That which shall not be named

It’s a sad day here. The flags at all the schools are flying at half-mast, and nobody has to ask why.
I’ve never written about the long shadow the Columbine shootings still cast on this area, but they do. Platte Canyon High School is a little farther away from the city than Columbine (which is in Littleton, a Denver suburb), but I know exactly where it is. It’s in a little mountain idyll about an hour away. I’ve passed it several times as I’ve driven through there, fantasizing about living nearby and wondering whether maybe, one day, my own children will go to school there. Now, I don’t know. I don’t want my children going to any school that has ghosts. I know it sounds bad, but there it is.
A story about Columbine still makes the paper almost every day – a lawsuit, someone still recovering from the trauma, grieving parents sharing their stories. But when people talk of Columbine, they rarely say the name. They talk of it in hushed tones – “Nobody wants another … you know.” And the Littleton Historical Museum, in a marvelously optimistic omission, includes absolutely nothing about it in its exhibits. People know they need to remember it, but they want to forget it. It’s a kind of evil that should be eradicated, pushed aside at all costs. And now all the emotions have been forced to the forefront.
Right now, what I feel is deep anger. What repulsive waste of air does something like this? Barges into a classroom, takes girls hostage, has his way with them, kills one? What do you do if you’re that girl’s parents, or her twin brother? The gunman is dead; where do you direct your anger, outward or inward? And what can the rest of us do about it? I feel totally helpless, as do many parents today. How can you feel good about sending your children to school?
Today, as my daughters played on the playground, I stood outside and watched them. Usually I just drop them off, but today I waited with them and gave them big, extra-long hugs before they went inside. I haven’t told them anything about the shooting, and I’m not sure when I will. This is the kind of evil with which parents, not children, should concern themselves.

It's all about the elevation

The mountains got their first snow Thursday, so yesterday (Saturday) we took a look.



At roughly 7,500 feet above sea level, it's fall ...



But at 10,000 feet, decidedly winter.

Photos c. 2006 Steven D. Dodds II

What happens here doesn't stay here

Needless to say, this has been huge news here, and its gruesomeness put it on the national stage, I guess. Here is the photo of the couple. What makes news here, makes news everywhere. JonBenet, Columbine ... yup. But not Aarone Thompson, who is still missing after nearly a year, the trail completely cold, especially now that one of the people of interest in the case is dead. Shely Lowe died in May, and the stories about her death are the most recent ones I can find anywhere about the case. So sad.

Here Is New York

"No one should come to New York to live unless he is prepared to be lucky."

I find my thoughts returning this line from E.B. White's famous essay quite often, for there are a number of ways to look at it. Luck seems to rule one's life in large and small ways to a greater extent than elsewhere, although I am not entirely sure why this is so -- perhaps it is simply the greater density of everything, including possibility. Missing your train by seconds. Finding a $20 bill on the street. Being struck and killed by a falling piece of building. Finding a terrific novel you've never heard of in a pile of books on the street. Getting on the subway car with the crazy person with the knife. Being caught in a torrential downpour on the way to an important interview. Having the job of your dreams. Eating a marvelous falafel sandwich. Getting sick and dying. Becoming a famous performance artist. Being hit by a bus. Getting a cheap ticket to the opera. Such things could happen almost everywhere (some of them, anyway) yet they seem more likely to happen here. The hand of fate lies heavier; the line between happiness and utter disaster seems narrow and easily crossed; the normal existential worries of life seem magnified in a truly alarming way. This has seemed so to me ever since moving here but seems even more so now, for we have just upped the ante of pushing our luck: we are in the process of buying an apartment.

And it is a process. I feel like someone who has been hit in the head, perhaps by a small piece of falling building, confronted with a series of tasks of increasing improbability. I make lists and stare at them dolefully.

Do we really have to move? Again?

Is the crazy bank really going to lend us that?

Can this really be happening? Or is it just a dream?

I'm having his baby

During this entry, I will embrace my inner “Yakov Smirnoff of Colorado” one more time. God, even he finally dropped that shtick.

In North Carolina, when it came time to birth your baby, people would ask you, “Which hospital are you going to?” This seems like a logical question, yes? But here in Colorado, people ask you, “Where are you planning to have your baby?” (Vatta state!)
This is a different question, because the alternatives are a) in one of about 10 hospitals or b) at home. And here in the Denver area, most people I know choose the latter. Home births, and midwives, are extremely popular here. The only person I knew in North Carolina who had a baby at home did it by accident, because she couldn’t get to the hospital quickly enough.
For me, this is not a possibility (my first was an emergency C-section – she almost died – and I ended up stuck with them for time eternal). I find myself feeling defensive because people will ask me The Question; I tell them first that I’m going to such-and-such hospital; they ask me, “Why aren’t you having the baby at home?”; I tell them I have to have a C-section; and I watch their faces fall. I imagine the judgments flitting through their heads – “She’s not a good mother. She’s not having her children the natural way.”
My defense always has been that birth is a means to an end, that end being a healthy baby. Whether your baby comes out of the hole the good Lord gave you or out of one the doctor makes, it’s what you do for the next 18 years that counts. The whole brouhaha about “natural” birthing seems like just one more divisive mechanism to keep us from all getting along.
As you can see, it’s frighteningly early, so much so that I’m afraid I might just teeter and fall off my soapbox, so I’m getting down now. A woman three weeks from birthing is not the most elegant thing. Kathleen, who is still lithe and fit and childless, needs to help me out here.

Papa

My mind’s distracted and diffused, my thoughts are many miles away …
(I know, it’s a cheesy song lyric, but sometimes a situation requires a little Paul Simon to pull you through it.)
Today the distance from home hurts like nails. Since Tuesday, my grandfather – who is nearly 91 years old – has been in the hospital with a lung and bladder infection. His health has been failing for the past year or so, but for the first time in a while, I feel frightened for his health. Part of me says I’m being silly. What’s to be frightened of? If death is only another part of life, a second act that we might not understand, then it would be silly to fear it. But it’s a part of life he would enter without any of us, and although I know it will happen, whether sooner or later, I dread it.
My grandfather was a radio man on an Air Force bomber during World War II, and he was present for Japan’s surrender. He was the oldest person on his plane, and he’s the only one still alive. A photo of him with the rest of the squadron hangs in my house, and I’ve been looking at it a lot the past few days. His body is on the mend, now that he’s been given drugs to fight the infections, but his mind is nearly gone. He’s being restrained to keep from pulling out his IV and he’ll only allow my grandmother (who is 89; this is taking its toll on her as well) to feed him.
My grandparents refuse to leave their 50-plus-year-old home and move into a nursing home. They live an hour from my mother, who was their only child, so she and my father spend a lot of time at their house cleaning, taking care of the yard, and helping to move my increasingly immobile grandfather around and down the ramp to his myriad doctor appointments. Everyone is spent, but they do what they do out of love.

And I am here. I can’t help. I can sit and listen on the phone when my mother sounds like she’s about to break, and I can hope that what they give me is more than just a hollow reassurance that “I’m sure everything will be OK.” And I can sit and feel guilty and know that, a couple of years ago, I could have helped with these tasks and visited in the hospital and done all the things a good granddaughter should do. And I can know that the sudden downturn in Papa’s health coincided a little too neatly with my leaving and taking the great-grandkids away. And I can know that he might just not ever meet his fourth great-grandchild.
And that’s all I can do.