montessori charter school this morning. I was hoping to learn Aitch’s status in the lottery by now, so I could cancel if he wasn’t going to get into the school, but that did not happen, nor did the threatened ice storm materialize, so off I went.

I spent about 45 minutes in the Kinderhaus, a class of 32 five- and six-year olds. There were two lead teachers and one assistant teacher (a certified teacher with a master’s degree, I was assured, not an aide). My overall impression of the class was favorable, but I did see a few small red flags.

The Good:

Many of the students were working independently, or with some guidance from the teachers, on one or two projects during this 45-minute stretch. Some of the students were doing very advanced work for kindergarten. One girl, for example, was working with a large box of alphabet cut-outs. As the teacher read words out to her, she would choose the letters to spell them out on a mat on the floor. The vowels were red and the consonants blue, allowing her to see the pattern in the one-syllable words. Each word used one or two two-consonant blends (west, trap, just, next, bland). The girl made some creative mistakes that illustrated that she was really thinking about the phonetics (for example, she spelled trap “chrap,” and the teacher repeated the word so that she could hear the sound more clearly). Afterwards, she copied each of the words onto paper. Another girl was putting the numbers 1 - 9, 10 - 90 (by tens), 100 - 900 (by hundreds), and 1000 - 9000 (by thousands) in an array on the floor. When she finished, the teacher had her choose one card from each column (4000, 600, 50, 6) and then assemble 4,656 things, stacked appropriately on each card. (For example, there were six beads; 5 bundles of 10 sticks each; 6 tiles with 100 dots on each; and 4 cubes with 1000 dots on each.)

The room was active, but not crazy. The kids were allowed to move around fairly freely, but they were not disruptively loud or boisterous. It seemed like a level of activity that most children could work with — neither too restrictive nor too anarchic. In the “life skills” corner, the children had to sign up for snack time by writing their names on a whiteboard and erasing them when they finished the snack.

The room was full of materials that made up interesting mini-lessons. Each set of materials was on its own tray or box, and the children were responsible for putting things back in the correct order after they finished a lesson (and I did observe this in action several times). Even with three teachers, it must have taken hours and hours to prepare all the materials, although there may be some kind of Montessori store where you can buy this stuff pre-made.

The teachers facilitated learning, rather than teaching lessons. Each teacher worked with two or three students at a time, taking notes on their progress. I had the sense that the lessons were really individualized. Meanwhile, the teachers handled interruptions from other students, and I never heard a raised voice. By that I mean that the teachers rarely even raised their voices to conversational level. Most discussion took place in a VERY low tone, so that I had to strain to hear even when the teacher was only a few paces from me. When the teachers reprimanded the kids for breaking a rule, they explained why the rule was important (”We can’t take the marker away from the whiteboard because then friends who want to sign up for snacktime have nothing to write with.”)

The Questionable:

The children were required to wear indoor soft shoes or slippers in the classroom, and I winced as I watched 32 little bodies schlek around in very unsupportive footwear. I suppose it might be OK for a five-year-old to run around barefoot all day, but backless slippers and the like seemed worse than barefoot. I foresee 64 fallen arches and a windfall for the local podiatrist.

Two of the three teachers were absolute stonefaces. The third teacher smiled at the kids while interacting with them and while praising them, like a typical kindergarten teacher. The other two were completely stoic. At one point, a bunch of girls gathered around the assistant teacher while she kneeled to investigate the case of the missing marker. One girl, standing behind the teacher, threw her arms around her in a hug. The teacher said, “No thank you” and removed the girl’s arms from around her neck. I almost cried. I suppose when there are 32 kids in the room, you can’t encourage a close relationship with one or two, but surely there was a kinder way to do this than a cold, “No thank you”? Later on, the same little girl asked another teacher if she could go to the nurse, and she said, “I was up coughing all night and I’m tired and now I have a runny nose,” and the teacher looked at her and said, “Get a tissue and we’ll see how you feel later.” A little bit of sympathy might have helped that little girl get through the day. Certainly you would extend that to any adult in your office who wasn’t feeling well.

While most of the kids were working intently, not all of them were. I noticed one girl and two boys who had a hard time choosing something to do. The first boy caught my eye because I knew him; he’s one of the few Asian kids in town with Asian parents. When I came in he was working within the orbit of one of the teachers, but soon wandered away to roam around the room. After about 10 minutes the teacher came to collect him again, and they worked on their task for a few minutes, but when she was called away, he immediately rolled over and stared at the ceiling. He roamed around for five more minutes, then started working on a water conservation activity in another corner of the room. He had been absorbed in that for a ten-minute stretch when I left. I felt oddly relieved to see him settle down to an activity.

Another little girl was very vocal and social, more interested in visiting than working. At one point the teacher pulled her aside and said, “Remember that every day we write down what you do here to show your parents. If you don’t do any work then we have to tell them that.” “I know,” the girl said, “but I’m really hungry.” “I just want to make sure you know you’re responsible for that,” the teacher said. Then the girl walked away, and the teacher didn’t follow up. I thought that a five-year-old might need some more direction than that.

Another little boy walked around the room for the 35 minutes. He didn’t work on any lessons or play with toys. He seemed a bit nervous, biting his hand and twisting his clothes. A teacher did notice him after about 15 minutes and said, “It’s time for you to go do math.” He walked to the math area and interrupted two boys working there, then continued wandering around. Finally, he sat down to a snack.

I don’t want the negatives to overwhelm the positives here. Teaching is hard, and those teachers must be doing an amazing job to have a room full of five-year-olds mostly on-task and doing productive work. The observation confirmed something I was taught in grad school, though: you need to use a plurality of teaching methods to reach every kid in the classroom. Montessori allows for a plurality of Montessori methods, but it obviously doesn’t allow the teachers to break through and use some non-Montessori methods that a minority of the kids might need.

Of course, those kids — or different ones — could languish in traditional schools, too.

Anyway, it’s a moot point because when the mail came this afternoon, Aitch had gotten the dreaded thin envelope. He is #67 on the wait list, which means that if a nuclear holocaust takes down the whole 2008 - 2009 kindergarten class, and then it fills up again with the wait list and then a terrible pandemic carries off all THOSE children, and then it fills up again, and then and a few kids move out of the district, THEN he will be able to join the class. In other words, I’m not counting on it.

So this evening I trudged off to the kindergarten registration at the local public school, situated at the unappetizing intersection of Milk and Lime streets. I signed one piece of paper authorizing the school nurse to give my child potassium iodide if there is indeed a nuclear holocaust, and another paper saying that I would pay $3300 tuition for the full-day kindergarten program and some unspecified amount, probably $250, if I want him to ride the bus, because we live within 2 miles of the school. (Since when did public schools charge tuition? Still, it’s a fraction of what preschool costs.)

There was one kindergarten teacher at the meeting. She looked huggable.

We Portions (Port City denizens) are not too fashion-conscious. It’s perfectly acceptable to tool around town looking like you just stepped off the beach or your boat. In winter, especially, all caution is thrown to the winds (out of the nor’east, gusting to 40 mph). You wear whatever gets you through the day. No one’s looking at you anyway. They can’t see, what with the hat, goggles, and scarf obscuring their vision.

In my rarefied social circle, functional winter outerwear is referred to as a “dog-walking coat.” Ostensibly, a dog-walking coat is an old but warm and waterproof coat you throw on to walk the dog in the salt marsh, but in reality you see a lot of dog-walking coats walking around town sans dog. My dog-walking coat, a bilious green down jacket covered in dog drool and lollipop spit, might also be my grocery-shopping coat or even my going-out-to-dinner coat on days when winter has just ground me down to an apathetic lump.

For years I have been eyeing, with a mixture of horror and envy, one particular dog-walking coat sported by several human members of my dog play group. It’s like the X-treme dog-walking coat; every essential quality (warmth, comfort, indestructibility, color and texture that allow dog hair to blend in) is included to the max. It is a full-length down coat in a utilitarian brown or matte black, with a large, fake fur-trimmed hood, made by that arbiter of style, L.L. Bean. Basically, it’s a down comforter with sleeves.

I finally broke down and bought one.

I wore it for the first time to the gym yesterday, accompanied by my pink not-Ugg boots, the ones that look like bedroom slippers. I looked like a flu sufferer who had just arisen from bed, pulling the covers with her for warmth, to go heat up some chicken soup in the kitchen. In short, I was ridiculous. But a winter storm sprang up while I was on the treadmill, and the whole time I spent digging out the car, driving to the grocery store, loading and unloading the bags, etc. I was as warm and toasty as if I were in bed.

(The dog also has a dog-walking coat, but his is quite stylish.)

Massachusetts is light-years behind the rest of the country when it comes to gym culture. The first gym I ever joined here, in Cambridge, was a huge cold dirty warehouse crammed with universal weights and treadmills. The locker room was unspeakable. I’ve worked in inner-city schools with more ambiance.

The next gym I joined, near my office, was in the bottom floor of another office park, and felt like the health club version of a cube farm. The rooms were about six and a half feet high and the whole thing was fluorescently lit. Whenever I climbed up onto the treadmill, I felt like I was about to burst right through the drop ceiling.

When we moved to Port City, I joined the local gym. It was cozier than the warehouse and roomier than the cube farm. But the treadmills on the first floor only went up to 6 miles an hour (!). There were limited entertainment options in the cardio room, just two big-screen TVs with the audio blaring through an antiquated PA system. The water pressure in the showers was flaccid. Every class I took was off somehow; one time, someone left a yoga class early, and the instructor bitched, “I always knew she didn’t like me.” Namaste to you, too.

This year, I was motivated by the extended renovations to and subsequent closure of the YWCA pool to check out a gym across the river. Swimming is one of the best ways for the kids to get exercise in the winter months, and I was dreading a season without a pool. And the new gym was much nicer, although not anywhere near the amenity levels of the health clubs I belonged to in Chicago almost a decade ago. There are enough parking spots, though, and the treadmills go up to 7.5 miles an hour (maybe higher; that’s as far as I go). The locker room is comfortable. The workout rooms are nice. And there are TVs everywhere, although I’m not sure if that’s a plus or minus. Almost all of the cardio machines have individual TVs, with personal audio hook-ups, and there are additional screens in all the rooms with closed-captioning, if you prefer to listen to music while you watch/read television, like I do. Sometimes I feel the information overload is a little much, but then again, running indoors is boring, and a little trash TV really helps to pass the time.

Unfortunately, as I recently discovered, the TV reception in the club is confined to six channels: The NFL network, ESPN 1, ESPN2, the Sci-Fi channel, CNN, and some kind of advertising channel for the club that also has videos on it. Why would anyone assume that just because someone wants to play sports, that they like to watch them on TV? I certainly don’t, and since “Battlestar Galactica” was not playing on the Sci-Fi channel, I was forced to watch Christine Amanpour’s depressing report on orphans in Africa. I believe my feelings about watching CNN on the treadmill have been well-documented here, so I won’t elaborate, except to say that I would prefer some more diverting entertainment. Since about 80% of the population of the cardio room was female, I don’t know why the programming was so skewed to the male demographic.

As I was leaving, I noticed another room off the main cardio room. It had some cardio machines, a few weight machines, free weights, and (of course) five televisions mounted on the wall. It was separated from the cardio area from a glass wall, and I wondered what was special about this collection of equipment. Then I saw the plaque:

Women Only.

Hmmm. Women Only. How do I feel about that?

On one hand, I have a few female friends who say they don’t like working out in the same room with men, and most of them have joined a women-only gym as a result. Some say they feel intimidated by men who seem to know more about weight machines or exercises than they do. Some have complained about the unsightliness or unsoundliness (”all the grunting!”) of men at workout. Personally none of these things bothers me, and it is also quite a while since I have had to worry about men hitting on me at the gym. But I suppose I can see their point, and it does seem like a savvy marketing ploy on the part of this health club to compete with Curves.

On the other hand, at this crucial juncture in feminist history, is it really the time to start re-segregating? Today’s amenity is tomorrow’s ghetto, and once the gyms start instituting purdah, we’re on the slippery slope to A Handmaid’s Tale. And I think it might be hard to run in a burqa. If you’re intimidated by men at the gym, shouldn’t you just do a few more push-ups and get over it? And the gym doesn’t escape responsibility, either: shouldn’t they take pains to make the whole place welcoming to both sexes? (I suppose we won’t have really arrived at gender equality until not only the workout rooms but also the locker rooms are unisex, like on “Battlestar Galactica.” Speaking of…we’ve just started the third season, and, whoa! Starbuck wouldn’t ask for a women’s only room; she would just kill any man who looked sideways at her during a workout. But I digress.)

On the third hand (as my students used to say)…to what channels are the TVs in the “women only” room tuned? I’ll report back.

There are three cemeteries within a quarter-mile radius of our home. This is the kind of fact with which you become conversant when you have a dog. Dogs need to be walked, and pretty, wooded park-like areas are much better than streets. Cemeteries are even better than parks, because there’s something to read. I can entertain myself for an hour altogether piecing together the narratives represented by the tombstone inscriptions. Death narratives can be sad, like the couple who lost three infants within five years, the last two named “Hannah” after their mother — I hoped they had some children who lived to adulthood and were buried elsewhere, with their own spouses and children — but there are lots of people who lived to a ripe old age, too.

Aside from the odd monument to a 9/11 victim, most of the stones in these cemeteries commemorate people long dead. The oldest cemetery in Port City is the one adjacent to the park across the street. Its occupants were largely born in the 1700s and early 1800s. It is not easy to navigate, for there are no neat paths or formal landscaping, but it is situated on a small hill and is terribly picturesque. Even the name, Old Hill Burying Ground, is quaint. Port City’s notables are buried there, like Lord Timothy Dexter (famous for staging his own fake funeral), Thomas Savage (Bermuda’s first recorded silversmith!), General John Titcomb (Brigadier-General of the Militia in the Revolutionary War), and, of course, Jim Morrison. The place is a madhouse on weekends.

The prettiest of the three is the Oak Hill Cemetery. It is of more recent vintage, established in 1842. I call this the High-Rent Cemetery: big monuments, pretty lanes, nice landscaping. There are large family plots here bearing the names that still grace the town’s streets, businesses, and institutions today: Jaques, Lunt, Greenleaf. It is what Husband calls a “squirrel-rich environment.” When we let Dog run off-leash there (only on the most desolate days, because it is now banned), he is half-crazed.

The New Hill Burying Ground is the sad cemetery. It’s across the street from the Old Hill Burying Ground, but it couldn’t be more different: treeless, weedy, and surrounded by an ugly chain-link fence. This graveyard is notable for one thing: its headstones bear the only ethnic names in town. Sure, most of them are WASPy Smiths, Lowells, Johnstons, and Coffins, but there is one small Armenian section and a tinier corner devoted to the Greeks.

For me, the discovery of these graves prompted a question: Where are all the other ethnic minorities in town? Where are the Poles, the Italians, the Germans? Over the years, Port City’s industries have included shipbuilding, silverwork, and mills; surely these jobs must have attracted people other than WASPs, but they’re not represented here. Of course, many of them would have been Catholic, but there is no Catholic cemetery in town. What happened to them all?

It’s Hallowe’en, and I don’t see enough dead people.