Approximately 2 minutes after arriving at the pool, Genevieve walked determinedly up to me and announced that I should come help her make a friend.   As she marched me over to another little girl and her dad, I got a vision of Child Services coming and accusing me or G of stalking.   She then said in a very serious tone “Hi I’m Genevieve, do you want to play with me?”

I’ve been noticing how awkward people are saying hello to others, making casual acquaintances, generally greasing the wheels of human interaction with such simple gestures.   Maybe I just notice it more cause with kids you have to do it more.   And even more so in Scottsdale than in Mesa: people drive their cars straight to their garages and shut the doors, sheepishly shuffle by each other at the daycare even having done this dance for days in a row.   Three months later and we’ve only met 2 neighbors immediately adjacent to our house, and one neighbor who like us recently moved in with children and is desperate to make friends.   Solipsism, faster-paced, generation net, fear? Its part of Scottsdale’s low-level noise, in sharp contrast to all the yammering idiots in Mesa who couldn’t mind their own business.   Never thought I’d miss em.

So I introduced myself to the little girl’s dad, and the two of us enjoyed a bro moment of kicking back and watching the clock turn while our respective Monsters ran themselves retarded, swimming and splashing and pretending to be penguins.   Alana started flapping her arms imitating her big sister. Each time we go to the pool now, G gets a little bolder about making friends, and seemingly a little wiser about this being her route to success.   Its not happening in our neighborhood, so this is the best I can offer her, and hopefully she will start to see the same kids again and again and start to have a comfort-level about friends at the pool like she does about her daycare.

This week I twice left work early to get G and A to the pool for an hour, and every day now she asks me if we can go swimming.   Her swimming gets bolder and better each time, and just like riding with better riders helps me, swimming with other kids she forgets herself and her fears as her natural exuberance and athleticism take over.

note: commuting home at 4:30 to take the girls to the pool includes approximately 30 minutes of sunscreening and pants-changing and car-seating and heat exhaustion before life-giving cooling ensues.