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fun in fours

Month: November 2014

Brains and Bones

Wednesday 12 November 2014

In the English I Honors classes I teach, I work with some really bright, really thoughtful kids, and I get to do some really fun things with them, like introduce them to Shakespeare with Romeo and Juliet. One of the most confusing passages for readers is Mercutio's long Queen Mab speech, which begins:

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;

To help with their understanding by forcing them to read it line by line, I have them draw a picture of Queen Mab. In the past, they've come up with some striking examples.

This year, one young man was particularly persistent on one small detail: "Mr. Scott," he began, "how can she have a whip made of a cricket's bone? Crickets don't have bones; they have exoskeletons."

Smart aleck...

Second Grade Performance

Monday 10 November 2014

Jabber

Sunday 09 November 2014

Morning Outing

Saturday 08 November 2014

Oldest Trick in the Book

Friday 07 November 2014

“Can I just call you Pete?” I ask. I often ask students if I can call them random names. Just something silly I do.

“Um, sure.”

Then I remember an old joke.

“You and Repeat were sitting on a log. You fell off. Who was left?”

“Repeat.”

“You and Repeat were sitting on a log. You fell off. Who was left?”

“Repeat?”

“You and Repeat were sitting on a log. You fell off. Who was left?”

“Oh, I get it.”

 

 

Eating Rosół

Thursday 06 November 2014

Three Picture Evening

Tuesday 04 November 2014

First there was the tea party. The prototypical cliche little girl game, the tea party has never really been a frequent occurrence in our house. I'm not sure why it made an appearance today. But there they were, all sipping tea.

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Then there was the homework. Reading comprehension. "Go back to the text," I reminded L time and time again. "Go back to the text. Don't try to answer the question from memory." And so as the Girl progresses through school, the things I say in the classroom start popping up during the homework sessions.

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Finally, the kids in bed, K and I turn to cooking. "We haven't had rosół in a while," K said some time ago, and so tonight we cook that Polish favorite that's really an international soup. After all, what is pho in essence but chicken noodle soup, which is exactly what rosół is. Sort of.

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Out at Last

Sunday 02 November 2014

F. Boyle, in his homily during the vigil Mass yesterday, spoke of being haunted by our former selves, of casting a backward glance over our shoulders at our younger selves and feeling shame, feeling disgust, or framed positively, feeling we'd grown. It reminded me of my own past, in more than one way. Just this week I was glancing through old journal entries, thinking to myself, "My my, how could anyone put of with my arrogance?"

It was around that time when I first read Bill Brown's "Strangers." I'd worked as an intern at a poetry review just before graduating college, and one snowy afternoon in Poland a couple of years later, I received a package of recent publications from the editors. Among them was The Art of Dying.

Strangers

Seventeen split my tongue
like a pet crow's, shrill,
mimicking, irreverent,
ignorant, and shamed.My glances were foul
balls, my hopes were
shooting stars, I was
batting zero.

I ate spaghetti
with a pitchfork, picked my teeth
with an ax, wrecked more cars
than a test dummy.

I measured out love
with tweezers, was as humble
as a chainsaw, and when my sincerity
was challenged,

cracked open my heart
like a coconut, the pure
sweet insides for all
to taste and marvel.

My hands were foxes,
my thoughts shot blanks,
my smile was as sweet
as plastic grapes. My dreams were strangers
who stood on a dark bridge
hiding their eyes from
the sun.

I was angry at my dead
father, I was hunting
Jesus on the cover
of record albums.

And one of the strangers
on the bridge? It was just
me three years older, tongue
sewed together,

mouth clamped shut,
army-mummed, staring down
on seventeen, wonder where
the hell I'd come from.

So as Fr. Boyle spoke, I thought of that poem, thought of the "I" who first read them, how much more like strangers I was compared to him than Brown's speaker could ever be as a twenty-year-old looking back at his seventeen-year-old self. So many changes that I'm almost embarrassed to meet myself in my journal entries. So full of myself, so sure I was so painfully intelligent, so superior to so many.

And then, out of the blue, I thought of a band that I'd once had a flickering interest in, a band that I bought one single album by and decided instantly that I didn't really like them at all, began wondering why I even bought the album as the band -- the Sugarcubes -- never really received much airplay. A little research and I found the "hit" from the album I bought was a little number called "Regina."

A few clicks on Spotify and I was listening to it again, wondering why in the world I'd bought an album that, as far as I could tell, didn't have a single redeeming song on it, an album that is to me today a laughable piece of trash. Undoubtedly one of the worst albums ever recorded. But when it came out in '88 or '89, I thought it was decent. I tried to like it. I wanted to like it. Part of that was, I guess, not wanting to have the feeling that I wasted money on a CD that I'd never listen to again.

All these things were tumbling around in my head this afternoon when we went out to the park after essentially an entire weekend in the house. A sick mother, a semi-sick daughter, a recovering father, and a boy with a seemingly endlessly running nose simply need to stay inside and rest, but that is ironically tiring. So off we went this afternoon for a little time in a new park. I found myself wondering how I'd view my forty-year-old self in another twenty-five or so years. Would I see myself as I see my late-teen self? My early-twenties self? It seems both likely and impossible.

Snowy Fall

Saturday 01 November 2014

We have snow this first day of November. Halloween it began snowing, and I was in bed with Emil, who woke at five this morning and whom I coaxed back to sleep by convincing that that Mama was on her way, when K came in and said, “You know it’s snowed?”

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At first I thought she was coming in to crawl into bed with the two of us, but in fact there were three of us: L woke up at some point around seven or so and crawled into bed with us, so when K walked in, the first thing I said was, “You know, we don’t have room for you, too!”

Of course there was no more sleeping — the Boy was up, the Girl was chatting with him, and we were all huddled together in E’s big bed, so there was no turning back. The day had begun.

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Besides, the Girl’s doll needed a diaper change, and the Boy was more than willing to take on the task. But like so many things — like our story telling effort from the afternoon — the whole activity doesn’t hold the Boy’s attention for long.

It’s partly due to his age no doubt. In fact, what’s more surprising than how frequently he loses interest quickly is how often he can become completely engrossed in some activity — drawing and playing with cars most often.

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Blocks can often hold his attention, but when it’s time to build — to really build — he’s not the one you want around. He likes destroying as much as building. No, more than building. The Girl, though, has rediscovered Legos, and this afternoon we had a little father-daughter building time. Nana saved some of my old toys, and most sensibly she saved all my Legos, so the Girl and I dig in to build a food crusher for when she’s playing animal hospital.

By this time, the snow was long gone and the wind had kicked up. It always makes me a bit nervous, especially considering how close some of the huge oaks in the backyard are to our house. Given they’re size, they could likely do some serious damage to our house if they fell at just the wrong angle.

But it’s not our own trees that worry me most, but a large oak in our neighbor’s yard that could potentially take out our whole upstairs. And by the late afternoon, the wind was constant, and the trees in the were swaying violently.

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But eventually, the sky cleared, the wind disappeared, and the most unexpected first day of November in memory passed into evening, snacks, baths, serenades, and sleep.