Leesburg Essay 4

No Time For Shoes...

Alexander's kindergarten experience has been quite positive so far. Leesburg Elementary employs an intensive reading program called “Steps to Literacy”and the kids have been working hard since the first week of school. As for math, George had a short discussion with the principal during which he satisfied himself that the school is not in the grip of the notorious there's- no- right- answer- all- that- matters- is- problem- solving- and- teamwork approach, which horrifies him as a former math major. We suspect they are talking about science as one day Alexander came home and asked George to teach him how to be a scientist over the weekend. Alexander likes the teachers and the bus has been OK, although inconsistent in terms of when it shows up. Some of the drivers appear to be more than reckless when they're trying to turn around in our neighborhood's numerous cul-de-sacs. One letdown: the teachers have no time to teach shoe-tying anymore, so we're on our own.

There was briefly a possibility that Alexander would be redistricted next year to the school I was interested in having him attend in the first place—the one that is right behind our street (Frances Hazel Reid Elementary). Leesburg (the seat of Loudoun County) is growing so fast that building schools is a constant activity. Loudoun has been one of the top growing counties in the country in the past few years, it has one of the highest median incomes, and some pretty big families. Each time a new school opens they rearrange the enrollment at the existing schools and there's a big bureaucratic process for making the decisions. Many of the parents at Leesburg Elementary were up in arms about our little section of the school district getting sent to Hazel Reid, so it looks like we'll remain where we are.

In some ways it would have been nice to have him redistricted back to our neighborhood, but at Hazel Reid our kids would probably count as low-income undesirables, as the kids that currently go to that school are bused from wealthier neighborhoods further afield. Plus, Leesburg Elementary is a “Blue Ribbon” school under No Child Left Behind, so it's actually very well regarded. Maybe we should have been fighting hard to stay there, but I'm optimistic that Alexander and Nora will do fine so long as their school is within reasonable bounds of competence.

I know that when kids start attending school every day they come home with all sorts of illnesses, but this fall has been ridiculous. After a couple of weeks of seemingly unrelated sicknesses (hives, ear infections, vomiting, fevers, hacking coughs, and most recently conjunctivitis), followed by a chest x-ray and a blood test, the doctor told us that Alexander had probably contracted mononucleosis. Okay, we all know that he spends a lot of time with girls, but he's a little young for something I used to relegate to the “kissing disease,” to be caught mainly by overactive teenagers.

Except perhaps I shouldn't be so hasty. This summer on our car trips we introduced the kids to the soundtrack to ”The Sound of Music,“ which quickly climbed to the top of the charts for them. As it turns out, Alexander's friend Cathryn down the street is a big fan, and Alexander has been known to go down to Cathryn's house to watch the movie. Cathryn's mom told me that she has seen the two of them dancing around very formally in the family room while watching the movie, so perhaps they've been playing the Baron and the Governess?

Because Alexander managed to contract a virus most often associated with college kids, we had to put off for several weekends a hiking trip with Aunt Felicie and Uncle Greg. When we were finally about to make it, we took the same waterfall hike in the Catoctin Mountains that Nora liked last time. Nora is finally clear on who Aunt Felicie and Uncle Greg are, although a little shaky on James (her godfather, currently attending basic training in Fort Benning in Georgia) and Joe (at college at Shippensburg in Pennsylvania). We see Felicie and Greg quite often, though. For other relatives viewed less often, the jury is still out, which is reasonable given the sheer number of relatives that the kids have, a volume that has even Alexander—who of course has a three-year head start on Nora—fishing for names. Nora has trouble remembering who Aunt Gabrielle is, and so, grasping a straws, she has been heard to refer to her as “the other Aunt Felicie.”

We had an unusually cold start to the fall and thus the kids were inside more than I expected them to be, but—I'm sure this warms my mother's librarian heart—they discovered the library, both the one in the town and the one at Alexander's school. Nora briefly enjoyed going to the mercifully short story hour for little kids, but then there was an incident that reminded me of taking Alexander to classes or story hours when he was her age. One day Nora and I were at the story hour with a sizable contingent of nannies and their charges, and the nannies would not control the kids, so they were standing up, walking around and generally making it difficult for other kids to hear or participate. Nora was clearly disturbed by this and has refused to go back ever since. Alexander never wanted to go anywhere with other kids when he was her age, but he's completely different now, so it's hard to say whether this objection to other children on Nora's part is temporary or not. I can't imagine, however, hiring a nanny (or a “manny,” although this particular group seemed to be young Slavic girls) and not requiring her to teach my kid how to behave. Hearkening back to Mary Poppins, this would seem to be part of the job description.

At the library I picked up a copy of Dr. Seuss's “The Lorax,” which is a pro-environment anti-unrestrained-capitalism treatise. I have a vague recollection of filing into the auditorium in elementary school and watching the movie version for more than one year in a row, so perhaps my indoctrination started early and my ten years at EPA really weren't a fluke. The kids loved this book, Nora especially enjoying the gloppity glopp and gluppity glupp mucking up the pond of the Swomee Swans. I'm not sure that the kids got the main point of the book, however, as after reading it they began to run around and pretend to, as Alexander puts it, “axe” down some trees. I suspect that Alexander has some definite vegetarian traits, however, as he prefers to eat cheese, doesn't like hamburgers, and told me he didn't want any turkey for Thanksgiving because he didn't want any turkeys to die (although he ended up eating quite a bit of turkey, and doesn't seem to care one iota about the death of chickens). I'm not sure about Nora, although she is iffy on cheese, loves peanut butter, and pasta has sometimes made her cry.

I've noticed an interesting theme in a lot of children's books, although the denouement is not always the same: a bunch of animals of varying sizes and temperaments and without invitation pile one at a time into some container (a canoe, a mitten, an umbrella, a moose's antlers), leading to an undesirable outcome when one finally tips the balance. Sometimes it's one of the littler ones that manages to bring on the end (e.g., hummingbird); sometimes one of the biggest (e.g., moose). Somewhat differently, in “Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose” (Dr. Seuss), there is no tipping point except in the moose's own mind; the moose, reaching the end of his rope, rids himself of the whole bunch of visitors sheltering in his antlers when he realizes that it's the time of year for him to shed the antlers (all the guests end up stuffed on some hunter's wall, adding an element of vengeance that the other, more gentle, stories don't include). One of the books (“The Mitten” by Jan Brett, in which all the animals pile into a little boy's mitten) claims that it is a Ukrainian folk story. What is this basic, recurring storyline meant to signify?

Alexander has been spending a lot of time on arts and crafts and drawing, with which he occupied himself a lot last winter when he wasn't spending much time outside or with his friends. The walls of our house have recently been covered with taped-up drawings of pumpkins, ghosts, and Frankenstein monsters for Halloween, and now turkeys and cornucopias, morphing quickly into stockings and Santas.

Nora has been drawing a lot as well and her blobs are beginning to actually resemble people. Watching her draw, it dawned on me that she uses her left hand. Not only that, but she has developed on her own that upside-down writing style used by lefties that gets marker all over the hand. Both my father and his sister, Aunt Marcia, are lefties, so if it's an inherited trait I guess it wouldn't be surprising, but despite having these close relatives that are lefties, I regard it as a strange affliction that in some cases requires special accommodations. My father points out that Aunt Marcia learned to write with her hand in a normal position and her handwriting is quite nice (much better than mine!), so I guess there's hope on this front. Although what about scissors: if Nora is a lefty, am I supposed to buy her special scissors, or is this some sort of marketing ploy?

Halloween is taken very seriously in this neighborhood, so it's good that it was a beautiful evening for trick-or-treating. George, Alexander and Nora went out with a bunch of other kids and parents. Alexander was dressed as an ice cream man (Good Humor man) and Nora as an ice cream sandwich. It was Nora's first real Halloween as last year she refused to wear a costume (the original idea last year was for Nora to be Yoda to Alexander's Darth Vader). George said Nora handled the trick-or-treating like a trooper and was very excited to tell everyone that she was an ice cream “Sammich,” and then she abruptly told George she was tired and wanted to go home.

There But For The Grace Of God Go I...Back To Best Buy and Other Random Events

One night George and I were in the basement catching up on the second season of something or other on DVD, when he heard an ominous “drip drip drip” coming from the ceiling just above the 62-inch Toshiba HDTV. I can only imagine what we would have faced had this dripping started in the middle of the night and remained undiscovered for a day or more. George, who had hoped to devote some time this fall to rebuilding the unpleasant deck floor and ridding ourselves of an unwanted shed (it's pretty new and we can't even give it away), instead started cutting into the basement ceiling and upstairs wall in an ultimately hopeless search for the source of the leak. Said source remained elusive until the second visit by the plumber, who discovered after much head scratching and a visit from his boss that the line to the ice maker in the refrigerator was the culprit. We don't even use our ice maker because George hates the taste of the ice, so who would have thought?

We hear a lot about poker these days, but little about the game of bunco that dominates the suburbs. This silly dice game is a popular way for women (mainly, it seems) to get together, gossip, eat, and drink. I managed to avoid playing in Berlin but here I've been sucked into the neighborhood group. A number of the women are around my age and thus were teenagers and young adults in the 80s. A recent bunco session had me marveling over the ability of my college roommate Julie to smoke while spraying vast amounts of Aquanet to hold her Big Hair in place during a humid fraternity party; how is it that she managed not to light herself and the whole dorm on fire?

Last summer when we were at George's parents' house in Ridgewood, New Jersey, George befriended a rather large spider building a web around the back porch light. When we went out for a walk at night he would stand and observe this spider patiently rebuilding his web and doing it pretty much the same way every night. George was clearly sad to leave the spider behind when we left New Jersey. Late this summer, however, a similar spider appeared in our front yard and proceeded every evening (at 19:00, give or take five minutes) to rebuild its web between the dogwood and blue spruce in the front yard. George not only observed it at work, he actually began to play with the spider by throwing bugs at the web to see if they would stick and then he would watch the spider roll up its prey in silk at an amazing speed. He then began musing about the technical requirements for filming the spider at work, and even tried doing so using the night-vision setting on our camcorder. Realizing that he would need a National Geographic-level setup, rather than just a simple Nikon SLR with a tripod, he abandoned the idea. I can tell that he's still bothered by his inability to translate his vision into reality. (By the way, his vision included putting his resulting video clip on this blog, so consider yourselves spared from the amateur version of the Discovery Channel.)

The most unexpected street food has appeared in Leesburg; a neighbor who lived in Stuttgart for a couple of years alerted us to its existence. I think I noted in one of my Berlin essays that the fast food worth eating in Berlin (other than American fast food) was Turkish Doener Kebaps, a sort of flatbread sandwich that usually features shaved lamb, salad, and some kind of tangy (yogurt-based, I believe) sauce. Some random guy from Hamburg in northern Germany has opened up a cart in a parking lot in Leesburg that features Doeners made from shaved beef with a choice of sauces. He even has the makings for a traditional German children's drink called Apfelschorle, which is a mixture of apple juice and sparkling mineral water. He's now added Milka chocolate bars, traditional German coffee and cake (Kaffee und Kuchen), and the notorious Berliner currywurst. This is just about the only food that I miss from Germany (other than the full-fat yogurt), so I still can't believe it showed up here, some 40 or so miles outside of D.C.

Couch Potato Update

We've seen a few good movies lately through Netflix: “The Squid and the Whale” with Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney, “Match Point,” which is a recent Woody Allen film, and “Capote,” for which Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar last year. The latter was particularly interesting as I reread “In Cold Blood” last year and it was pretty chilling. The gallows humor in the movie comes as Truman waits for his doomed interviewee to be hanged—through endless stays and appeals—so that he can finally finish his book.

We also caught“The Passenger,” which is a 1970s movie starring Jack Nicholson in his skinny years. It had to be one of the slowest and most inexplicable movies we've watched in a long time, to be surpassed only by ”The New World,” directed by Terrence Malick. This last film purports to be the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, although the director couldn't bring himself to let anyone say her name—until the colonists apparently renamed her “Rebecca.” Like other Terrence Malick movies (“The Thin Red Line” or “Days of Heaven”), “The New World” includes little dialog but lots of shots of nature and people standing around in contemplation of such. Before we had viewed the movie, George made the mistake of popping it into the DVD player to check whether the subtitles functioned on our TV (after he reassembled the home theater post-leak): he slowly went mad as he realized that there was no dialog to subtitle.

Two of our favorite TV shows—“Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica”—are now in their third seasons and in serious danger of “jumping the shark,” so we continue to hold our collective breath. (For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it refers to the point in the evolution of the show “Happy Days” when Fonzie jumped an actual shark on water skis, sending the series into terminal decline. There's actually a website devoted entirely to debating the point at which various television series jumped the shark and became unwatchable.) We weren't sure where Battlestar Galactica was headed this season (for your own look, check out their website), but it luckily took a turn in the third episode—a turn back to the fleet, rather than the cold, marginally habitable planet where they'd been hanging for a few episodes, shivering, setting off bombs and waiting for the Galactica to return.

The previous season of “Lost” (season 2) included this bizarre feature of a supposed doomsday button that had to be pressed every 108 minutes or Something Undefined But Awful Would Happen. It wasn't clear whether this was just some vast psychological experiment for our favorite castaways, but it's easy for us to see how one might get caught up in such a bind because Nora briefly exhibited such behavior when sitting near the computer and listening to a set of children's music that I put together. Every once in awhile the computer's screen saver would come on even though the music was still playing. Nora was convinced that this meant that everything had turned off, and she would rush over anxiously and jiggle a key or two to make the screen saver go away.

Although I didn't watch it, there was a blast from my past on the daytime soap opera“General Hospital” this month as characters Luke and Laura Spencer got remarried. You may remember the hoopla back in 1981 or so when Luke Spencer and Laura Baldwin got married. I was a big GH fan at the time but I find it incredible that people still could find them intriguing. At least Tony Geary, the actor who plays Luke, has much better hair than the afro he had back in the 80s, but the weird thing is that as far as I can tell, Genie Francis (now probably in her mid-40s), the actress who played Laura, has not changed at all—exactly like a soap opera character! I haven't watched a soap opera since about 1981, but I suspect that my grandmother, who liked to watch her “story” (I believe it was “The Young and the Restless”), would be horrified by the subjects covered regularly nowadays on daytime TV.

Being a life long radio fan, my Grundig World Band transistor short-wave radio remains one of the best purchases I've ever made. It's about 11 years old and still going strong although the dial is broken so I'm no longer sure what station it is on and the cover for the battery compartment is gone and thus the batteries occasionally come tumbling out. I've used the shortwave function sporadically, such as traveling overseas, where it also functioned as a travel alarm. I used the regular FM radio all the time at work (before MP3s were common!) and then had it set constantly to the BBC World broadcast when we were in Germany, so I could get some occasional news in my language of fluency. I don't know what I'll do when the thing finally coughs and dies. It's probably been made obsolete and thus is no longer available, although I see advertisements for a lot of emergency crank-turned radios.

George has acquired an IPod Nano, and has begun loading music onto it. I have the perfect playlist in mind for him. Although George is an unrepentant neocon, he happens to love anti-war music. My playlist starts out perhaps with Nena's “99 Red Balloons” (in German, if I can get it), “Ohio” from Crosby Stills Nash and Young, “For What it's Worth” from Buffalo Springfield, “War” from Edwin Starr, and maybe a smattering of “Bullet the Blue Sky” from U2 or “Born in the USA” from Bruce. Enough such tunes would allow him hours of soothing memories of protests past. Suggestions welcome.

Try A Little Diplomacy

Diplomacy is a tricky concept. The word itself carries with it an aura of civility, maturity and forward motion, although it rarely reaches this exalted level in practice. Because it is sometimes implied that only trigger-happy America does not practice diplomacy, I thought I would note for my readers some of the more subtle, non-obvious uses of diplomatic (i.e., non-war) solutions to problems around the world. So as you Americans head out today, try out some of these approaches as perfected by current foreign leaders:

• Publicly rule out one whole category of non-violent tools for encouraging behavior change. Back in September, France's President Jacques Chirac ever-so-helpfully eased the international pressure on Iran regarding its suspected nuclear program in an interview before a UN General Assembly session in New York, saying: "I am never in favor of sanctions." That's right, make sure your opponent knows that true sticks will not be employed, leaving only carrots in your arsenal.

• Retaliate for perceived offenses by throwing out your opponents and cutting commercial ties. During their current dispute, reminiscent of Cold War “diplomacy,” Georgia and Russia have arrested each other's “spies” and tossed them out, cut transportation and postal links, embargoed wine imports, and upped the rhetoric. On October 3 Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated: “One must not feed off Russia and insult it. The Georgian leadership must understand this.” A related approach is the following:

• Make small, weird incidents even worse by overreaction on both sides. On October 17th, the Polish Coast Guard fired warning shots at a German tourist ship after it tried to evade inspection in the Polish port of Swinoujscle and made a run for the German border with three Polish customs officers on board. Polish officials accused the vessel, the Adler Dania, of concealing tax-free cigarettes and booze; the Germans accused the Poles of overreacting, “Are Our Neighbors Insane?” mused Bild, German's largest newspaper.

• Show off your stuff in defiance of the community. As tension and concern over North Korea's nuclear intentions continued to grow this fall, North Korea upped the ante by scheduling a nuclear test. North Korea's Foreign Ministry had the following to say: “...nuclear weapons will serve as a reliable war deterrent for protecting the supreme interests of the state and the security of the Korean nation from the U.S. threat of aggression.” When the powers that be speak sternly, up the ante.

• Leave the hard things to others, especially those who can be continually opposed and vilified. In October, a number of Arab states with close ties to the U.S. let the Secretary of State know that they don't feel comfortable taking a stand against militancy in the Middle East because they don't want to set themselves up in direct opposition to other Arab states or movements. These nations then informed the U.S. that the solution to the Middle East problem is American leadership to solve the Arab-Israeli crisis.

• Pass laws addressing events in other peoples' pasts. France's National Assembly this fall passed a law making it a crime to deny Turkish genocide against the Armenians. It's much easier than addressing your own pressing issues.

• Agree to joint action and then refuse to carry it out. South Korea and China are only the latest example of such behavior, as they spent the fall hemming and hawing about the proper response to bad behavior by North Korea. Talk is cheap, and temporarily soothing for everyone.

• Bribe and undercut your neighbors in order to gain coveted jobs. Venezuela's tactic for gaining a seat on the U.N. Security Council, although ultimately unsuccessful.

• Claim you've been dissed. Like the Sudan, which kicked out U.N. observers because of statements made on U.N. officials' personal websites that appear ed to insult the morale and capability of the Sudanese army.

• Kill off those you can't shut up. Take a page from Syria's playbook...or for that matter Russia's, whose “enemies” seem to find themselves victims of “mysterious” poisonings. This is an extreme approach, but there seem to be very few repercussions in the international arena. I suggest you check with your local police.

• Make public statements about the personal odor and religious affiliations of your opponents. There was a stench at the United Nations in September, according to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and President Bush was responsible for it. Chavez stated that the smell of the devil tainted the lectern where Bush stood the day before and that it continued to smell of sulfur the next day.

• If all else fails, invent a new grammatical category. If you need to cover up your lack of progress in problem-solving, try a tactic perfected by the U.N. This massive bureaucracy has invented an entire new category of verb; one that implies action where none exists, exemplified by the word “rehatting.” In the context of the conflict in Sudan, this non-action verb means replacing African Union troops without a mandate to do anything with blue-hatted United Nations troops without a mandate to do anything.

Alternatively, if you're interested in checking out the opinions of someone who displays sense concerning foreign affairs, I suggest that you try out Anne Applebaum, whose column is carried in the Washington Post (she also has her own web page). She wrote a great book about the Soviet Union called “Gulag,” and stands out as a genuine adult amongst all the blowhards on both sides.

Regression?

Alexander has developed this bad habit of lunging across the table to get things or point out something in a book (I sometimes read to the kids during meals) and has recently spilled his milk more times than I can count, so I occasionally make him go back to using a sippy cup, a circumstance for which I wrote the following little ditty, sung to the tune of BINGO:

There was a boy who had a cup

His Mommy made him use it

S – I – P – P – Y

S – I – P – P – Y

S – I – P – P – Y

His Mommy made him use it

He spilled his milk oh everywhere

His Mommy made him use it

S – I – P – P – Y

S – I – P – P – Y

S – I – P – P – Y

His Mommy made him use it