Yesterday I was melancholy. It was raining and cold and at first I was melancholy because we were going to the beach for a week and while YES it is fun to play on the beach whether or not it is raining, especially if you have two identical yellow rainsuits for your children and your older child just figured out how to put on his own rubber boots, NO it is not fun for more than one day. I’m sorry. It’s not. Back in July when I was sweating my junk off in the 38C weather I thought, it had Better Not Be Cold for my beach vacation or I will bust some heads. Yo.
Turned out I was being psychic-melancholy because I had a feeling we were going to have to cancel our beach vacation and no, not because of the weather, we’re not LAME we’re just broken. Really broken.
Here’s a not-at-all funny story about skipping rope. If you skip rope and you have osteoporosis? You can fracture your spine. No, I didn’t do this. My mother did. But it’s totally my fault because I’m the one who brought over the skipping rope and showed off by skipping like three times in a row and then panting and saying, ha! beat that!
Note to self: you are not 10 years old and your mother is not 30.
Note to mom: this is not your fault.
Note to everyone else: eat your calcium!
A compression fracture of the spine heals itself, just like a broken pinky toe, but it hurts a lot worse while it’s healing and also it helps if you don’t move around too much. Since the definition of hanging out with me and my sweet children is “you will move around too much” and also since it seemed yesterday that Trombone, Fresco and I were all coming down with a cold, we canceled the vacation.
Boo!
Oh, AND my website got hacked because I didn’t upgrade to the newest version of wordpress.
Another note to everyone: you might want to do that. And then eat something with calcium.
Early in the evening I heard a story on the radio news about parents dropping off their children at university for the first time and my already-melancholy was enhanced with some good old fashioned nostalgia re: the first day of school and the first day of university and the first day of the rest of your life and how can we hold on to the nights and to the memories if our nights are 30 minutes long and our memories even shorter? My life is over and I need a red corvette right now and also a makeover.
Silly. After all, I don’t really remember the first day of university and nothing about university really changed my life and Schmutzie wrote a much more coherent exploration of the back to school topic so I just read her post, nodded in agreement, made a note to post a comment later saying so and then forgot about schools entirely and got on with my day, which involved my favourite orange bandana and talking to the children in funny voices to get them to pay attention to me
It’s amazing how quickly a regular routine with one’s small children can instantly cancel any melancholy or ability to even spend five minutes thinking about the cause of said melancholy. And for this, I am grateful.
Suddenly, one block into our walk this morning, after convincing both children that they did not want to sit on the sidewalk and stab each other with leaves until lunch time, I remembered it is the first day of school. We live across the street from a school, you see. And not just any school. A DESTINATION school. I have decided that’s what it is because at 9 am and 3 pm there are approximately 400 cars (SUVs, actually) milling about the crucial intersection like sharks in bloody water. This morning the streets were clogged with cars again after so many months of scarce traffic and the sidewalks were clogged with parents, all of whom were just standing there, staring at the doors of the school as though a tsunami were about to break through and wash us all away.
I like that there are schools nearby and that, by all accounts, this particular school is a good one, otherwise would people be coming from who knows where to attend it. Probably not? And if we still live here in 8 years, my kids will go to this school. Probably. But they will take their lives in their hands crossing the street to get there. Seriously, there is a need for crossing guards at our four-way stop because when people are driving to school to drop off their kids, they are distracted, looking for parking, looking to see if their kids are on the steps yet, looking *anywhere* except at the stop sign or at the sidewalk where I am standing, waiting patiently for them to figure out that stopping is NOT optional, even if you have a student at the school.
They stop IN, not AT the intersections. They stop in the middle of the road, double-parking, to wait for their precious cargo. They stop wherever they feel like it, looking off in the distance at that perfect spot or Joey’s mom who has a new hairdo and in doing so, they are almost hitting me. Don’t tell me it wouldn’t hurt, even at 20 kms/hr it would hurt. SUV vs. human? That shit hurts!
Dudes! I am five foot eleven and I have a fluorescent orange double stroller with Very Loud Children in it. How could you miss me? Oh you just spilled your double bullshit decaf all over your white linen trousers and your blackberry fell out of your hand? My sympathies.
Don’t even get me started on why no one is walking and all the idling engines I’m passing as I go to get groceries. I’m sure there are good reasons.
And so, courtesy of my routine and my idiot neighbourhood, my back-to-school no-vacation melancholy is officially over. All of you: get back to school. Get inside. Get out of my way.
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