ever-fixed mark

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.

There is a clerk at the neighborhood drugstore who has rather alarming hair. It is carefully arranged, with the aid of copius amounts of product, into a kind of pompadour wave on top of his forehead. It’s a kind of unholy cross between Jimmy Neutron and Ed Grimley, and I CAN’T LOOK AWAY. I feel like that socially inept friend of Husband’s who always addresses remarks to my chest; I can’t talk to him without looking at his hair. And he’s always very pleasant and professional, so I need to respond to his, “How are you?’ and “Do you have a CVS card?” and “Have a great day!” out of basic politeness. In fact, although he’s only a teenager, he’s the most professional clerk in the store.

I found out recently that he’s 17 years old, he just graduated from high school, and he’s running for mayor. He seems pretty serious about it, too. Although it seems like folly to turn over the reins of our city to someone so inexperienced at this point, with the school budget crisis and all, I can’t help hoping that he makes a good showing. He’s a sort of Obama in a field of smarmy Hillary types, two of whom have grave problems with the English language. This kid has at least taken a grammar class in the past five years, and anyway, a guy with the confidence to wear that hair would probably be able to face down a bunch of city councilors with ease.

The city newspaper recently reported on each candidate’s “war chest,” their ridiculous term for an election fund. The incumbent has the colossal sum of $11,000, virtually guaranteeing his re-election. A sign on every lawn! My friend C., who is on top of all things political in our fair city, told me that The Hair has $70. $40 came from his grandmother.

The primary is Tuesday. Godspeed to The Hair! I may not be voting for you, but I’ll be pulling for you.

Tuesday was the day of the Big Race. In the heat of the afternoon, I put on my shiny new shoes, and Dog and I walked over to the registration desk to pick up my number. By the time I got home I was a hot, sweaty, tired wreck, and I also couldn’t deny that my shoes were hurting my feet. I don’t mean they were too tight, or rubbing in the wrong spot, but that they were causing a sharp pain under my left heel and arch. Now, I fear plantar fasciitis more than the Red Manace, halitosis, and Dick Cheney rolled up into one foul-smelling ball, so I reluctantly concluded that I was not going to be able to wear my new shoes for the race, and I prayed that the pain would not persist.

And then, after that, everything that could go right went right. The temperature dropped slightly. The humidity stayed manageable. I was able to drink enough water before the race that I felt hydrated, and yet hit the bathroom at the optimal moment pre-race so I didn’t feel like I needed to pee through the whole thing. My feet did not hurt. My back did not hurt. Nothing chafed, dug, or blistered. I felt a little breathless on Mile 1 and was feeling a little bored and tired on miles 2 - 5, which were on one long, straight road, but after I did the hill at the end of mile 5 and we hit the scenic part of the race, I was really able to relax and enjoy it.

The race, in its 48th year, is a real community event. The route goes right through town — in fact, right in front of my house — and the people who lined the streets to cheer the relatively quick-paced 5K runners and to see the elite cadaverous-looking 10-mile racers were kind enough to hang around to cheer for us, too. I saw so many people I knew. Are you familiar with the extended opening credits of “The Simpsons” where Bart flies through town on his skateboard and passes every major and minor character in the Simpsons canon on the sidewalk? That’s what it was like, for ten whole miles. There was every person I’ve written about in these pages —Jogging Jesus! The fence neighbors! The mayor! The play group! — and many more. There were people with hoses to spray us and people who had set up unofficial water stations and people blaring music and one little urchin who held out a half-eaten popsicle. I wanted to take it, too, because I found I was unable to drink any water from an open cup without choking while traveling at speed, and I was afraid if I slowed to a walk I would never start again.

The funny thing was, since we were so far behind the pack, not only were people cheering us on, but they were cheering us personally. Time after time someone looked directly into my eyes and said, “You can do it! Four miles to go! You’re doing great!” And time after time I felt compelled to say, “Thank you!” because, after all, the person was looking right at me; there was no one else around. It’s not what Joan Benoit would do, but it only seemed polite.

At mile 9 it was getting dark, and I found myself wanting to speed up to finish. A number of the 5K runners were already walking to their cars, and they continued to call encouragement to us. “You can almost smell the hot dogs!” one guy yelled, leaving me to wonder. Was that a euphemism, like “hitting the wall”? “How was the race, Joe?” “Well, Dave, I was great up to mile 9, then I totally smelled the hot dogs.” Then I did start to smell hot dogs, and I envisioned spectators setting up barbecues near the finish line to picnic among the carnage, much like the first Battle of Bull Run. But it was actually the race organizers providing food for the runners. The nausea that accompanied that smell was probably the worst I felt for the whole race, that is until I crossed the finish line and had to bend down to take off my ChampionChip. Hot dogs. Head rush. Whoa.

Checking the race results the next day, I was relieved to see that we were not the very last of the ten-mile racers, but we were last in the Middle-Aged Fat Lady division. I suppose there is a point of pride in running a race as slowly as you could possibly run it without actually walking. The best part, of course, was running through the familiar streets and having people we know hail us like we were real marathoners. What a great memory.

I can almost smell the hot dogs.

On Sunday evening, Aitch’s “best friend” from preschool stopped by with his mother to see if we wanted to go for a walk to the nearby school playground. We did, and after spending a half-hour exploring the joys of the swings, the slide, and especially the water fountain, we walked home by way of the pond.

The kids threw a few stones into the water, which attracted a family of ducks, who thought we were throwing food. I had some dog biscuits in my pocket, so we broke them into tiny pieces and fed them to the cute little ducklings. We said hi to the city councilor for our ward, who was out walking his dog around the pond.

As I’ve mentioned before, the pond is an old kettle hole, so the surface sits well below street level. On our way home we climbed the stairs to reach the street just in time to see a police car pull up. One of Port City’s finest got out and hurried down the stairs, and we stopped, curious to see what nefarious crime was taking place right in our midst.

About halfway down the stairs, he spotted the city councilor, and they exchanged a few words. Then he came back up the stairs.

“Is something going on?” I asked him.

“Well…” he said. “Someone complained that you were throwing stones at the ducks. We have to respond to everything.”

Let’s get this straight: Someone called the police to neutralize the menace posed by a COUPLE OF THREE-YEAR-OLDS SKIMMING STONES.

My kid’s not even out of preschool, and he’s already appearing in the police blotter.

A park lies across the street from our house, and at the far end is a quaintly old-fashioned brick elementary school. The structure dates back to the 19th century, and unfortunately its quaintness extends beyond the facade to the inside. The school has no cafeteria, no gymnasium, no auditorium, no athletic fields. Nothing is up to code, so nothing can really be properly renovated unless the whole thing is redone. Every summer, the fire inspector threatens to close the school for some infraction or another. Last year, I was told, a local contractor performed some Labor Day weekend heroics that allowed the school to open on time. Since then, the City Council decided that it’s not feasible to keep open a school that will eventually need to be replaced or gutted. The school will close for good this summer.

The other two elementary schools are already overcrowded, so to accommodate the additional 60 kids, the schools are being completely restructured. All the kindergarten classes will be housed at one schools. All the first through fourth grades will be housed at the other. Fifth and sixth grades will be moved to the middle school, where they will be maintained separately from the seventh and eighth graders, with different principals and staff. The newly renovated (but not-yet-paid-for) high school will remain as is. This means that if our boys go to public school they will travel through three different buildings before they’re out of fifth grade.

It’s a small town, so that’s not such a huge concern. The farthest school is only a mile and a half away, so they’re all technically walking distance. The big problem is the budget cuts that are accompanying these changes. The district, which has already lost 36 teaching positions in the last few years, is slated to lose another 30 next year. Foreign language is being cut in the middle school. Class size will increase, foreign language at the middle school will be eliminated, and one English or history teacher from each middle-school team will be fired, leaving the other to combine both subjects in a “humanities” course. I used to teach middle-school English, and this sounds like a very bad idea to me. Public school teachers are (supposed to be) certified in their subject areas, and although it’s certainly possible to stay one chapter ahead of a bunch of seventh-graders in a subject in which you are not an expert, it’s not desirable. If it were a great idea, every school district in the country would be firing English teachers.

Did I mention that the high school is in danger of losing its accreditation?

In response to the proposed cuts, a group of concerned parents formed a political action group to push for a tax override intended to be used to restore the positions. With the override, each household’s yearly tax bill would increase between $90 and $450, depending on property value. One of my fellow playgroup members asked for my help, so I became the “data guru” for her ward. I was very surprised to learn that this group, using a six-degrees-of-separation methodology, was compiling information on how different people were likely to vote so they could focus their efforts on undecideds. My job was to input the information into a fully functional web-based database that they threw together in a few days. I must be very naïve about politics, because I had no idea a small grassroots group could organize that quickly or efficiently.

Unfortunately, the referendum on the override took place last week, and it failed, with about 60% of the voters opposing the increase. I believe the vote split mostly along age lines, with parents of young children generally in favor and older people generally against. The political group will try to have the override question reinstated on the November ballot, but I don’t think another campaign will change any minds. The “no” voters don’t want their taxes to go up, are upset about the conditions that led to this budget crisis in the first place, and want to work on reform at the federal level instead of funding increases through property taxes. The “yes” voters feel the exact same way, but at the same time realize what a disaster it will be to lose 30 positions from the school district next year.

So now what? Unfortunately, there are not a lot of alternatives to the public school system. There is one private Catholic school, close enough to see from my window. They have a lot of applicants and can afford to restrict enrollment to sincere church supporters, which we are not. There is one private Montessori school, which is reputably good, but tuition is high and the kids would have to transition to another school by fifth grade anyway. There is one charter Montessori school that runs from kindergarten through eighth grade; unfortunately, the waiting list is twice as large as the current school enrollment, and next year several hundred people are expected to apply for fewer than 20 kindergarten places. (By the way, the closest private prep school, perhaps in anticipation of the soon-to-increase applicant pool, recently changed its name from the unfortunate “Governor Dummer Academy” to the more blue-blood sounding “Governor’s Academy.” Damn it, I was really looking forward to sending my kids to “Dummer.”)

I have friends who have decided to move over this, and others who are thinking about moving. That seems drastic to me. This is a wealthy community. If we can’t get this right, than who can? Certainly, with “school choice” programs in place, schools have to respond to community needs to continue to attract students, but at some point doesn’t the community have to turn around and support the schools as well? I’m starting to fear that the community gets the schools it deserves, and our long disengagement from these issues proves that we don’t deserve a whole lot. I include myself in the “disengaged” group, because this is the first school issue I’ve followed in the five years I’ve lived here.

The one good thing that came out of this election was an increased awareness, as demonstrated by the high voter turnout: 46%. If even some of the no-voters are willing to work with the rest of us on finding some solution to the school crisis that does not include raising property taxes, it will be a bonus.

What this really brings home, for me, is a sense that we cannot entrust our children’s education to the schools, whether they live out their tenure in the public schools or they end up at Andover or Exeter. However they spend their days at school, we’re going to have to make sure they get reinforcement in the basics and critical thinking skills at home. I’m not talking about formal sit-down lessons, but enrichment that’s integrated into home life. I hope I will know how to do that.

Even so, I hope they reinstate foreign language, music, and English by the time they get into middle school, because that’s a lot of curriculum to cover on the weekends.

Speaking of clubs…

This weekend, my friend hosted a surprise 60th-birthday party for her boyfriend at a private club in town.

Let’s put aside, for the moment, the fact that a woman who is exactly my age has a significant other who is about to be 60, and when they appear in public together people DON’T chastise him angrily for defiling a flower of young womanhood, which is what I would expect to happen if I dated a 60-year-old. Let’s talk instead about the boys’ version of a club.

The D——- Club (to use the 19th-century convention) is located a block from our house. We pass it every time we go to or return from town. It’s marked only by a discreet sign, and it has no web presence whatsoever, so for years we’ve wondered what the heck it was.

The first time we passed it, Husband said, “I want a club.”

“You?” I asked, pointing out that he was neither sporty nor social nor philanthropic, the typical raisons d’être for men’s clubs.

“I’m not interested in any of that. I just want a place where I can retire after dinner, drink brandy, and smoke cigars. Like Bertie Wooster and the Drones Club.”

The Palliser novels are rife with men’s clubs of that description, but I told Husband that outside of London or New York or the nineteenth century, that kind of club was probably no longer in vogue.

Fast forward to this weekend, when we got to see the inside of the club and found out that it is in fact a place where men go to hang out, drink brandy and smoke cigars. By design it eschews any sporty, business, or philanthropic purpose.

That started me thinking. What if the mothers’ club raised dues, bought themselves a cool little clubhouse, and turned it into a private bar and lounge for mothers to use to socialize their cares away? Children, men, and improving activities would be expressly forbidden. Wouldn’t that be better than a playgroup, a newsletter, and a Hallowe’en party?

Mothers who drink. Can you imagine the consternation?

Last week, I attended a performance of Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d’amore at the Deutsche Staatsoper, on the east side of Berlin. The Staatsoper, for all its grandeur on the outside, turned out to be kind of dowdy on the inside. I imagine it wasn’t kept up well during the Communist years, and they just haven’t gotten around to redoing it, what with the thousands of other construction projects ongoing in that side of town. The hall was very short, so that the side balconies were approximately the same length as the back balcony. That made for a wonderfully intimate space where every patron had an excellent view of all the other patrons, as well as a close view of the stage.

I was not at all familiar with the opera, which was sung in Italian and super-titled in German. This necessitated some linguistic gymnastics (lingnastics?) in which I had to mentally translate the supertitles from German to English, mostly successfully, and then just for fun tried to match that meaning to the Italian words, mostly unsuccessfully. I got the gist of the plot, though: boy meets girl; boy loves girl; boy enlists in the army to get enough money to buy a love potion to get the girl; misunderstanding, misunderstanding, misunderstanding; boy gets girl.

The whole thing was pretty silly, but there was one point in the performance where the audience transitioned from “mildly entertained” to “enraptured.” Thanks to the house configuration I was able to observe the audience closely as it happened, which made it all very communal. Usually the soprano is the star of the opera, especially if she is pretty. This soprano was gorgeous, but for some reason it was the young tenor who held everyone’s attention. He sang a very pretty romantic aria in the second act, and you could just feel everyone’s focus sharpen on him. The last part of the aria was a capella, and the house grew absolutely silent. The tenor indulged in a long, dramatic pause before the final flourish…all eyes were fixed on him…and some idiot blew his nose. It didn’t ruin the effect, though. I think the crowd was even more partial to him after that. He got the most applause at the end, and the curtain call was so long I think I sprained my hand. I don’t know if the excessive applause was a European thing, or if he really was that good.

When I returned home I did a typical New England thing and attended a literary talk. (From the nineteenth-century novels of which I’m so fond, I get the impression that New England bluestockings of that era were always rushing around attending “improving lectures.” The Bostonians, which I finished on my trip and which was every bit as good as I had anticipated, lampooned this tendency.) Port City was putting on a literary festival. It was a spectacular effort, with multiple events scheduled every hour. The two talks I was most interested in attending, X. J. Kennedy and Richard Russo, were scheduled for the same hour. I chose the latter.

Russo wrote two books that I adored. The first, Straight Man, belongs to what is now a veritable subgenre of “frustrated English professor novels.” (See David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World for exemplars.) As a former frustrated English professor, I enjoy reading about others’ pain. The second, Empire Falls, won a Pulitzer prize and was made into an HBO movie, which I have not yet seen. Russo is best known for Nobody’s Fool, which was adapted into a movie starring Paul Newman.

Russo spoke in the downtown Unitarian church, which I had never before entered. It was similar in style to the two other Protestant churches I’ve toured in Port City: plain, with hard straight box pews and big clear-glass windows. Russo’s microphone intermittently cut out, and he periodically eyed the high pulpit, concerned that he would be forced to deliver his lecture from there.

He read excerpts from his new short story collection, The Whore’s Child. Now, I am a fan of the short story, but more in theory than in principle. In other words, I have enormous respect for the power of the short story but strenuously avoid reading them. Once I drag myself metaphorically kicking and screaming into a story, though, I usually find something to admire. Thus I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Russo read three excerpts, and was tickled when he uttered a curse that had probably never before been proclaimed publicly in church. (Even Unitarians have their limits.)

What with the opera and the literary festival, I feel decidedly improved.

Yesterday Port City, in its usual half-hearted way, dug itself out from yesterday’s snowstorm. As I strolled Aitch downtown, dodging moguls, I had occasion to recall his first few weeks with us, in frigid February ‘04, and remember how awful it is to wheel a stroller on snowy streets. Most people are pretty good about shoveling, but inevitably you run into a property line, where the adjacent occupants can’t agree on who owns the last foot, or the curb cut where the plows have piled snow from the street, so you can’t get out. There’s nothing worse than having to backtrack an entire block because your stroller is trapped. I think this is sufficient excuse for having let a few “oh, shits” escape my lips, even though I have been valiantly trying to contain that sort of ejaculation in the vicinity of Little Pitcher.

Of course, Aitch picked up on it right away, but he waited until later to spring it. “Oh, shit,” he said as I was putting him into his snowsuit later that day. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit.” He looked at me expectantly. He wasn’t giggling with glee, which meant that he didn’t realize it was something “bad,” but he was anticipating some praise for picking up on my expression.

I tried to be cool. “‘Outside’?” I asked, nonchalantly. “Yes, Aitch, we’re going outside.”

“Outside?” he tried on. “No, Mommy. ‘Oh, shit.’”

Oh. Shit.

Anyway, I was boiling with anger at having to walk the stroller on the street because our neighbors, a soon-to-be-defunct chapter of the Knights of Columbus (motto: “Keep Christ in Christmas and strollers in traffic, where the Baby Jesus would have traveled!”), left a portion of their sidewalk impassable and the curb cut to the street obstructed. Then I had a brain wave. “I could come out here with a shovel,” I thought, “and clear the path downtown I use every day. I should do it now, before the snow gets too packed.” So I took Aitch home, grabbed the shovel, wheeled him back along my usual route, and shoveled myself out of every place between here and the business district that the stroller could not fit.

At one point, a young man who was gassing up his car at the station across the street saw me, ran across the street, grabbed the shovel and widened the path down the sidewalk for me. How lovely — someone being nice for no reason at all.

I was a bit disgruntled with myself, because an act like shoveling a neighbor’s walk should proceed from an impulse of generosity like his, and not from irritation, like mine. But maybe the dozens of stroller-piloting parents who pass this way each day will benefit from my random act of selfishness.