Last night I was driving down to my favorite Thai place in town to pick up some dinner.\u00c2\u00a0 The restaurant is pretty much a straight shot from our house towards downtown.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve probably driven that stretch hundreds of times, and it’s stayed mostly the same over the years.\u00c2\u00a0 Until recently.<\/p>\n
There’s a new, 12-story building going up near the restaurant that makes big changes to the I.C. skyline.\u00c2\u00a0 It was turning dark as I went past the tower last night, and I noticed for the first time the aircraft warning lights on the building’s roof.\u00c2\u00a0 It made me think about all the helicopter traffic there is between Iowa City and cities to the east that ferry critically ill patients to and from the tertiary care facility at the university’s hospital here.\u00c2\u00a0 Some of those flights come right over the new building and then must drop down to land on the helipad at the hospital.<\/p>\n
I wondered how, or whether, this new obstacle changed the way these pilots approached the hospital.\u00c2\u00a0 Which in turn prompted me to think about the magnetic heading the pilots must have to memorize as they fly between all the hospitals in the Midwest.\u00c2\u00a0 Those are numbers I (almost) never think about, but that they absolutely need to do their jobs.<\/p>\n
I have plenty of my own numbers to memorize.\u00c2\u00a0 Birthdays.\u00c2\u00a0 Phone numbers.\u00c2\u00a0 Passwords.\u00c2\u00a0 IP addresses.\u00c2\u00a0 Mailing addresses.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people have to carry around those numbers.\u00c2\u00a0 But I have close friends and family who have to memorize completely different sets of numbers to function in their daily lives.\u00c2\u00a0 Having all these numbers disappear would be like losing the electricity in your house; you’d still be sitting there in front of your TV, but everything would be dark.<\/p>\n
I was trying to count with Ava the other day by holding my hand in front of her face and pointing at my fingers, slowly counting out each one up to five.\u00c2\u00a0 It was interesting to watch the look on her face.\u00c2\u00a0 It was like she knew something was going on, but she had no way to process it.\u00c2\u00a0 The concept that that there’s a way to attach significance to an item in any way other than giving it a name (ball, fish, dog, grandma) just doesn’t appear to register yet.<\/p>\n
It’s the same story with colors.\u00c2\u00a0 Ava has a red ball.\u00c2\u00a0 And a yellow bus.\u00c2\u00a0 She has a box of big crayons that come in black, orange, pink, and blue.\u00c2\u00a0 But as of now, black, yellow, and pink crayons sitting together on her table are only “crayons.”\u00c2\u00a0 There’s no number for them in her world (“three crayons”).\u00c2\u00a0 No names for their colors (“pink crayon; black crayon”).\u00c2\u00a0 At least not in any way that she can yet convey to us.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s wonderful to try to think about what her mind must be like right now.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s such an empty vessel in so many ways, waiting, ready to be filled with all these words and numbers.\u00c2\u00a0 So far, her words have come like intermittent raindrops from the leading edge of a good spring shower.\u00c2\u00a0 I wonder if sometime soon they’ll begin to flood from her.\u00c2\u00a0 I hope so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night I was driving down to my favorite Thai place in town to pick up some dinner.\u00c2\u00a0 The restaurant is pretty much a straight shot from our house towards downtown.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve probably driven that stretch hundreds of times, and it’s stayed mostly the same over the years.\u00c2\u00a0 Until recently. There’s a new, 12-story building […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ava"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9oLlO-4a","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}