OmegaMom

I had promised GrannyJ that I would stop at Trader Joe’s on my way up to buy her some lemon-dill sauce and some tuna steaks.  I had a plan:  I would go to the TJ’s I know, at 99th and Thunderbird, then head on up the hill.  No problemo; the route was engrained in my head.  So I pulled out of the rental car complex and let my autopilot take over:  turn this way, turn that, get on I-17, drive, drive, drive, turn off on Thunderbird, drive, drive, drive.

I arrived at 99th and Thunderbird, and there was the familiar shape of the TJ’s mall.  But it looked different. Where were all the cars?  I turned across the intersection and pulled in, realizing, with a sinking feeling, that TJ’s was gone. Yes, I had the right spot:  there was the familiar shape of the TJ’s store front.  But where the “Trader Joe’s” sign had been there was only a fading memory burned into the creamy adobe by the sunlight, a dim shadow of where the letters had been.

Oops.

So I pulled into the Wells Fargo parking lot, pulled out the phone, called mom.  Sorry, I said.  I’ll be there in about an hour and a half.

I decided it would be fun to drive up 99th (the Lake Pleasant Road) up to the Carefree Highway, though I knew it would be painful.  The last time I had done the drive, the encroaching ticky-tacky boxes had been pushed further north, but surely there would still be some desert out there that I could drive through in the setting sun.

I drove up 99th, just getting into the swing of things, and was abruptly stopped at a T-intersection where 99th ended.  Before me was a mall, a swanky earth-colored eminence with neon lights advertising eateries and clothing stores.  The cross street was called “Lake Pleasant Parkway”.

Say what?!

I had to make a snap decision, and was not in the left-hand lanes…goodness only knows how things had changed further, and perhaps the better thing to do would be to just turn right, head back to I-17.

As I was driving the broad new parkway, expecting to head towards the highway, it started curving.  I noticed a cross street:  Beardsley.  Say what?!  That’s not right, I thought–doesn’t Beardsley intersect with the highway?  I kept on, but started looking ahead for cross-street signs.  And I realized that the setting sun was no longer behind me, but off to my right.

There ahead of me was Union Hills.  ACK!  Yes, I was right:  ”Lake Pleasant Parkway” had morphed from a possible intersection with the highway into something heading directly south–back the way I had come.  I turned on Union Hills, and saw that LPP had, at some point, turned into 83rd Avenue.

But despite this unexpected detour–which had taken an extra 30 minutes–I soon made it to the highway, and was motoring north through the edges of Phoenix…and passing yet another “Photo speed enforcement zone”.  They were littering the area on all the highways, and they were new.

I passed Deer Valley and hit construction:  a long, long passage of arrows pointing left, then pointing right, the highway lanes swinging this way and that, the Arizona Department of Transportation widening the highway and rerouting it.

I passed an intersection labeled “Jomax Road”.  Once, only 10 years ago, Jomax Road was a small dirt road that fed into 99th Avenue in the middle of the desert, a lonely sign on a 2-lane road, that led into an area of old 2-acre spreads with dowdy ranch houses.  Now, it was big enough to warrant an entrance to the interstate.

I passed the construction on the new, expanded interchange with Carefree Highway.  It was dark now.

The newness passed away; now I was on familiar ground.  Coming up on my bete noire, a development called Anthem.  Once upon a time, the road there was called Desert Foothills; now it was called Anthem Way.  Once upon a time, there had been a (for the desert) lush forest of palo verde trees, one of my most favorite spots to drive through in springtime, as the wildflowers carpeted the ground and the pale chartreuse leaves popped out on the trees.  When Del Webb came through and raped the desert to install its huge development out by New River, they made very sure to keep all the saguaro cacti–it was required by law.  But all the palo verde trees?  The thing that made that spot unique?  Poof.  Gone.  See, they weren’t required to do anything with them.  So they brought in their bulldozers and ripped them out of the ground to make way for hundreds of square adobe-colored McMansions.  McMansions purchased by people who wanted inexpensive housing near to Phoenix, out in the desert where the nights were an endless expanse of darkness filled with hundreds of stars.

Of course, now that those McMansions are there, with their associated street lights and porch lights and their carefully saved saguaros, the velvety nights with the tiara of brilliant stars are no more.

I’m sure the people who had lived in New River for years beforehand were pleased to have their night skies removed like that…

Most of the drive between Anthem and Prescott was the same, thank heavens.  Long sweeps of emptiness with a blob of lights around Black Canyon City, and scattered spots of light marking old houses out in the chapparal.  A small spot of newness at the entrance to Prescott, where ADOT is remodeling the old highway interchange, but not too much difference.

The past ten years have changed so much about this land I love.  The relentless expansion of Phoenix has chewed up an amazing amount of the desert, and it saddens me.  It especially saddens me to realize that–according to reports I have heard–many of those new houses, built to cash in on the real estate run-up of 1997-2006, are empty or on the verge of foreclosure.

Ah, well.  I am at mom’s house.  Her street is the same as it has been in the past ten years; the changes came here before that.  We spent yesterday visiting the local Gingerbread House Village, hanging out, and going out for dinner.  It’s quiet and relaxing, and I find I miss my dotter very, very much.

In a comment to the previous entry, Kate said I should try the Lindy Hop.

Come with me friends, to a time long ago, a simpler time, a time when OmegaMom was a carefree single living in Chicago…

There was (and still is) a “lifelong learning” organization in Chicago called The Discovery Center.  After many times flipping through their monthly course catalog and looking yearningly at the dance classes, I decided to take the plunge and sign up for a Swing Dance class, even though (being single) I had no partner.

It was a great class.

The teachers started out slow.  We partnered up with each other, and switched partners after every little bit of practice, and then, at the end of the evening’s class, they put on some nice slow jazz and we’d practice our mostly-klutzy-but-slowly-improving dance steps.

(Part of the idea, of course, was to introduce singles to each other.  Sort of a pseudo-mass-dating scene.)

It was an eight-week session.  By week six, Mr. Police Officer Into Nudism and I were heading out after class to Jukebox Saturday Night, on Clark Street, and tripping the light fantastic on the dance floor.  We danced well enough, I might add, that we got applause and had people asking us how long we had been dancing together.

(Let us pause for a moment while OmegaMom preens herself.)

It was grand fun.  Let’s put aside the fact that Mr. Police Officer kept a gun tucked into the waistband of his pants at all times.  And that he really, really wanted me to come to the nudist club with him for a weekend.  And that I was too uptight to even consider it.  I got some experience with a radar gun and some dates out of the whole affair, and we both had fun at the nightclub.

The problem is that this was at least twenty years ago.

The additional problem is that OmegaDad has the rhythmic competency of a piece of driftwood:  i.e., none.

The third piece of the puzzle is that, while OmegaDad actually can dance if he is very carefully handled by my cousin Sissy (I have seen this with my own two eyeballs), my cousin Sissy has the patience of a saint.  I do not.  So any practice would need to be done by OmegaDad and Someone Else.  But OmegaDad is finicky about things…for quite a while, he would get insulted if some cute thing flirted with him in the checkout line, because he was Married! dammit!  My explaining that the flirter probably didn’t see his wedding ring wouldn’t cause him to pardon her; she was automatically placed into the category of Bad Person.  Anyway, I can hardly imagine how he would respond to dancing with some woman who wasn’t OmegaMom.  Except for cousin Sissy, who is a special case.

Anyway, once upon a time, OmegaMom could dance quite well, and all the credit should go to the method of teaching, which was:  slow, steady, and practice over and over and over again.  And have fun.

Which is what I was talking about in my previous post.

And to all and sundry who said they’d take one of these courses if I started one, I will merely point out that I am in Alaska, Land of Wild Freedom, and you all are Outsiders.  (That’s what they call the Lower 48 here: “Outside”.)  It would be quite difficult to hold a class for someone who lives in Kentucky, someone who lives in NJ, someone who lives in Oregon, and someone who lives in Arizona.

But!  If we were all in the same neck of the woods…!  Hey, we’d have to just hire ourselves a dance teacher and have a grand ol’ time.

Right?

Living in a shoebox has some side effects.  One of those is, since we are sans washer and dryer, we must visit the laundromat.

OmegaDad did the honors the first time.

Now…I hate crowds.  I hate noisy situations.  Too many people making too much noise around me makes my back start twisting up, my adrenaline level rise, and my teeth grind.  Figlet recently asked “What’s Your Krazy”–this is one of my very biggest crazies.

OmegaDad has it much, much worse than I do.

So he returned from his excursion to the world of coin-operated washers and dryers frazzled to a fare-thee-well, his teeth set, and his psychic aura emitting “KEEP AWAY FROM ME, MOTHERFUCKERS!!” on a continuous loop.  He gritted his teeth at me and hissed, “YOU are doing the laundry from now on!” and then went on a tirade about the quality of people at the laundromat, the level of noise, the problems he had simply moving about, on and on, for half an hour.

I nodded my head, rolled my eyes, and said, “Yessir!”

I’ve been visiting the laundromat once per week ever since.  OmegaDad gave me the hairy eyeball last week and asked me, “How come when you go to the laundromat, it’s empty and nice and quiet, but when I go to the laundromat, it’s a seething mob scene?”

I dunno.  I’d guess it’s my laundromat karma.

You see, I love doing laundry.  It’s soothing.  It’s calming.  I go into a Happy Place mentally.  I zone out.  I plunge my hands into heaps of warm, fresh-out-of-the-dryer clothes and could just get wiggly like a small puppy.

And the laundromat doesn’t seem noisy to me, because all the things making “noise” are making white noise.  There are washers washing (schloop schloop schloop) and dryers drying (rumble rumble rumble thunka rumble rumble rumble thunka) and video games going bleep bloop and various people chattering to each other, which, with the white noise as a background, blends right in.

Okay, so I’ve been lucky:  No great huge fights have broken out, no whacked out druggies have suddenly started seeing spiders crawling down the walls, no fundamentalist nutcase has started preaching The Word at the top of his (or her) lungs.

Given the current close quarters at the Shoebox, going to the laundromat has an added plus:  I am gloriously alone.  OmegaDad drops me off with the clothes and accoutrements, and then hauls the dotter off to do shopping.  I get myself a frappucino, read a book or the Sunday paper, and just relax.

Part of this being-in-the-moment and zoning out to the white noise is related to having grown up and living as an adult in the big city.  Chicago (and any other big city) is filled with noise.  There’s the sound of traffic.  There’s the sound of people’s boomboxes and TVs.  There’s the sound of the couple two floors down having yet another fight.  There’s the El rumbling by a block away.  There’s the distant rumble from the expressway.  There’s the kssshhhh-SCREECH of buses stopping.  There’s the sound of jets taking off and landing and circling around waiting for a chance to land.

The city is an ocean of noise.  And to survive, people who live in cities learn to let the noise mash into a generic background wash, like the sound of ocean surf.  Because if you paid attention to all those different noises while living in a city, you would go utterly insane.

The only time I wasn’t able to put city noise into the general white noise mishmosh was when visiting my buddy Suz when she lived in Wicker Park in a walk-up that was directly behind the El tracks.  That noise was impossible to mesh with the rest of the ocean surf.  (However, as I recall, Suz herself said that after a few weeks, it started to blend in with the rest.)

Today was our last wash day at the laundromat.  I get to do laundry in the peace and privacy of our own home Real Soon Now.  I’ll be able to do the weekly laundry without spending $20.  I’ll be able to nosh in the kitchen, piddle in the office, wear my jammies, and sort my damned clothes into as many different color piles as I want starting tomorrow.  Yeehaw!

But I’m going to–in a weird way–miss the laundromat zen.  A bit.

Spring has definitely sprung in Small Mountain University Town.  This weekend was the annual kite festival, so I took the dotter off to fly a kite.

There were stiltwalkers.  There was a kiddy carnival–complete with games such as “knock the bowling pins off the table with a ball”, and the classic “fishing game”, and the one where you toss beanbags through holes.

The weather was flawless, except for just one thing:  there was hardly any wind.  So those of us who had brought kites to fly were rather disappointed.

But first, there were bubble wands to wave through the air with a trail of lovely shimmering bubbles…there was food to be had…

While I was in line trying to get my $2.50 burrito (this took forever because the burrito seller’s microwave broke), who should we run into but One And Only True Love and his mother!  So OAOTL’s mom purchased him some shaved ice while I was waiting, and the dotter went to sit with him and share the shaved ice.

Then off to the kiddy carnival area, where first the two spent an inordinate amount of time in the bouncy houses (a first!  The dotter has refused to do bouncy houses until now!), and then it was time for mommy to camp out in the line for getting faces painted while the dotter and OAOTL went running like madmen through the grass, encountering yet more kids we all knew.  It’s one of the delights of living in a smallish city–go to an event and you will always run into people you know.

Finally, the dotter was able to get her face painted–this is supposedly a horse.  It looks more like a cat to me, but, hey, what do I know?  The dotter was delighted.

We wandered on to the grassy area where people were supposed to fly their kites.  But first we stopped at the “Geology for Kids” booth, where a splendid fellow was inviting children to smash rocks with hammers.  He obviously had stocked himself with a goodly supply of fossil-rich limestone, because every kid who smashed a rock got a performance of this gent eyeing the split pieces and finding shells and snails and–best of all, for kids!–crab poop!

Then it was time to wrestle the kites out of their bags, put them together, and try flying them.

Bah.

 We have a couple of lovely dragon kites, purchased from Sam’s, that do wonderfully when the wind is up.  Unfortunately, when the wind is not up, a great deal of running can get the kite up into the sky for a few moments, after which it takes an ungainly dive to the ground, narrowly missing other families out trying to fly their kites.

When we finally decided it was an exercise in futility, and frustrating to boot, the fair was winding down and it was time to go.  The dotter, hot and tired and thirsty, slumped and whined on the way back up the hill to where we had parked the car, and then fell fast asleep on the way home.

So.  I have a vivid sunburn, and the dotter still has remnants of her horsie face.  A good day.

Technorati: Spring, festivals

A few years after I moved away from the Bay Area to join Not-Yet-Mr.-OmegaMom, we traveled back there to visit some relatives.  I took him in to the city to do the usual touron things.  As we were walking through downtown San Francisco, we encountered a quartet singing opera, a violinist, and some people playing folk music.

It reminded me of one of the things I absolutely loved about living in/near a city:  the nonchalant expectation that one would run across buskers almost every day during one’s normal, everyday routine.  Climbing out of the BART station, I was greeted by the sounds of the saxophone; walking down the streets, I would hear a trio of guitarists who I could see if I peered down the sidestreet; there would be multiple groups of musicians jamming in the various parks.  It wasn’t a bonus of being in San Francisco–the same delightful musical free-for-all existed in Chicago, as well.

I miss it.  Oh, we have music here in Small Mountain University Town, but it’s not the same.  The type of musical encounter one has in the city is serendipitous–there’s no schedule to it, no need to put it into one’s calendar and remember it.

My mom remembers an instance, during a visit to Vienna, when she climbed out of a subway station into the midst of a large group of people singing the Carmina Burana.

The Washington Post, prompted by–curiosity?–ennui?–sheer deviltry?–enlisted the famed violinist Joshua Bell in a busking experiment, seeking to determine if “beauty can transcend”.  Bell was assigned a DC Metro station to settle in and play his violin during the morning rush hour.  Hidden cameras took video; reporters cornered commuters outside the station to take names and contact info for a “commuter study”.  Bell made $32 in the 45 minutes he was playing; tickets to Bell’s performances on stage regularly command $100 and up.

The Post claims that most of the commuters didn’t even look, yet when I watch the videos, it seems to me that a majority of people actually glanced over at Bell.

In Chicago and San Francisco, when I encountered these serendipitous musical moments, I was often in transit–on my way to work (and usually about to be late), on my way to a date with friends, or on my way home and just dog-tired.  I preferred my buskers lurking on station platforms during the evening rush hour, rather than the upper levels or the connecting passageways or by the exit doors; though the music was constantly interrupted by trains arriving and departing, I could enjoy it in a more relaxed manner without a constant underlying nagging feeling that I Should Be Somewhere Else!

A few of the commuters knew that they were listening to an excellent violinist; one of them knew who he was.  But the majority hustled on by, some flinging some money into his violin case in passing.

Perhaps if the Post had positioned him elsewhere…perhaps if it had been the evening crowd, rather than the morning crowd…there would have been a different response.  I’d like to think that I’d recognize the quality of the instrument and the playing if I had been there–but, even so, the pressure of modern life, of needing to “be there on time”, would have intruded and had an impact on my response.

But, no matter what the response was in reality, the tale makes me wistful for those days of serendipitous music providing a sound track for my city life.

(FYI:  “Brainwashing my child” is featured at the Carnival of Family Life at Lil’ Duck Duck, along with many other fun and touching blog posts.  Wander on over and check them out!)

Technorati: Joshua Bell, busking, music, city life