triinu!

Another fixture in our lives is Triin or "Triinu," our neighbor's youngest daughter. Marta is very independent about sequestering Triinu for some play time. Often, she wants to go next door herself and see if Triinu is at home. Triinu is four. She has blond hair and looks a lot like her father, who happens to be a doctor I've seen a few times. It's a bit odd having your doctor for a neighbor. You feel like he might know more about you than you know yourself. And you know what the doctor was doing when we arrived? That's right. Making apple juice. He's like us. He won't be buying juice from the store for months to come.

Before we went to Triinu's, Marta said she wanted to go to the playground "with somebody." I said that, "You are with somebody, silly, your sister." "With somebody I can play with," she answered. See Anna didn't count. She was like part of the furniture. She's always there. I think Anna likes Triinu too. She likes having big girls around. The only thing is that I can't let Anna go and play next door alone. She's got to stay with us. Still too small.

At the playground, Anna fell asleep and Marta and Triinu collected pretty leaves to be used in some future art project. They told me they found a really good tree on the periphery of the park. I was reading a book about class in America called Class Matters. It brought me back to college a bit -- when there were low-income students and very high income students living on the same floors. And the low-income students really hated the high-income students. They would watch the girls walk back from Georgetown with fat shopping bags every weekend and complain to me.

I was more like middle income, so I could associate with both classes. There were some very rich kids there on campus with, of course, expensive drug habits. That's another thing -- the wealthy get into things like cocaine. The merely middle class or lower-income have to settle for marijuana and booze. And the really low-income? They smoke crack. Which is a cheaper form of cocaine. See, we've come full circle. Why I am discussing this on a blog about my kids, I don't know. I hope they never use drugs, because, the consensus is the truth: drugs really are (mostly) bad for you.

I learned a lot about class on campus. I had a friend from Greenwich, Conn., but even he said he wasn't truly rich. Wealthy people don't vacation on the known Caribbean islands, he told me. They have their own islands. And they get there by private plane. He told me a game in high school in Greenwich was stealing from wealthy homes. Kids would steal all sorts of things from the homes of the hyper rich as a test. If nobody noticed the expensive vase in the living room was missing, then they passed -- they were from the uppermost part of the upper crust. An interesting place, college. You get educated in the classroom and out.