“Another one rides the bus,” pt. 2; R.I.P. two mainstays

Success!

The bus took Samuel to school this morning for the first time.

I’m pleased that we got this sorted out within the month. The bussing in this district is not well thought of.

That said, the half-dozen dispatchers and drivers Karin & I talked to this week were all wonderfully helpful and kind.

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R.I.P. Nevin Longenecker, distinguished high school science teacher. (No, really. Distinguished.) I used to drink coffee with him in the Social Studies lounge before I’d go off to make photocopies for lesser pedagogues.

He ended up coming to my wedding. When it was discovered that his was the longest-lasting marriage in attendance, he was obliged to give a little speech.

I knew teachers in the school who had no idea how remarkable his record was. He didn’t toot his own horn – at least, not to me.

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R.I.P. the iconic Dame Maggie Smith.

“I believe I am past my prime” (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1969).

No: Her prime was just beginning.

The scholar, pt. 5: “Another one rides the bus”

At last, Samuel has been assigned to a school bus route.

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I took him outside this morning. We waited by the curb, in the dark.

Then the bus flew past us on a different street.

Maybe he’ll get to ride the bus to school tomorrow.

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He did make today’s return journey on the bus.

Daniel and I sat in lawn chairs on the front porch and waited for Samuel to arrive. When the bus pulled up, all the windows but one were empty … and there was Samuel’s curly head. There were his big eyes, staring out expressionlessly.

I was so proud of my little son for enduring this ordeal: his first bus ride, his first solo journey.

As soon as he got indoors, he went to his toy cars. He was virtually mute for an hour or so.

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Eventually, I learned that other children had ridden with him, and that he had enjoyed looking out at the houses.

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His driver seemed very conscientious. When she stopped the bus, she put on latex gloves and went back to help Samuel out of his seat. Then she waited to drive away until after he’d gone into the house.

The school bus is the safest vehicle on the road – your child is much safer taking a bus to and from school than traveling by car. In fact, students are about 70 times more likely to get to school safely when taking a bus instead of traveling by car. That’s because school buses are the most regulated vehicles on the road; they’re designed to be safer than passenger vehicles in preventing crashes and injuries; and in every state, stop-arm laws protect children from other motorists.

(Indiana Criminal Justice Institute)

We feed our children

Another “dine-in” attempt – this time with Daniel and Samuel, at a Chinese buffet. It was a success. Buttery cabbage on buttery whitefish on buttery, spicy, sugary chicken, on buttery noodles, with dumplings. Daniel ate for free; Samuel’s rate was reduced; the boys mostly stayed in their chairs. You could see the calories rushing through their arteries and veins, draining away their consciousness.

Not the fetus’s, though. “ ‘Pip’ loves this food,” Karin said. “He’s dancing around.”

Daniel heard a very tiny baby crying in the restaurant. He smiled. “Meow, meow,” he said.

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I’m sorry to admit, our sons have terrible eating habits. Daniel wakes up at 6:30 or 7:00 and begs for candy. (No, I don’t give him any.)

He may have finally turned a corner. He’s been asking for meals with more balance: today, peanut-buttered toast, strawberries, and Spanish rice.

Now that Karin is “in pig” (Nancy Mitford’s phrase), our WIC allowance has been raised: At the end of each month, we realize we haven’t claimed anything like our full share of vegetables. So, half-panicked, we go to the store and pick out avocados and other “costly” free items. This month it was dragon fruit, from Ecuador. I wondered if any of the fruit we looked at was descended, nearly or distantly, from Hoku’s parents’ farm.

Body-text fonts, pt. 31: Scala

The font.

Comparisons to Electra and Joanna are apt: not for actual shape so much as for, I dunno, a shared ideal of conspicuous unadornedness.

This early ’90s typeface (in terms of birthday, not heydey) is used here in a collection of writings by an art-history-informed feminist whose “moment” was the early ’90s.

I’m no accomplished gender theorist, but I do think it should count in favor of a theory of gender that it harbors resources to predict, or at least retrospectively explain, the widespread “gendering” of non-persons: words, objects, animal species, topographical features, and so on (in this passage: religion-types).

Typefaces, as designers and marketers often describe them, are manly or womanly.

Scala, Electra and Joanna, if womanly – as their names suggest – are so in a prickly, thorny way.

I’ll post about Electra and Joanna later.

An oddball and I practice civic friendship

Two bang-average but worthwhile true crime docs:

Deadnorth (Tubi), set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula;

Lover, Stalker, Killer (Netflix), set in Omaha and its environs.

I watched one right after the other, knowing little about either. There was considerable thematic overlap. The true crime genre is, if nothing else, extremely useful as a catalog of behavioral red flags.

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Samuel went to the lake with grandparents, grandaunts, granduncles, and second cousins (an inexact tally). He came home this afternoon, sunburnt.

With just Daniel in tow, Karin & I went out for gyros. As we were finishing our meal, a nerdy, headset-clad man one table over, who’d been talking into his phone all lunch long, asked me to look after his food while he ran out to his truck. I nodded. His truck was a semi. I watched through the restaurant window while he fumbled around in the cab. Then he brought out a cigarette and smoked it outside the restaurant.

Finally, he returned to the bits of onion and tomato on his plate.

He grinned and thanked me. I nodded again.

My good deed for the day.