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Tuesday

Tuesday 4 August 2015

I always maintained that Tuesdays had nothing going for them. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not about to suggest that Mondays have a lot going for them, I would continue. Mondays, though, have the force of the weekend behind them and the sheer necessity to get going. You push through Monday like you push through a two-kilometer, 5% grade climb at the beginning of a long bike ride: it’s not pleasant, but you still have the energy to do it, so you just do it.

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Wednesday carries the advantage of being the mid-way marker of the week: make it through Wednesday, and it’s all downhill from there. Thursday is almost Friday, and Friday is Friday. Only Tuesday has nothing going for it.

This all carries the assumption that the only enjoyable part of the week, the only part of the week really worth enjoying, is the weekend. In the summer, for a teacher, that just isn’t true: every day is the weekend in a sense. Every day can be a day of exploration, a day of getting stamped with anti-bug, anti-wild-attack-cat antidotes. Every day can include some discovery and rediscovery with one’s children.

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That’s the easy part. The challenge is getting that to carry over into the school year, to think, “‘Tuesday has nothing going for it’ is nonsense because all days have something going for them.”

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To live each day as if, given a choice of any day in your life to relive, you chose today.

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At this point in the year, less than two weeks before the kids head back into the classroom, I’m always confident that I’ll succeed. Last year, that confidence didn’t even make it through the first week of school, so challenging were a couple of classes. But in the end, that too is a choice.

Trapped

Monday 3 August 2015

Pictures for the day — a day of exploring and bike riding of old — are trapped on the memory card. The cable to connect the camera is still in Poland; the built-in card reader isn’t working. And so the pictures remain on the camera…

Back To Normal

Sunday 2 August 2015

“Well, now everything is back to normal,” I said just the other evening, when the kids were having an evening snack, and K and I were divvying up the evening responsibilities — who does the bathing and tooth-brushing, who does the reading/praying/tucking-in.

“Not quite, Daddy,” L corrected. “We’re still missing Bida.”

Our oldest cat had run off just before I’d left for Poland, and no one had seen her since. “She’ll come back” was K’s constant refrain, but I wasn’t so sure. How well could an arthritic, deaf, virtually-toothless old cat survive without human intervention?

Apparently, she could survive quite well, because this evening, she came trotting into the carport as if nothing had happened. Her long, gray hair was starting to mat after a month of neglect, and it was filled with little twigs, seeds, and dirt. She’d lost a fair amount of weight. But other than that, she was just like normal: the old grumpy lady who hisses at Elsa, our year-old-cat, for the slightest little thing, who trots up the stairs and hides under our bed whenever she’s offended (which doesn’t take much).

Elsa, for her part, was thrilled to see Bida, and eager to help. She gave up her food for Bida, backing away when the elder cat approached, and she stood watch as Bida ate slowly.

Elsa’s restraint has always impressed me: with her sharp teeth and sharper claws, she could tear Bida apart in a fight. Yet every time Bida hisses and swats ineffectually at Elsa, Elsa just backs down and submits.

So tonight, when we’re all divvying up responsibilities and snacks, I can try again: “Everything’s back to normal now.”

Return

Saturday 1 August 2015

Routines, it turns out, are easily formed. It only takes a few mornings of waking alone, eating breakfast alone while glancing through the news on the Internet and sipping coffee, and enjoying the peace of a quiet morning. Only a few mornings of this and it becomes a new routine, replacing the old. On the other hand, it only takes one morning of noisy breakfast preparation, of kids laughing, fussing, and playing—only one morning and everything returns back to normal. The Saturday morning ritual conversation with Babcia through Skype, with the kids downstairs while I sit upstairs reading the news and sipping coffee, falls back into place as if we’d been doing it all summer.