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11-7-63
Thank you very much for the check and the chaise covers. Both have done much to make us more comfortable here, in diverse ways. We're about as settled as we're going to get before the end of the semester. There are a lot of things I'd like to do, like scrub the floors with clorox, but all but the real essentials will have to wait. School comes first, & it's really a rat-race. I got started late & am still trying to figure out when & where I'm going to study. It seems like every time I think I have a few hours & sit down, something happens. The only sure time is between 10:00 P.M. & when we get up in the morning, & I'm a little worn out for that. It will get squared away in time, I'm sure. These little insurmountable obstacles always do.
The kids are doing pretty well in nursery school & kindergarden. Reading readiness isn't moving quite fast enough for Pooh, & here in the good old-fashioned East, the lesson-plan & not the child sets the speed. They like the emotional climate & the kids, so for now we're satisfied. Pooh spends her time at home covering paper with letters, asking one how to spell every word she knows & reading letters off of labels asking one what they mean. At school, after learning each letter, they're busy copying the alphabet over & over, which is a good idea for [p?]
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2 ship, but I wish they'd do something else. They do let her write her own name on her paper now, which she's been able to do since last summer when she practiced & learned to write Eileen so that she could have her own library card. We haven't yet visited either the Cambridge or Boston Public libraries yet, but will do when time permits. The latter is supposed to be very good. We have a million museums to see here, starting with the Museum of Fine Arts & the Gardner Museum. Our trip to the Children's Museum was a rousing success. They're having an exhibit of costumes thru the ages at the MFA, & it will be over soon, so we're hoping to take that in this coming 3-day weekend. It's been raining for a week, so the kids are really feeling cramped. They'll probably have an interesting but undignified romp thru the museum. Last weekend we got them all fixed up with rainboots & mittens, so they're prepared for the weather so far. We haven't gotten snow stuff yet because there are various things one can wear, & we're really not sure what will work best for them. We walk 3 1/2 blocks to Nursery School every morning, & then I walk another 3 1/2 to the subway which means we've got to have the right foul-weather gear. Jim has been luxuriating to work in the car because where he goes, they have someplace to park, but I go to downtown Boston & parking is absolutely impossible. We really regret not
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Jim has really got our apt set up. He scrounged some lumber at work & bought a vinyl remnant & now we have a folding bar-table in the kitchen. He's now looking for some stools to scrounge. He's got hooks up all over the kitchen to make up for the lack of drawer space, & we have decided to put a dresser in one corner (a la Irish cottage kitchen) & cover it with vinyl on top. The automatic controls on the boiler in our bldg went blooie & after living without heat & hot weather for a couple of days Jim started firing it manually, explained what was the matter with it to the supt., fixed part of it & now we're waiting for a part, so when the supt. doesn't get around to firing it manually, Jim does. Little do the neighbors realize that Jim is keeping them warm, but we're keeping his talents a secret from everyone but the supt, who is a good guy to have on your side. He helped Jim scrounge enough venetian blinds for most of the windows. One of the neighbors gave him a nice mahogany door, & it makes a great worktable in our bedroom, & that's where we're going to lay out the hi-fi hit & build it - the AM FM tunes.
I would certainly like to buzz over to Worcester & see Aunt Margaret, but we're really in no position to take
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4 that much time right now, I look forward to the between semester vacation for that. Right now, if I'm going to keep in school & if Jim & I are going to stave off exhaustion, we've got to limit recreation to the most essential for the kids, & very short term, like week-end mornings, then we come home, everyone naps & I study. If you have occasion to write to Aunt Margaret please explain & by the way, please send me her address. I haven't told the kids they have any relatives back here yet, but I know they'll be delighted when I do, since they feel a little cut off.
By the way if you have any of those black & green goodies to spare, we could sure use some. They've been a great help in coping with all the stresses of our Oddysey & I'm sure I would have had a lot more headaches without them. Some [amitol?] would be nice too. By the way, about packages, be sure & send everything insured. We live across the street from a public housing project, & the somewhat unsupervised & destructive kids there think our bldg is their private playground. Anything not nailed down dissapears. They even get into stuff stored in the basement. The mailmen leave uninsured parcels in the hall in front of the door. I assume that if they're insured they don't leave them without a signature. There's usually a
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neighbor around to sign, since we're gone all day. Also we only live a couple of blocks from the main Cambridge P.O., so could easily pick parcels up. We were lucky with the chaise covers, since a neighbor we didn't even know saw them sitting there & kept them for us until we got home, because she's wise to the ways of the local kids. We really have very nice neighbors, & they're from all over the world. On Halloween I took the kids around our building & the one next to it, about 40 apartments distributed in 3 story bldgs, & that was plenty. We had a good look at the international flavor of the place though, & there's quite a variety. Most of them are pretty busy with the reasons that brought them here, but we've managed to meet quite a few, some of whom have kids going to the same Nursery School as our kids. I expect we'll see a lot more of them in the summer when the evenings are longer & this abominable weather goes away. We'd make a lot of friends fast if Jim started fixing people's stuff but that's one of the things we came here to get relief from. The boiler keeps him busy enough.
The biggest problem I anticipate at present is where to start Pooh in the first grade. This Nursery School also has after-school day care, so at least that problem is solved & the kids can be together in the
