Alessandra – Seldom at a loss for words

I have a couple of stories that will illustrate Alessandra’s vocal skills. Not only can she talk a lot, but she can “say the darndest things”.

1. Until she entered Kindergarten she spent much of her days at “Mama Gail’s”, which was at Gail Paul’s, her babysitter. It seemed like so much happened during those short hours that during the 7 minute drive home she would just talk my ear off. If she got done with her stories before we got home then she’d just start back at the beginning and go through them again.

One particular day, when she was about 3, my mind was mulling over a technical problem at work and I just wasn’t up for any noise beyond what was already going on in my head. As she began a rerun of story she’d just finished, I stopped her rather abruptly. “Ali”, I said “you’ve gotta stop talking, I need to think”. There was a brief silence until I glanced over at her and noticed she was quite upset. She looked at me through her glistening eyes and quietly said, ‘I just don’t know how to stop”.

2. In the mid 90s we got our first cellular phone. It was that ever-popular Motorola flip phone that weighed about 2.5 pounds. One day when she was 3 years old we let her place a call to one of Melodie’s friends. They talked for just a few minutes and then she hung up. She handed her mom the phone back and with no emotion whatsoever said, ‘hmm, now I know how to use a cell phone”, as if it was on a “to do’ list to be checked off.

3. About this same time we were driving in my pickup on North Main Street in Bishop. A 60s era Chevy El Camino passed us on the roadway. She exclaimed, “Hey Dad….look at that thing. It’s not really a car and it’s not really a truck. What’s the point?” I looked at her and in all the seriousness I could muster simply uttered back. “That’s a question that no one is able to answer.”

Oops….gotta run, Ali’s calling on the phone.