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Saturday, August 4, 2012

Bilbur

You may recall, I have three children.

My oldest child is named Kylie and I tend to call her Ky or Kytito. Kytito is not a real word but rather a poor attempt to make her name sound Spanish. And my mother I believe was the first person to call her that.

My middle child is named Elizabeth. We call her Lizzie. Or LizzieLou. Or Lou. Or PooPoo. When we knew she was a girl I wanted to name her Beth after the character in Little Women. My mother referred to her once, when I was pregnant, as Lizzie. It stuck.

My youngest child's name is William. I fought against that name when I was pregnant because I don't like the name Bill. It sounds too old to me. We have tried numerous nicknames on him but none ever really seemed right. Billy. Will.Willy.Dolichan. Nothing.

Until his daycare provider called him Wilbur. William was just too big a name for such a small boy and so she took to calling him Wilbur. The other kids called him Wilbur. Then we did. Now he does. He responds better to Wilbur or the nickname Bilbur than he does to his own name.

Both grandmothers, Leslie and Linda, hate the name Wilbur. It sounds too old.

But I wish we would have named him Wilbur instead of William.

Bilbur is just perfect.

Sometimes you don't really know a child's name when they are born. You have to learn it over time and experience.

Aurora

I haven't posted this because frankly I didn't know where to start.

You may have heard, my sweet little town, the town without even a downtown, had a shooting.

If you hadn't heard then, well, we did. On July 20th a man, James Holmes, went to a midnight showing of the new Batman movie and opened fire. He killed 12 people and injured many more.

Friday morning I went to work early. I was pulling into the parking lot at 15 minutes to 6am when I started to get text messages from friends on the East Coast. I didn't understand at first why they were asking me about going to the movies and if I was alright.

I'm 33 but live life at the breakneck speed of 60. Of course I didn't go to a midnight showing of a movie. Are you out of your mind? Some of us have jobs to do. At 6am on a Friday.

But. I've been to that theater. I have taken my children to movies there. Kylie asked if they were hiring earlier in the summer.

My town is small. Most people in Denver make fun of it because we are essentially just a suburb. They talk about it like it's full of gangsters and drug dealers. Lots of people call it Saudi Aurora. (I have no idea why, by the way. It's not as if we are an oil rich city in the desert.)

But Friday morning the people of Aurora and the people of Colorado felt the sting of violence. For all the joking we don't have a high crime rate. We are middle class, working folks. Almost everyone I know works in other cities within Colorado but we live in Aurora. We shop here. We play here. We go to movies here. We live here.

Here it is now, a few weeks later, and for most of the country Aurora is forgotten. A sad situation in a little town in Colorado.

But for us here, we are still healing. And reeling.