Five-Finger Discounts

So this evening, I was downtown buying a gift in a shop full of shiny, breakable objects. Julia is quite good at the hands-off browsing, but Vivi sees with the tips of her fingers. To distract her, I passed along a nice wooden ring from a little tray near the register. The ring occupied her a minute or two – just long enough for me to pay and get my receipt. I hustled us out the door, happy I didn’t have to also pay for a shattered this or a cracked that.

When I hoisted Vivi into the car, she happily showed me her new ring, which fit nicely onto her thumb. Whoops! Rush inside, drop the ring in the counter display, and get back outside before Northfield’s finest come looking for the town’s smallest shoplifter. I returned the ring partly because, you know, we didn’t buy it, but also because – Vivi in jail? Those other inmates wouldn’t stand a chance.

Secrecy Is the Best Policy

Home with the Younger while Shannon dropped the Older off at a birthday party, I asked Vivi what she did today. “Did you run errands with Mama?” She nodded. “We wend do Cuuuuub!” (“We went to Cub [the local grocery store].”) “Oh, good!” I said, “We needed some things there. What did you buy?”

She looked at me, leaned forward, and said, “Dom candy. Wittle baws. [Little balls.] Fo my daddy. Dey yockalit! [They’re chocolate!] Dey a sup-rise!” I laughed. “Honey, I think you just told me what my birthday present is. Were they malted milk balls?” “Yef. Dey a sup-rise for my daddy.”

I love that she couldn’t keep the surprise, but had absolutely no awareness of having given it away, right down to continuing to say they were for “my daddy” when I was sitting right there.

Three Seasons in One Run

Walking from the office to the car this afternoon, the air had that heavy, unmistakable smell of spring: wet, green, growing. This contrasted sharply with my run on Sunday – the longest run of the new training year, from my house to the far northeastern corner of the Lower Arb, near the Waterford Bridge. I was out for a nice long time, and in that time, I experienced every season but summer.

I started into a brutal north headwind that was first just chilly but that, when I reached the Arb, started to create wet little squalls by blowing frozen and melted snow out of the trees onto me, the robins, and the squirrels. Where I could see them through the trees, the Carleton and St. Olaf wind turbines were spinning madly, trying to put that wind to more productive use. For one long stretch, as I crossed some open fields, a red-tailed hawk rode the gusts above me, using the wind for his own purposes and, I worried, deciding if I was edible.

Deeper in the woods, where the morning sun had only intermittently shone on the path, the trails were either still covered with supremely wet, sticky snow or with supremely wet, sticky black mud. At one point, the goo in my left shoe’s treads picked up a foot-long twig that was godawfully hard to shake off. When I stopped to yank the stick loose, a pheasant screeched somewhere nearby, giving me a literal and figurative start. A few minutes after that, just before the turnaround at Canada Avenue, I reached a mudpatch so wide, long, and deep that I turned around instead of eking out the last few meters to the parking lot.

The second half of the run was hazier, thanks to fatigue, but as I passed the perfect little Kettle Hole Marsh, I heard a bedlam chorus of spring peepers – this, just a few hours after the last snow of the season. And just a few minutes after that, the sun slid out from behind the gray-white clouds, spectacularly lighting up the still gray-brown fields.

Blanket Adjustments

About thirty minutes after being put to bed, Julia urgently called for me. I hustled upstairs before she raised the volume and woke her sister, only to find that she was troubled “because the comforter doesn’t have the edge I can hold.” It was all I could do not to say, “WTF!” Turns out, after much back-and-forth whispering, that one end of her comforter has a flatter seam than the other, and she likes that edge because she can better hold onto it. So I had to pull up her comforter, turn it end to end (a surprisingly noisy operation), and then tuck it back in Just So. She is particular, this one.

Pepper in the Sky

For a day that’s had about two-thirds of the usual minimum hours of sleep between, say, midnight at three p.m., things aren’t half bad. Genevieve is alternating exhausted screeching and stubbornness with wonderful observations. On our walk back from the park, she first asked about “dat black and white thing that goes up and up and up” (which turned out to be some heavily shadowed vertical blinds in the windows of a house near the park) and later, watching, a flock of starlings fly up and away into the white-blue sky, said, “Dat yooks like pepper in the sky!”

Springy

Even though there’s light snow in the weekend forecast, I’m okay with spring. Today I biked home through the Upper Arb, which still looks pretty winter-sleepy and brown (and even sports a few little traces of snow and ice), and tonight I’m going to go for a nighttime run in the Lower Arb along the river. Sure, I’d rather be skiing in both locations, but I’ll take what I can get!

April First News

Lots of April First news to report…

Here in Northfield, Carleton College is installing a Dutch-style windmill, while our neighbors across town, St. Olaf College, has already installed a fiery eye on top of its tallest dorm. Both of these initiatives should be more successful than the City of Northfield’s costly cat park.

Elsewhere in Minnesota, the northwoods resort town of Ely announced a late bid to host the 2016 Olympics at a press conference. This gambit succeeds last year’s failed attempt by Canada to buy Ely and move it north.

In technology, Google has launched Gmail Autopilot, an automatic email response system that, as the first product of Google’s sophisticated new CADIE artificial intelligence project, is the perfect complement to Gmail Paper. (Check out CADIE’s impressive homepage for another example of its power.)

And in business, American whale farmers are doing quite well despite controversy over the ethics of cetaciculture and an inability to figure out how to use the whales’ blowholes.

Chatty Vivi

Presumably because she’s had a good night’s sleep every night for more than two weeks, Genevieve has been talking up a storm lately. Sunday night, she and I sat in the girls’ Disney Princess tent for half an hour, and she held court: recounting what we had done that day, describing what she had done “wif Mama an’ Oolia” on Friday, tell me about this or that book she’d read..

Vivi will be three in August, and this was easily the longest time I’ve ever talked with her, face to little pink face. She has a wonderful way of talking right now: a breathless torrent of words, all pronounced in her inimitable way and all clearly showing off her delight at being able to finally express herself. I realized later that she didn’t once get frustrated by my incomprehension during our whole chat  – no screams of “Doan talkabout it!” when I asked her to say something I missed the first time, no angry swings of her pudgy little fists, no dashing away to pout over a book. She just repeated whatever I didn’t catch, often saying, “Daddy, I daid dat…” and even pausing for my bad ears to work. It was just plain wonderful.

Hustle and Bustle

A guy can get a lot done during the long spring break at Carleton, but the campus is much more pleasing with the students hustling and bustling about. The trickle of suitcases started already last Friday, but today the riptides of backpacks were very strong all day. It was nice, after working in a very quiet building for two weeks, to hear the happy din of kids – they call themselves that! – trooping up and down the steps, catching each other up on their spring breaks, complaining about their classes…

Spring Utterances

Rude Bodily Noises:
At the breakfast table today, Genevieve passed some gas, laughed at herself, and shouted, inappropriately, “My bottom just burped!”

Bad Astronomy:
At the park this afternoon, Julia, pretending to be an astronaut on a spaceship, peered through a hole in the guardrail and told me seriously, “I can see the planet Marjorie! Right next to the sun!”

The Silky Is Dead, Long Live the Barbie

We held off the inevitable for nearly five years, but this week, Julia succumbed, finally, to Barbie fever – courtesy of an older cousin who donated a few spare Barbies to Julia and Genevieve and a grandma who sent them to us even as Moorhead was facing the floodwaters. (How’s that for love?)

The fever took hold slowly, over two or three days, but today its victory was total. For the first time since she was a few months old, Julia did not take her nap (and right now is not going to sleep at night) with her beloved Winnie-the-Pooh Silky, now rather tattered and torn. She also discarded her other sleeping “friends”: a worn-out toy cat, a soft little pillow, and a small pink Care Bear. In their stead, she’s sleeping with a blonde Barbie doll dressed in a long blue dress that, not coincidentally, looks an awful lot like a dress a Disney Princess might wear.

Assuming this fever will persist for some time, we need to get more and different clothes for the Barbies. The clothes that came with the dolls are fine, don’t get me wrong, but the number of tops is one fewer than the number of chests, and the pants refuse to be fastened in any way that wouldn’t get you kicked out of junior high. If I must have Barbies, I can insist that they’re decorous, can’t I?

Underwater

All day long, I’ve been distracted and worried by the situation in Fargo-Moorhead, where the flood is getting worse literally by the minute, as a check of Twitter or the “Valley Flood Watch” website reveals. Thirty hours before the expected crest (sometime on Friday night or Saturday morning), the river is already past 39 feet, which was about where the 1997 flood crested.

My sadness and concern is mixed with some outright anger at idiots like the two talking heads on CNN at noon who laffed their way through a half-witted graphic purporting to show how much of the White House a forty-foot flood would cover and who then, by way of segue, gravely informed us that if the dikes fail, the people of Fargo will just have to head to higher ground. Higher ground where? Fracking Montana, you #&%ing dolts? Less offensive but still quite oversimplifyingly stupid is the way most of the media coverage covers the flood in “Fargo,” rarely mentioning the sister city, Moorhead, which is a pretty respectable burg in its own right and which stands to suffer just as much as Fargo.

Far more than typically bad media coverage of the disaster, my horror at the situation in Fargo-Moorhead mounts because I can clearly picture it all. Water creeping over the coffeeshop patio where the four Tassavas had a lovely outdoor snack last summer. Water lapping at the doors of Moorhead’s wonderful public library, then sneaking in to soak the carpets where my girls have enjoyed numerous storytimes. Water surging over Fargo’s famous dike,  the only serious incline for miles and thus the only real sledding hill in town. Water ruining the wonderful outdoor theatre at the arts camp that was an important part of Shannon’s childhood and where I saw an impressive amateur performance of Les Miz a few summer ago with her. Water wrecking all the great little shops in Fargo’s lovely downtown – the candy shop, Zandbros variety store, the cool running store, the restaurants where I’ve always meant to have dinner.

It’s horrible to contemplate, and it’s happening more or less right now. Like the Bottle Rockets sing, “There ain’t nothing you can do to stop it/Just hope for the best/And mop up the rest.”