Life in the Slow Lane

With all of the recent advancements, parenting has become a rigorous obstacle course of navigating "How you will ruin and/or neglect your kid today".  Observe: Task: Wash laundry in laundry room. Complicating Factors: One twenty pound toddler, a flight of stairs, three doors (one requiring a key), and an absolutely non babyproof laundry room. Option 1: Leave child unattended in condo while you cart baskets to the washing machines. Hope child doesn't spend entire 5 minutes screaming and banging on door. (Although, at least with this option you know exactly how your child is spending the unsupervised time, as opposed to, say, chewing cords or pulling stools down on his head.) Option 2: Place child on top of laundry basket and hope he hangs on tight enough for the trips down and up the stairs. Make sure that no one observes your awkward juggling act to keep basket steady while unlocking laundry room door. Option 3: Allow toddler to come down the stairs on ...

Ire. That is the best word for the feeling I felt when the book my sixth grade teacher read aloud to us ended unhappily. It couldn't have been the end, really. There had to be an epilogue that made the story resolve more to my liking. There just had to be. That is, I think, the first time I remember feeling so betrayed by an author. How dare they make me care and then treat my emotions so cavalierly? (And how could my teacher, knowing the ending, go ahead with the choice?) My mother tells me otherwise, though. She remembers how I would insist on finishing the bedtime story with Goldilocks coming back to the house of the three bears and becoming best friends with Baby Bear after her breaking and entering was forgiven. I endured quite a bit of mockery in my English and Spanish literature classes following that first instance of disappointed trust in an author. Why did Kafka have to write such awful, depressing yuck? Why did Ana Maria Matute write with the assumption that e...

1)  Unless you are on a commuter route, plan on being late.  Because Amtrak rents rails from freighter companies, freight trains get the right of way. Delays also happen on account of engine trouble (for your train or another on the tracks), objects on the rails (animals, water, another train), maintenance of track or signaling system, etc., etc. We had some early arrivals and some on time arrivals, but every time we had someone waiting for us, we were late. 2)  Bring ear plugs, especially if you are riding in coach . Trains don't provide quite as much white noise as airplanes, so you may get stuck sitting in front of the woman who figures now is the best time to call all of her friends to retell (and retell) the same gruesome, juicy story she heard last night.  Or you may end up two seats up and across the aisle from two passengers who start the 10 hour journey as strangers and DO NOT STOP TALKING until they have exhausted everyone's ears but their own.  Sleep...

One of the best things about our trip around the country is the number of things I knew but didn't know until I experienced it first hand. For instance, in case you didn't know, Texas is a big state.  Our train arrived in El Paso at about 7 in the morning and we spent all that day and into mid morning the next traveling through Texas (with the exception of our hour and a half in San Antonio, as previously mentioned ). Texas has a lot of beautiful places, but it also has a whole lot of places that look just like what we saw five minutes ago and five minutes before that and even five hours before that. While each of us three enjoyed watching our scenic routes throughout our trip, halfway through Texas, CutieBabyBoy found something far more interesting to watch than more of Texas.

It was midnight and we were finally in a taxi heading to our hotel room from the train station. We'd been in DC for two hours already but I had only seen the inside of Union Station and SOS had seen little more than I had: the Urgent Care of the hospital attached to the train station. But that is a different story. Miraculously all of our luggage had fit into the trunk of the taxi and even more miraculously, our sick baby had fallen asleep in his car seat. The streets were near empty and the route to our hotel curved around a number of museums and buildings recognizable as classic DC. We asked our driver if he knew which museums we were passing, and although he didn't know, he summoned some late night energy to tell us more about the captivating locations along our route. We rounded a corner and before us, dramatically lit against the dark night sky, was the Lincoln Memorial. SOS and I both ooed in appreciation and our driver jumped in to tell us what sight we were enjoying ...

What does a lump of coal mean to you? When we were planning our travels, I came across information about a coal mine in West Virginia that conducted tours. If I put aside my initial unease about traveling underground, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to see a significant part of our nation's history. Remembering all the lore about company stores and caged canaries and coal darkened lungs, I was eager to see first hand bits of this necessary evil on our way to true modern progress. Oh, how naive. At first, my tour seemed to reinforce my ideas. On the grounds surrounding the mine entrance they have placed a number of original buildings from various mining towns and the tiny shanty of the mine worker contrasts sharply with the luxurious home of the supervisor. The description of the company store even seems to fit. But then my little bubble of ignorance shook. We all took our seats on the rail car to travel into the mine and as we waited the tour guide handed out bumper-stickers t...

After two full days in the nation's Capitol, SOS and I found ourselves in small town America to celebrate the Fourth of July. So small, in fact, that we and our host family drove fifteen miles to find a small town big enough to have an Independence Day parade. I've never been to a Fourth of July parade that I recall, but someone passed along a bit of insight they had overheard on the subject: if you are in or attend an Independence Day parade, you are probably a Republican. I was wondering where everyone else was. We saw classic cars, fire engines and police cars. Veterans of Foreign Wars marched or rode in the bed of a big truck. Red convertibles crawled by with the city mayor and other elected officers. And then the tractors! I'm not quite sure why tractors are patriotic, but I've never seen so many tractors all in one place outside of a John Deere ad. After the tractors proceeded what may have been every red automobile in town, representing various lo...