DIED 2014
AFTER MY DAUGHTER’S YEAR at the Christian preschool in Central Pennsylvania, I was delighted to find out there was a Montessori up the road in Jacobus, which also featured an Amish butcher and a fishing supply. The school was run by a mother-daughter team, an appealing yet unlikely pair. The mother was a put-together blonde who wore wool suits and taught fractions to toddlers using a special set of blocks called the Pink Tower. The daughter, Miss Nancy, was nearly a foot taller than her mom, big and soft, with dark, bushy curls and eyes like an Italian movie star. Miss Nancy had a special-needs son the same age as my daughter. She was clearly the most nurturing person in the world.
T, T, TLC. Mon-te, Montessori! We love eve-ry-bo-dy, at TLC Montessori. I had composed a long ballad about the school, which I sang to my daughter at bedtime, adding verses for each teacher, aide, and playmate. What a joy it was to find something to sing about in this place that had turned me into a perpetual kvetch machine.
Not long after we moved away, Miss Nancy’s brother died in a motorcycle accident. Her mother took an indefinite leave of absence; Miss Nancy carried on. But one evening six years later, she got home from work and rushed into the house—a ringing phone? a bursting bladder? a boy with a nosebleed?—accidentally leaving her car running in the garage. Steadily, the colorless, odorless carbon monoxide gas seeped into the house; she and her son very likely went to bed with headaches. In the morning, both of them were found dead in their beds, each with one of the dogs. What her mother did after that I do not know.
I have looked up the directions for using the Pink Tower, which consists of ten pink wooden cubes, increasing in volume by powers of three: 1, 8, 27, 64, and so on. To begin, tell the child you have something to show him. Say: for this lesson, we will need a mat. Have him fetch and unroll a mat. Then bring him over to the Pink Tower. Say: this is the Pink Tower.
This is the Pink Tower. It is something even a child can understand.