The Boy’s Disney Performance
Donald J. Christ
First Loss
New Easter
Every year, we have at least one final-time experience without even knowing it. A new calendar year turns over, and we never realize that at some point during that previous year, it was the last time we would hold our child, talk to our mother, work at a given job. Sometimes, we know it’s our last time. When I said goodbye to my students at the end of last year, I knew it was the last time I’d do that at Hughes. Occasionally, we’re wrong: we think it’s the final time, but it’s not. Such was leaving Poland in 1999.
Usually, though, we have no idea we’re experiencing a final moment as we live it: we don’t realize it’s a last-time. I walked out of our house to photograph an ordination, offering my mother a casual “See you,” without realizing it was the last time I would talk to her. I don’t even remember my final conversation with my father-in-law.
Last year was possibly the last time our whole family will be together during Easter. I doubt it: I think we’ll end up together many more times, but it’s possible that 2025 was our final Easter together. Since Thanksgiving and Christmas always provide more time off, those are the likely family holidays within which we’ll create reunion traditions. Yet as our ideas grow up, move out, and create lives of their own, they’ll likely share those lives with someone, and that will result in split familial obligations. We celebrated Thanksgiving with my mother’s family one year and my father’s the next because of this. (Christmas and Easter didn’t even come into the picture as they were pagan traditions no true Christian would celebrate.) Something like that will likely setting into place in our family, but Easter will often be that outlier, I suspect. L and her partner might be with us one year while E and his partner are visiting her family. Who knows?
What I do know and noticed immediately this weekend is how different our Easter was this year compared to others. Most significantly, the Girl was not with us. Her club volleyball team had a tournament in Kansas City, so she was not with us. The Boy got a gig playing in a small orchestra for a Baptist Church’s Easter service, and we had to leave Sunday morning at 6:30 to make it on time. So we didn’t go to a regular family Easter service together either. (Of course, it’s not missing the service that bothers me: it’s the change in tradition.) In the early evening, most of the usual guests had arrived. But there were not enough kids even to attempt an Easter egg hunt. Young T brought her infant son (so we teased Ciocia M about being Babcia M now), but he’s the closest to being of an age that even has an interest in the Easter egg hunt. And everyone left well before eight. An atypical Easter in every sense.
It got me thinking about the transition we’re in: L’s a legal adult now starting to make a life of her own. The Boy will begin high school in a matter of months, and those four years will simply melt. Everything will be in flux as they figure out in their early adulthood what exactly they’re going to make of their lives. I didn’t figure all of that out until I was nearly thirty, so it could be a long period of fluctuation and change. But one thing is for sure: with both kids, we’ve left childhood behind long ago.
Easter 2026
Holy Saturday 2026
Palm Sunday 2026
After CPA and at Work
Requiem
We went to hear Mozart’s Requiem tonight. In part because Mozart’s Requiem. In part because E’s trombone teacher played the solo at the Tuba Mirum section. (This is, of course, not him. We don’t have any churches like that in the area.)
Rooms at King
I technically started college before I’d graduated high school. It wasn’t that I took dual-credit or AP classes: while the latter were an option at my high school (and I took exactly zero such classes compared to the countless AP classes L took), dual-credit wasn’t even available (that I know of). However, I took a June-term western civilization course, which began about a week before my high school graduation.
Dr. Thomas Peake, a legend in the college’s history department, taught the course. A specialist in Russian history, he would famously turn to write something on the board in Russian in this or that history course and turn back around continuing the lecture in Russian, unaware he’d switched languages until he saw the confusion in his students’ faces. (To have that kind of fluency!) He also once expressed surprise that no one in the room knew the Cyrillic alphabet. “It’s just Greek,” he exclaimed incredulously. He had that kind of mind.
We met in this classroom on the ground floor of Bristol Hall. Over the course of my years at the college, I took countless classes in this room, but I most clearly remember Dr. Peake going over Mesopotamian history at the blackboard, his tangle of hair from his comb-over dancing to one side as he wrote on the blackboard.
In later years, I would sit in various classrooms in Bristol Hall talking to this or that friend about relationships, theology, the future, music — whatever passion was then stirring us.
High Dive
Looking for all the extra runway he can find, he leans back, arms straight, glistening hands gripping the rails. He hangs momentarily, his body hovering over the concrete ten feet down — certain death if his wet hands lose their grip — before he jerks his whole body forward as he begins his takeoff. As he bolts toward the end of the board, a fine mist of water blooming from is wet hair with each step, those of us still with feet planted firmly on the pool deck watch, mouths slightly agape in wonder of what mastery Chad is going to display. Approaching the end of the board, Chad leaps upward, somehow transferring his forward momentum into an upward launch while still miraculously maintaining much of his forward motion so that when he springs from the end of the board, he soars impossibly high and impossibly far. We all watch him as his legs pump in the air and his arms extend from his sides like wings gliding. He leans slightly forward, legs still turning as he approaches the water. Just when it seems he’s going to fold into the water face-first, he throws one arm forward, one arm backward, instantaneously rotating his body 180 degrees. […] Finally, the back of his head pops the water with a loud crack. Countless shards of glass — or even diamonds — explode upward accompanied by a single cannon shot, an explosive pop!, all of which arc and fall back back, showering the water in flashes of sunlight. Chad, the best diver in the pool, has performed yet another perfect twister.
I am next, a scrawny thirteen-year-old who cannot do a twister at all. My slider is also non-existent. And a flying squirrel? No way. But I do have a trick that produces a moderately high and voluminous splash: my watermelon.
I reach the top of the high dive and begin may approach. Like the twister, the watermelon is a trick of delay. The key, what makes it look dangerous and thus gives it panache, is to look like you’re about to do a simple belly flop. At the last minute, you assume a fetal position and throw your ass over your feet, essentially completing a half flip just as you enter the water. If your timing is right, your feet will hit last and produce an eruption of water. You can always tell how succesful you were by the depth of the pop you hear underwater. If your rotation is wrong or improperly timed, you make no splash or, at worst, complete a belly-flop.
This one, though, is as good as I’ve ever done. I surface feeling certain I’ve held my own in the informal, unspoken daily contest at the high dive of Spring Lakes Swim Club. Confirmation comes when I hear Chad, who is sitting on the edge of the pool chatting with a bikini-clad goddess whom I would never approach, say, “Sweet watermelon, man.”
The king has spoken; the king approves.
Final Days of School
As we move into the last quarter of this inaugural GPA year, the students in my class are embarking on one of the most challenging topics of the year: public speaking. We’ll be working toward a straightforward (but certainly not simple) goal: a five-minute speech.
“Five minutes?!” was a fairly common refrain. “There’s no way I can give a speech that long!”
A few students reacted with incredulity of a different nature: “Only five minutes?!”
Our preparation toward the seemingly daunting goal will roughly follow the template we established today. We began with a writing prompted that served as the basis for the rest of the day: “How was your spring break? What was the best part of it? What would you relive if you could? Why?”
After students wrote their responses, they had short conversations to share their ideas. (A secondary focus this quarter is social/conversational skills — we’ll be talking all quarter.) From there, they used rock/paper/scissors to determine who from each table would go first.
“Go first, Mr. Scott? In what?”
“The first speech!” Anxiety washed over several faces until I explained it was only a one-minute speech, and their audience would be limited to their tables. After a short time to prepare for the modified topic (“Make an argument that your spring break, no matter what you did, was the best imaginable spring break”), students took turns giving their short speeches to their groups. Listeners were to pay attention to four different elements depending on which speaker was presenting:
Use of fillers and repeated words/phrases
- Eye contact
- Organization
- Clear speaking
After each speech, the three audience members gave a bit of feedback on the element in question. Once all four group members completed their speech, we used Class Dojo to choose randomly one student.
“You’re the class winner!” I exclaimed.
“What did I win?”
“The privilege of giving your speech to the whole class!”
After the student gave her short presentation (Class Dojo chose only girls for some reason), I explained that what we’d just done would serve as something of a template for most of the lessons for the next couple of weeks. We’ll have mini-lessons on a number of topics including but not limited to:
- Filler words
- Eye contact
- SPS (Specific purpose statement)
- Gestures
- Engaging the crowd
- Speaking loudly and clearly
- Confidence
- Effective notes for a speech
Finally, we’ll end the quarter by using all the discussions we’ve been having as inspiration for our speeches.
It will be a busy quarter, but we’re finishing the year with a challenge because that’s what we do at GPA.
From class website update.
Nowy Targ Hala
When we head back to Polska, I’m always curious about what has changed since the last time we were there. All my old hanuts — Lipnica, Jablonka, Nowy Targ, Krakow — have changed enormously over the last two decades, and there’s almost almost nothing commercial that looks untouched. Yet there’s one building on Ludźmierska Street heading into Nowy Targ that looks the same every visit.
In fact, It looks just the same as the first time I saw it in 1996 — along with the movie theater in Nowy Targ, it’s the only thing I can say that about.
Every time we head back, I wonder if perhaps this visit it will be gone like the bus station in Nowy Targ.
But year after year, it’s still there, looking no more neglected and dilapidated than it did the last time I saw it or indeed the first time.
Early Spring Volleyball
Out with the Old
Tomorrow’s Job
Back Home
But our thoughts are still on the beach.
Ormond Beach Day 3
Our third day began without any alarm, with any reminder that we had to get up at any particular hour at all. Yesterday, we received a message from our Vrbo host “Hope all is well and enjoy your weekend!” to which I replied, “Everything is going great. We’re being very lazy, which was the whole idea.” Since we got up yesterday for the sunrise, I guess that wasn’t really all that accurate. Today, though, it was. No alarm. No commitments. So we weren’t all out of bed until after nine.
After a breakfast of K’s lovely pancakes, we went for walk on the beach, heading south toward the Daytona area for a change. Daytona Beach was in the news this morning for four separate shooting incidents over the weekend. Apparently, it’s filled with college students partying for spring break, but here we are, just fifteen miles south, and there’s no one around and not a hint of any kind of violence.
At least, not that type of violence. We watched a sea bird of some sort — here my landlubber nature shows specularly — catch a fish of some sort and fly about above us for a while. It seemed unable to decide what exactly to do, to land on the beach or to strafe the water’s surface.
And just a bit further down the beach, a fisherman who’d caught a bonnet-head shark, itself quite the predator. It uses it’s bonnet-shaped head to detect changes in electrical charge as it swims along the ocean floor. When it detects a change, it attacks that spot in the hopes of finding a blue crab or some mollusk or other.
All the while, more potential violence just off the shore: squadron after squadron of pelicans (that’s what a group of them in flight is actually called — what a perfect name) flew along the coast, not seemingly hunting (for they none ever dove), but also not seemingly uninterested in what was going on below them. Perhaps that’s for the best: each time they dive, they do more damage to their vision until they eventually become completely blind. I suppose at that point, they starve. The cruelty of the natural world.
It gets me wondering how relatively violent we are as a species compared to other species. We like to think of life in the twenty-first as relatively calm, peaceful even, and it is for most of in the developed world. But the violence we do to each other in other parts of the world, and the violence we do to the Earth itself and most species, makes us unquestionably the most dangerous species on the planet. We are, after all, capable of all but destroying life on the whole planet in a a number of ways. Sure, we don’t often end up violently devoured by some superior species, but we do more than enough violence to each other to make up for that.
But we can play cards.
Ormond Beach Day 2
“It’s probably the most convenient time of year to catch a sunrise,” K argued as she began her argument last night that we should get up early enough to watch the sunrise over the ocean. With it so close to daylight savings time switch, the sun rises at a very reasonable 7:30. It took surprisingly little convincing, so at 6:50, we were all up and heading to the beach.
We weren’t the only ones. An older gentleman — “older” probably meaning my age by now or just a touch older; I keep forgetting I’m in my fifties now — was out setting up his fishing gear, and a few others were venturing out, coffee cups in head, to watch the sunrise.
I was hoping the large cloud mass on the horizon would make for a more beautiful sunrise than it actually did. Still, having the four of us there made it a memorable way to begin our first day here at Ormond Beach, which is only a 1.5-ish hour drive from UF, where L is studying.
After a half hour on the beach, we returned from a solid breakfast of bacon and eggs with biscuits before all decided that 9:00 am is a perfect time for a late-morning nap. We’ve all been sleep-deprived over the last few weeks, and since we had absolutely nothing planned for the day except some time on the beach, we all trundled back to our bed
In the afternoon, the kids took another nap (we did come here, after all, to relax) while K and I went on a walk.
Ormond Beach Day 1
We’ve come down to Florida to spend a couple of days on the beach with L. In some miracle of timing, all three of us connected to or involved in education have spring break the same week. So we arrived today and went straight to the beach after dinner.
