Of Fog And Friendliness

Day 3 of the Stay-At-Home-Dad Experiment dawned gray and dreary, just like days 1 and 2 but not as cold. Abby and I got up about 10 and ate grapes and apples for breakfast. We’d been cooped up inside all the day before, so we were itching to get out of the house. We hit the bank and then Panera Bread for lunch where I had the asiago roast beef sandwich and Abby had baked potato soup. Her jacket had most of the soup until I took over the spooning duties.

It was quite foggy and I thought a trip to view the fog-shrouded Little Rock skyline from the new pedestrian walkway on the Junction Bridge over the Arkansas River would be interesting. The bridge is an old railroad drawbridge and the part that rises is locked in the up position. It was cold but we toughed it out walking to the raised part of the bridge and rode the elevator up. Abby is leery of elevators but she handled it well. When we got to the top and got off the lift she turned around and said “Thanks elevator.” (She anthropomorphizes everything. I think it’s from watching Thomas the Tank Engine and Dora the Explora.)

When we moved from Little Rock to Northwest Arkansas almost five years ago I remarked several times that people in NWA aren’t as friendly as in Little Rock. I contended that Little Rock is The South where nearly everybody is demonstrably nice and polite (at least to your face) and NWA is more midwestern where people are more reserved. I remember Gina and Kurt and even Shannon, who is from L.A. (lower Arkansas) like me, where southern courtliness is the norm, telling me I was wrong. And I bought into it.

Well, after being back for a week it turns out I was right. When we were at the bank drive-through a woman who wasn’t even our teller saw Abby in the truck and came over to offer her a sucker and tell me about her nephew who is about Abby’s age. The banks in NWA don’t even have suckers. Even the woman from the incompetent cable company, whom I spoke harshly to over the phone, just said “Yes sir, we should tell people who call to set up service that they are making an appointment for a phone call and not for a cable man to come to their house.” When I went to the main office of the incompetent cable company to exchange a nonworking cable box for a good one, the woman there called me sugar and hon. It’s funny that this should matter to me because I tend to dislike chatting up strangers, but it does.