Addendum: Jack in the saddle

And another thing: I've had the pleasure of meeting Jack Weil and other members of his family. Great folks. Go Jack!

Aarone update

Aarone's on the front page again. Regardless of the truth of this story, if her name stays on the lips and in the minds of the people, maybe pressure will mount to solve this case. And again, I'm getting a little tired of the smack-talking from Dan Oates.

world of dreams

I dreamt of Kathleen last night, though it was not nearly as poetic and moving as hers about me, and about her house. It was just odd.
I dreamt that Art Spiegelman had died, and I was distraught. The only other person in the dream was Kathleen, consoling me on the carousel of Pullen Park in Raleigh. "How can I live in a world that doesn't have Art Spiegelman in it?" I asked. I woke up whispering frantically, "Spiegelman! Spiegelman!" Thank goodness I don't actually know anyone named Spiegelman, or my husband might have been suspicious. What an odd dream, made more so by the fact that he is very much alive. I suppose the dream is a testament to art and its place in our friend life together, combined with Kathleen's ability always to say and do the right thing, no matter how dire the situation. Every day, I miss Kathleen.

I find that my dreams mostly take place outdoors now, or in places that are not the one in which I live. Empty, cavernous, unsafe feeling rooms. The grocery store. My car. I no longer dream of my old house. It's not my safe space anymore - it's someone else's. I betrayed it.
This house is too small to hold dreams. No hidden spaces like the tiny space next to the steps in the old house, where fairies and leprechauns hid during the day and came up the stairs to give me happy, capricious dreams at night. No nooks like the "reading center" for the girls, where my younger daughter once got her head stuck in the slats of the barrier between it and the ceramic tile a story down, and I nearly had to use vegetable oil on her head to get it out. (Maybe that was more of a nightmare space.) No quarter of a garage stuffed behind the work bench, where I had convinced myself that my dream world's gnomes and trolls lived to come through the floor and haunt me on restless nights.
This house is too straightforward. There's a basement, but we already cleaned the ghosts out. When gnomes and trolls follow one from house to house, one has little need for ghosts. (The basement door would open spontaneously, and more than once, my husband and I heard phantom feet march up the steps. In Boulder, we found a Native American cleansing herb that was supposed to get rid of them. You were supposed to light it, like incense, and carry it around the house. It made the house smell like we'd smoked about an acre of pot. We had to send the children outside. But, we haven't heard the phantom feet since.)
I've purposely kept my room terribly messy; maybe the magic crew lives in there, in the corner behind the mannequin or in the cabinets ten feet up that I can't open, and make my brain glom onto avant-garde artists in my sleep.

Aarone

If Aarone Thompson had been a white girl, you would have heard of her by now. Her case is more chilling than that of Jonbenet Ramsey, the Denver area's winner and still champ in child cause celebre cases. I guess I don't need to keep on going about how there's a deep and disturbing racial divide here, more so than in the South. I started to write about this when Kathleen wrote so movingly about New York's reaction to the death of Nixzmary Brown. Unfortunately, the reaction here to Aarone Thompson has been more muted, in part because the case just isn't as clear-cut, in part because her brown face doesn't fit with Denver's image of itself as a playground for the upscale bourgeoisie.

Aarone (her name has an accent aigu on the "e," but I don't know how to do that with HTML) would be seven years old, if only anyone could find her. She lived with her father and his girlfriend in Aurora, a city next door to Denver, supposedly until the beginning of November. (Her mother, at least at the time, lived in a homeless shelter in Detroit.) For two days, news coverage here revolved around the massive hunt for the sweet-faced little girl who had allegedly wandered off from her home on a freezing cold afternoon, supposedly after a dispute with her father's girlfriend over a cookie.
Two days into the search, the police abruptly called it off. Then came the announcement: Aarone had been gone for a year and a half. She hadn't been seen by the other kids in the house, hadn't been seen by neighbors, hadn't ever been enrolled in school, nothing. A little girl had disappeared into the ether.
Nobody ever has been charged in Aarone's disappearance. Nothing was found in a grim search of her house and yard and surrounding areas for her remains. Friends of her family continued their door-to-door search for a live child. Nothing.
Now, four months later, the police and press have grown eerily quiet. Every once in a while, someone comes forward and swears they have seen Aarone -- getting on a city bus, walking down a sidewalk. For me, there is the equally horrific thought that, if she didn't meet a terrible end nearly two years ago, she's wandering around out there, somewhere in the world. I see her in my dreams sometimes, the little girl with braids and a wry smile. If I were the praying kind, I would do it for her.
This is the first mention of Aarone in the Denver Post in months. The Aurora police chief takes the occasion of the father's girlfriend's arrest on traffic charges to talk some smack about her. I'm going to take the politician's route and avoid saying whether I think this is deserved. Rather, I would ask him to focus his energy on finding this little girl, dead or alive, and rounding up the person or people who might have hurt her. There's always evidence. There's always a way to bring justice to the deserving.

my dream of you

Last night I dreamed that Robin had bought my house in Raleigh. She had furnished it in a way that was totally different from how I had it, and yet it was very beautiful. The curious thing was in my dream it seemed she had arranged it in such a way that all the rooms -- which were very small, are very small in real life -- seemed much bigger. Now that I am awake I realize this was nonsense: the ceilings had grown higher, the rooms had doubled in size. This was like one of those dreams where you find an extra room in your house you had never noticed before.

"I'm so glad," I told Robin in my dream, choking back a sob as I said it, "that you have this house now and I can come and visit sometimes."

A year ago we sold the house, cleaned it, walked out forever. Last year we were driving north on I-95 to a new and unknown life. From spring flowers in North Carolina to piles of snow in Connecticut, all in one day. I thought I had stopped being sad about all that but at this anniversary time it has come back: the feelings I had then, the sadness of saying goodbye. Like when someone dies; you never stop being sad somewhere inside. It's just that daily life covers it up, distracts you.

concerned passers-by

Today I saw a girl nearly get run over by a bus. I was walking to take the subway home to Brooklyn at that beautiful moment of day when the sky is just a shade lighter than midnight blue. I was standing at the curb waiting to cross 42nd Street. Since Times Square is an experience in sensory overload, I didn't notice her at first; instead, I heard a man yell, "Hey, look out!"

"Watch it!" someone else said in a more urgent tone. Since Times Square is also not a place where people usally take a great deal of interest in one another's business, this caught my attention.

And then I saw her, in the middle of 42nd Street, calmly -- no, obliviously -- crossing against the light, amid a stream of cars and the bus, not a city bus but some kind of intercity or tour bus, just feet away. I held my breath, and time seemed to stop for a moment.

And then it was over. The bus driver slowed down and with unusual restraint did not even honk. The girl kept walking, into the stream of cars going the other way, which also managed to miss her. I could see her better now; she had long blonde hair and appeared to be talking on a cell phone. "She never even looked!" someone said behind me.

Addendum: Welcome mat

I have just noticed that I say "Welcome to Colorado" a lot here. Usually when I say it out loud, it's accompanied by an unfortunate finger gesture. I suppose I don't have to tell you that's pretty much how I feel right now.

one for you, nineteen for me

Here in the fair city/county of Denver (motto: "Mild today, snow tomorrow" -- we're covered in snow, and Monday it was in the 70s!), our tax rate is high. I can't even remember what it is; I think I have blocked it out. It's right around 9 percent of everything -- income, property, you name it.

Here are two things our tax money goes to:
1. Parks and Rec. Denver boasts an admirable amount of green space. Washington Park, which is close to our house, is something like 200 acres; and spacewise it's a chump compared with City Park. There's also an extensive system of rec centers complete with indoor pools, workout centers -- the works.
2. Invesco Field at Mile High. This is where the Broncos play. One thing you can say is, Denverites loves them some football. The Denverites who don't give a rat's tuchis about football pay for it too, though.

Here are a couple of things our tax money DOESN'T go to:
1. Public health. We have no health insurance and are woefully short on funds right now, but not so chronically short that we qualify for Medicaid. But because Denver doesn't have a health department, our only option is to go to a clinic that requires a $60 fee up front. My children need to see a doctor and can't go back to school until they have a doctor's note (don't ever get lice, that's all I'm sayin'), and we don't have $60. They haven't been to school all week, and I doubt they'll be back today. Welcome to Colorado!
2. Education. Speaking of school, due to some creative budget rejiggering on the part of Denver Public Schools, our school will suffer a $22,000 shortfall next year. In order to keep all teachers on staff, each of us is going to be required to pay an extra $100 per student (if you're keeping score, that's $200 for us, the ones who can't cough up $60 for a doctor visit). This on top of an endless stream of fundraisers in which we're expected to participate; and coming from a school that managed to maintain an 18:2 student/teacher ratio and a well-stocked library on nothing more than county funding and a fall carnival each year.

Maybe Denver's new motto should be: Fun, yes, but at what price?