My daughter was playing with her play-doh.  She has a mold which makes cute little 3-D teddy bears out of the stuff.  I was sitting on the sofa and she brought over one of her play-doh teddy bear creations. I grasped it by the bottom and exclaimed, “Ohhh look, it’s a cute little teddy bear….” as I tilted the bear up towards its head, I noticed the entire space above the nose had been smashed in repeatedly with a pen, creating a mutant teddy bear with 8 eyes.  “It’s an alien teddy bear” my daughter explained.

I don’t recall laughing that hard in a long, long time.

 

 

For the second Thanksgiving in a row, my toddler daughter fell off a chair and injured herself almost necessitating a visit to the emergency room.  Falling out of chairs isn’t at all unusual for her, all last year she was falling out of chairs several times a week, but would always catch herself so she would get a bump and cry but no injury.  I was actually starting to be concerned that she had a neurological problem and/or a pathological need to test the limits of gravity.

Last year, just as we sat down to a Thanksgiving dinner for 16 people that I and several others spent all day cooking, my daughter fell out of the chair and SMACK on the ground, she started screaming and holding her arm strangely.  I thought she may have broken it, and screamed at my poor mother-in-law (who was having a conversation with someone else) to tell me where the nearest hospital was (more than an hour away), the result of which, on top of all the holiday stress the poor woman already experiences, caused her to burst into tears along with my daughter who as it turned out, didn’t have a broken arm, just a sore one.

This year, the night before Thanksgiving, my daughter fell out of my mother-in-law’s recliner, SMACK on her FACE.  She cut both lips, blood everywhere.  I thought she may have knocked a tooth out because I couldn’t see in her mouth very well.  We cleaned her up, she cried for an hour, her lips swelled up like Angelina Jolie on collagen, but they stopped bleeding and all her teeth were accounted for; she ran around chasing the dog shortly thereafter.  I, however, needed more than my share of holiday liquor that night.

Next year she is only sitting in bean bags.
 

I guess being alienated from your community is so common now, it’s being used as a sales pitch.  The letter below is a response I sent to Colorado Public Radio regarding a letter they sent to me (and presumably also my neighbors) recently.

————-Begin Letter——————————————–

Today I received one of your letters asking for support in the mail.  As I love CPR and listen to it almost exclusively, you will be getting a support check from me.  However, I thought you might want to tell your marketing department they may want to alter the pitch of the letter when they are sending them to new urbanist communities like mine in Colorado.

 

The letter begins “There was a time when “community” conjured up images of town meetings on village greens.  We rocked on our front porches, bought lemonade from the kid next door, and knew the names of every dog on the block.  But times have changed. Sometimes we barely get to know our neighbors before we (or they) move on.  The kid next door is more liekly to have a website than a lemonade stand.  Still, the need for community is strong in us, so we have redefined it to fit our lives…”

 

Here in my community, and I know also in many of the other new urbanist neighborhoods in Colorado, these “times” are back.  We have town meetings, although in our town hall and not our village green (which we also have).  We do all sit on our front porches.  We all know our neighbors.  And I know every kid on my block, the block behind me, and the blocks on the other side of the neighborhood, as well as their dogs.  Admittedly, I’ve only seen kids selling lemonade at a stand here once, which was last summer.

 

The idea of longing for community may be effective in most of Colorado’s sterile beige box subdivisions, but it won’t work here, we actually have one.

 

Best Regards,
Petra Spiess

 

———————————————————

 

A little snotty I guess, but I thought it was amusing.

Sometimes…I don’t know how to explain things we do in my neighborhood.  One of my neighbors related this story:

Her long time friend had a boa constrictor, Ruby, for 8 years (which is actually a short time, boas can live 20 years plus).  Ruby went from cold-blooded to just plain cold the other night.  Her friend lives in a townhouse, and didn’t have any place he could properly inter his long and beefy friend, so being the nice, caring, somewhat twisted person my neighbor is, she volunteered her yard for Ruby’s burial.  The funeral was attended by her, her 4 year old daughter, another neighbor (who quipped, “yeah I just went over there for pizza and this is what I get”), her husband, and their 4 year old daughter, and the long time friend.

Her friend apparently dug the grave, and placed his departed friend inside. They all took turns shovelling dirt in.  Then they gathered around, lit a candle–a scented one as boa constrictors are large snakes–and recited:

Clark Griswold’s Eulogy for Aunt Edna from Vacation

I swear I am not making this up.  

This is one of the ways I know I belong in this neighborhood–it’s populated by kind hearted, sweet and twisted Gen Xers. 

My mother and I stood in a dark hospital room next to the prostrate and still form of my stepfather. A respirator–breathing for him–rasped and beeped urgently and alarmingly at seemingly random intervals.  A small computer monitor next to the hospital bed provided a constant yellow and black readout of my stepfather’s level of consciousness–the numbers range from 0 to 100, 100 being conscious.  His number was in the 30s. This would not be a problem if he had been sedated, but it had been a week since they had turned off the medication and he wasn’t waking up.  It had been more than a week since his heart surgery and the development of pneumonia cascading into multiple organ failure, landing him in the ICU with tubes snaking out from every possible angle, tubes keeping him alive.

A puppy aged but sincere neurologist explained that he had performed a brain wave scan and it may show irreversible brain damage.  He was compassionate, eloquent, and not definitive, but what he said boiled down to this: If he doesn’t wake up in two days he is a vegetable.

 
After that, we left, and started talking about memorial arrangements and the bizarre logistics that come with death.  Memorize how to spell the word “mortuary” because someday, you may have to look it up in the yellow pages after your brain has been totally scrambled by momentous loss, but decisions still have to be made.

 
The next morning, my stepfather woke up and asked for a glass of water. One week later, he asked for a strawberry Blizzard and if my mom had paid the insurance bill.  Things are still dicey and his recovery is slow, but this experience has convinced me to add an addendum to my living will: After you’re sure I’m brain dead, wait a week.

I love my neighborhood for a variety of reasons, but the foremost one is my neighbors. They are hilarious. I had coffee this morning with the neighborhood ladies–all moms of small children like me–and we were talking about birthdays since mine is forthcoming. One of my neighbors who has 3 children under 6 just recently had her birthday, and related that it wasn’t exactly her best. She had just finished changing a nasty poopy diaper on her youngest when her oldest shouted “nasty poop alert” which caused her to shoot straight up with indignance, and forced a heartfelt cry from her tired mommy breast:

“I shouldn’t have to wipe asses on my birthday!”.

Amen sister.