Chelmsford, Massachusetts to Canastota, NY

Today we left Chelmsford, Massachusetts for Portland, Oregon.  This time we are ensuring that we will bypass Texas by routing our trip through Canada.  

As a Massachusetts native, I know the roads in that state like the back of my hand.  I convinced Eric that we should take Route 2 instead of the Massachusetts Turnpike in order to save the $2 toll and see more of the Berkshires.  I assured him it was a two-lane highway and would add only about 10 or 15 minutes to the trip.    It is a two-lane highway for about 10 or 15 minutes and you do see more of the Berkshires.  Round about North Adams, after we'd had close and personal views of every collapsing roof of every rustic barn along the 25 mph one-lane construction-peppered Sunday-driver-laden switch-backed mountain road, Eric gently observed that Route 2 was less like a highway than he'd expected.  I know now why James Taylor goes "from Stockbridge to Boston."  "The Berkshires seem dreamlike," so he takes the Mass Pike.

We ate at Flo's Diner in Canastota, NY.  You don't starve at Flo's.  I had the roast pork.  I think they gave me the whole pig.  Liam and Kai each received a serving bowl of macaroni that was bigger than their heads.  If we can find enough ice, we can eat leftover mac and cheese all the way to Montana.

We've been working on table manners at restaurants lately.  I knew when I had kids that someday I would be lecturing on using your fork instead of your fingers, saying 'please' and 'thank you' to the server, and the virtues of starting with "Please pass...."  We've also covered the advantages of using your napkin instead of your shirt, taking bites small enough to fit in your mouth (and emergency measures if it doesn't), sitting at the table instead of under it, sitting at your own table instead of the table of someone who looks more interesting than your parents, and making the stuff that your straw is in go into your mouth instead of the other way.

Tonight I was at a complete loss.  Between the dinner and dessert courses at Flo's, Kai yanked his top front tooth out.  What's the general etiquette?  A strict "Keep your teeth in your mouth until after dinner" rule? is it more like a burp, calling for an "excuse me"?  or like an olive pit, requiring a swift palming of the detached incisor, an unobtrusive staunching of the surprised gum?

Kai cut short my dilemma by informing the server of his dental development.  She seemed very happy for him and brought him a plastic baggie to keep it safe.  Liam advised Kai that the Tooth Fairy might not be able to find the tooth if it remained in the baggie (why not?  does she detect them by smell?).  Kai went to sleep trusting without question that the T.F. would be able to find him and his unbagged under-pillowed tooth in a Canastota, New York motel.

-Juliet

Weekend

Becky and John went to the Eastern Townships for a few days, leaving Eric and I and the kids alone in Montreal to get our bearings.  Parents used to do this to their children to teach them to swim.  Fortunately, Eric has both a sense of direction and a lot of French.  I accommodate my lack of both by having no shame about practicing my Franglish in public and by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs when I leave the house.

Becky and John returned just before Uncle Ben (aka "the Pied Piper") and Vanessa came to visit.  There was Great Rejoicing from the kids.  Every once in a while we dig Ben and Vanessa out from under the flurry of arms and legs and offer them pancakes and coffee.

Becky and I took the kids sledding so Ben and Vanessa could have a moment to themselves for a walk in the neighborhood.  Sledding was great.  The hill was full of people and kids screaming and laughing when we arrived, but emptied out as evening fell.  My best run was with Kai on my back and me on my stomach on the minimalist sled, which is just a piece of plastic with two holes cut out for handholds.  You feel every bump, but the thing really flies down the hill.  Steering is mostly unavailable.

-Juliet

Montreal, Day One

We arrived in Montreal last night, just after crossing Portland's latitude.  It gave me that sense of satisfaction I always feel (don't you?) when completing the letter "U."  Canada is so accommodating of its in-migrants that they were willing to issue me a temporary work permit at 8:30 pm at the I-89 border-crossing.

Becky and John greeted us at the door to the townhouse we are to live in together, and we celebrated with  hot cider and tea and cookies.  And Annika was still up! having gotten special dispensation from her parents to stay up late to see her cousins.  The three kids were still bouncing off the ceiling when we put them to bed.

It's cold here.  When we arrived it was 5 degrees.  For those of you who live in the double- and triple-digit habitats, that's very cold (you can count it on one hand).  I have been staring around me in wonder all day at the beings that pass me on the street, striding confidently along in their down jackets and acting as if their very lives did not hang on the integrity of paper-thin layers of polyester stuffed with teensy baby bird feathers.  That's courage.

We took a walk to open a bank account and to buy warm socks for the kids and me.  Kai, bundled in his fleece and down sweater and snowsuit and hat and hood and mittens and snowboots, sat down on the floor when we arrived at the bank and and fell asleep leaning against Eric's calf.  We carried his boneless body to the sock store and laid him down in the display window next to the slide and the Leggo's.  He woke up thinking he'd gone to heaven.

We walked home together in the twilight, four socks richer, with a soft snow falling from the streetlights.  The alley beside the house is a sheet of ice, so before we went inside we slid up and down it for a while holding hands for safety, until Kai had fallen on his head, and I had fallen on my back and then on my hand, and then on his leg, and Liam on his stomach, and then they fell over a few more times as practice and for good measure.

No photos, as it took so long to dress the kids and myself in our own survival gear that finding a snowsuit for the camera was beyond me.

-Juliet

 

Poem for the Holidays

I asked my Secret Santa for a poem for Christmas.  Here's what I got from Ben:

Montreal Meander Poem

(a line drawn from each day of the blog)

About an hour out of Portland

Kai asked how much longer it would be

before we got to Rhode Island

When would the extraterrestrial memory wipe kick in??

Fortunately Las Vegas had a brothel-free Starbucks.

Then on to Albuquerque (thank you spell-checker).

I feel confident that Kai will not put his new knowledge

about balloon piloting to use.

We are returning the favor by leaving half of the kids' dirty socks here

It was like drinking beauty from a fire hydrant

A long-expired sheriff oversaw our meal from his frame on the wall

I don't know what happened to Granny

Where the GPS insisted her spirit remained, our grosser senses detected only a muffler shop

We also passed up "How to Spot a Bastard by His Star Sign."

It was like feeding a baby bird with no neck muscles.

Our window offered a fine view of the gaseous output of an industrial plant

White chocolate jalapeño fudge that melts in your mouth and then sets it on fire

We've started stacking the kids on top of each other to save space

Kai has never had much use for the boundary constructed between customer and merchant

One kid carried an electronic friend-attractor. 

My mother would have been mortified

She managed to turn our backseat Franz Kafka into a relatively pleasant if a bit antsy little boy

We have left socks in every region.

-Juliet

Silver Spring, MD to Westerly, RI

Wednesday morning, after a hopeless attempt to return Amber and Vivek's house to a modicum of the state it had been when we arrived, a quick photo session, and masterful dodging of questions from Liam and Kai about why we weren't staying longer to play with Jonah, why they hadn't seen enough of Noah and Vivek, why we didn't live closer to them, when we were going to see Amber again, why didn't we know, and whether they could take the leftover chocolate-chip pancakes with them in the car, we left.  Amber pressed a bag full of food and car activities into my hand as I was walking out the door.

  We racked up the states on our way north: Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York.  I was afraid to 

fall asleep for fear of missing one.  Traffic rescued Kai from sleeping all the way through Connecticut.  After flying up most of the Eastern Seaboard (I get the "sea" part but where exactly is the "board?"), we screeched to a halt on the Merritt Parkway at the first of a series of accidents so numerous and prolonged that Eric and I lost count.  On Route 95 (pronounced "route," as in "to rout your enemy," not "to pull a kumquat up by its root"), we had been traveling between 3 and 8 mph for so long that Kai began to despair of ever reaching Rhode Island ("We have been in traffic forever and we will never never never ever get there").  In desperation, I handed him my cell phone and gave him permission to call my mother.  I don't know what she said, but she managed to turn our backseat Franz Kafka into a relatively pleasant if a bit antsy little boy.  As we passed the scene of the accident, Eric and I saw a figure lying on the tarmac covered by a white sheet.

The lights of my parents' house were a welcome sight.  So were they.  It was worth driving 4900 miles to see them.

I have sand from Death Valley in my socks, wintered arroyo grass from Albuquerque stuck in my running pants, cross-country crumbs all over the back seat.  We have left socks in every region.  When I close my eyes the road still pulls down and forward and there is a red flash of a truck curving up a hill.  The New Orleans sun has a warm fragile hold under my skin, and my fingers remember the freshness of the Georgia flea market taco.  I regret now giving my stinging mouth the veto on the rest of that Pakistani lamb chop.

Eric says we don't remember what people look like or what they did as much as we remember how they made us feel.  Jean and Paul and Sam and Joe and Vivek and Amber, the ranger at Carlsbad Caverns, Dave the Balloonist, the ticket seller at Birmingham, the shopkeepers at Roanoke: thanks for letting us drop into your lives and for everything you did to make us feel so welcome.

We didn't bring a DVD player or an electronic game player with us, and I was apprehensive about how that would be.  It meant that I traveled in the back between Liam and Kai for large chunks of the trip, having "school" by making up math challenges, learning French, U.S. geography, bits of history and the sociology of the civil rights movement.  Reasons came up to read books and signs and maps, to write letters, journal entries, and thank you notes.  We met a ton of people.  We didn't kill each other.  We had wonderful luck with weather and mostly with traffic.  The car didn't break down, and the dog and most of our possessions arrived with us.  Each of us, I'm sure, knows more and better ways to push each other's buttons, but by the end of the trip the tendrils that connect each one of us to the other are thicker and more abundant.  I'm content to be enmeshed with these people, my family.   

Signing off, til the road trip to Montreal,
Juliet

  



 

Roanoke, VA to Silver Spring, MD

Driving north toward Washington, DC, I was kicking myself for leaving Roanoke so late.  We were heading to Silver Spring, Maryland where Liam's godparents, Amber and Vivek, live.  Shopping had cut into the sliver of time we had with them.  I had promised my mother we'd be in Westerly, Rhode Island by Wednesday evening, over seven hours from Silver Spring.  By my calculations, that left us with time for dinner, an overnight, and an early morning start for the sprint to the finish line in Westerly.  I called Amber to tell her we'd be late, and my friend Jenny to tell her we wouldn't be able to see her at all.

It's very difficult to keep up with the way people keep re-naming the day every time the sun sets and rises.  Eric said something to the kids about it being being Monday.  Which was odd.  I'm the one who usually confuses these things.  I gently let him know that it was Tuesday.  He gently let me know it wasn't.

It came to me in a flash that yesterday was Sunday.  And that people usually put Monday after Sunday and before Wednesday and Tuesday.  Which meant two things: Eric was right (the universe re-aligned itself). It also meant we had an extra day.  It was like daylight savings time on steroids.

So instead of having us overnight, the Chopra-Khans found that a family of four (plus a dog that Amber is allergic to and Jonah is afraid of) had moved into the guest suite.  My mother would have been mortified (right, Mom?).  We spent our time with Vivek and Amber the way we usually do: eating and talking to the wee hours.  Amber's chicken and basmati rice, chocolate chip pancakes, amazing Elaiki tea.    

The next day we took Liam and Kai and Jonah to the Natural History museum.  At the entrance there's an Easter Island statue which anthropologists think served the function of watching over and protect the community.  Here are the three of them protecting their community:

We finally saw some wildlife:

I finally saw a mountain goat.  Or whatever this is:

We took the elephant very seriously:

 We had dinner Tuesday night at Kabob N Karahi (I ate the lamb chops until I couldn't stand the heat).  I was a little late getting a shot of our repast:

There was another family with kids the same age as Kai and Jonah.  One carried an electronic friend-attractor.  

If Kai's parents loved him more, they'd buy him one.

Here are the godbrothers, Noah and Liam, with Amber the Godmother:

 -Juliet

Roanoke, VA

Liam and Kai awoke as usual at dawn (using I can only assume some form of prehensile solar sensors, as Eric nightly draws three layers of curtain over the hotel window to ensure that not a crack of sunlight can pierce the room, and yet still they defeat every effort at lightlessness and arise at dawn and spring upon us and lay heavily upon our sleep-enfeebled bones and poke us with their sharp elbows and chins until Eric succumbs and rises) and we made an early start for the Roanoke City Market -- 11 am!  Our children find holiday shopping scintillating.

Kai has never had much use for the boundary constructed between customer and merchant.  He poked his head through the half-propped door into the storage room at the back of the storefront where the salespeople had disappeared.  Spying him, one asking whether he wanted her to put him to work.  We laughed in that adult he-he-he way about the unlawfulness of child labor.

Here's Kai about ten minutes later, expediting the cashier's line using the bar code reader:

And confirming the accuracy of the total on the computer cash register:

They told him he had a future in retail.  "I'll be back" he said. We took our little Terminator across the street.  The gift wrapper at La De Da needed some assistance.

At Fair Trade down the block he ferried a freshly unloaded cardboard box to the dumpster - no pics, as all I would have gotten was an image of a floating box.

We hightailed it out of Roanoke before the Department of Labor showed up.

-Juliet