Bubble, bubble

 

After shoving a couple of wooden serving spoons into the salad and quickly checking on the pot of Thai curry, the rice cooker, the cheesy garlic bread, and the peach and cherry cobbler – mismatched cuisine to match my haphazard tastes -- I stepped over to set the dinner table.  Plates, mugs, forks – one at every place.  Thirteen. 

It was good to be back to eating with a perfectly normal number of people. A community.

Our non-standard living arrangements have been both a comfort and a challenge during COVID. For the past 17 years, our little neighborhood of friends has shared some of our space and resources, and has dined together on weeknights.  This has always been a little hard to explain to new acquaintances, in a “What kind of oddball Alaskan cult are you, exactly?” kind of way.  Americans just don’t do that.

Our nation has an awkward attitude about “community”.  We ostensibly champion close extended families and cohesive neighborhoods, but if someone lives with several great-aunts, starts a childcare cooperative, or suggests that tax money should go toward town recreation centers – well, that’s… suspect.  Culturally, we assume that Mom, Dad, their 2.1 children, and their 1.6 dogs are an entirely self-sufficient unit in terms of economics, emotional support, logistics, vacuum cleaner ownership, and apple-pie-baking.  (The 1.8 cats refused to comment on their role.) Such are the joys of unfettered capitalism that we fail to recognize the gaps.  We continually create social norms and economic infrastructure that undermine communities.

Since COVID first reared its ugly spike proteins, the question of community has become both more fraught and more overtly discussed.  Who is in your bubble?  Who is not?  What do wealth, class, race, culture, and definitions of family have to do with it?  What do roommates owe one another, and WHO LEFT THESE DIRTY SOCKS ON THE COUNTER?  What about strangers in the same building, the same laundromat, the same bathroom-down-the hall?  Where is the fuzzy middle ground between fully cohabiting married couples and entanglements that are harder to explain to your grandpa -- and how can you keep your grandpa healthy while you’re explaining?  When is privacy a privilege, and when is isolation a curse?  What are the tradeoffs between safety, loneliness, civic duty, and love? 

People who know about our living setup asked us how we were dealing with our unusual situation.  The answer was “the best we can”.  Ultimately, how we reconfigured depended on individual and family-level choices about risk and uncertainty.  One family of three chose to become a self-contained unit, and one young adult and one older individual each temporarily left our bubble to be with their respective off-site partners.  That left eight of us at the dinner table: my own family of four, and two other couples. 

Eight people still felt like a large bubble.  Moreover, the group included two high-risk people, based on their ages (73 and 88). The responsibility felt heavy, and I fretted.  But at the same time, the daily company of these long-time friends was a balm – and if an octogenarian wanted to throw in his lot with me, my husband, and our twin 13-year-olds, who was I to second-guess him?  We were all lucky enough to be in low-risk, work-from-home jobs and Zoom school.  We were all luckily to still have jobs, and teachers.  And we were lucky to have one another.  Together, we celebrated a 74^th birthday, and an 89^th.

The community members who stepped out of our bubble nonetheless regularly stepped into our shared building for showers and laundry.  We live in the woods on land underlain by permafrost, and don’t have standard pipes or septic.  Our water is delivered by truck to a shared tank.  I don’t need to explain the necessity of a year’s worth of hygiene.

The non-dinner-table community members became part of a new social genre: the Outdoor Friends, a.k.a the Walk Buddies or Driveway Hangers.  All friends are awesome, of course, but the ones who willingly-but-awkwardly stand next to a parked car to chat with you or get together for socially distanced ambles in Fairbanks in January are Lindt-truffle-level awesome. 

My Outdoor Friends are cautiously crossing thresholds with me again.  We’re not post-COVID -- not even close. Nonetheless, we’re vaccinated, and some things ARE changing.  That includes some quirky yet fundamental aspects of my own life.  This week, I regained access to the showers in the basement of my plumbing-enabled workplace.  I took a full-force shower that was eleven minutes long.  Eleven!

The twins turned fourteen during COVID.  Then they turned fifteen – still during COVID.  Yesterday marked the day when they were two-weeks-post their second Pfizer vaccines.  They spent the day hanging out with a similarly freshly-vaccinated kid who has been their stalwart Outdoor Friend for the duration.  Last winter, these teenagers spent hours in the snow at 20 below zero Fahrenheit, just to be together.  I tossed snacks out to them as if they were feral. 

No one will believe their stories when they’re all geezers.  Then again, what will be “normal” in 2090? 

As we all try to figure out how the world has changed, how it’s stayed the same, and whether we want to go back to wearing real pants and making small-talk, I’ll continue to ponder the meaning of community.  And -- superstitions and my questionable cooking skills notwithstanding -- I’ll keep setting thirteen plates at dinner.

Just Passing Through

Photo of our community living room, blatantly stolen from Scott Pauker's blog
(http://spokeandwords.com/hitching-prudhoe-bay-part-2/)

When the kids and I found the sheet of fresh cookies and the pan of homemade brownies that Scott Pauker had left on our kitchen counter, I felt a twinge of regret that he would not be there to share them with us. 

Not that our little community of nine adults and four kids would have any trouble gobbling down the treats without outside assistance.  We have a strong track-record in Postprandial Gooey Deliciousness Consumption.  It’s part of the rhythm of the evening, which starts when we hungrily gather to sniff out whatever the chef du jour has concocted, and ends when we drag unwilling children home for necessary slumber. 

Dinner itself is usually gratifyingly replete with dark leafy greens, organic legumes, and whole-graininess.  While dining – and in the comfortable after-supper half-hour of plate-scrubbing and leftover-wrapping – we all decompress from work, gripe about current events, share our very best in off-color humor, or (in the case of the eight-to-ten-year-old crowd) happily absorb the off-color humor while bouncing off the walls.  Finally, we settle down to the pleasures of Dessert Time.

For two evenings during the previous week as well as two evenings this week, Scott had made a nice addition to that tableau.  His sunburned grin radiated his total lack of concern at finding himself in the midst of some kind of weird intellectual hippie mini-commune.  They use an outhouse and make jokes about Oxford commas?  Yeah, I’m cool with that.  He filled us in on enticing tidbits of Seattle news and biking lore.  He shared amusing details of his Adventure Thus Far -- and we were fond of his penchant for washing more than his share of the dishes. 

But, of course, he couldn’t hang around Fairbanks, Alaska forever.  He had places to go…such as Tierra del Fuego.  On his bicycle.

“Will we ever see him again?” asked Molly. She was indirectly responsible for the hoard of baked stickiness that was now brightening our morning with the joys of anticipation; with the honed cunning on an almost-third-grader, she’d been the fastest responder when Scott had kindly asked what sort of foodstuffs he might contribute to the general well-being of Tamarack Knoll. 

“Probably not,” I admitted.  “But we can follow his adventures online, if you want.”

“Okay.”

Molly sounded interested rather than disappointed.  She’d liked Scott.  Still, at age eight, she already seems well-acquainted with the fact that people come and go.  Travelers don’t always return. 

She strapped her own bike helmet over her raincoat hood for the decidedly less epic ride to this week’s summer camp – Shakespearean acting for the eight-to-twelve set – and the subject shifted to the question of why Lizzy’s bike has a rear mud-guard, while her twin’s does not.  But, as we splashed our way up our dirt road, and as I offered pointers on what gear a bike ought to be in on a steep incline (“Try a lower one, kiddo… no, a LOWER one…”) I found myself mulling over how we relate to the transient people in our lives: The Travelers.

I’ve blogged previously about the importance of community; of friendships; of sense of place; of ties that are permanent (okay, fine, not permanent on an intergalactic scale, but you know what I mean); and of people who are SO AWESOME that one can pawn off one’s kids on them at short notice. These myriad bonds are at once as complex as calculus and as comfortable as couch cushions.  In our clock-watching, parking-lot-infested, glowing-screen-riddled lives, the time-and-connectedness algorithms are often tricky to compute, and the fabric of community needs a bit of darning, to say the least.  But where, in weaving that mathematical tapestry, do we place the person who is new, foreign, strange, unknown, and temporary?  What is the role of The Archetypal Traveler?

The Traveler shows up in plenty of stories, from the Odyssey on out.  He or she is the Gypsy, the Tinker, the Explorer, the Warrior, the Vagabond, and the Stranger all rolled into one.  She is the Fairy Godmother, who appears for just long enough to do her trick with the pumpkin.  He is that Brad Pitt character who runs off with all the money in Thelma and Louise – but that’s not why you remember the character, now is it?  He is Gandalf, who never quite seems able to stick around long enough for the entire adventure, due to mysteriously pressing business elsewhere. 

Scott, of course, is not an archetype; he’s a specific, cheerful, 37-year-old man from Seattle with muddy Spandex and a liberal-arts background.  But, for the purposes of my ruminations, he makes a splendid archetypal proxy. We’d never heard of him until a few weeks ago.  He came our way as the friend-of-friends-of-friends, in a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon kind of way. 

Jay mentioned to me, in a vague sort of way, that “some biker guy” might be passing through, like, sometime, and did I think the community would be okay with letting him crash in the guest room?  As the Communications Specialist of the family (a job that falls to me by default, not based on any useful skillset), I posed this question to whomever happened to be around, received some unperturbed “yes” responses, and promptly forgot all about it until my phone rang, showing an unknown out-of-state number. 

“You’re where?  Old Nenana?  Okey-doke, you should be here in about twenty minutes.” 

I went to find a set of sheets, some sandwich-fixings, and a towel with not too many holes in it.

The Traveler is, by definition, is on the move. He’s not merely someone you’ve never met before; he’s someone who has been places you’ve never been, and is going places you probably can’t even imagine: “You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon? … It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.”

Han Solo may not have known the difference between units of distance and units of time, but he was definitely going places: "Look, I ain't in this for your revolution, and I'm not in it for you, princess. I expect to be well paid. I'm in it for the money.” The traveler may or may not be one of the Good Guys in White Hats, but he’s interesting – and undeniably, oddly magnetic.

The Traveler doesn’t just crop up in literature (yes, of course Star Wars is literature!); he or she also seems to crop up with some regularity in our community.  Why?  Well, I’m not sure.  It might be because, given that there are five households in our group, we naturally receive five times the standard-issue number of guests.  It might be because Fairbanks is the kind of place where people frequently couch-surf – sometimes in a not-getting-off-this-couch-without-a-crowbar kind of way.  Or it might be because our community has an excellent reputation for not yet having slaughtered a single visitor in our ten-year history. 

Be that as it may, the vast majority of our guests have brightened and enlivened our lives.  Fairbanks is not a place that people “just pass through” unless they are up to something just a bit peculiar – such as a stint at Toolik Lake field station, measuring arctic shrubbery while enjoying the enthralling company of a few billion mosquitoes. We’ve housed researchers, families, relatives, and strangers.  We played host to the now-community-legend Fred, a retired African-American factory worker who came up to Alaska just to take part in the White Mountains 100 wilderness race.  I’d explain all about Fred, but this sign that the kids made says it all.  

Some of this enlivenment-via-house-guest, granted, involved a sort of after-the-fact “Type 2” fun.  The young woman who left a large, bloody, meaty item in our freezer, for example… well, she might have been lacking a few rudimentary social skills, but she left us with a most excellent story.*

Why are we drawn to The Traveler?  Why, knowing that we have no chance of developing a permanent bond, a reciprocal relationship, or even a real friendship, do we eagerly take in the traveler, make him a sandwich, and tell him to “make himself at home”?  Scott gave us wine, dishwashing, and brownies, but such generosity wasn’t expected or required.  What intangibles make The Traveler worthwhile?

What is The Traveler giving away for free?  Well, in the course of my 42 years, I have not only encountered The Traveler many times; I’ve also been The Traveler.  When I signed up to join the US Peace Corps at the ripe old age of 21, I had only the vaguest notion of what it might mean to go away and live in a less-developed foreign country for two years.  That is, I thought about many of the things I might have to give up: running water, electricity, spaghetti, Cadbury’s.  I didn’t understand quite so clearly what it might mean to give up familiarity, belonging, being at home.  I didn’t understand what it would be like to have to explain – weekly, daily, hourly – everything about myself, my worldview, my race, my nationality, my culture.

But there was no choice.  I was The Traveler.  I needed to describe snow to children who had never experienced temperatures below sixty Fahrenheit.  I needed to describe the American educational system to people who had struggled to get as far as seventh grade.  I, a lone white woman in a sea of resentment, needed to discuss racial tensions, the misunderstood plots of soap operas I’d never seen, the entire history of slavery, what New York City is like, the fact that I was NOT a Mormon missionary, class warfare, hurricanes, the CIA, school gardens, international trade, and English grammar.  My role as story-teller was non-negotiable.

I recall, with peculiar clarity, the day when I was seating at the bottom of a pit – destined to be a new school latrine -- with a shovel and crowbar.  The temperature was well over ninety.  It always was.  I was dripping.  But I was digging with fierce determination, in part because I knew that everyone had one eye on their own work, and one eye on me.  As I worked, a very old man, seated comfortably above-ground, turned to no one in particular and wheezed, with absolute conviction, that white girls sure can dig an outhouse.

If it hadn’t been clear before, it was clear then: the payment for my acceptance was not only my tales from afar, but also my role as a proxy for every American that everyone had never met.  I was The Traveler.   And being The Traveler is fascinating.  It’s exhilarating.  It’s also utterly exhausting – although not usually in the bone-weary sledge-hammer sense.  It’s draining socially, psychically, and emotionally. 

Scott passed through our humble not-a-commune on his way north to the official start of his bike ride at the Arctic Ocean.  He passed through again on his way south.  We saw him for a total of four evenings.  Since then, we’ve followed some of his adventures via Facebook and his blog.  “Oh, look, Scott made it to Whitehorse… Hey, did you read the piece Scott wrote about Skinny Dick’s Half-Way Inn?…” 

We won’t see him again.  The brownies are long gone.  The kids are not pining for the missing guest.  But when another Traveler gets in touch with us (by text or Facebook or pure-white carrier pigeon tossed upward from the slopes of a mythical volcano), we’ll welcome her.  We’ll make her a sandwich, and offer her a shower (replete with caveats about our limited water supply).  And we’ll ply her for stories, for mystery, for vicarious armchair-adventure.  She’ll understand the currency.  It’s one with a long history, and yet – despite the Age of Communication, despite supersonic speeds and instant messaging and a distinct lack of tinkers, magicians, Gypsies, and bundle-carrying train-hopping hobos in  a world grown small -- it still clings to shreds of its former value.

Community spells comfort, familiarity, home.  Without a community of friends and family, it’s easy to feel lost, ungrounded, purposeless.  The Traveler, on the other hand, symbolizes the mysterious, the unknown, the adventure you haven’t yet had, and the places you haven’t yet seen – but might.  Without The Traveler, the world can seem too small, too dull, too unchanging, too lacking in possibility. Thus, Community and Traveler are yin and yang.  We need one because we need the other.  And– at least at some time in our lives – we all need to take at least a brief turn at carrying the tales.  We probably won’t cover as many parsecs as Han Solo.  We probably won’t keep our pedals turning all the way from the Arctic Ocean to the tip of South America.  But we’ll at least gain some appreciation for those who do.

Happy trails, Scott.

* The young woman in question called us up about six months later and told us that she’d be swinging by to pick it up.  When we informed her that’s we’d thrown it away (not without some confusion and disgust), she was incensed.  “You threw away my bear heart?!”

Take my kids, for example...

She is a conscientious student and always strives to do her best.  She is a pleasure to have in class.

 “Do I haaaaaaave to?”

You’re sure you didn’t mix up the report cards, Mrs. Impossibly Patient First Grade Teacher?  Because… I don’t think you know the child that I know. 

Do you have to?  Um, yeah, kid.  You. Have. To.  Despite all indications that the vast magnitude of my cruelty is overwhelming your neural circuits, I’m not, in fact, asking you to read Plato in the original Greek or walk across a wasteland of smoldering lava in your Dora the Explorer socks.   I’m asking you to amble over to the cutlery drawer and take out some spoons.  You know, those things that make it possible to eat pudding without getting it on your ears?  Yeah.  I’d like a few of those.  On the table.  And really, I’d like this to happen without any whining.

“But Mamaaaaa…”

There are times when parenting feels rewarding: truly, deeply, I-am-part-of-the-future awesome.  For example, a few days ago, one of my kids wanted to know the length of the human genome.  We Googled it together, and discovered that there are TWO METERS of DNA in every human cell, and that all the tiny encoded chains of nucleic acids in your body would reach to Pluto and back.  Yeah, how cool is that? 

There are times when parenting feels peanut-buttery: that is, run-of-the-mill, with occasionally chunky niblets of humor value to keep me going – like reading aloud all six novels in a series about Humphrey the classroom hamster, whom, despite myself, I’m kind of starting to bond with. 

And there are times when I wish that the notion of child-theft-by-gypsies were not a myth (and a racial slur to boot).  Or maybe not theft, per se, but child trading.  Because I’m pretty sure those gypsy (sorry, Romani) kids would be way more tractable than my own – and not have the same three knock-knock jokes imprinted on a mental Mobius strip.

At those times, of course, I am consumed by guilt.  Because Nice Parents do not have such thoughts.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my children.  I adore them; I dote on them; I would take on an angry bear on their behalf, armed only with my bitten-down fingernails and a pocketful of hair-snaggled rubber bands and used Kleenex.  I love my children… and yet I’ve often wondered why it is that despite the fact that I am viewing them through the lens of my positively-biased genetically-related bonded-since-infancy gaze, they nonetheless sometimes appear to be nightmarish little demons.  Conversely, I’ve wondered why other adults – who are under no particular imperative to love, like, or even tolerate my kids – often seem to see them as relatively functional small human beings.

I was proud of her courage to speak in front of her peers… Great job!

Ah.  So… the other twin doesn’t talk much at school, huh?  Uh-huh.  Yup.  THAT MUST BE BECAUSE SHE’S SAVING IT ALL UP.

“But I don’t want to go to bed!  I’m not tired!  Wait, I need to tell you about my book… so in the first part….

“… and then after they go into the cave, then their flashlights run out of batteries…

“…and they have these walkie-talkies… wait, Mom, I need to tell you about the walkie-talkies…

“…and then the one girl with the pony…

“…so then after they switched the batteries…

“… and then there’s another girl, and she’s in the cave too… Mom, wait, I’m not done yet!  Wait, listen!”

I meant to listen.  Really, I did. I mean, who could resist a twenty-minute oral book report on a novel entitled “Pony Pals”?  But my brain had melted fifteen minutes previously, and leaked out my ears.  Maybe it puddled somewhere in my stained hoodie, I’m not sure.  It was really too bad, because I’d been hoping to use it to help me parse the intricacies of the crisis in Syria, or to write a couple of scientific journal articles, or at the very least to make a marginally erudite pun on Facebook.

Facebook.  Facebook is where my parental guilt goes to metastasize.  On Facebook, given my place in the over-educated-middle-aged-people demographic, many of my friends went through the Kindergarten Rite of Passage with the baby of the family this fall.  The last one! On Facebook, there were many bittersweet parental sighs.  But… when my first one and my last one set off for their first day at University Park Elementary School two years ago, I did not weep; I exhaled.  And then I zoomed off to work, my spirits and my bike both free-wheeling.  Because someone else was taking care of my kids. 

Yeah, I know.  Not nice.  Wasn’t I supposed to be mourning the end of their babyhood?  Regretting the loss of some portion of my time with them, and some portion of my influence over their little lives?  Wasn’t I supposed to be concerned about the not-me influences they would be prey to in a big, bad world full of Other People? 

 “Mama, it’s not faaaaair!” 

At times like these, the Other People can have my kids.  On any given day, there are at least seventeen things that are “not fair”.  I’ve leveled with the kids: yup, life isn’t fair.  I’ve pointed out to them that most of the time, the not-fairness of the world has been working heavily in their favor.  This is commonly known as the “You should be grateful, because some kid is starving in a country you’ve never heard of” strategy.  It doesn’t work.  Or, maybe it only works on other people’s children, who invariably seem to remember, when in my care, to say “please” and “thank you” and “I had a very nice time” and even “Wow, you’re so cool”.  You think I’m making this up?  No, really, someone else’s offspring thinks I’m, like, awesome.  My own?  Not so much.

“You gave her the bigger piece!”

The thing is, I LIKE kids.  I always have.  I revel in their imaginative energy (“I will give you a ticket to our kingdom.  But you have to paint yourself with cranberries.”)  I am amused by their disarming honesty (“You have a really big nose, Nancy!”) I appreciate their peculiarly abstract view of the word, as evidenced by the poetry-magnet ode that appeared on the fridge (“He is warm butter.  He is a chocolate sandwich.  He is gorgeous.”)  Why, given that I genuinely like hanging out with kids, am I sometimes driven ape-feces loony by my own? 

Nice Parents definitely do not offer to sell, barter, or trade their children. 

Or… do they?  Maybe I’ve just been focusing on the positive.  I have a problem with that – always seeing the stupid glass as half-full, even when someone has clearing been filching my lemonade. 

Ok, I told myself.  Let’s go back and dig deeper.

Jackpot. 

In the past few weeks alone, two different friends of mine publically confessed (with photographic evidence) that their toddlers had decided to “decorate” the family car by creatively engraving its exterior with a rock.   One mom shared deadpan and marvelously unsympathetic reports on just how often her three sons were vomiting.  Another parent offered dark humor regarding little-kid nightmares and being woken from well-deserved slumber for the eleventeenth time.  And one, a peculiarly honest fellow, suggested that he would like to divorce his ten-year-old. 

I commiserated with a coworker whose two-year-old will not put on his snow boots for her, although the same task goes over just fine at daycare.  Why, she sighed, were all his meltdowns directed at her?  Another office-mate chimed in from behind the next segment of carpeted wall: “It doesn’t get any better as they get older!”  She just sent a kid off to college.  “It just shows they’re normal.”

Normal?  Someone out there has kids who are “normal”?  Then again… if every kid is abnormal in a different way, perhaps it makes sense that dealing with someone else’s normally-abnormal child feels like a gulp of fresh oxygen after being locked in a gym locker room for a week.

A couple of weeks ago, our family headed out on a three-day 20-mile hiking excursion that included nine adults and six (six!) kids between the ages of 6 and 10.  Although I wouldn’t bet my life on it, I’m pretty sure all fifteen of us managed to have a (mostly) good time, despite mud, hills, the ultimate inevitability of bedtime, and the innate unfairness of being between the ages of 6 and 10.  And for me, one of the greatest things about the trip (besides the hot tubs, because I can’t let this go by without mentioning the hot tubs) was the constant and sometimes hilarious shell-game of siblings and parents. 

For example, at one point, a kid from family A and a kid from family B were grooving together in the somewhat distant charge of the parents from family C, who had left their teenager at home in the nominal care of family D.  An extra adult with no kids of her own was happily hiking with the other kids from families A and B, who were getting along marvelously with one another, despite wanting to have nothing to do with their awful, terrible, respective siblings.  Meanwhile I hiked with Child E, who even ten miles into a long day was unfailingly charming.  Child F was the only one hiking with a parent.  By mile nine, she was moaning piteously.  However, she was sweet as a snickerdoodle a very short while later, splashing in a hot tub with me -- because she is normal.

Yes, it seems that this is precisely correct.  So says the Official Psychology Literature, and so says the common wisdom, and so says my cubicle-neighbor.  Kids do their very best whining, sniveling, and sociopath-impersonations for their parents – and only for their parents.  The teacher who thinks they are angels is not lying.  Neither is the neighbor, the friend, the anybody-but-you person who gets all the pleases and thank-yous and holding-together-of-emotions.  The tedious complaints?  The screaming, door-slamming awfulness?  Those are just for you.  Why?  Well, because your little Beelzebub knows you love him unconditionally.  Even when he’s lying on the floor shrieking.

Part of me wants to greet this harsh reality with a wail of my own:  “That’s not faaaaaair!”  But… in my heart I know it is fair.  For one thing, it’s payback for what I probably did to Dear Old Mom and Dad three decades or more ago.  But I also realize now that it’s more than fair – it’s actually good.  There’s a silver lining somewhere in the cumulonimbus of parental despair.  Because, ok, you can’t actually sell your kids, but occasional trading isn’t just a-ok, it’s necessary.  Kids have something to learn from Other Grownups.  And grownups have something to learn from Other Kids.  Somewhere out there is an adult with new ideas, a novel perspective, and some thoroughly exciting snacks to share.  Somewhere out there is a grownup who hasn’t been worn down by this particular child’s set of idiosyncrasies.  Somewhere out there is a grownup who has not yet heard those three knock-knock jokes.

A couple of days after the trip, Jay and I received a kind-hearted and eloquent thank-you message from the parents of family F:  Thanks… for giving a parenting break: most times, [Child F] did not even want us around, and we indulged in that freedom for a bit.

Oh, you are very welcome, my good friends.  I’m always happy to hang out with your imaginative, energetic, sharp-witted kid – on a hike, on a bike, in a show, on the go… (but keep the green eggs and ham out of the hot tub, okay?)  Besides, you are among the ranks of those who have spent their oh-so-valuable time with our own children.  To you – and to all who have talked to them, babysat them, taught them, or even biked around Iceland with them – thank you.

Today, by some peculiar serendipity related to half-written blog-posts, another friend made this comment on Facebook, directed at family A:  You should follow Nancy's advice precisely… Just keep her away from your girls or they, like ours, will suddenly find themselves happily involved in Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater productions for the next decade or two!

You hear that?  Lend me your kids, and I will corrupt them with four-hundred-year-old plays full of bloodshed and sexual innuendos!  Meanwhile, I’ll send you the twins.  I hear that one of them “speaks up” and that the other “always strives to do her best” so I’ll bet they’ll make a really good showing when they tell you those knock-knock jokes.