Impossibilities

I spend a large portion of my musing time imagining alternate scenarios to the way we live now. Not just us, our nuclear unit, but us in the community sense. My mind tends to run toward idealistic strategies. (As a counterbalance, much of the rest of my musing time is spent in arguing the merits of my own personal beliefs to imaginary companions.)

I try to imagine my world, more-or-less just as it is, but with certain intractable problems no longer so intractable. The ability to work, make money, have colleagues...and still be able to meet the school bus, or volunteer in class. The ability to live in a place that is pleasant and friendly and reasonably convenient to the places we need to go, yet isn't mostly surfaced in asphalt, shingles, and bluegrass turf.

One of the things I've been imagining lately is how to live once a person's mobility has been compromised, specifically, the mobility afforded by the personal car (a development that often dovetails with a loss of physical mobility). According to what I've read recently, the best place to live as an older, mobility-compromised person is the walking-friendly village or dense urban neighborhood you grew old in, or on an estate with servants, a driver, and a legion of loving relatives with their own separate quarters. I've been wondering about ways those of us who missed the train on (a) or (b) can create their benefits with the materials at hand.

As I muse, I've been using the specific example of an older relative who can see the end of her driving days in her rear-view mirror. How to recreate the village in the suburbs, at a price that's affordable for a person on a limited budget? I will leave aside the issue that one of the sacred tenets of this particular person's personal identity has been her ability to spend all day out and about in her car. That's separate, I think. The basic problem here is systemic.

For example, this person lives in a 55-and-older neighborhood, which is not, as it happens, well-designed to accommodate people who can no longer drive. For one thing, the nearest grocery store is two miles away. For another, the very 55-and-older-ness of the community has bred a certain vicious paranoia about infirmity: the residents here are too close to the age of immobility to brook any suggestion of weakness in that quarter. You drive or you leave, seems to be the consensus. Finally, the 55-and-older-ness has shut off other avenues of community engagement, such as having younger relatives (like us) living nearby. I think such a community could foster ways to gracefully accommodate the gradual loss of mobility and increase in isolation; I just don't think this one has. So I imagine ways this could change: daily dinners at the clubhouse, for example. A mobile pharmacy. A bus service. An errand service.

Even better, I think, would be a community that was closer to us. As suburbs go, we're pretty walkable: we have a nearby grocery store, restaurants, and library (what more does a person want? if a person is me, anyway.) With a little tweaking - such as extending the sidewalks surrounding the grocery store so that they actually extend into the surrounding neighborhoods, instead of dumping pedestrians into traffic in random places - this could be a suburb friendly to unsteady older adults on foot. Oh, and also we'd have to do something about that big road, the one with all the cars. This tends to be a theme in my alternate scenarios. It's not exactly that's I'm anticar, it's just I'd rather there were many, many more places where cars were not. (Am I willing to give up my car to achieve this scenario? No! I mean, not yet.)

So. I'm really not any closer to figuring this one out (and there's the added intractability of the fact that this is a real person with a real problem that we really need to address, sooner than later, and it needs to be affordable and also needs to not involve anyone moving into our basement) (which would be imperfect anyway, because of all the stairs) (notice how I'm not even mentioning the personality problems.)

 And now, for something completely different: it's Western Wear week, and I totally caved.

Not-pink boots were so completely not an option.

You Know What I Hate?

Western Days at Helen's preschool. Oh, sure, it sounds so seasonal and festive: the Stock Show's in town! Let's learn about farm animals and wear Western gear and make Western-y things like bandanas stamped with horseshoes! Which is all fine and good until the pony stops, with a short sobbing screech, at the wear Western gear part. Because here's the deal: we don't actually have any Western gear lying around the house, at least not in five-year-old girl size. No little Western vests. No pink Western hats with the curlicues and the bolo-tie straps. And certainly no $30 Western cowboy boots, in pink or any other color. So that Western Days either means a panicked run to Target at 7:30 p.m. on a school night, or 24 hours of sobbing. Guess which one we picked? Kill me.

Helen cried herself to sleep last night on the subject of Why can't we go buy a cowgirl hat? And woke up the morning crying for real about I want some COWGIRL BOOTS. And went to school not crying, but all pink and puffy and tender. In her completely non-Western leggings and striped shirt. Because even though she had a very Western-y jeans and a flowery button-up blouse, these weren't really cowgirl things without the boots and the hat. So why even bother, really?

God. At first I was game. "Oh, you really want to wear Western stuff because your friends are going to be wearing Western stuff," I said. "I really see that. Well, luckily you have some Western stuff. And you can wear Dad's cowboy hat!"

Then I started to get mad. "Western Wear Day is really only for wearing stuff you already have around the house," I said. "Not for going out and buying new special stuff that you're only going to wear once."

And finally I lost my temper. "Because last time we rushed out and bought special shoes for school? You didn't even wear them to the program we bought them for." I held up the white shoes with the rainbow lace-ups, and also the brand-new shoes that we bought two weeks ago and which haven't been worn yet, not even once, and also the sneakers she went and bought with her grandma at the beginning of school and which have been worn maybe once, if that. "We are not buying any more special shoes for special occasions until these shoes have gotten worn, and I mean it!"

Commence the weeping and the sobbing and the guilt. This is my absolutely least favorite thing about parenting--how it ropes me into stupid materialistic dramas that I outgrew or opted out of thirty years ago, and makes me feel like a total asshole for not just going along (how hard is it to rush out and buy $35 of special crap, anyway? yes, it's annoying, but is it going to break the budget for the month? not really, so what's the hold up? why not just buy $35 of felted plastic knickknack and make the girl happy? also, shouldn't we go to the damn Stock Show this weekend like apparently everybody else in town? don't we owe it to our kids, or the moment, or posterity, or something?)

You know what I hate? Social pressure.

Happy Wednesday. With a side of bitter.