Dog days of June here. We've just passed the summer solstice, so the long march back toward winter has begun. The weather tends to bounce between upper 60's and lower 80's, usually with some clouds in the sky, sometimes clear blue and sometimes, like today, totally overcast. A couple of mosquitoes humming around. Ordinary Rhode Island summer.
Except that this weekend will be the big air show at Naval Air Station Quonset, about two miles as the crow flies from our home. Several planes have been in the air practicing all week, mostly World War II-vintage props. On the other hand, the big cargo planes aren't coming and going as usual this week, so it's actually been a bit quieter than usual.
Until today, when the Blue Angels took to the air. They're the last act for the Air Show, the rockstars of the whole getup. I've seen them in person, and being no expert on flight, and fearing heights in general, I'm highly impressed by the precision, speed and of course, noise. (The air show folks hand out free earplugs to the crowd--a welcome courtesy.)
So the Blue Angels and a few other jets are now in town rehearsing, and it's possible to hear them screaming and roaring all over the place. It will go mostly quiet for a few minutes, perhaps with a distant purr in the air, when suddenly the scream gets loud again and you can hear a plane (or several) ripping by. If they're especially low--within a few hundred feet--a low hum accompanies the scream. Even as an adult, for me the experience ranges between annoying and unsettling.
For a 21-month-old girl, however, it can be pretty much terrifying. Eva normally loves to watch planes, scans the sky for them, and will point one out as soon as she sees or hears it (and frequently when she doesn't). When the big cargo lugs are coming in and out of the air station, lumbering potbellied 4-prop behemoths, Eva will stop whatever she's doing and stare.
However, when these high-speed war machines go exploding by, the poor girl is no less than nervous, frequently frightened enough to seek a hug, and sometimes dissolves altogether into tears. It doesn't help that right now, as the boys are practicing out there, it's supposed to be naptime.
The planes started flying just as I cleaned up Eva's lunch and brought her into her room for a few books before her nap. I began reading to her when the first group of jets came low overhead.
Now Eva is also learning to listen and talk, and she's growing increasingly sophisticated at it. Just a week or so ago she told her first story, a series of single words which referred to a sequence of events in time: "Mama...dada...pizza...milk...sauce." ("Sauce" being applesauce.) In her babyish way, Eva had described dinner to her doll. Just recently she's begun pairing words, as if she's linking the concepts: "Mama-dada...Mama-Eva...Eva-dada."
Of course she still talks a fair amount of gibberish, that almost-significant alphabet soup of sound toddlers make when they're engaging you but have no English at their command. What's particularly entertaining is when Eva sprinkles actual words in amongst the gibberish. And today, with the planes disturbing our reading session, was the best example yet.
Eva looked up nervously when the planes roared overhead, and clearly wasn't paying attention to Winnie the Pooh, so I started explaining. "Those are planes," I told her, "They're making a lot of noise because they're close to the ground." Of course Eva was just as unsettled as before, so I kept on repeating this, adding that "You're safe. You're here with Dada."
Soon, Eva was repeating, sort of, my words back to me, with her endearingly wide eyes, signed gestures and emphatic diction:
"Eema thama muissu abba pwaaaane."
"Oowa vimmi dikka guwa nooise."
"Matha aiea bamma anni gwoound."
"Amma thama iwi magga safe."
She kept on like that for a little while, nonsense followed by one of the words I'd emphasized to her. I got the feeling it was therapeutic for her, since the planes kept flying by and she was plainly still nervous. At one point, since they were so close, I grabbed her, ran outside and we saw four Blue Angels go ripping overhead in close formation, just a couple of hundred feet above the trees. "Planes," I said, pointing.
"Pwaaanes," Eva answered.
After returning her to her room, the jets came ripping by once more even lower, and I cursed myself for bringing the little girl in too soon. And of course she exploded into tears at the sound, so I went in, calmed her down with another book, and went back out to finish my lunch.
As of right now, the jets are still in the air practicing, and still occasionally flying overhead. And I just checked on the little girl: passed out on her bed, partially covered by her blankie, with one corner stuffed in her mouth.
That's my girl.
No comments:
Post a Comment