Sonoma Hotel

We had lunch with friends at The Girl and the Fig, a favorite spot of ours in Sonoma. I like the row of dormer windows in the roof of the Sonoma Hotel which houses the restaurant. Dormer windows are charming from the outside but not so much so from the inside. Our 1907 Berkeley Craftsman house had dormer windows in the upstairs bedrooms which meant dark rooms with low sloping ceilings and very little view of anything but the treetops and the roof.

An unintended consequence of having a dormer window was when Tim was born and we moved Matt temporarily into Dana's room. We put his crib under the window in a little crib-sized alcove.  We quickly expedited the building of a  bedroom for him when the next door neighbor came over to inform us that Matt was crawling around on the roof which he had accessed by using his crib to climb out the dormer window. 

Dana was three and a half years old when Tim was born so we were a little overwhelmed. One saving grace was the advent of 'Sesame Street'...a sanity saving hour of children's television which I sometimes enjoyed watching too. The first episode of 'Sesame Street' was sponsored by the letters W, S and E and the numbers 2 and 3 and aired in the fall of 1969. I know, because I was there watching it. It took place on a multicultural urban street where humans, monsters and animals all lived peacefully together. 

'Sesame Street' was clever. It not only had numbers and letters and shapes and colors, it had celebrities. Carol Burnett and  Danny DeVito mingled with Miss Piggy, Kermit the Frog and Elmo. And it had music. I can still occasionally burst into a round of  'It's Not Easy Being Green' or 'Rubber Ducky'.

When Julia (now a college student) was a baby she would wake up early (very early) in the morning and call for somebody to come get her out of bed. One morning at about four we heard, 'Mommy, Daddy...Mommy, Daddy...Mommy Daddy'...When no response was forthcoming we heard, 'Mommy, Daddy.......Elmo?'

I use the past tense when I write about 'Sesame Street' because I haven't watched it since the grandchildren were little, but this year it is celebrating its 50th year on air. It will get a Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime artistic achievement in December, the first time a television show has received the award. 

'Sesame Street'  is a testament to staying relevant and interesting for half a century....