Matching Tracksuits

Month: April 2018

Sunday Evening Downtown

Sunday 29 April 2018

K and I left the kids with the grandparents and headed downtown for some dinner and a walk. It’s one of those things that we keep putting off, and as soon as we do it, I find myself thinking, “Dang, we ought to do this more often.” We could skip dinner for all I care and just have the walk and the chat.

Greenville has really grown in the last eleven years. The downtown park has expanded and what was once simply wild space next to the park has been incorporated and cultivated enough to make it look like a park but left wild enough to still make you think, “Is this really just a few hundred meters from the heart of downtown?”

With all the cold weather of late, I think everyone in the county was eager to get outside at some point this weekend, and what better time than the last few hours of the weekend?

This week we’re staring down is the first of May, and May has always been a rough month for us. E’s birthday, end-of-school activities at school, Memorial Day — it all piles up.

Soccer and the New Garden

Saturday 28 April 2018

Every kid needs a break-out game, a moment when he shines like a professional player who hits the grand slam in the bottom of the ninth to overcome a three-run deficit or scores the winning goal in overtime. E had his today. The first half was relatively calm. No score, no real threats. The big scorer from a couple of weeks ago couldn’t work his magic, and although E’s team kept the ball in the opponent’s half of the field most of the time, they’d been unable to convert anything to a goal.

In the beginning of the third quarter (little kids’ soccer is divided into quarters, not halves), E broke out of the pack of kids that always hovers around the ball, drove down half the field, and scored. All the parents were cheering for him as he broke through, and I sat thinking, “Please, let him make this. It could change everything.” It wasn’t that I was thinking about winning the game. I just knew that such a spectacular play could really boost his confidence. Shortly after that, he did it again. High fives from everyone. A big smile from the Boy.

During the fourth quarter, the Boy initially sat. He was not at all upset about it: he was panting, sweaty, and positively glowing. A few minutes into the quarter, though, one of the boys on E’s team wandered off the field and decided he didn’t want to play anymore.

“E!” the coach called out. We found him practicing in the area by the field and sent him back in. “Come on, superstar,” said our tough-love coach.

The fourth quarter saw a turnaround. Twice a player from the other team broke through; twice the Boy chased the opponent down and got in front of him/her to try to stop the goal; twice the opponent scored on the Boy. He’d been trying each time to get far enough ahead of the attacker to turn and defend like a goalie (we don’t play with goalies at this level), and there was just not enough time for him to make the transition.

So instead of winning 2-0 it was a 2-2 tie. Perhaps that’s better. The Boy was still the star and everyone went home happy.

No pictures, though, because I left the camera at home. “Ah, we have tons of pictures from this year,” I mumbled as we walked out.

The rest of the day we spent at home. Tilling, raking, spreading manure, peat moss, and compost, tilling again. It was an exhausting but rewarding day.

After School Friday

Friday 27 April 2018

I come home from school some Fridays, and I only want to do one thing: get the grading done for the weekend. Those Fridays are very few and infrequent. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I’ve done that. In fact, I’ve been leaving my weekend grading (articles of the week, anyway) at school to work through Monday and Tuesday.

Other Fridays, I come home and help K with the cleaning. She’s always trying to get the bathrooms done Friday afternoon because she has enough work in the house Saturday that any dint will help.

Sometimes, I come home to find everyone in the backyard. I make a cup of coffee and join them.

Today, I came home and mowed. With a soccer game tomorrow and plans to remake our garden, albeit, in a new location, I knew mowing might be tricky tomorrow, so I got the mower out while K made dinner, and much to my surprise, I got it all done before dinner. Well, the front yard, anyway.

After dinner, a quick trip to Home Depot to pick up a tiller to break the ground for our new garden. The Boy chatted up the sales clerk as he tried to show me how to operate the machine, and he was ready to load the thing himself until he heard how loud it was.

“Maybe I can get the first tilling done before we head to the game in the morning,” I’d said during dinner, but when the Boy and I got back and, with a bit of help from our neighbor, got the tiller unloaded, I decided, “Why wait?”

“Hey, E, want to do some tilling?”

He dropped what he was doing and ran for his work boots.

We walked up and down the stretch of lawn by our driveway — the sunniest place on our lot except for the front yard — several times, with a couple of breaks for the Boy to empty his boots.

Once we were all done, the Boy had one request, one simple desire: “Daddy, can I run in the dirt without shoes?”

And then he stepped on a rock…

Up and Down

Tuesday 24 April 2018

In the morning, we had the school talent show.

A time for the Girl to shine, a time that brought applause and high fives.

The evening brought the second and final round of the Battle of the Books. The girls got in on a wildcard, and they were terribly excited about the prospect of being able to win the whole thing.

They were asked to lead the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the competition, and everyone laughed that it was definitely a good sign.

They were up against the school that, in their minds, was the favorite to win the whole thing. The first round went quickly: seven questions to each, no mistakes from anyone. But these were the easy questions — they questions they’d been given before. “The practice questions” the judge called them. And it showed: very little consultation for each question from either side.

Round two featured questions that they’d never heard. Gone were the immediate answers. The teams sat huddled talking about each question, and after our girls gave their answer, the tension immediately increased as we waited for the magical words: “That is correct.” Everyone trying to read into the judge’s body language, tone, facial expression. A slight pause from the judge and everyone thinks, “No! We got it wrong!” only to have that assumption mercifully shattered: “That is correct.”

And then it happens: we get a question wrong. The other team swoops in for the bonus points (3 instead of 5) for answering it correctly.

“Now team B will get their next question.” Everyone knows what this means: there’s only one way for our girls to continue. The other team has to get this question wrong, and they have to get it right to get the bonus points to tie the match. But they get it right. And the girls’ faces all drop.

The winning team comes over and shows perfect sportsmanship:

But that does little to take the sting out.

Afterward, the girls talk about the answer and they’re sure their answer was just as correct as the other team’s, but it’s for naught.

Or is it?

There’s much to gain from losing, and perhaps even more from losing unfairly. If losing builds character, as they say, unfairly losing builds even more.

Tempers, Tacos, Chess, and a Church

Monday 23 April 2018

A day of contrasts. At school, the kids in eighth-grade English as working on performances of small excerpts from The Diary of Anne Frank, the play based on Anne’s diary. Most of the groups are doing great: they work well together; they take criticism from each other well since they know part of their grade comes from how well they’re performing as a group; they seem to enjoy the challenge. Most of them. One group, not so much. The group just isn’t getting along. One girl — we’ll call her Alicia — has a temper that could be measured in nanometers, and she has to express her thought when she finds herself annoyed, which is frequently. Another girl — we’ll call her Susan — just doesn’t care, and she doesn’t care that other people might care, and she doesn’t care that her apathy affects them. And she has a temper as well. One boy in the group likes to provoke anyone and everyone he can. And finally, a third girl has made a big turn-around this year in my class and has gone from being nasty to being a fairly well behaved, decent working young lady, but one who doesn’t like it when things don’t go her way. So while all other groups were developing their ideas, rehearsing their lines, planning who would bring what props, this group broke into fits of frustration and argument literally every three or four minutes.

How can you teach kids any subject when first they need to be taught how to control their temper, how to control their tongue, how to control their sense of self-injury?

At home, the Boy and I initiated what we’re going to try to make into a daily activity: a bit of chess together. He knows how to move the pawns fairly well now. He knows the basics of the rooks. Next, we’ll introduce bishops, the king, the queen, and finish up with the tricky knights.

He’s learning to pile up attackers and count defenders to determine if he can take a piece or not; he’s starting to think offensively and defensively at the same time; he’s eager to learn more — all good signs. His mind is growing. His body, too — faster, in fact.

Tonight was taco knight (see what I did there?), and the Boy loves Mexican food. We have a little Mexican restaurant down the street where the two of us have eaten dinner when the girls are out on their own, and he’s always eager for more.

Tonight, he skipped the beans and the rice and ate not one, not two, but three tacos. Half the fun for him is actually making the taco.

The calm and the joy of chess followed by tacos seemed so jarring juxtaposed with the chaos my one group of students was experiencing. Those who were causing the issues — what kind of jarring, chaotic home life might they have? It doesn’t seem that people who would go home to some time with their family and a bit of comfort food would have that much difficulty keeping themselves in check because it would have been modeled for them and perhaps taught explicitly.

In the evening, when the girls have gone to gymnastics and shopping, the Boy and I decided to play with Legos, and we decided we needed to make something we’d never made before. We decided on a church.

As I was building the roof, the Boy declared that he would start working on things for the inside. After a few minutes, he showed me something he’d made.

“It’s that table, where they do everything,” he explained.

“The altar?”

“Yeah.”

And he made it complete with chalices and a paten.

Sunday Without L

Sunday 22 April 2018

Puppies are like newborns: you never really know how much they’re going to change your life — turn everything positively upside down — until you actually have one of your own. They will both affect your life in ways that you never imagined. Our puppy, for example, has transformed our backyard. It was once a place for us to hang out with the kids, to play, to swing, to bounce, to laugh. We two hammocks and a cloth swing in addition to our wooden swing and trampoline. Then we got a fence and let the dog spend time in our backyard without us. She destroyed the hammocks; she destroyed the swing; she dug up large swaths of the backyard; she would have destroyed trampoline if she could, I’m sure.

Today, we started replacing some things, with a different plan for keeping the dog at bay. In short, we’re taking everything down every time we finish playing down there. It seems a bit extreme, but there’s no other way to keep the dog from destroying it, short of getting rid of the dog. Which has crossed my mind. More than once. Or even twice.

The irony: the person who most loves the swing and the hammocks wasn’t here. The Girl spent most of the day with a friend from the church choir, which meant we were a family of three for most of the day. And that meant the the Boy didn’t have to “call” (as in, “I call the swing!” as they go running down to the back corner of the yard) anything. But he did anyway. Just for practice.

Birthday Party

Saturday 21 April 2018

It started with that warm sunlight that is a sure harbinger of warmer weather. The young leaves diffuse the light, making everything glow. It’s something I’ve tried to capture several times but have never really managed.

Perhaps I just haven’t tried hard enough — maybe I do that purposely to leave the mystery in place.

Soccer today was camera-less. I’ve taken probably a thousand pictures this season — what could happen today that hasn’t already happened this year? I cheered like a normal parent, sitting at the sidelines, not so worried about getting the shot as simply living in the moment. It made me think that I should leave it at home more often.

Today’s game was a loss — number two for the year. It wasn’t a horrible score: 3-1. Last week we were on the other end of a complete overwhelming of the other team. It was something like eight or nine to zero. For the entire second half, I was hoping the other team would score something. So perhaps it was a sort of mild karma today. Over-winning is not a good thing, and I was actually pleased to see them lose.

While E was learning how to lose, K was cooking and baking, preparing for Papa’s birthday party. On the way to Nana’s and Papa’s, K related an amusing story about E. He’s been struggling with tying his shoes. When it came time for new shoes, he’d insisted on Under Armor shoes because Nikes are no longer fashionable. However, this meant laces. He’s been trying to master the art of tying his shoes, but it’s been slow going. The other day in car line, though, a little girl asked him to tie her shoes, and since then, he’s been tying his own.

At Nana’s and Papa’s, we knew the aunties were waiting — a surprise for Papa.

Back home after the celebration, we planted more, weeded more, pruned more — squeezed a bit of a typical spring Saturday.

Spring Thursday

Thursday 19 April 2018

I know it’s a coast-to-coast question, but still, it bears asking: when is spring going to get here and stay here? Sure, we don’t have snow like Babcia has in Poland and folks here have up north. But still — we haven’t taken out our summer clothes because every time K thinks it’s time, we get a drop in temperature.

So the kids wear shorts every day that it’s feasible. The other day, it was 36 when we got up; the next day, it was 52. Tomorrow, back down to the low 40s.

All the flowers and berries are blooming, but if they had any kind of sentience, I would wonder if they really could make any more sense of it than we do.

Basket Blessing 2018

Saturday 14 April 2018

I never put up the pictures from this year’s blessing of the baskets on Holy Saturday.

The Lesson

Tuesday 10 April 2018

There’s a lesson I share with my students every year that I both look forward to and dread. It’s at the beginning of the Anne Frank unit, and what I try to do is simple: make them empathize with the plight of Anne and all the other Jews (and non-Jews) who were victims of the Nazis’ fury. It’s a two-part lesson, with both parts running simultaneously. The main portion involves a presentation to build students’ background knowledge of the Holocaust. We begin with the rise of the Nazis, go through the systematic alienation and stigmatization of the Jewish population, touch on the ghettos, and end with the stark directions of Nazi doctors at the Birkenau train station: left or right. Death or imprisonment.

Through this whole process, students stop to reflect. We start with putting ourselves in Anne’s place:

We’re all unique in some way, and we all belong to a group that is itself unique in some way. Find the one thing that connects you to one group of people yet makes you different from many other people. It can race, religion, political views, where your family comes from—anything.

As we move through the lesson, students have other opportunities to reflect:

Leaders are blaming you subgroup for all the country’s problems. They are taking steps to remove your group’s power and influence in society. Write a diary entry about how your group is being singled out and treated differently.

Could this happen in the States? Many of my students divide themselves mentally in this exercise along racial lines, and many of my students are African American. It sounds to them like a return to the worst of the Jim Crow days. Could anything like that happen in 2018?

One day, soldiers come to your house and tell you and your family that everyone must move to a new section of town. You’re given ten minutes to gather your belongings. What do you take with you?

I’m surprised at how many students immediately write, “Cell phone.” Surprised and not surprised.

You hear rumors that people are being rounded up in other parts of the country and murdered. Write a dialog you overhear among adults.

Could this happen in 2018? Could an oppressed people be completely cut off from the reality of their situation? As students write, I find myself doubting it. Yet didn’t many Jews in the West doubt the initial reports of the Holocaust? “Why kill us? We’re their workforce!” The Jews who’d been shipped into concentration camps from the east knew, though. They’d already seen the Holocaust of bullets: men, women, and children, lined up in front of ditches, shot in the back of the head. Repeat.

One night, soldiers burst into your house and force you into trucks that begin speeding down the highway to an unknown location. Write a description of the experience for your diary.

I go over how wretched the transport was to the camps. Standing room only in boxcars. Need to go to the bathroom? There’s only one option. Back aching from standing for days on end? Too bad.

You arrive at the camp. You’re split apart from your family and forced into a small barracks with many other people. Write a conversation you might have in the barracks with someone your age who has been there for several months.

What is there to say? I tell them about the reality of many of those who made it through selection: some inmate or another pointed at the smoke billowing out from the chimneys of the crematoria and said, “There’s your family.”

As all of this is going on, we play a game. “I have a lot of little slips of paper with an ‘X’ on it. You don’t want this slip of paper. You want to avoid getting one at all costs. And if you get one, you want to avoid getting a second one. Your goal is two-fold: end the lesson with as few of these slips as possible, and figure out what leads to getting one of these slips.” In the past, I made it more obvious: the paper had a small image of a bullet on it. The exercise was more explicit: “You’re going to try to avoid getting one of these bullets.” They figure out pretty soon — immediately, in fact — that I’m putting them in the situation of Jews in a ghetto or concentration camp. With the mass shootings that have been taking place in the last few months, I decided a bullet wasn’t a good idea, and it provided an unexpected benefit. The kids didn’t initially know what was going on with the slips. They didn’t know what they represented.

I passed them out in increasingly random fashion. The first people to get a slip were those who talked out of turn. Then I started handing them out to students who just asked a question. To students who simply raised their hand. To students who just made eye contact with me. At one point, I had all the students stand up. I counted them off and gave every fifth student a slip. Sometimes, toward the end of the lesson, I’d ask a student, “Do you have a slip?” He’d say, “No,” and I’d give him one. Then I’d ask another student the same question. She wouldn’t get a slip.

“What was the point of the slips?” I asked at the end of the lesson. By then they’d figured it out. “How could you avoid getting them?”

“You couldn’t,” one student answered immediately.

“Precisely. You had no rules by which you could simply put your head down, play by the rules, and make it safely to the other side. This was the reality of the Jews of Europe between 1939 and 1945. This is what Anne Frank and her family were trying to avoid by going into hiding.”

I think they’re actually excited to begin reading it tomorrow.

What a depressing way to end the day. Fortunately, the kids provided just the perfect antidote to such thoughts.

They made up a game. What was the goal? I have no idea — I couldn’t really figure it out. E, I think, couldn’t figure it out either. What were the rules? They changed, as they always do. What was the result? Isn’t it obvious?

End of Spring Break 2018

Friday 6 April 2018

The guests have all returned home and we’re all getting ready to return to our normal schedules next week. That meant a bit of cleaning today — getting things back in some semblance of order after four days of fun in sixes as opposed to fun in fours. Fifty percent more people results in decidedly more than fifty percent more mess, but who’s complaining? It gave the kids a bit of a chance to build some character.

In the morning, the Boy and I finished off a little project we’d started the day before. The area in front of our new fence’s gate will never — never — see grass again due to the simple fact that the gate funnels foot traffic in a way that an open space never did. We dug down about four inches, added some landscaping timbers and two dozen bags of river rock and solved the problem.

We created a new one in the meantime. The Boy, as always, was keen to help. He wanted to help drive the spikes into the timbers.

“Be careful,” I said. “You can easily get hurt.” A little Boy slinging a two-pound hammer about could be a formula for a mini-disaster, and that’s exactly what happened. He was driving in the spike I’d started for him, holding the hammer with two hands as I’d instructed when he unexpectedly reached down and grabbed the spike with one hand just as he was dropping the hammer. The crying was as close to screaming as it could be: he struck a glancing blow that gouged out a little hunk of flesh.

He sat in my lap afterward for a long time as the cry died to a whimper and then finally stopped. It was another one of those little reminders about how being a parent is such a gift. There was only one person on the planet whom he might have would have picked over me to comfort him: K. It’s medicine for the soul to feel that needed.

In the afternoon, the family went to a local plant nursery to pick up the shrubs and trees we’re going to use to fill in the corner of the fence.

“I don’t want the first thing people see when they pull into our driveway to be that fence,” K said on more than one occasion. That fence — K has a love/hate relationship with it. She loves the sense of security it provides given the simple fact that one of our neighbors has a pit bull that has gotten out of its small fenced area a few times, but she hates the look.

We hope to finish the planting tomorrow — the above is a before shot as a point of reference prior to our initial planting today. The forecast doesn’t look cooperative, though. We’ll find something to do, though, no doubt.