Baby V's Thanksgiving Road Trip

When you're as cute and as popular as Valencia, you garner a lot of attention. You have a lot of admirers. People know you. The byproduct of that level of stardom is that people want to see you. Your fans want to squish your cheeks, hear your cooing voice, and clean your blowout diapers. Fame comes with some serious perks.

As the parents of Valencia (and we've now learned to go by that moniker, hereafter abbreviated as PoV), we did our best this Thanksgiving to facilitate meetings between our celebrity daughter and the people so eager to meet her for the very first time. It took more than 1,500 miles of driving and staying in four different locations, but we did it. They are, in chronological order:

• Aunt Holly
• Uncle Adam
• Cousin Olivia
• Cousin Ruby
• Cousin Sonoma (aka Telesca)
• Aunt Josie
• Uncle Rick
• Cousin Forrest
• PoV's Cousin Daniel
• Aunt Mandy
• Cousin Sadie
• Cousin Jake
• Great Uncle Dan
• Great Aunt Jeanne
• PoV's Cousin Nick
• PoV's Cousin Danielle
• PoV's Cousin James
• 2nd Cousin Cameron
• NY Friends Lynn Hock
• Eddie Hock
• Joseph Hock
• UT Friends Gabe Bush
• Ellen Bush

Vali & Aunt Holly

Vali chilling with her cousins Ruby & Olivia

The one thing I can tell you about Valencia is that she she does not disappoint. If you think she's cute in these pictures, then your heart will skip a beat when you meet her in real life. The people listed above can corroborate. She's an angel straight from heaven, embodied in squishy skin, busy limbs, and a face with seemingly unlimited expressions.

For us, the lowly PoV, it was a great Thanksgiving. Living on the East Coast when most of our family is out West rarely offers us the opportunity to be with so many family at once. In fact, it's never happened in the five and a half years since we moved here. But the stars aligned this year, and we were able to surround ourselves with the people we love on a day that symbolizes the gratitude we feel for our wonderful families and friends.

We are richly blessed. Valencia is a treasure. Celeste is a saint. I am tolerable under most circumstances. Family is forever. How grateful I am for that eternal truth.

The ladies socialize while the gentlemen, well...

Not something we Southerners are accustomed to seeing.

"Another adoring stranger? Better put my game face on."

Vali & Uncle Dan, laughing at the fact that they have the same hair cut.

Mandy flew all the way from Ireland to meet Valencia and be with us for Thanksgiving.

Sadie, Jake, and Merlin. Sadie, the proper lady that she is, couldn't abide Merlin's presence the first time they met. By the time we left, she was racing out the door to give him a farewell hug. #thepowerofmerlin

Jake took no time warming up to Merlin. He got a kick out of hugging and "tickling" him.

The East Coast Olsen/Kidd Crew - Daniel, Mandy, Jake, Forrest, Rick, Josie, Sadie, Merlin, Jack, Les, and Vali

Aunt Josie holding Valencia, getting a whiff of her head, which smells like baby.

Jake & Jack

Close-up of that hat-bootie combo. Ridiculous.

1,500 miles and something like 40+ hours in this carseat, and this is how she looks.

Remembering the Blackout of 2003

This might seem like a day late, but I just copied and pasted from my journal, date 8/14/13:

Ten years ago today, I was an intern-grunt working at Hock Films in New York City.  We were housed in a high rise at the corner of West Houston Street and 7^th Ave in lower Manhattan, just beyond the campus of NYU.  It was the mid-afternoon, and I was busy logging digital footage for the ESPN series Streetball when all the sudden my computer screen went blank.  At first, I thought it was just me, but as I wandered through the office, I noticed all the lights were out and all the computer screens were blank.  There were about thirty of us working in that office, and we all thought that it was a temporary power-outage.  But as phone calls were made and people from other offices started coming by to see what was going on, we realized that the entire building was out.  After waiting about a half hour to see if power would come back, we were all instructed by the super to exit the building.  Nineteen floors and a whole lot of stairs later, we finally spilled onto the 7^th Avenue, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The streets were crawling with people.  Manhattan is usually busy, but this was busy on a whole new scale.  It was as if a foot from the sky had kicked the New York anthill, and we scurried and scattered in every direction.  It was a frantic, anxious, pulsating busy with thousands more people at our little street corner than usual.  I looked at the traffic lights.  They were dead.  I looked at the building signs.  They were dark.  I looked at my cell phone.  There was no signal.  A brief moment of panic entered my heart as I recalled memories of the infamous 9/11 terrorist attack just two years prior.  I wasn’t in New York when that happened, but most of the people around me on that street corner had been, and they had fear in their eyes.

I don’t remember how it came to happen, but I soon found myself walking northbound on 6^th Avenue, or Avenue of the Americas toward Midtown.  My feet carried me farther and faster than any cab, bus, or train could; the entire city was shut down.  There was congested traffic in every direction, and the intersections were manned by ordinary citizens (I would have volunteered, but only a true New Yorker, battle-born and refined by fire, could have so aptly barked orders at the angry mobs, the frightened tourists, and the wily cabbies).  Meanwhile, all public transportation was at a rigid standstill.  No buses.  No trains.  No subways.  Several people were trapped in tunnels under the East and Harlem Rivers while they waited in darkness for hours for power to bring them safely from the subway’s belly.

I was living in Queens at the time, but thankfully, my sister’s boyfriend-soon-to-be-husband lived on the Upper East Side, and it was in his apartment five miles north of Hock Films that I found refuge for the next 72 hours.  The people of New York transformed somewhat during those days from the hard-nosed, fast-paced, sharp-tongued sports freaks to an affable bunch of porch-partiers.  People sat in the sun and swapped stories while their radios provided updates in the background.  As for Mandy and Bryan and I, we read, played board games and suppressed bowel movements as best we could (plumbing was out, too) until our corner of the city was back on the grid, and lived to say that we survived the Blackout of 2003.

Return to the Reservation

It was mid-March 1976.  My father had just graduated from law school at the University of Utah, and my mother was eight months pregnant with their second child.  They had set out early that morning from Salt Lake City with the humble belongings of a young, poor couple: dinnerware (a wedding gift), clothes (of the thrift store variety), and enough books to strain the rear shocks of their '71 Chevy Vega, which they named "Kermit" on account of it being green.  Their most prized possession, an incorrigible little 2-year old named Robert Wade, was tucked tightly into his carseat, and given toys to distract him from the long hours and desolation of Southeastern Utah.

They drove all day and into the night, making frequent stops for little Wade and to check on the health of the car.  When they finally arrived in Gallup, New Mexico that evening, the sun had already fallen, and the small town (known by the natives as the "Indian Capital of the World" because so many tribes share its space) was aglow with street lights and illuminated bar signs.


My mother had lump in her throat as my father pulled onto historic Route 66 and drove through the heart of town.  To her left and to her right she saw the ugliness of Gallup.  Drunks stumbled in and out of bars and down the sidewalks.  Homeless men lay in the street gutters and paid no mind to passing cars.  It was an alien and unfamiliar sight for her.  She had grown up in the cozy bubble of Cache Valley, within the larger bubble of the state of Utah.  By steady increments peppered over a lifetime, she had grown accustomed to a world of vigilant church-goers and affable neighbors that would bring you a cheese and potato casserole if you fell ill.  She was the kind of woman who had only seen alcohol consumed in movies, and who, by her own admission, had never uttered a single swear word.

My father's skin was a bit thicker, his mind more resolute on living and working among the Indians.  While some of that could be attributed to his more PG-13 upbringing with siblings who enjoyed tormenting one another and a mother who frequently referred to her kids as "little shits," much of my father's obstinate confidence that night came from the fact that he had lived there before.  Two years as a Mormon Missionary on the Navajo Reservation put ice in his veins and assurance in his heart.  It helped him to see past the drunkards in the street, the raggedness of the town, and, with the exception of their puttering automobile, the profound absence of the color green.

My mother made it about half a mile into town before she burst into tears.

I spent the last week in Gallup for a conference hosted by Teach For America for school leaders in rural regions, and the trip gave me an excuse to do a little family history.  I had always known that my family had lived on the Navajo Reservation before I was born, and I had always known that my oldest sister, Mandy, was born there.  But that's about the extent of it.  I didn't know...

• That my family lived in Fort Defiance, Arizona, and that each day my dad drove 15 minutes south to Window Rock where the Navajo Tribal Headquarters were located.
• That my sister Mandy could not be born in Fort Defiance or Window Rock for lack of western medicine, and was instead born just outside of Gallup in a Christian-run hospital in Rehoboth, NM.
• That my sister Mandy was pale and bald.  The only other baby in the hospital that day was a premature Native with long, black hair.
• That my family only lived on the Reservation for 9 months.
• That they lived in a small government-built house with aluminum siding.
• That it was a phone call and a job offer from the late Congressman Gunn McKay to my dad that pulled my family from the Reservation and to Washington, DC.
• How hard it was on my mother, or how happy she was when that phone call came.

Throughout my week on the Reservation, I asked myself, "Could I live here?  Could I do what my dad did?  Could I bring my wife and family to this place and live and work?"  There is certainly work to be had.  Teach For America is placing as many teachers and alumni as they can on Navajo land, and the demand is still not met.  The Indian school systems are desperate for committed educators to fill the vacancies that seem to have a revolving door attached to them.  But so are school systems in L.A.  And D.C.  And Oakland.  And New York.  And North Carolina.

Could we live and work on the Res?  Probably.  Will we?  Probably not.  Celeste and I fielded a lot of questions while we were in Utah earlier this month about where we'll go after I finish my doctorate at UNC.  We really don't know.  We talk about returning to the West and probably will, but right now our future is as wide open as the endless horizon of the New Mexican desert.

TFA put us up in El Rancho Hotel & Motel, aka"Home of the Movie Stars", where many of the big names in Hollywood would stay when filming westerns.  The interior is a mixture of a rustic Southwest lodge, Indian Art, and Hollywood headshots signed by the big names that stayed there, including John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Humphrey Bogart.

Old school.

A Navajo silversmith.

The County Courthouse

Zuni Indian Dance.  The city of Gallup hosts nightly Indian dances in the summer.

Pyramid Peak.  We hiked to its summit on the last day of the conference.  For some of the participants, it was there first experience with a mountain.