We are sitting in the Darjeeling Café, eating crepes of chicken and apple and brie in our new hometown of Staunton, Virginia. The sun steams though the tall white schoolhouse windows onto our little corner where we sit on tatami mats amongst piled rugs and pillows. I have just nursed you to sleep and transferred you to a made-up bed of pillows and sweaters between us- you suck your binky and sleep dreamlessly. You are the absolute picture of repose, while your dad struggles though his book on Zizek- he started his new job last week and weekends are his only time to study for his philosophy PhD. He has been here since Thanksgiving. You and me and Nico have been here for exactly one week… we arrived 7pm on Sunday the 7th after a whirlwind trip across the country in great-grandpa’s old blue Mercedes so that somebody would be there on Monday to meet the moving truck.
The Mercedes: grandma and grandpa up front with their maps and crossword puzzles and you and me and Nico in back, the old car so stuffed with toys and clothes and blankets and xmas presents and bottles of wine and all the miscellaneous doo-dads left over from the move, that grandma wasn’t allowed to even go grocery shopping- there was no room for things like lettuce.
You were an absolute peach on the road trip… we couldn’t believe what a quiet, happy baby you were (had all kinda steeled ourselves for a nightmare marathon of ceaseless baby screams) but we were saved by two inventions…. 1:
the Binky. 2:
Backseat breastfeeding, which I invented after the happy discovery that I could kinda jerk the car seat over to the right and lean over just enough to drop my boob into your mouth (not the most comfortable of positions, to be sure- but it beats listening to a crying baby!) With the above tools, and then all this time to stare at each other's face, we actually had a really good trip. You did a lot of sleeping. And damn girl- you love yourself some Binky. Nipple confusion be damned. That was one
fine invention. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is not to be the sole solution to your sucking fetish.
So here is how it would go…. As the snowswept frozen plains of Kansas and then Missouri slipped past, I sat in dreamy winter sunshine slanting though my south-facing window, reading Obama's autobiography and playing and talking to you. When you started to get grumpy and lost interest in the myriads of toys spread out at your feet, I would stick the binky in. That would usually settle you down. If the binky failed, and you were tired of me singing or talking to you or showing you things to look at and you weren’t hungry and if you were seriously just losing it or overstimulated or exhausted, and we weren’t about to stop somewhere, then I would lean in and give you my 3rd weapon: a powerful round of Oms…. Right up close to your head so that the sound would vibrate your little cranium. That usually stopped your screams, and would at least tide you over until we could stop. We called it the
Illinois Om in 3 Part Harmony, for a particularly long stretch of road right before we hit Kentucky, when Grandma and Grandpa were inspired to pitch in.
Side note: Your dad and I discovered Om-ing one night when you were restless and cranky, unable to fall asleep against my chest, and I was humming to you in my off-key way and your dad delicately suggested that I try something a little more harmonious to hum…. So (after shooting him a dirty look) I started to Om and he joined in and we just did these circles over and over until your lids dropped- you were powerless to resist the vibrations, and fell fast asleep. We couldn’t believe it. We just stared gratefully at each other over your head and mouthed “Oh my god- she
is a little Buddha!” (meaning you don’t just look like one). And I swear- it is like something in you recognizes those sounds from a past life… those deep vibrations work when all else fails. My only fear is that I am conditioning you so well that years later, if you ever decide to become a Buddhist, you are going to be a complete narcoleptic in the meditation hall when they start to chant.
The other thing that happened on our road trip, other than our first-ever trip to a Bob’s Big Boy (in Kentucky- I forced us to stop there because it had been one of grandma Robin's first jobs, back in the sixties when she was but a wee lass…it was truly horrible food but all the waitresses just
luuoooovved you- they all had to come over to our table to check you out and tell us
aaullll about their little babies and kids and their sister’s kids and so on. It was quite the southern experience, complete with our first real accents (“
my little girl just wakes me up so aurrly in the morning, I can’t even tell you! But I just luuoove her”)).
But I digress…. The other thing that happened was that you, miss Sava Talulah Dunn, my smart little biscuit, you learned….
to read. Quite possibly the
smallest human ever to accomplish such a thing.
What happened was that your favorite thing to look at (unless it was at night in which case there was a toy that lit up all these different colored buttons in time to different musical tunes while pronouncing the names of the colors in all the different languages of the world “
red! rojo! amarillo! blau!) But during the day, your favorite thing to look at was this felt-sewn book, all of 6 pages, called “Where’s the Bone?”. This is a beautiful book (compliments of your grandma of course, along with all the other goodies spilling over the seats), with a big-ole black and white puppy face all leaping off the cover at you, and then a bone on a string that you get to put places, like under the water with all the fishes…. or behind a fuzzy white cloud… or under a ball... you get the picture. Very tactile and awesome. Point is…. you would just stare at this book for hours, and I would occasionally turn the pages for you so that you wouldn’t get bored (I am really trying hard to stimulate your visual synapses… apparently it is supposed to make you smarter in the end, and since I have lost my fish oil capsules sometime during the move, I am guiltily making up for it with external stimuli). And you would just sit and stare at the pages, looking from left to right, and back again, just letting your gaze wander all over the open pages, and I swear it looked exactly like you were reading. At the very least, I think having such bookworms for parents has encoded some deep genetic memory of the act of reading into your bones, so that your body knows what to do with a book even if your mind doesn’t. Anyway, at one point, you just got so damn excited that you kicked your legs out and jerked your arms all happy and frantic-like, and you turned the page yourself. And kept reading.
I swear. I have it on tape. I will show you. You did it more than once.
We love Staunton. Staunton is the best. Staunton is this cool historic town with the most beautiful Victorian houses (with those deep southern porches) all jostling together on these rolling hills with lots of trees which are bare of leaves at the moment, since it is winter, and it is really lovely because that way you can see all the houses better- they can’t hide behind their green skirts. So many of them look like haunted houses, with their stark black skeletal trees posing theatrically beside crumbling front stoops and peeling walls.
The train that comes through town- about a half-mile down the hill from our house- is the same train line that supplied the confederate troops with goods and food during the Civil War. It makes a lovely deep and rumbly sound as it passes by, and delicious low blasts of the horn. It is actually quite a dramatic train, so self-important, announcing its arrival at 11 pm at night with a great trumpeting fanfare. I like the fact that this fragment of history will be one of the earliest recurring sounds to be encoded in your auditory memory, and that we will be taking this train to places like New York City, Washington D.C...
Weather: In this one week it has been piercing cold- and also warmish and humid and tropical feeling. It kind of flops between those two moods. So far the weather has been mild and amazing, and I feel like saying “if this is what passes for winter.. bring it on!” I like the warm moist days, when I get a hint of how it is going to be in the spring and summer, when we will have to be rocking furiously on the porch hoping to generate a gust of wind to cool our perspiring brows.
Apparently Staunton brings out the latent southern belle in me- I walk out my front door onto this deep curving porch, with the town falling away at my feet and the brown hills far off in the distance, and feel like flouncing around in a big hoop skirt. Yes, flouncing. Which I haven’t done yet but I have started sporting this pinkish/mauve velvety bathrobe everywhere. It is so soft and wonderful I can’t even tell you. Yesterday I met our new neighbors across the street while wearing that bathrobe and vacuuming our rugs out on the porch while you lay in the bassinet staring transfixed up at the empty sky. They were very nice- they didn’t say anything about my bathrobe. They loved Nico, kept petting her and laughing at how transfixed she was by the squirrel in the tree way across the street. This man liked your name, asked me if I knew that it was a Slavic name. I told him yes: it means old man. Then he said that Sava is the patron saint of the Serbians. He knew this because he was Serbian.
People in Staunton could not be friendlier. I don’t know if it is this town in particular, or Virginia in general, but we have been welcomed with open arms. The man carrying his motorcycle helmet in line at the hardware store (he was shopping for stocking stuffers and didn’t find anything he liked so he just bought a Mounds bar) seeing me juggle baby and new broom/mop purchase, insisted that he carry my things out to my car for me. He has lived here since 1974, raised his kids here. Or our neighbor Dante, who upon learning of our plight with the movers (the fact that we expected them first on the 1st and then on the 8th but they didn’t actually show up until the 13th, and that our Mercedes and its cargo of baby and grandparents and dog arrived to a house with not a stick of furniture except one little blow-up mattress Jamba bought at Wal-mart to sleep on while he was here alone, and which kept deflating half the night), absolutely insisted that we all stay at his house for the night. And not only that, but he was leaving for the week (he is only here on the weekends and lives with his partner up in Baltimore) and that we must stay at his house until the movers came. Which we did- for a whole week- and I don’t know what we would have done without him, or his big, lovely house with its grand wood curving staircase and sitting room and thick curtains on the windows.
Side note: Dante is fast becoming one of my favorite persons. Because he is this very kind, soft-spoken, lovely man, who has a habit of saying thoughtful and wise things and generally being a calming and grounding influence on this sometimes harried and frantic mother of yours. Yesterday while the movers were here and Jamba was at a yoga class and I was trying to juggle you (starting to disintegrate amongst the chaos) and the movers, Dante showed up and asked if he could hold you. It was so wonderful to have an extra pair of hands, and I gratefully handed you over and then started rushing around the house directing traffic. When I came downstairs it was to the sound of the most beautiful sonorous whistling, and Dante swaying with you near the front windows in the sun. I moved transfixed to his side, wanting to be close to that sound, and saw that you had passed out- your head leaning back and your mouth open in that pose of surrender which I had only before seen you do after the most satisfactory of breastfeedings. He told me it was an old Filipino lullaby, and I wanted to cry, so grateful that you were having such an enchanting experience and so sad that I didn’t know how to whistle such beauty into your ears. Or maybe, that I was not that baby being held and sung to in the sunshine.
The other neighbors have been just as wonderful- I am finding out that we are surrounded by painters and writers and history teachers and world travelers- and tonight we have been the recipients of not only a tin of cookies (“welcome to the neighborhood!”) from the neighbors down the street, but a bottle of wine and a paper plate of brownies still warm from the oven from the couple across from us- the ones who so loved Nico and who told us that the man who used to live in this house- the brilliant protégé of Ezra Pound- was a right-wing conspiracy theorist who had so many books stacked in his front parlour that the entire house tilted down towards the street. I am devouring the brownies as I type. They are helping me deal with the fact that it just took us two and a half hours to get you to go down to sleep tonight.
Yes. I like this town. Today we sat on the path in Dante’s front yard as he took a break from gardening, and in his quiet, grounded way he put it best…"This is a place where you feel you can create, and make things happen. It seems like things are possible here- not only that- they are begging for you to make it happen. But mostly, it feels like a place where you can just… breathe..."
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