It’s always been one of my favorite songs, Sting’s “Fragile.” But this particular version is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.
Month: February 2014
PD
It’s four thirty; no one really wants to be here, yet at some level, we’re all keenly aware of how important it is to be here. Still, we’ve wished our students well for the day, we’re hungry, and really the last thing we want is to sit through professional development — i.e., a Power Point presentation.
In all honesty, it’s a great disservice to the district head of secondary English instruction to reduce down all her research, planning, and background conversations to three words: “a Power Point.” Mrs. B has done a superb job helping us all get a grasp on the changes Common Core mean for our teaching, and without her quarterly professional development (PD), I’d be much further behind the curve than I am now. I walk away from each session feeling better about my teaching, feeling I have a lot of new strategies to implement, and feeling generally more confident in my ability to prepare kids for high school. But in the tired haze of a Thursday afternoon, it can all seem just a bit much.
“You want me to teach for eight hours, then sit for ninety-minutes on the other side of the desk?” You can see that question almost visibly in thought-bubbles above every attendee’s head. Glance around the room and you’re not likely to be surprised at what you see: bottles of various sizes and materials, filled with diet soda, iced tea, water, and various mysteries — no, not those mysteries — as well as coffee cups, snack wrappers, smart phones, laptops, watches, jewelry. It’s like we’re all getting ready for bed and watching television at the same time: we’re all as comfortable as we can be without actually kicking off our shoes. The presentation starts, and you see someone surreptitiously scrolling through messages on her phone, someone else looking at the news on her laptop. You hear someone desperately trying to open a snack — perhaps a bag of pretzels — without making too much noise. You see two teachers huddled together, finishing a conversation that started before the presentation. You think of how tired you are, of how much you’d like to be napping. And then it occurs to you: “We’re just as bad as our own students.”
Barszcz in the Family
What Polish family would be truly Polish if barszcz weren’t a favorite? For as long as I can remember, the Girl has adored it, placed it almost at the very top of her favorite food list — just below pizza, of course.
The Boy has been warming to the idea, and tonight, he decided it was time to get serious about beet root soup.
Somehow he managed to get two spoons, and he did make use of both of them.
That only left one family member: the cat. K, though, solved that problem today, taking a few seconds that L hadn’t managed to finish, running them through a food processor to grind up the sausage (the poor old girl has lost almost all her teeth), and pouring the resulting purple mush into Bida’s bowl.
And so now it’s official: the Scott family, to a person/cat, loves beetroot soup.
Bubbling Sentences
He dashed to the bathroom as soon as he heard the water running, squealing “Bubbles!” He tends to pronounce that final “s” as a voiceless palato-alveolar fricative, though; in other words, he says “bubblesh!” Such a mouthful to describe such a simple sound — admittedly, I didn’t even know what it was until I asked Google — seems an apt illustration for how the Boy in fact uses language. Seeing the bubbles foam in the bathtub, he returned to the back top of the stairs and called, “L! Bubbles! Chodz!” Three little words that communicated a whole cosmos of new understanding and excitement.
At it’s most simple level, the Boy’s utterance was a highly simplified, mixed-language group of sentences. “Hey, L! Dad’s running the bath, and he’s put the bubbles in! Come quick!” But the excitement in his voice added more: “Hey, I’m able to communicate a complete thought!”
Gratitude, Redux
Being a parent means seeing constant development, but it’s often so gradual that the moments that really shine don’t as they slip into the continuum of the everyday. But every now and then, I catch a moment, something that reminds me how much I have to be grateful for.
I catch L curled up on the couch, reading. She whispers the words to herself, folds the back on itself, and settles deeper into the corner of the couch.
Upstairs, I play with the Boy as he rolls his many cars about the floor in L’s room. “Eeee–oooo! Eeee–oooo! Eeee–oooo!” he cries, pushing his favorite police car in circles around himself. Then he tries to say “police car.”
I’m grateful for getting to hear sounds like this, that I can witness the slow development of a mind, of a personality, of a worldview, and I can help shape it. And I’m thankful that I’m learning when to back off of this “shaping.”
Later, he plays peekaboo when we are dressing him for bed, spreading his small fingers gingerly over his eyes, peeping through the lattice, probably certain I don’t notice. I remember doing that. Or am I vicariously remembering L doing that? The two kids lives are winding together into my own memories, and others are slipping away — like putting him to bed a year ago. It’s so much easier than in the past, when it meant walking for twenty, thirty, forty minutes (or more) with him on my shoulder. We were hesitant to put him down before he was completely out for fear that he would begin crying, loosening the congestion and send it all flowing out because he was so often with the sniffles. Now it’s a matter of a few moments. Slip the sleeper on, turn the light out, put the music on. He puts his head down on my shoulder. I pat his back. I pace back and forth a few moments, and when he’s ready, he pushes up from my shoulder, gives me a kiss, and says, “Spac.”
It’s that backing off that seems to be leading L back to a lost love of reading, and it’s that backing off that has led moments like our evening prayers with the Girl. We pray half a decade of the rosary, and once again, I show her how to hold the bead lightly between thumb and finger, letting the rest of the beads string out of the bottom of her hand.
With that energy she shows every day, every single day, getting her sitting still, thoughtful, is itself an accomplishment that we are only now realizing will come on its own, only with gentle guidance from us. It’s been K that pushes me to that realization, though.
“She’s just a kid,” she’ll remind with a smile. I’m thankful that sometimes I remember that without reminding.
So I finish up the day, with small thanks in three categories — spirit, spouse, children — and the realization once again that it wasn’t that difficult to find significant markers of grace for which to be thankful. And I find myself thinking, “Maybe I could do this every day.”
Gratitude
The small steps one takes to the greater goal: with the Boy today, it struck me that I don’t do enough with him during Mass to help him develop spiritually. I’d fallen into that silly line of thinking that he’s too young to get it. How ridiculous. We’d begun teaching him how to cross himself after dinner prayer. He gets the head — belly and shoulders, not so much. And he ends folding his hands together for “amen.” “If he can get that, of course he can begin other rudiments of the faith.” So today, during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, we knelt together for a moment. He ran his car on the floor after a few seconds, but it’s the small steps.
Small steps can of course grow into gigantic leaps, and Polish Mass today showed that as well. The choir, which began simply as K singing along with the organist, has grown in all senses, so that today the choir boasted seven members including an international accompaniment section that included a trumpet player who’d learned the hejnał played from St. Mary’s Basilica in Krakow hourly. I recorded the final hymn; watching the video, K mused about the irony: “That’s one of our most patriotic hymn, and we had a Latino accompanist and an Irish-American trumpet player.”
I can’t deny that at times, K’s choir involvement bothered me. Not because of what it was but the lengths to which she sometimes went to participate, singing when she was sick, singing when she’d rather do just about anything else. To have such a woman in my life at all could not fail to make me a better man; to have such a woman as my wife often leaves me speechless.
Given the rambunctious nature of our daughter, such a temperament as K’s seems nonnegotiable. It’s certainly not environment and it’s not obviously genetic — at least not in the first generation — but there it is all the same: energy that can be frustratingly exhausting, frustratingly difficult to redirect, frustratingly everything. Yet it’s not hard to see the gifts and wonder packed into her small frame as well. While playing tag after Mass, she reminded me just how incredibly nimble-minded she is. “JesteÅ› berkiem!” one of the boys called out, and she smiled as she ran after him: “I know I’m it!” She lives in the midst of two languages, two cultures, so effortlessly. If only it were effortlessly: it’s another struggle sometimes, but these little moments that show us that it’s not all in vain are welcome.
Back at home, I returned to my morning task, grading essays on Romeo and Juliet. As they’re all turned in online through a course management system, I can see the resulting word-counts in a simple list. Quantity is not quality, but seeing word-counts that average close to a thousand words, I remembered students’ incredulity at the beginning of the year when I told them that by the end of the year, five hundred words would seem restrictively short. And here it was, right on my computer screen: proof that I’ve had an impact. It’s easy to say, “We teachers can only plant seeds,” after days that seem like staying at home and bashing one’s head into the wall repeatedly would have been more productive, but such moments of clarity make those days all worthwhile.
Four things to be grateful for, in four different categories — spiritual, spousal, familial, and career. And the fact that it was so easy for me to think of these four things is itself something for which I can be thankful.
Yard Sale
We see the signs for them all the time, in various neighborhoods: yard sale. It’s an idea that has enchanted the Girl: take your stuff out into your yard and sell it. And earn some money.
So today, on the spur of the moment, she gathered some books she no longer wants, an old toy kitchen, and her bike (which we’re hoping to sell to replace it with a more appropriate model) and set up shop in the front yard with her friend, W. She thought it would be so easy. If you offer it, they will come.
Except they didn’t, to her disappointment. An early lesson in marketing and economics.
The Boy Around the House
Ancient Modern
In English I Honors, we’ve been accompanying Odysseus as he struggles to make it back to Ithaca and his beloved Penelope. We reach Tiresias’s prophecy from the underworld and the confusion starts.
‘Great captain,
a fair wind and the honey lights of home
are all you seek. But anguish lies ahead;
the god who thunders on the land prepares it,
not to be shaken from your track, implacable,
in rancor for the son whose eye you blinded.
One narrow strait may take you through his blows:
denial of yourself, restraint of shipmates.
When you make landfall on Thrinákia first
and quit the violet sea, dark on the land
you’ll find the grazing herds of Hêlios
by whom all things are seen, all speech is known.
Avoid those kine, hold fast to your intent,
and hard seafaring brings you all to Ithaka.
But if you raid the beeves, I see destruction
for ship and crew. Though you survive alone,
bereft of all companions, lost for years,
under strange sail shall you come home, to find
your own house filled with trouble: insolent men
eating your livestock as they court your lady.
Aye, you shall make those men atone in blood!
But after you have dealt out death–in open
combat or by stealth–to all the suitors,
go overland on foot, and take an oar,
until one day you come where men have lived
with meat unsalted, never known the sea,
nor seen seagoing ships, with crimson bows
and oars that fledge light hulls for dipping flight.
The spot will soon be plain to you, and I
can tell you how: some passerby will say,
“What winnowing fan is that upon your shoulder?”
Halt, and implant your smooth oar in the turf
and make fair sacrifice to Lord Poseidon:
a ram, a bull, a great buck boar; turn back,
and carry out pure hekatombs at home
to all wide heaven’s lords, the undying gods,
to each in order. Then a seaborne death
soft as this hand of mist will come upon you
when you are wearied out with rich old age,
your country folk in blessed peace around you.
And all this shall be just as I foretell.’
They see the line about being “lost for years,” and with with some guidance, realize that this is Calypso and that the blind prophet says it using future tense (“under strange sail shall you come home”).
“Wait,” they say. “That’s what the Odyssey begins with? How is it in future tense?” (We begin our exploration of the Odyssey on Calypso’s island in book five, skipping all of Telemachus’s search in books one through four.) With some more guidance they realize it’s a story within a story. A prophecy in something like a flashback. Which itself is all set within the larger story: a story within a story within a story.
Notes from the board
“And people liked to praise about Pulp Fiction‘s non-linear storyline,” I say with a smile, but no one gets it.
Pickles and the Giant Slalom
The Girl is odd when it comes to food, to say the least. It’s tempting to say it’s due to growing up in a half-Polish household where we cook a great deal of Polish food. That explains her absolute love of beet root soup, and it might explain why she’s not wild about things like hamburgers. On the other hand, pizza is another favorite, to the dgree that when asked about favorite foods, sometimes she lists pizza, sometimes barszcz.
Snacking and treats seem fairly straight forward: she likes most of the things typical American kinds like. Chocolate. Apples. Ice cream. Pickles. A whole jar. With the juice poured into a cup and savored through a straw.
The Boy sees the pickles, squeals “Pickle!” and grabs one in each hand and almost gets away with them both before K catches him and lets him know that one is enough. The three of them curl up together and watch Ted Ligety work his magic in the giant slalom.
Dressing the Boy
I usually end up dressing the Boy after a bath. Not always, but usually. It’s one of the times he’s most chatty, and his developing bilinguality shows often, as does the linguistically-hybrid nature of our family.
“Who’s my misiek?” I ask after he’s pointed to a teddy bear on his sleeper and proclaimed it to be a “misiek.” He smiles. I ask again: “Are you my misiek?”
“Tak!” he joyously replies.
Best on the Block
Nothing about the house makes sense, but it’s obvious it was once the best house on the block. Or at least it wanted to be. In the days before McMansions, this must have been something of an intermediate step. But a strange one.
The addition at the back of the house is almost as big as the house itself, but there seems to be little living space in it: the top floor is one enormous room with a wall of glass that overlooks the swimming pool; the first floor is a series of garages.
But what’s more impressive than the garages is the brick wall and cement pads around the entire property. A double-course wall complete with lights, it must have cost well over several thousand dollars when it was made decades ago. And there is no backyard: it’s all been cemented — another several-thousand-dollar project.
It just doesn’t add up: You’d expect to peek over a wall like this and see some great mansion, something Chateau-like. Instead, it’s just a typical suburban brick home from the seventies, a home with a large addition but no central air as evidenced by the multiple window-unit air conditioners.
According to the realtor sign that has been in the front yard for years, it’s now under contract. K and I walked during the snow break last week, discussing much of the ideas above.
“It’s in such bad shape, though,” she sad, looking at the rotting wood and the remnants of previous owners.
Perhaps the house is worth it, despite its dire repair, just because of the brick work.
No Fluke
A second gold proves it was no fluke.
Morning Slips By
The morning begins with cartoons. There is always a rotating group of favorites, with Peep and the Big Wide World recently coming back into favor. I’ve liked that show from the first time I heard the theme song: any animated series that uses banjo in its theme song in a non-Beverly-Hillbillies, non-cliche fashion already has an advantage in my opinion
Of course, cartoons entertain only so long. One can only sit comfortably on a couch and watch cartoons for one half of an episode before the urge to build a fort arises. L has been building forts for some time, now, and while there was a blanket-and-chairs period, the living room couch has become the standard construction material.
The Boy has recently learned the joys of the living room fort, and L, being the sweet girl she can be is, devised a two-room fort. E loaded his room with cars, cars, cars — such a typical boy.
The Girl loads her’s with plush toys and books, taking a battery-powered camping lantern into the fort to provide adequate light for reading.
The real test comes with it’s nap time for the Boy. The television might have been off for an hour or more, but the two of them continue playing in the fort. Coaxing the Boy out of the fort and getting the Girl to clean up the fort can be equally challenging.
Steam
No morning would be complete without it.
Enchantment
As surely and completely as the snow fell on our small town, a spell floated down with the snow, and suddenly, we were outside the rhythms, sounds, and textures of our every-day life, outside our habits, outside time. The South was no longer the South, and time skipped the entire mid-week. The storm took and it gave. It stripped some every-day items that we use without thinking and replaced them with gifts that sent K and me back in time, gifts for almost all the senses.
It was more than just the free time provided by several days home from work and school. That’s merely vacation, and the fact that we stayed home makes it similar to a fairly typical winter break. No, it was the unexpected nature of it: we’d heard about the coming storm for a week, but it still wasn’t in our plans, which this time of year include the simple repetitiveness of daily and weekly life: morning rush, afternoon weariness, evening ballet, jazz, religious education, shopping, choir practice, and the thousand other things that make a routine. Suddenly, it was all in the air with the flakes, and as the snow fell, it became obvious that we were given a bit of breathing space. Still, it wasn’t just time off. There was more to the spell.
The white of the snow transformed our surroundings into a lovely monochromatic landscape that paradoxically highlighted all the shades I’d never noticed. Giving everything a uniform background highlights the red of our neighbor’s house’s brick, the off-white of our tired shutters, the dark brown of the Sweet Gum seed balls that always litter our front yard.
The freezing temperatures were such a change from the sweater-weather weekend, so similar to the temperatures of southern Poland. Before our afternoon sledding expeditions and our evening walks, we slipped layers on everyone, bundled the family in mittens, scarves, and hats. The frigid temperatures inspired me: I pulled out old wool socks I hadn’t worn in years, socks I’d bought back in the 90s before heading to Poland, then shoved my newly-bulky feet into boots I’d bought with the socks, boots I’d paid a fortune for but which now cost approximately fourteen dollars for the almost twenty years I’ve owned them.
Ironically, even when Pax — what an odd name for a storm — took, it gave something back, often of vastly greater value. The most obvious thing it ripped away from us was our cars. They sat idle for days, piled with snow — even the minivan in the carport — and we reverted to walking. Not that there was anywhere to go, but there was everywhere to go. Just to walk about in the snow was a treat in itself: we went out for a walk each night, thrilled with the crunch of snow underfoot and the yelling and whooping of L and her closest neighborhood friend, W, who spent almost every afternoon and evening with us. They threw snowballs at us, and we went back and forth with “remember when” moments. Remember walking back from ballroom dance classes to the bus station in Nowy Targ the winter before we married? Remember walking to midnight Mass Christmas Eve, the sound of ice underfoot like fingernails down a chalkboard? Remember walking down to Adam’s for drinks and conversation with Johnny and friends? When it comes to walking in a snowy night in Lipnica, I could reminisce for days: the small radius of my daily life and the absence of a car filled me with innumerable such memories.
So waking today, we knew the end was nearing. The Boy still looked from the window, captivated, but K and I knew the forecast high would turn almost all the snow to slush.
“Bubbles!” the Boy continued squealing as he’d been doing for days. He was eager to get outside, and watching L and W sledding in the backyard simultaneously frustrated and excited him. But once the nap concluded and he finished his lunch, we all went outside to play in the slush.
We took an afternoon walk once Babcia took the Boy back inside. A last jaunt.The streets were covered in muddy slushies, and cars were slowly reappearing on the road, sending frigid spray from their tires as they passed.
There were still children playing outside, but conditions weren’t optimal for much of anything: too wet for snowballs, too soggy for sledding. About the only thing to do was jump in slush and watch the spray fly as I’d done just before heading out.
Returning from the walk, the decay was evident everywhere. L’s snowman had morphed into something almost unrecognizable, the fallen carrot the only sign of its past glory.
I stayed out, shoveling the slush off the drive so K could get out tomorrow for work — the coming drop in temperature ensured by the cloudless sky threatened to turn the driveway into an ice block — and that’s when it really hit me.
The spell, the magic and all it contained, was over. K would return to work tomorrow, and L and I would venture out to do the week’s shopping.
The white sheen was disappearing, the plain mud and grass underneath it reminding us that the only thing that makes such spells so magical is their temporary nature.
Sledding
An icy hill, some molded plastic, and some kids — it’s all you need. And some oompah music. Can’t forget the oompah music.
Historic Storm
It’s supposed to be a historic storm, despite the fact that forecasters on the television have been calling a historical storm. That’s inevitable once we stop living through it and start looking back at it. When we woke this morning, the application of the adjective “historic” was still unwarranted.
In fact, it remained that way until the afternoon. The snow fell all day, but it was a fine snow that accumulated slowly.
We went out in it, sledded in it, walked in it (day and night), rolled in it, threw it. And I recorded two or three videos. Which are still on the camera hard drive.
Sounds of Pax
The falling snow, now turning to ice, pelts my face and creates a chaotic rhythm on my jacket.
As I head down the driveway, I hear the familiar crunch of ice underfoot, and immediately I am again taken back to the streets of Nowy Targ, the alleyways of Krakow, the walkway to my school in Lipnica.
I head to the back door so I can leave all my wet clothes in the basement, kicking the snow off my boots just before entering.
Sounds I haven’t heard in ages. Music that takes me back in time.
Snow Day 2014 Redux
It was supposed to be a three-punch storm. The first swing was Monday afternoon: nothing spectacular. Some rain with ice in it, nothing much to be thrilled with. When we went to bed last night, I wasn’t expecting much. Officials had called off school, but they do that at the whisper of icy weather, so that meant little to me.
In the morning, the second part rolled through. It began accumulating quickly, in the front yard, on the back porch, and I thought, “Perhaps something will come of this.”
But as the snow continued falling, the accumulation actually decreased in the backyard. The snow on the deck slowly disappeared and the yard itself turned into a mud bank.
Of course that was not enough to keep us from diving into the white front yard, L eager to build a snowman (“Babciu, dasz mi marchewka?”) and the Boy running about screaming “Bubbles! Bubbles!” The Girl teamed with young W from up the street, and the two of them made a little snowdrawf. Or snowman-ish-blob, which intrigued the Boy. Seeing the small sticks for arms, he pulled one out and began yelling, “Tick! Tick!” It means both “stick” and “outside,” for he goes to the door, often enough with coat in hand, and proclaims “Tick! Tick!” whenever he wants to go outside.
L was initially upset with the Boy’s obsession: he pulled out the carrot nose, ripped out the snowman-ish-blob’s right arm, and knocked one or two Sweet-Gum-seed-ball teeth out.
“Tick! Tick!”
Soon, however, attention turned to snowballs, and the snowman-ish-blob suddenly was not nearly as intriguing.
Yet nothing can hold their attention forever, and the last attraction was the sled a neighbor kindly made for L. Anyone with any sledding experience would have been able to tell L that three inches — max — of slushy snow is just not enough for sledding. But it’s one of the many things one has to learn for oneself from experience. They tried a few different variations before realizing the futility of it.
“Maybe tomorrow, when there’s more snow.”
It is supposedly more than a possibility; it is a certainty. “A historical storm,” local weather forecasters have said. “Historic,” I’ve said under my breath, thinking, “It’s not historical until it’s history.”
“We’re going to be talking about this storm for years to come,” they say. Provided it’s the six to twelve inches, it will be great; if the ice comes along with it, well, let’s just hope it doesn’t happen.