CoronaE de Tucson

corona: crown; circles of light seen around a luminous body; plural form: coronae or coronas

vail: to doff one's hat in reverence/respect

How perfectly fitting. I live in Vail, Arizona. Yet Vail shares the same zip code with Corona de Tucson. Our neighborhood happens to be right near the border of Corona de Tucson, so around here they are nearly synonymous when mentioned in conversation. Though Vail was named after the rancher brothers, Edward and Walter, I'd like to acknowledge the above meaning of their family name.

This is the first year, since Grace has been in school, that she has been old enough and close enough to her school to walk or ride her bike alone. It was one of the reasons she was most excited to begin at this new school, despite her sadness at having to leave friends behind at Basis Tucson. It was a forty minute drive one way that we were happy to give up in favor of a school that is just over a mile away.

After walking for two weeks, Grace's new friend Luis invited her to start riding her bike with him, telling her she could lock her bike up with his. He lives a subdivision over so they agreed they would leave at the same time and just meet up on the way to school at some point.

A few days ago, her second day riding, after she had left for school, I made a phone call to another school in our district, Vail Academy, to decline the opening they had just offered the day before. It's a school that is about twenty minutes away by car that we had been considering, but that goes by a lottery system for new students trying to get in. One of the pluses is that they limit class sizes for her age-group (the largest in the K-12 school) to 28 students maximum (to account for siblings), 26 ideally. But now that we're over two weeks in, we know Grace is happy and well-adjusted to this closer school, her "home school." We saw no reason to pull her out and start over at what would've been her sixth new school in her short lifetime.

After that phone call, I noticed I had missed two calls from an unknown number and there was a text from the same number: Hi my name is erin...I'm with grace, she feel of her bike...She's ok but trying to get a hold of you

Leave it to my beautiful and anything BUT physically adept daughter, Grace, to wipe out on her second day of riding to school. She is graceful in spirit but her body is still trying to catch up.

When I immediately called back, Erin informed me that she'd been driving along, noticed a kid on a bike, but then when she went past and looked in her rearview mirror, the bike and the kid had disappeared. She said at first she thought she'd been hallucinating, it happened so fast, she even asked aloud, Wasn't there just a kid on a bike? Her sons weren't sure, but she knew something wasn't right, so this kind and caring woman looped back around and sure enough she spotted a little girl in the rocks trying to lift her bike. Grace.

Erin said another mom, at a nearby bus stop for the younger kids, had joined them with a first aid kit to help clean her up with antisepitc (don't you love these moms already?). Erin asked if I was nearby, but quickly added that she was willing to take Grace to school, bike and all, in her Acadia. She said she was pretty scraped up and should still stop by  the nurse's office to get cleaned and bandaged up better. She said she'd have Grace call me again once they were at the school.

Uhhh. I hesitated because I was nearby, but I was not dressed, I didn't have my contacts in, I didn't want to make them wait for me since I knew they'd already be late, and most mysteriously, I felt completely at ease with Erin's offer to take Grace which was, in itself, slightly confusing to me.

Erin then added that she totally gets it if I wasn't comfortable with her idea and if I'd rather come get her myself she'd wait with her. And truly, my gut had no qualms. And because Erin listened to her gut, I listened to mine and told her to go ahead and take her as long as Grace was okay with it.

Five minutes later, Grace called on Erin's cell to let me know she had signed in late at the school and that she was okay and didn't need me to come (but of course, I was dressed and ready to go by then). She passed the phone to Erin, who also guided her to nurse's office as we spoke, and told me for the second time what "a tough cookie" Grace was for not crying and holding it together so well for being so scraped up. She pointed out that they were not just the small rocks that she fell in, but the big jagged ones. She said Grace declined her offer to help her put her bike on the rack, and that she even voiced her concern of making her two boys late for school. Erin assured her the school would understand.

I told Erin that Grace's dad would get a kick out of her assessment of Grace being "a tough cookie" since he calls her a "drama queen" all the time. We joked about how our kids save the drama for us parents. But to Grace's credit, she really is mature. And tough, too. (I'd like to see how Joel handles having days of 102-105 degree fevers the way she does, almost like it's nothing. But that's another post. Grace and her fevers.)

After hanging up with Erin, I drove to see Grace while she was still in the nurse's office and found her smiling self-deprecatingly at her clutziness. She had some minor road rash on one forearm, pucture marks and bruises on each palm, one with a good-sized flap of skin torn up with debris under it, and various scrapes, basically more road-rash, on one knee which was already covered with a bandage. But overall she was doing so well. So, so well. All thanks to Erin and that other mom.

What if no one had stopped? I know it would've been a much more stressful morning for Grace. She worries about being late, always. She likes to be at least ten minutes early for school and not a minute later. She's always been that way, even though I can only remember her ever being late for school twice in her lifetime. So besides the fact that she would've been alone and hurt, she would be worried about getting to school on time as she tried to ride or walk the bike with her scrapes and bruises. What a way to start a morning for a ten year old kid who's still pretty new to a school and its teachers.

(It turns out Luis had been running late and did pass the moms with Grace, mumbling a shy hi to her, as he zoomed by to get to school. I know he would've stopped had she been alone still. He told her later in class that he'd thought one of the moms was hers.)

Having Erin and the still nameless mom there to help made a world of difference to Grace. (I tried to track the other mom down by going to that bus stop using Erin's description of her van and hair, but no luck. I will keep trying come Monday.) They were her guardian angels. Her day turned out bright and happy and she has a great story to tell of the kindness of strangers.

Thank you, Erin and First-Aid-Kit-Toting-Mom at the Desert Haven bus stop. We are deeply grateful.