One last mention of the trip to New York, I promise.

As I was leaving the hotel for the final time, the doorman handed me my bag and asked where I was headed.

“Phoenix,” I replied, in a way that did not indicate a great deal of excitement. He got it.

“Oh. I lived there for six years.” He attended a digital recording academy in Tempe, which made sense given his hyper-hipness.

And now, of course, he’s in New York to make it big. Doorman at a cool hotel’s not such a bad place to start.

As I was climbing into the cab, he rubbed his jacket-clad arms (it was that cold last Thursday morning in Manhattan) and said, “Hey, enjoy the heat! If I were you, I’d be in Sedona all summer.”

“Funny you say that,” I answered. “I’ll be there soon.”

And I will. Ray has a campsite reserved and everything. I have promised to not complain about camping. (A promise I’ve come close to keeping.)

I decided to take the exchange with the doorman as a positive sign. So when Ray produced a list of camping supplies this weekend, I headed off to Target cheerfully.

Sunday morning, Annabelle stood gazing at the pile of boxes and turned around, excited.

“Mommy, can we make a smoothie in that new blender?!” she asked.

Sure, sweetie, except it’s a Coleman lantern. I guess camping will be illuminating for all the girls in the house. Sophie’s already packing….

 This morning, Sophie was in our bed (as usual) and Ray was teasing her (as usual) and she said, clear as a bell, “Don’t attack me again, Daddy.”

I sat up. Wow. “Good sentence!” I told her.

Sad that typical play — whatever that is — has to be interrupted by such thoughts, but hey, such is our lives. Here’s an email I came home to, from Sophie’s speech therapist, who facilitated a play date this for her with another little girl to work on communication skills. This is verbatim, reports the therapist, who was tickled (me too): 

End of discussion—no comeback from Jordan.  She accepted defeat gracefully

I am home. I mean it.

And that’s saying something, considering I spent the last 2 and a half days in New York City, the place I always assumed I’d call home, from the time I saw Sesame Street — followed by a life-long barrage of manufactured scenes set in a city far more glamorous than my own hometown.

New York is a dangerous place for me. Ray and I brought the girls in 2007 and before that, I don’t think I’d been at all since 1999. Going alone was a big deal — it meant staying not just at a funky hotel but inside my own funky head. I didn’t have a choice. The boss ordered it. It was very nice of him; one of my writers won a big, huge journalism award and the boss sweetly acknowledged the importance of editors by asking me to attend.

So I picked the risotto (or was it orzo?) from around a big piece of salmon (no one at the Yale Club got the memo about my fish phobia, obviously) and made small talk. (And lamented the fact that in just a short year, my newspaper has shorted the commitment to telling long, hard stories and focused instead on blogging, which for me has a place — right here. But not right there, not in the Yale Club with the NYT and the WSJ and a bunch of other serious journalists. That’s a topic for different day.)

The luncheon was fine, as I knew it would be. It was the rest of the trip I had worried about. Would I have a breakdown in the Village, swoon on 5th Avenue, disolve into a puddle of tears at Columbus Circle? I padded the awards luncheon with a day on either end — of course, I was flying across the country! psyche be damned! — and topping my alterna-agenda was meeting Maya, my fellow mom blogger, mother of Leo and Ellie and a real kindred spirit.

The meeting was terrific. Maya did what I meant to do — she grew up across the country, moved to New York for grad school, and now she works in the city, even with two kids (one with DS) and all that entails. (The story’s longer than that, but that’s basically it.) But I didn’t hate her, not one little bit, and if you know her, you know why. That is one cool chick.

I spent time with another cool chick, Amy, my best friend from second grade. (And no, this is not a coy reference back to the in-my-head thing. Her name really is Amy. Another Amy S., in fact.)

Amy also vowed to move to New York after college, but she made it stick. She was my welcome wagon during my brief time in the city — I’ll never forget the image of her walking her fast NYC walk up Broadway, carrying a little house plant to welcome me in 1990. I was scared shitless, which is probably a big part of why I was gone by 1991. All talk, little action.

Not Amy. She is as fabulous as any character Candace Bushnell could conjure (and hey, at the moment, she’s single! The most desirable bachelorette in the city, so let me know if you know any eligible men) and just as complicated — in a good way. She got the last good job in finance and a breathtaking (seriously, I was drooling) office view of Central Park and the roof of the Plaza and, as it turns out, she lives around the corner from a kiddie restaurant with a bar called Sweetie Pie. Which is how we found ourselves on a Tuesday night, sitting together in a gilded cage, eating teeny tiny ice cream cones and talking.

So sad but true: My “to do” list for New York pretty much consisted of stuff I’d read about. That’s not to say it wasn’t worth the trip. Papabubble, a candy store I saw in Martha Stewart Living, was sooooo cool, and so was I, for locating it (with some advice from Amy). Even the American Girl doll I had to get for Annabelle was Rebecca — the new Jew on the AG block, was featured in the Sunday Style section a couple weeks ago. (Sophie got one too, Chrissa; so far she’s only talked about giving her a haircut.)

I was craving Chinese, since I was in the middle of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which I highly recommend, so we hit an Empire Szechuan. (And it was there that we got all-too telling fortunes. Fancy Amy’s said something about pleasures to come, and her Chinese word was “wait”. Mine read, “Hugs are life’s rainbows.” My word was “friend.” We had a good laugh.)

But it was Sweetie Pie, featured in a recent issue of Elle, that really took the cake, or, rather, the bite-sized, perfectly appointed lemon cake on Amy’s fancy mismatched china plate. Menu aside (I really didn’t look at it, except for cocktails and dessert) it’s my all-time dream restaurant: All fuscia banquettes and white wrought iron, an Alice in Wonderland “Open Me” faux door to the bathroom and the aforementioned cage.

We felt like idiots and people kept staring in, but what better place, I decided later, to face the truth of one’s obsession with a fake existence, than in a gigantic bird cage in the West Village?

Of course, for Amy, it’s not fake at all. It really is her life. Walking to the theater the next night (August: Osage County — it was terrific) I sighed and said, “I wouldn’t do this if I lived here, right? You don’t go to the theater every night, do you?”

Well, she admitted, she goes pretty often. And she’d already been to the bar at Sweetie Pie, even before I hit town with my magazine clippings. Amy lives the life. Maya lives it, although I know she doesn’t get to the theater as often as Amy. Still.  The couple I saw walking through the East Village with a carriage holding what was unmistakably a baby with Down syndrome, they live it, even though I always tell myself, “You just can’t think about living in New York, not with your situation.”

Ray is the one who didn’t want to live there, back when I still had the guts to do it. Now he brings it up from time to time. But you know, despite my concerns about breakdowns beforehand and maybe a tear or two at Central Park South, while on the phone with my mom, it turns out I really was okay with saying hello — and goodbye — to my favorite city. At this point, I’d almost rather enjoy it through the media, though I vowed to return much sooner next time, with a new to do list.

I came home to to a beautiful card from Annabelle, who doesn’t know a thing about my struggles with New York — except maybe by osmosis. 

“Welcome Home” it said in big letters, and in smaller script below, “Home is Where the Heart is.”

(I keep telling you, Annabelle’s become the adult in our relationship. And don’t you think her art –below — belongs on the walls of the Sweetie Pie bathroom, along with the piece at the top of this post?)

Next up: a family trip to New York City. That birdcage seats four.

To say that I’m a reluctant exerciser is the understatement of the year — or at least of the last few months.

I walked that half marathon at the end of January, and haven’t moved since. Of course that’s not true. I feel like I’ve barely stopped moving. But you wouldn’t call any of it formal exercise. Til last week, when I started walking the dog.

I’ve never much seen the value in dog walking. Growing up, we always had two things: a family dog, and an enormous (by many standards) backyard. At least, more than big enough for our sheltie/corgi mix to pretend to herd whatever she was pretending to herd back there. The whole dog walking thing struck me as quaint — something you did in a climate where you didn’t have to put shoes on your dog’s feet many months of the year to avoid third degree burns from the pavement.

Ray grew up like the rest of America, walking the dog. And our back yard is non-existent. It’s a sore subject. When Rosy was a puppy, 14 years ago, I walked her — some. The task fell to Ray. When we got Jack, I made it clear that he was Ray’s dog; I didn’t think we had time for a puppy. And of course we don’t. But he’s here and there’s no fighting it, and I’ve got to figure out a way to get him to stop eating all of my favorite furniture.

And I need to exercise. I didn’t want to call dog walking exercise, because really, it’s hard to get your heart rate up with 50-plus pounds of puppy desperate to stop and sniff (and don’t get me started on the pooping). The first day, I leashed him up, put on the Shuffle (I recommend a mix of Vampire Weekend and The Fratellis for any kind of walking, which is good, since that’s what’s on my Shuffle and I can’t remember how to change it), grabbed some plastic bags, and dragged him through the Arizona State University campus, my typical walk. Neither of us was very happy.

The next day, I had an epiphany. Why worry about exercise? It’s not like I was getting any last week. Maybe I should try an experiment: simply walk the dog and try to enjoy the world — or at least, the little world in a two block radius from our house.

Along with exercise, this is something I should be working on, for sure. I’m good at appreciating other worlds — pretty much any world other than the one I inhabit. I can wax nostalgic about European cities and just about anything along the Eastern seaboard, of course, but I’ll even get going on the tiny town of Claremont, California, where I went to college, or Tucson, where my parents went, if you’ll let me.

I’ve lived in downtown Tempe for 12 years next month, and while I don’t hate it, I certainly don’t celebrate it. You’re still not going to get me to say much good about ASU (I hope you caught the Daily Show’s piece about the party school refusing to give Obama an honorary degree — this is typical) but I’ve decided to stop  with Jack and smell the roses, along with the oleanders, bougenvilla, pines, xeriscape, overgrown lush, nameless greenscape, cactus and — well, you get the idea.

My neighborhood is much more eclectic than I give it credit for. Every house is dramatically different, most built in the 40s and 50s, ancient for these parts. Home to students, professors and who knows what else, so some stretches are downright slummish; others are McMansion-y. Ours is pretty tame in both regards, although on our block (as I noticed on yesterday’s walk) we have: a fairy garden (really, it’s marked that way — and I think I noticed fresh earth where either a dead body or tomatoes were recently planted); a large display of bright red pick axes created by a landscape architect who mistakenly thinks he’s an artist; a circle of cactus (planted by same); and a chartreuse — I’m not exaggerating — house.

You don’t really notice much of that unless you’re forced to slow way down, to Jack-speed. I certainly hadn’t noticed other items on other blocks — the totem poles in one front yard, a tree hung with metal birds and other objects in another. One yard had very tall bamboo, which I only saw when Jack stopped to have a stare down with a fluffy white cat. The slummy blocks are more fun, I must admit, than the super-perfect, trimmed, polished ones. I like the block that’s a happy medium; there’s an old adobe there I’ve coveted for years.

People are always doing things to these houses. Popping the tops and adding on wings, carports, ginormous, hideous light posts in the middle of a driveway. Yesterday I noticed that signs denoting this a “historic neighborhood” have gone up — likely precluding much more funny business, which is too bad, because one of my major gripes about metropolitan Phoenix has always been the cookie cutter aspect.

At least I won’t ever say that about my own neighborhood again, not after walking the dog.

When Ray was searching for a picture of Izzy the Cat, he found a great one of Sophie the Baby, or “Soph-a-corn,” as Annabelle puts it, given the unicorn-esque hairdo.

A year ago, we had three cats.

Then a neighbor dog got Ernie, an orange Cornish Rex (think Austin Powers’ cat with a bit of hair). And last night — ironically, during  a game called “Pets on Parade,” featuring discussion and celebration of each pet in the house — Annabelle found Izzy. Izzy was Ray’s first Cornish Rex, bought a million (14 or so) years ago to keep his original cat company. The cats never liked each other, but Izzy and Ray fell in love. He once wrote a short story featuring Izzy as President of the Earth.

Izzy was painfully old, and frail. Her kidneys had given up and I hadn’t seen her in days; she was sleeping — and peeing — in a cat bed under a desk in a far corner of the house. Annabelle took it better than expected, as did Ray, though there were a few tears when I got home and found them standing over her, the game over.

That leaves Lulu as the Last Cat Standing. Lulu is only 2, she’ll be around for a long time. It wasn’t til she was gone that I realized how little appreciation I had for Izzy — she was the only cat who didn’t bird (or rat or mouse, is that an expression I can get away with?) and she was the only other mother in the house. She once gave birth to three kittens in what is now Sophie’s closet.

I’m tempted to buy Ray a kitten for Father’s Day, but as the staunchest anti-cat person I know, I’m also tempted not to. Still, like so many things — sea creatures, roller coasters, hikes down the Grand Canyon — cats are something my kids appreciate. So maybe, in appreciation of that, I’ll make a call to the Cornish Rex breeder in town.

Every few weeks or so, it happens. I think it’s out there for everyone, you just have to be looking for it — or, in my case, I guess, writing about it. The universe hands over some lesson, some example, some unavoidable truth. For me, it’s delivered by Sophie.

These offerings are tough to take, sometimes, but overall, a relief, since they force you into the moment like nothing else can. (Except maybe the young David Sedaris’ head into the windshield.) The other day, an acquaintance wrote a column about how he wished he could quiet his head so he could hear his heart. (I’m boiling down 1,000 words, but I think that’s really the message.) Boy, do I know what he means.

For me, having kids in the first place meant that I was simply too busy to roam around much in my head. (A blessing, trust me! You don’t want to see what it’s like in here — worse than my laundry basket-filled bedroom!) And having Sophie took it to another place — I was forced to see the world through her chromsomal prism. That means a lot of things on a lot of levels, but sometimes it means nothing more than simply clearing away the bullshit and seeing what’s right in front of you.

Funny how procrastination and writer’s block works. I’m blogging this morning to put off some bigger writing and editing projects, so forgive me if I use you, reader, as a means of distraction. I really didn’t have a topic today, it just wasn’t a day for some of the bigger thoughts I plan to explore (ironic, I know, given this rambling) so I thought I’d ruminate on summer — how it’s still not quite off the ground, how I’m worried I don’t have things planned right for Sophie — but can’t put my finger on what I need to do.

I was in the midst of my pre-writing rituals (which used to include checking one email account and now involve checking three email accounts, Facebook and Twitter — someone, please release me from social media hell!) when I found today’s topic in my spam filter, in the form of a blog comment from Joyce.

I’ve written about Joyce and Sarah before. In my little world, they’re rock stars — a young woman with Down syndrome who kicks some serious ass regardless of any sort of diagnosis. I followed with interest Sarah’s trip down memory lane vis a vis her time as a Daisy, Brownie and Girl Scout, since Sophie’s just completed her first year as a Daisy. (Sarah is one reason I’ll stick with it, regardless of cookie torture.)

In part, Joyce wrote:

The reason I really stopped by to leave this rambling message is to make sure you have followed Sarah’s blog this week.  I had it “in the can” knowing I was going to be really busy this week when you started to write about your mom and her ballet studio and Sophie and her dance recital.  I have to tell you I sat and cried as I watched her on that stage, happy tears of course, because I knew as soon as I saw it that you get it.  My point.  Exactly.   

I started this series because of an article that was in People magazine a few weeks ago.  It was about a ballet teacher in Boston and a physical therapist who decided it would be great to have a ballet class for kids with Ds.  And there they were smiling for the camera.  I certainly don’t want to be critical of the teacher or the PT or the families that are participating so I did not mention it on our blog, but I thought NO,  NO, NO.  That’s not it.  Yes, they need to be dancing but with other kids from their neighborhood.  Not just each other.  You get that.  I hope others will too.

Of course, this happened to be a week I had not followed Sarah’s blog. I’m out of sorts on the blog reading thing, ever since the Girl in a Party Hat switchover. I’ve been pre0ccupied with getting the last bells and whistles on the site to work, worried that I’ll lose my readers with a switch that now doesn’t include an easy way to subscribe to the blog. (Not that I’d know how to subscribe to someone else’s blog to save my soul. Sad confession. Hey, I can barely tweet or twit or whatever the cool kids are calling it today.)

I went to Sarah’s blog immediately and cried at Joyce’s gorgeous collections of photos and realized what’s missing from Sophie’s summer. She needs to be with other kids, with typical kids, doing typical summer stuff. DUH.

It’s such a game of whack a mole, this parenting thing. I have the school year dance class thing down — finally, and trust me, it wasn’t easy at all to get Sophie set up in a typical ballet class. We waited years til it seemed appropriate, we even tried a DS class for Sophie and two other little girls — a bona fide disaster; as Joyce observes, she needed to learn from her typical peers and they from her — and finally, I got her in that class. No sooner had I let myself get comfortable than summer came, with no ballet class, no kindergarten, no nothing with peers.

So thank you gods, and thank you Joyce and Sarah. I’m off now to find some summer fun for Sophie. You, on the other hand, need to go look at Joyce and Sarah’s blog.

When I heard that the pre-eminent kids music blogger lived in Phoenix, I knew I had to meet the guy.

“What?! Blogging about childrens music?!” one of my colleagues (a childless one) asked, as I announced I was headed out to do an interview (a rare occurence in my job, these days; mostly I edit other writers’ stories, after they’ve gone out and done the interviews).

Actually, as Stefan Shepherd, creator and author of Zooglobble, explained over Asian fusion, the kid music thing is downright passe at this point. I figured, since I’m so into it.

I was a little nervous about meeting Shepherd. “How’d you hear about me?” he emailed back when I found him. “I”m much bigger outside of Phoenix.”

Here we go, I thought. A huge snob. A Brooklyn type, slumming in Phoenix. Actually, Stefan was all but the opposite — the guy works at the state’s Joint Legislative Budget Committee and randomly started writing reviews of kid CDs for a local parenting group’s newsletter his wife was editing, several years ago. He liked it, so he started a blog. (Zooglobble is a reference to a word in a Sandra Boynton song.) And in 2006, not everyone was starting a blog (like they were in 2008), so it stood out and took off.

I liked Stefan, mainly because he takes pains to not be snobby about childrens music. (And if you’re not intimately familiar with the genre, you’re chuckling right now, but trust me, there’s a lot of room for snobbery.) He even recommended a Raffi album as one of his top six. (I’ll save the rest for the story I need to write for New Times, which I’ll link to — wait with baited breath, people! It’s about the Wiggles!)

He doesn’t make money off the blog, per se, but he does have some fun. He’s the music guy for the Land of Nod catalogue (that gave him serious cred with me) and does some work for NPR, including on All Things Considered.

I came close but didn’t quite admit to him that I find my favorite kid music the same way I tend to find my favorite adult music: on comps. (With adult music it’s actually worse: soundtracks.) That’s really embarrassing. I know that because I learned my mixed tape (it was tapes back then, and if you haven’t read Rob Sheffield’s book Love is a Mix Tape, you must — immediately) etiquette from an ex-boyfriend in grad school. This guy was Israeli and okay, yes, I’ll stereotype: he was very sincere and committed to his convictions (see? I put it quite kindly), one of which was that when making a mixed tape, there are certain rules that must be followed.

I made the mistake of taping an album one day and presenting it to him. “I made you a tape!”  I said. Oh no, I didn’t, I was informed. I taped a tape. I didn’t make a tape. A mixed tape is made with forethought and love — one must consider each song individually, and consider them as a whole. Each must merge into the next seamlessly, each must have a purpose in both its music and words.

The guy was a total pain in the ass. I broke up with him as soon as I could (not easy, since we lived across the hall from one another, and the break up was delayed by the fact that the first Gulf War was on, and his family was at home in Tel Aviv, in gas masks) but I saved those tapes (til Ray “accidentally” threw them away — he swears to this day it was an accident) and I always think of this guy when I’m copying an album for a friend.

I do make a mix once in a while, always for the girls’ birthdays. But this year I felt guilty making Sophie’s, because most of the songs came off the “For the Kids” CD comps. I can’t help it. That music’s the best. If you want to complete your kid music library, you can go to Stefan’s blog and he has fabulous advice. Or go to amazon (don’t tell my indie book/record friends I said that) and buy all three “For the Kids” collections. That and some Beatles, and you’ll be set — with apologies to kid music bloggers and ex-boyfriends. OK, throw in some Dan Zanes. He’s the best kid-music-maker out there today — the Zooglobble guy and I wholeheartedly concurred.

Sophie’s comp has “For the Kids” music by Of Montreal and The Format, and I also tossed on Hotel Yorba by the White Stripes and Move It from Madagascar, two family favorites. The key to good kid music, Stefan Shepherd explains, is simply that it should be something you can listen to eight times between here and the grocery store.

Make that nine and I am in complete agreement.

Here is a lovely photo of the girls, posing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, marred only by the fact that Sophie insisted on clutching a Sesame Street coloring book.

I can relate. At the next lookout point (I lost count, not sure which that was) yesterday, she initially refused to get out of the car, and so I read “Junie B. Jones, Graduation Girl” while Ray and Annabelle oohed and ahhed. Eventually, Sophie did agree to get out, so I joined her. We walked to the edge of that lookout, and she was suitably impressed.

Ray was pleased, which pleased me. Despite the fact that he accused me of a sullen expression most of the trip (I swear, I felt like crap, I have a sinus infection, and even tried showing him a Kleenexful of green snot to prove it) I actually enjoyed myself. Ray made great efforts were made to assure that — we stayed in a nice hotel (not El Tovar, but still, it was very clean and spacious) and I was not forced to attempt any hikes that scared me. (Which, to be honest, is most any hike, particularly one that involves standing near a precipice, which is pretty much what the Grand Canyon is all about, hence the name.)

Sophie’s a great equalizer in the equation of our family, I have to admit. She and I attempt the more modest physical endeavors in life (she’ll tip the balance and surpass me, I know, it’s just a matter of time), while Ray nudges Annabelle to join him. She had whined for weeks, anytime he suggested a hike, so I was worried and I know he was, too. But she performed admirably, this trip. They made it almost to the first rest house, which I’m told is a heck of a hike for an almost 8 year old.

Ray adores the Grand Canyon. It’s one of his favorite places. He first traveled there with his parents when he was young, recently transplanted from New York. He’s stayed in Bucky O’Neil’s cabin (so close to the edge you wouldn’t want to stay there if you sleepwalk), he’s hiked up and down in a day (not recommended) and even rim to rim in a day (definitely not recommended). He’d been there before, but this trip he thoroughly enjoyed every lookout, every peek, every bit of the canyon experience.

I most appreciated the parts that involved people and buildings — I’m fascinated by Mary Colter, who designed many of the buildings at the Grand Canyon’s south rim, long before it was fashionable for a woman to do so. I love the decor in her Bright Angel lodge, down to the whimsical, decrepit, painted window panes near the ceiling of the lodge’s cafe.

The Grand Canyon itself? Eh. To me, it looks like a backdrop for a movie — almost too pretty to look at for too long, and definitely vertigo-inducing for me if I go anywhere close to the edge. I’ll admit that perhaps I lack a full appreciation because I have not ever ventured down into the canyon. And I never will. I walked 13 and a half miles a few months ago, but that was all flat except for a slight incline near the end that nearly killed me. I trip over curbs; no thanks, I’ll skip mile-deep canyons.

Despite the fact (or maybe because of it) that I’m an Arizona native, my first trip to the Grand Canyon didn’t come til I was in my 20s, on assignment for my first newspaper job: A murderer was loose in the Grand Canyon National Park. Now, that was my kind of trip! The guy didn’t hurt anybody (else, that is) and they caught him fairly quickly, but I had fun traisping around the grounds, talking to scared tourists.

I did walk to the edge and looked for a few seconds, National Lampoon’s Vacation-style, then posed and our photographer (handy, to have one of those around; these days I’d be forced to take my own photos) snapped my picture, smiling and waving.

I knew I’d be okay if I never went back. So yeah, to be completely honest, that sullen expression this weekend may have been 90 percent sinus infection and 10 percent Grand Canyon, but I know one thing: I thoroughly enjoyed being with my family for three days straight, even though Sophie pooed her pants (bye bye Elmo panties) and later drew all over herself with markers (where’d she get them?!) and Annabelle got motion sick and threw up in the car, just minutes from home. (My weak stomach — she did inherit something from me.)

I’m looking forward to traveling — even camping, yes, I’ve committed — with the family this summer. Sophie will now sleep in a bed with the rest of us in the room without getting up all night (knock wood), climbs stairs on her own and, generally speaking, doesn’t bolt, which is a very good thing when you’re standing next to, oh, say, the Grand Canyon.

And Sophie’s my kindred spirit — for the moment, at least. I, too, reach for reading materials when I’ve had too much sightseeing (most memorable: me, sitting on a pile of Roman ruins, reading People magazine on my honeymoon, while Ray inspected the nth stone whatever).

I’ll need to stock up on the reading material, because we’re headed to some more national parks. After turning it down at the Petrified Forest  last year, Ray decided we should take the Park Service up on its kind offer, and score Sophie a free lifetime pass to all national parks.

“Anyone in this car have a medical disability that gets them government services?” the ranger asked when we pulled up. I looked at my feet.

Ray pointed toward the back seat.

“Sophie does!” he said.

I couldn’t look, but Ray said said the ranger barely glanced back.

“OK, let’s make this quick,” she said, shoving a clipboard in Ray’s face. He signed for Sophie and handed her the card (she was thrilled), which he later wisely grabbed and hid in his wallet. We saved $25.

The Petrified Forest ranger’s words echoed in my ears as we drove into the park — “You get one of those, you never leave that person home when you go on vacation!”

As if.