Spies like us revisited

I was telling my husband about my recent experiences at the bank. The following conversation ensued:

Me: ... I mean, I'm all for being friendly, but I just think that's a little over the top. Don't you?

Him: Well, that is kind of "their thing." You know, they are the friendly local bank. They know their customers by name. I mean, I even had one of the tellers recognize me at the mall and say hello.

Me: That would freak me out. Even more so because I would probably recognize her but wouldn't know where I knew her from. Is she from church? Is she a customer from work? Do I know her from the gym?

Him: I knew who she was, but it was kind of weird because after she said hello, she made a point of saying, "Yeah, I just saw you shopping in such-and-such store." That did kind of make me feel like she was spying on me.

Me: Ex-actly.

Him: Yeah. Because what if I was in there buying stuff for my mistress or something?

Spies like us

I've been learning a lot about how the world works since I've been staying at home with the baby lately. For example, I am going to the bank during the day now and interacting with the tellers. Our bank is locally owned and operated and apparently prides itself on knowing its customers personally.

The first time I went in to make a deposit after the baby was born, the teller scrutinized my checks carefully and then cried, "Oh! Are you Brett's wife?!" I answered in the affirmative and she seemed delighted to meet me. "We just love Brett," she gushed. "He comes in here a lot, usually with the dogs, but we haven't seen too much of you... that's why I didn't recognize you. But... but... YOU HAVE A BABY! Ohmygosh! Is she yours?" I answered in the affirmative again.

Suddenly, there was a swarm of bank tellers behind the bulletproof glass all angling for a glance at my newborn.

"Ohhh! She's so cute!"
"How tiny!"
"What a doll!"
"Awww..."
"Brett didn't mention that you were pregnant OR that you'd had a baby! Why didn't he tell us? Make sure you scold him for us!"

Uhhh... okay. I don't know why he would have told you, my bank teller friends, but sure, I'll yell at him for you.

"We watched you get out of the car, but none of us recognized you. We just figured you were just some new mother. We didn't know you were Brett's wife!"

You watched me get out of the car? And you tried to figure out who I was? Interesting. Okay, it was a slow day at the bank. Maybe you all had nothing else to do. Maybe you are required to try to greet everyone by name so it behooves you to get a jump start while people are still in the parking lot.

I wondered if they would remember me when I went in the next week without the baby.

"Oh, hello Mrs. Fox," the teller greeted me. "Is that your mom out there in the car with the baby?" she inquired. "I can tell. She looks a lot like you."

Okay. Now I just feel like I'm being spied on. It's one thing to watch the parking lot for customers. It's another thing to peer into your customers' parked cars and comment on the facial features of their passengers.

I pity the fool who tries to rob my bank. He won't realize there's 4 bored tellers and a bank manager watching his every move from the moment he steps out of his car until he hands over his hold up note.

They might even know his mother.

Degrees of separation

My husband was born in Wisconsin. My college roommate was from Wisconsin. I've never been to Wisconsin or anywhere near it, really. Apparently, it's a very, very small place.

Last winter, my mother-in-law and I were chatting as we drove through the dreary Nevada wastelands to get to the dreary wastelands of Utah. I mentioned that my college roommate was from a little town in Wisconsin called Grafton and asked if she had ever heard of it.

"Nope. Doesn't ring a bell. Must be a very small town."

"I think so. But I understand the ward and stake boundaries out there are huge, so I thought maybe it would have been in your stake or something. It didn't look like it was too far from where you guys lived when Brett was born."

"That's true. But I don't think I've heard of it."

We drove on through the unchanging scenery, each lost in our own thoughts.

"Wait!" she cries, causing me to almost veer off the freeway. "Did you say 'Grafton'?"

"Yes. So you've heard of it?"

"Of course, it wasn't too far from where we lived when Brett was born! They were in our ward! I thought you said 'Brafton' at first."

"Well, my roommate was Miranda. Miranda M******. But everyone called her Mandy. She about my age so she would have been a baby when you guys were there. I think her dad was Mike M*******."

"Oh oh! I do remember them! Mike was a big, big guy, if I remember right."

"Yeah! He came to visit Mandy while we were in school and I remember he filled up the whole doorway to our room. Wow. It's a small world. Who would have thought that you were in the same ward with my college roommate's parents when my husband was born?"

Amazing, right? It gets better.

At Sunday dinner last week, the talk turned to delivering babies and the relative merits of taking pictures or video of your offspring being born and the appropriateness of sharing such a record with others. My father-in-law remembered that once in his was a member had brought photos of his wife giving birth to church and had shared them freely with others.

"It was certainly... out of the ordinary," he admitted. "Do you remember who that was?" he asked my mother-in-law. "Was it when we lived in Chicago? Or no... It think it was Wisconsin. Yeah, it was, uhhh... I don't remember his name. But they were related to the J***** family."

"Hey, I know some people named J*****," I chimed in unhelpfully. "But they lived in Provo. They were my roommate's cousins and they used to store her stuff for her in when she went home for the summer. As a matter of fact, mom actually knew my roommate's family when you guys lived in Wisconsin. The M******* family. Come to think of it, my roommate's mom's maiden name must have been J*****, because it was Mandy's aunt and uncle."

"Yup. That's it."

"What?"

"M*******. That was the guy's name. Mike M*******. He's a really big guy. Very tall, just massive."

"How funny! That's my roommate's dad! I can't believe you knew him!"

"He was a great guy. We went hunting a few times together. Anyway, yeah, he was the one who brought the pictures of his wife giving birth to church."

"No kidding. It makes sense though. I mean, he is a photographer by trade so it's understandable that he'd want to capture and share the moment on film. It's so weird that we can be thousands of miles away and yet still so connected. I only know one family from Wisconsin and they happen to be people you also know. AND you've seen pictures of..."

My voice trailed off. "It just occurred to me," I finally was able to continue, "Those pictures... that baby... That was my roommate. Being born."

So there you have it. My father-in-law not only knows the parents of my college roommate, but has seen pictures of her birth.

Now, if only we could fit Kevin Bacon in this story somewhere...

Darn kids! Turn that racket down!

I was out toodling around this afternoon, running some errands for the office. The glorious weather inspired me to pull out a CD that Brett made for me a couple of years ago which is filled with rap, dance and hip-hop music. It's not always what I am in the mood for, but today it was perfect.

One of my favorite songs came on just as I was pulling up to a stoplight. ("Yeah!" by Usher. Ok? Don't judge me.) I cranked it up and the bass started thumping.

"BOOM! BOOM! Ba-BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BA-BA-BA-BOOM!" The windows of my car were almost rattling and I was feelin' da power.

An elderly man and woman were in the car next to me, waiting at the stoplight with their windows down. (My windows were up, thank you very much.) As soon as the song, and specifically the BOOM-ing, started, the woman's face contorted and looked as if she had just caught a whiff of something very, very rotten. She turned her crusty-face to her husband and he began twisting around every-which-way in his seat, obviously to locate the car from whence this unholy sound was emanating.

"BOOM! BOOM! Ba-BOOM!" My stereo thumped on and on.

After making a quick survey of the surrounding cars, any of which could have been producing the offending noise, the man turned and stared directly at me with a look of annoyance on his face. I stared back, displaying my innocent blue eyes and distinctly pregnant belly as prominently as possible. His gaze immediately softened and he rolled his eyes at me as if to say, "Kids these days! You must be as annoyed at this racket as I am..." I nodded sympathetically and lifted my hands in a "But what can you do?" gesture. The light turned green and we both drove on.

Poor guy. He had no idea that he was trying to commiserate with Chill Cool Li'l Puffy Snoop Platypus herself. At least, that's what they call me in da 'hood.

I'll do my shopping at night from now on

I went to the grocery store this morning to pick up some noms for lunch. As I was pulling in the less-frequently used side driveway to the shopping center, I saw several drop cloths laying in the empty parking spaces. I thought it was odd because the shopping center is fairly new and certainly not in need of painting. Also, there were no work vehicles anywhere in sight.

As I drove toward the other end of the lot, I saw a beat-up green Taurus slowly cruising along. Every few feet, the car would stop and the driver would hurl out another drop cloth. Weird. What kind of painting company sends a private vehicle out early in the morning just to throw drop cloths into the parking lot? Wouldn't it be better if the driver got out and arranged the cloths so they were actually covering the ground near where the painting would be taking place?

The driver of the Taurus turned suddenly, gunned the engine, and raced down the aisle (nearly clipping my car in the process). I could see the driver was a young woman with a look of steely determination in her eyes. She screeched to a halt as a man jumped out in front of her car.

The man slammed his hands down on the hood and they exchanged heated words. He walked to the driver side window and she threw a pair of shoes at him. He swore at her, she swore back and threw another pair of shoes at him. She raced off, leaving the man in a trail of black exhaust, his arms extended wide in a "What the..." posture.

With an air of resignation, he slowly bent down and picked up the shoes and a drop cloth. I realized then that what I had thought were drop cloths were actually denim jeans. His jeans.

Ahhh... so baby did a bad bad thing and got caught. I guess kicking him out wasn't enough. She had to spread his clothes all over the Safeway parking lot. When I left the store and headed to work, I could see she had not limited herself to the parking lot. There were clothes strewn for a least a mile down the nearest main drag.

I laughed. I couldn't help it. I wasn't laughing at their domestic difficulties, though. I was laughing at the fact that this man, who maybe had a 26-inch waist, owned at least 12 pairs of jeans large enough to be mistaken for drop cloths.

Haha, haha.

Nothing gold can stay

I watched an incredible golden-violet sunrise through my rear view mirror this morning on the way to work. I can't watch a sunrise or a sunset without thinking of Diane, a lady I tutored one semester in statistics.

Diane was a very sheltered, nervous, skittish slip of a woman. She was probably in her early forties when we met and she had just enrolled in a few classes at UBR. (UBR was slang for "University Behind Raley's" which is what we called the community college in Placerville.) She talked quickly and quietly and asked what I thought a lot but never listened to what I had to say. She had a tender heart, especially toward her mother (who she lived with) and cats (she had many).

I don't think she had ever lived anywhere other than Camino and for her, even that small world was fraught with danger. She drove an enormous tank of a car because she thought it would be safer if she was involved in an accident. She wore her keys on a rubber scrunchie around her wrist because if she set them down they would be stolen and the thief would somehow be able to track her keys to her house and break in while she was away. She refused to talk on the phone during a storm because she was afraid of being electrocuted when lightening struck her home.

Her declared major was art but the counselling office had told her she needed to have math credits to graduate. They had offered either trigonometry or statistics as options to fill the requirement. She opted for statistics because it sounded like fun.

As someone who majored in statistical science, I can assure you that statistics is fun. Fun for people who love numbers and data and graphs and charts. But I have met people who, well, how can I put it... HATE STATISTICS WITH THE WHITE-HOT PASSIONS OF A MILLION SUNS. These people usually major is something non-math related, like art.

Diane quickly realized she was in over her head in Stat 101 and needed a tutor. I'm not exactly sure how she got my number but I started tutoring her twice a week. When it wasn't raining, she would come to my house and we would work at the dining room table.

Let me stop for a moment and tell you about my cabin in Camino. It was a whole lot of awesome awesome. It was built on the side of a hill so the living room was on huge piers. Looking east, you felt like you were at eye-level with the snowy mountain peaks surrounding Lake Tahoe. On a clear day, you really could see forever.

Diane commented on the spectacular view one day as we slogged through normal distributions and standard deviations. "I'll bet it's so beautiful when the sun sets over those mountains at night. I like sunsets. That's okay, isn't it? I mean, I like to watch them by myself at home. I think it's okay even if I'm watching it by myself. That's okay, right?"

I explained that it really was very beautiful in the morning when the sun was coming up, but that if she wanted to see the sunset it would be on the other side of the house. She nodded and turned back to her book.

A few minutes later:

Her: Say, what class did you learn that in? Was it astrology? That sounds like fun. Maybe I'd like to take that class next semester. That's okay, isn't it? Was it astrology or something else? Do you think they'd have it at the college? Was it fun when you took it? Was it hard? It sounds hard. Was it really hard? I probably couldn't do it, huh? You're really smart, that's why you took that class. It was probably really hard.

Me: You want to take astrology? Like horoscopes and stuff? I've never taken it, but they probably wouldn't offer it at the college.

Her: Oh. Well, where did you learn it then? I probably need to go to a university to learn it, huh? I'd never be able to do that. You have to be really smart to go to a university. It's okay that I'm just going to the community college, isn't it?

Me: That's perfectly fine. Learn what, exactly?

Her: About the sun and stuff. You said the sun goes down behind the house, not over the mountains. What class did you learn that in?

Me: Well, uhh... I didn't really take a class for that. It's just that when I wake up in the morning, the sun is coming up over the mountains. And when I go out my back door in the evening, I see the sun setting.

Her: Every day?

Me: Yup. Every day. As a matter of fact, if you start watching where the sun sets at your house, I think you'll find it is about the same place every day.

Her: Really? Okay. I'm going to start keeping track tonight. That's okay, isn't it?

Diane and I had a little bit of a falling out toward the end of the semester. She became more and more anxious (which I didn't think was possible) as her final exam approached. She called me constantly at work and wanted me to walk her through complicated problems over the phone. I encouraged her to use the book to find the answers because I felt like even though it was an open-book final, it probably wasn't an open-tutor final. She became more frustrated and anxious and one day ended up screaming at me that it would be my fault when she failed her final. Then she hung up on me and stopped calling back. Even though there was nothing more I could do for her, I felt bad about how it ended.

I saw Diane a couple of years later at a Dairy Queen. We recognized each other and I was worried that she would start railing on me for causing her to fail the class.

She didn't. She was genuinely happy to see me -- thrilled even. She introduced me to her co-workers and then whispered, "So, I did okay in that class. I got a C-. That's okay, isn't it? I mean, I'm not as smart as you. But I didn't fail it. The teacher let me re-take the final because I was so nervous I couldn't finish the first time. That's okay, isn't it? I mean, I still passed the class and everything. I decided not to take any more math classes. I'm taking a painting class now. That's okay, isn't it?"

I assured her that a C- was great and that I was proud of her for sticking it out. And I truly was.