The Boy has been discovering his hands, discovering that he has them, discovering that he can control them.
Results For "Month: August 2012"
Final Day
The final day at Lake Tillery also included a boat ride, with the girls sitting in the back singing Polish Christmas carols as the Boy slept.
The destination: “Big Bridge,” a name that sounds just like something a three- or four-year-old would name a bridge that is rather large. Sort of like Big Wolf. (He still sleeps with the Girl every night. “He keeps me calm,” she once explained.)
Of course, there was one last swim…
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First
Nana and Papa certainly have the picture somewhere: I stand by my uncle’s pond, rod and reel in hand, with a small fish on the line. I must have been four, maybe fine. The rod and reel seemed impossibly heavy, and I thought the photographer — my uncle? mother? — would never snap the picture.
So I think I can understand the Girl’s frustration with me as I maneuvered for picture after picture of her first fish.
Boat Ride Bookends, Part Two
After the boat ride and swimming, we were shocked suddenly to discover it was lunch time. And once lunch was over, we were shocked at how tired the kids were — except the two youngest.
But soon after, everyone was rested and the water called us back again. The little puppy running around the lakefront — dubbed Cutie by the kids — was quite an attraction, too. In fact, more so in many ways. Even when the puppy wasn’t there, they played as if she were there. “We must find Cutie!” L cried out, fishing for her with a bit of line and a magnet. “She must have fallen in!”
But she hadn’t — we were the only ones to fall in. Make that jump in — the Girl’s newest water obsession.
Meanwhile, the youngest looked on and ate an early dinner.
With a twelve-week-old, our schedule is his schedule. “He ate at three,” K begins, figuring the next feeding time and its impact on our less-than-tight schedule. Sometimes that’s a challenge; at the lake, it was inconsequential. After all, how many vacations run on a tight schedule? Well, scratch that: I know some who run their vacations like boot camp.
Evening came and we decided on another boat ride. The Boy took it all in stride: his expression consistently said, “Oh well, here we go again. This should be fun…”
And it was for some of us. L got to drive a boat for the first time. It was a carefree frolic for her. No stress; no worries, no fear.
We returned to find brilliance.
Brilliance that shifted.
Boat Ride Bookends, Part One
Day two at Lake Tillery began and ended with a boat ride. “I’ve never been on a boat,” L announced in excitement, obviously having forgotten earlier rides in Slovakia.
Yet it was certainly the Boy’s first boat ride, the first time we bundled him up in a life jacket.
“L would not have put up with this for a moment,” K laughed as we pulled out of the channel into the lake. The Boy, though, simply snuggled into the jacket and fell asleep.
Had he known who was driving, he might not have been quite so calm. L’s best friend from Montessori, E, was at the wheel, his father at his side, doing a fine job despite the jokes.
Pulling into the dock of E’s aunt, K immediately loosened the Boy’s life jacket and found a place for him to continue his apparently eternal nap.
The Girl took a quick break, and upon waking, the Boy joined his mother in the lake with his newest friends.
Afternoon at the Lake
L has fallen in love with water this summer. Among her favorite sports to watch in London are swimming and diving; she asks daily to go to the pool; she flops about in the tub in her best imitation of Rebecca Soni. Despite her consistent love of water, though, she wasn’t that wild about the beach when we first went. Or when we went the second time. So when we headed to North Carolina with friends for a weekend at the lake, I was a but curious how she would take swimming in the open water.
As might be expected, she was a bit cautions at first. Thought she’d given up her arm floats earlier in the summer, she learned that one of the rules of the pier was that children must always wear flotation devices — and since there were no more swim belts, the Girl was stuck wearing her arm floats again.
There was also initial concern regarding what else might be swimming with her — or under her. Talk of an enormous catfish that broke a line earlier in the day had her worried and sitting on the edge for a while.
But only for a while.
Thus began a weekend of firsts. Fishing, for example — something that requires more patience than I thought the Girl had ever shown in her whole life. Something that involves touching things the Girl might not like to touch, like hooks and worms and fish. Something that can pass hours with only one reward: the peace of the wait.
Yet the girl is growing, and she’s always surprising us with what she can do, what she’s willing to try, what we can force her to eat. (Some humor intended there.) Fishing became the big hit for the Girl.
Yet there were the old stand-bys — what kid in history has been able to turn down an invitation to watch a film while sitting in an old water heater box?
Cramped, stuffy, view-blocking — it didn’t matter. What mattered was to be in the box. The movie was only secondary entertainment.
With a full moon that night, though, adults had other forms of less-cramped, more serene entertainment.
Playground
The earliest memories center on the large rectangular jungle gym in the center, or so it would eventually seem to me, of an enormous playground. It was a fort, battleship, a prison, starship, a dungeon, a jungle, a towering inferno, and anything and everything else we needed in first grade. With its seemingly towering western side, it also gave me my first inclination of hierarchy and where I might stand in a given hierarchy. The brave boys, the boys who were already above — literally and figuratively — the average play of a first or second grader would climb to the top, straddle a top beam, and sit there for most of recess, calling out to us mortals below. Or perhaps it was simply they couldn’t fit in. Who knows — it’s been thirty-plus years, and divining motivations of those in my everyday life is difficult enough. Still, I felt them above me, sensed them above, and always thought they were somehow different.
Just down the hill were the swings, which never held much interest to me. I wanted to use my imagination: swings weren’t conducive to that. Back and forth, back and forth, the more athletic boys in later grades would use the swings to show off their bravery, leaping from in-motion swings from heights that made me dizzy.
The swings were not my thing, but just south of the swings, a crag of rocks stretched out endlessly, with perfect curves and shapes to make the most majestic star cruiser ever built. There was a cockpit carved perfectly out of the rock, and toward the tail of the ship, a perfect gun torret for fending off attacks from marauding aliens. When we jocks (and even then, they could be called jocks) chased us nerds away from the serve-all jungle gym, this is where we came. And when we were lucky, we got to use both — mothership and explorer.
As we moved through elementary school, the playground grew with us. A new jungle gym made a better prison/dungeon than the old rectangular beast, so we made a move. A new spider-like contraption took away some of the spill-over from the rectangular beast, so I and my small group of space-loving friends took permanent possession of the dungeon and rock formation.
Unless it was a day that the teacher emerged from the school carrying a rubber, inflatable ball under her arm — a sure sign of impending disaster. We all knew where to go without being told: the large field to the east of the playground.
It was to be a kickball day. These were the days when all my inadequacies and worries seemed to come to fruition: always among the last picked, I hated kickball with a passion. The boys that hung out — literally — at the top of the jungle gym loved it. It wasn’t that I was not athletic. Indeed, I was a fast runner and always looked forward to the 50 yard dash (or was it only 40 yards?) during the fall and spring physical fitness tests. I knew I would have one of the top three times, and by fourth grade, the teacher always had Ernie and me go last. He always beat me, but I never worried: I could shine in second place just as well. Kickball, though, just didn’t do it for me: a rubber ball, bouncing along the roughly turfed field as it approached, with a team of fifteen of my peers all waiting to catch the ball I would inevitably send skyward as the ball took a small bounce just as I kicked.
It was the beginning of my sense of never truly fitting in, my feeling of always been just on the outside. Never popular nor particularly unpopular, something that continued though junior high and high school.
With the Girl entering kindergarten in a few short weeks, I’ve begun thinking about my own school experiences and how I might like L’s to be different and what elements I might prefer to keep as similar to my own — as if I really have any say in the matter at all. Yet, I do: as a parent, I see behaviors and habits form that I quickly correct, explaining things like, “Being unwilling to share will make it difficult to make friends” and “Playing doesn’t mean telling your playmates what to pretend; that will make friendships hard.” We explain; we correct; we role play. Soon, we’ll see how successful our efforts have been.
Downtown Rock Hill, Part 2
Is downtown Rock Hill is the story of America? One would certainly hope not, but in some ways, it seems to have all the elements in parallel. Within a couple of blocks we have signs of incredible affluence
and poverty-driven decay. What’s the difference between these two homes? What’s the difference between the owners of these homes? Over the last few years, my explanations have shifted from the left to the center-right of the political spectrum. The answer seems hinted in other parts of town.
Still only a few blocks away, Nana points out yet another building with personal significance: the remains of Rock Hill Printing & Finishing. “This was where I was working when I met Papa,” she explains to us. She shows us where she used to enter, pointing out roughly where her desk was.
One wonders if there are any plans to renovate this particular building as others in the area. Just up the road, an old factory has been turned into an apartment complex. One could likely turn this shell into high-ceiling lofts or something similar. But is the demand there? I think back to the abandoned post office just a few blocks away, figuring it’s unlikely that this gigantic building will ever become of anything more than the subject of a blog post.
Just behind it lies the heart of the factory, once impressive, but now merely tragic. According to one source,
The building of the Rock Hill Printing and Finishing Plant in 1929 moved M. Lowenstein halfway along the way to becoming a totally integrated producer of textiles. The Rock Hill plant bleached, dyed, printed and finished cloth purchased from a variety of sources, primarily in the South. The rapid expansion of Lowenstein through the acquisition of textile mills produced the raw material for the plant and resulted in its own expansion. By the early 1960s, it grew from a plant with 200,000 square feet to one with more than 2 million square feet, which bleached, dyed, and finished both cotton and synthetic fabrics. New processes such as Sanforizing and the use of Scotchgard TM finishing permitted it to create permanent press cloth during the 1970s. Acquired by Springs Industries in 1986, the plant included 23 roller print machines and 7 screen print machines. (textilehistory.org)
Looking at an aerial view of the factory in its heyday, it’s clear the impact its closure had on the economics of Rock Hill. Now, only inspiration remains.
This is the story of South Carolina, a story that hopefully America as a whole will not echo. But I wonder. South Carolina used to be a textile center. My family’s fate was tied into that of the mills. My mother worked in a mill; my grandmother worked in a mill; countless aunts worked in mills. My father did electrical work in mills; my grandfather likely did masonry work for a mill or two. Every South Carolinian has mill work somewhere in her family history.
The cemetery just a block or so away is surely filled with those who worked the roller print machines and the bleaching machines, with those who did the screen printing and counted the cost of everything.
Rock Hill is only one of many textile cities in South Carolina that has suffered this fate. It’s only one of thousands of cities in America that must be harboring doubts that its best days lie in the future.
Mixing
The Girl has fallen in love with the Olympics. “Can I watch gymnastics tonight instead of reading before bed?” she asked last night. This morning, it’s the same. She has her favorites, but she’ll watch just about anything. Gymnastics, though, sends her into a hypnotic trance — at least as much as a hyper five-year-old slide into motionlessness.
After breakfast, she, K, and the Boy curl up to watch beach volleyball — not the Girl’s favorite, but she still chants “U-S-A!” endlessly.
It’s been an inspiring week for her. A week of growth. Rarely does she list “princess” as the first thing she wants to do with her life. Now the list includes gymnast, swimmer, dancer, and artist. Occasionally she adds “princess” to the mix,” but so many other things seem so much more interesting.
But I’m not really worried about that kind of mixing. She’ll have enough goal mixing as she grows up. I anticipate at least three different majors during her freshman year, now only thirteen years away. No, it’s the little things that thrill me more.
Things like stabbing a green bean and a piece of chicken onto the lunchtime fork in an effort to kill the bean taste. Or mixing rice and leftover chicken.
Sweet and Sour
Summer is sweet and sour. It is vines of filled with tomatoes turning a gentle orange before shifting to deep, sweet red. We pick them and smell the perfume that lingers on our hands. Romas provide consistency; Better Boys provide juice.
Then there’s the sour: weeds. They grow in the now-composted mulch that’s supposed to be keeping them out.
But there’s the sweetest of all: a boy who will wait patiently while mom tugs at the weeds.
