Matching Tracksuits

Month: December 2018

2018 Becomes 2019

Monday 31 December 2018

The idea was simple: twelve pictures to represent twelve months. It was something I used to do with the Girl, but with a full family — wife, two kids, two cats, and a dog — that quickly became unreasonable. I had twelve pictures and I wasn’t even through a quarter of the year.

Then I began noticing a theme in the pictures, both the ones I’d selected and the ones I was noticing: maturity and independence. The kids working more, helping more, taking more on for themselves. The kids showing interest in things they’d never shown interest in before. Sure, there were lots of pictures of the kids being kids, but there were lots of pictures of kids growing up. Mowing, baking, reading, helping.

L finished elementary school and dove into middle school with eagerness. The Boy went from barely reading to showing an interest in chapter books and excitement at the prospect of reading them on his own. The Girl committed herself to singing in the church choir, now led by an Italian who was the associate choir director at the Sistine Chapel and has the girls singing most of their stuff in Latin these days.

There were some downs as there always are. One of Papa’s sisters passed away unexpectedly, and our dear friend who was battling cancer and had been given four to eight weeks to live survived only a few more days. Bida is growing more and more pathetic (in the classical sense of the word), and with her slowly stopping eating and moving less and less, for the first time, K and I discussed the inevitable. Not for a while, that’s true, but it’s coming, I fear.

This year will bring even more changes. The Girl will officially be a teenager. I will begin the second half of my forties. The Boy will likely be eating more that K. The Girl will likely be taller than K. And no matter the other changes, family will still be family.

Poor Bida

Sunday 30 December 2018

We have a cat who’s so old now that I’m a little surprised she’s still walking about let alone jumping on tables and the like. She’s a rescue cat we got at least ten years ago, and at the time, the vet said she was four to six years old, which makes her fourteen to sixteen years old. She was rough to begin with, hence the name: “Bida” means “poor little thing” in Polish. With cats having an average lifespan of 16 years, this puts her right at upper limit.

Playing cars after breakfast

She’s completely deaf now. When she’s on any surface that largely absorbs vibrations, you can sneak right up on her without even trying to do so. She has no idea what’s going on around her, and I think it’s only through the vibrations through our hardwood floors that she anticipates anything that she can’t see.

She’s lost all of her teeth except the small incisors at the front of her mouth. This makes for a pathetic moment when she gets angry — say, when you’re trying to get one of her many, seemingly endless clumps of matted hair out — and she tries to bite you. Without her canines, there’s simply nothing there that can actually do any damage or cause any pain.

Her claws are brittle and largely dull. She can’t do much of anything with them but get them stuck in something she’s trying to scratch.

Working on the “island” we’re creating

Her body is withering away, and she’s literally a sack of bones now. And since she’s developed arthritis over the last few years, they are knobby and protruding hideously. Running your hands along her back, you feel each and ever vertebrae clearly.

She no longer grooms herself very much. This means her hair gets matted easily and thoroughly, and I’ve quite honestly given up on trying to get them all out. The only option is the nuclear option: shave her completely, especially her belly. We don’t have the heart do that, so we do what we can. The other side of this is the odor that emanates from her: a long-haired cat who doesn’t groom herself simply stinks for reasons that don’t need further explanation. This is why we give her a bath on a fairly regular basis.

I mention all of this simply because I bathed her tonight and noticed, when she’s completely wet, there’s almost nothing there. She is literally nothing but a sack of bones, and I’m quite surprised she can survive like that.

Exploring the same area we’ve explored countless times before

“Has she not been eating?” I asked K, and apparently, she’s turned up her nose at everything but human food. So I took her into the kitchen, still wrapped in towels from her bath, and made her one of her favorites: scrambled eggs. No salt, no pepper — just a bit of butter and the eggs. She initially had some trouble finding it, but once she located the pile of eggs, she hunkered down for a long, slow meal. (With no teeth, it takes her a long time to eat anything.)

She’s a fighter. Of our two cats, she’s the one who’s stood up to our dog from the time she was a puppy, and she’s the one who, though defenseless, defends her territory fiercely while the younger, faster, stronger cat with deadly teeth and sharper claws runs. Bida knows she’s a member of our family and refuses to let anyone forget it: she’s always looking for a lap, always begging to be with someone.

“She’ll outlive us all,” K laughs on a regular basis, and she’s probably right.

Three Boys, a Creek, and Pain

Saturday 29 December 2018

N and R came over for a little play time today after the Boy spent a couple of hours at their house this morning as K and I went to visit a dear friend who is in the final stages of a battle against cancer.

“The fight’s gone. It’s done,” said our friend. And what a fight he’d put up: this summer I helped him with an addition to his home, and he worked with a chemo backpack on, pumping him full of pain to fight the ultimate pain.

Seeing the boys playing, with all their energy, excitement, and passion was jarring in juxtaposition. All three of those boys will, at some point, grow old and die, long after I’ve done the same thing.

That’s what we all assume. We all wake up every day and work under that assumption without even thinking about it. We obviously can’t paralyze ourselves thinking every day, “Something could happen this day that takes someone we love away from us,” but a little reminder about our mortality is a good thing from time to time. It inspires us to do the little things that we might not have done because we’re tired, we need to do something else, or we just have other priorities at that moment.

Perhaps that’s what’s just beyond the edges of the addiction to pain some athletes feel. I’m nowhere near that level, but three nights of running have left my muscles aching in a way that I almost look forward to the next run, the next shot I have at pushing through the pain, of bettering the pain, because I won’t always be able to do that. There will come a time when I have to give up the fight, but each night I run, I can push against it.

Seeing that perseverance, limited though it might be, in my own children would be the purest blessing. One of the character traits I consistently see less and less frequently in my students is perseverance, or “grit” as edu-speak likes to call it these days. So many give up before even trying, convinced that they can’t do it, persuaded before they even begin that there’s no use in even trying.

It’s a natural enough inclination, I think. I already see it in E: he sometimes gives up on something so quickly that K and I just look at each other, that concerned parent look on our faces simultaneously.  So when E suggested tonight that he might want to join me on my run, it brought such a smile.

“But we’ll run the whole time, Daddy,” he said.

We did half a mile in just under seven minutes, with three short walking breaks and a lot of sweet, nonsensical chatter.

So I left for my solo run with a lighter step: the Boy took a little step toward becoming a fighter, toward realizing that that excitement in the creek with his friends can be found even in moments of pain.

Old and Young

Friday 28 December 2018

Life is a collision of old and young. When you’re young, all you do is dream of being old; when you’re old, you often reminisce about being young. We can’t have it both ways, but we always want it both ways.

For some reason, eleven was the age for me when I was E’s age. It just seemed like the perfect age. Perhaps it was because eleven is the nearest age with repeating numbers — 11 is cool, and 22 seems so far off as to be impossible.

The Boy has taken on a role as defender of our old rescue cat, Bida, in her never-ending conflict with our overly excited dog, Clover.

Of course, when I was in middle school and high school, I couldn’t wait to be sixteen. There was nothing about how the numerals 1 and 6 looked juxtaposed — it was just the relative freedom of having a driver’s license, even if one didn’t have a car.

Eighteen meant adulthood, voting, and the like; twenty-one meant drinking; twenty-five meant a quarter century. And then suddenly, I really didn’t care about age. It just didn’t seem to matter. And then, age began bothering me, slightly. I turned thirty and realized, “Hey, I am so far from being a kid now that I can’t even pretend anymore.”

He spent much of the morning carrying her around.

I know this extends into my near future and distant future: I’ll be 50 before I know it, and then 60, and so on. But at this point, what’s the point of thinking about it except to take stock in one’s life and ask, “Is this how I want to be at age 45?” Couldn’t I be in a bit better shape? Couldn’t I spend my time a little more wisely, a little more conscientiously?

All this is brought into sharp relief by the fact that Nana is in rehab, a dear friend is struggling with cancer, and most of my peers and I are getting to the age that such worries are realistic worries or even realities.

Bida isn’t the only one that excites Clover; just seeing Papa sends her into spasms of uncontrolled excitement.

And so I’ve begun jogging. I haven’t run (without being chased) since I was in high school. I stopped after my freshman year because I developed what was diagnosed as shin splints but which still occur, thirty years later. Are shin splints a permanent condition? I could ask the internet.

Shin splints result when muscles, tendons, and bone tissue become overworked. Shin splints often occur in athletes who’ve recently intensified or changed their training routines.

That doesn’t sound like me. Instead of worrying much about it, I went out and bought good running shoes and began running. Well, running for a bit and then walking as the burning along the sides of my lower legs becomes too great. Apparently whatever condition I have in my legs is still there, thirty years later.

Here’s where the intersection of youthful recklessness and approaching-middle-aged cautiousness meet: do I stop or do I push through the pain? Right now, youthful recklessness is winning, and for a couple of nights now, I’ve just pushed through the pain, walking when it intensifies, running again when it goes away. And besides, that sweet burning in the quads hours later that tells you you’re getting stronger — that’s too good to give up.

But I think back on the day, remembering the time we spent at the local trampoline park, the Girl learning some new tricks,

and my response to the question, “Will you be jumping, too?” and I realize that tension is as strong as ever. Would I have liked to jump? Not really. Every time I jump on our own trampoline in the backyard, the jarring makes my back ache. Would I like to jump with my kids? That’s an entirely different question, but I decided to sit it out because of my worries about a sore back or worse later.

And yet, a few hours later, I went for a run knowing very well what might happen, knowing very well that if it did happen, I was going to push through the pain as much as possible.

Young and old, old and young — the eternal conflict in us all.

Old and Young

Railing

Thursday 27 December 2018

Sometimes, I think I can’t do anything right when it comes to projects around the house. If it’s something I’ve done a number of times, I’m fine with it. The toilet in our master bathroom, for example — I’ve replaced it twice. If I had to replace it again, I would be frustrated but not overwhelmed. I wouldn’t even have to look at a YouTube video for help. Any spigot replacement is no problem because I’ve done it so many times that I simply installed a Shark Bite coupling, and it’s a simple matter of some Teflon tape and a quick trip into the crawl space. The reason is obvious: practice makes perfect.

But catch me doing something for the first time, and you’ll probably find me using inappropriate language at some point, sitting at some point with my head in my hands, standing at some point staring at what I just messed up.

Today, I put up the stair railing that we took down over two years ago when we remodeled our kitchen. Following the principle that one doesn’t want to rush into anything unadvisedly, I’d put this off for ages. When necessity finally overcame procrastination, I thought it would be a simple process — after all, it looked simple on the YouTube video. And in hindsight, it should have been terribly simple. Yet not being a professional handyman, I screwed things up (poor pun intended). I mismeasured once even though I checked it. Somehow 29 3/8″ morphed into 31 3/8″ in my head, and though I’d written down 29 3/8″ and drilled the first hole 29 3/8″ from the stair tread, I drilled the pilot hole for the last bracket a full two inches higher than needed.

That wasn’t the first error, and it wasn’t the last, and as a result, I have a number of superfluous holes that need to be patched, sanded, and repainted.

What I wouldn’t give for a second shot with clean walls…

Boxing Day 2018

Wednesday 26 December 2018

The holidays’ end always brings a tinge of sadness. All the anticipation, all the preparation, all the excitement — all behind us now, gone in a flash. Sure, there’s one last hurrah with New Year’s Eve coming up, but that’s just one evening. For us, it’s never really had any tradition behind it like Christmas.

Tomorrow, K goes back to work, M and T return to Ashville, leaving C for a couple of more days. Life slowly transformed into the holiday season, and now — boom! — it’s back to normal. But that’s probably a good thing. Living this kind of life all the time would make it the new normal. We’d struggle to get through endless parties and celebrations just as we sometimes struggle to get through seemingly-endless weeks at work and school.

Christmas 2018

Tuesday 25 December 2018

During a proper party, a proper family gathering, time seems to disappear into an eternally present “now” that blends effortlessly out of the last moment, imperceptibly into the next, a continuum of laughter. A proper Christmas day, then, should be like a proper party. And what better way to start the smiles than a pile of hot waffles.

And what better activity after breakfast than to help with the Lego set the Boy got yesterday? Truth be told, it was a challenge for me to understand those instructions at times, so it’s no surprise that high on his priority list was getting some help.

We build this knowing that as soon as the snow plow is completed, it will be a focus of attention for a few days and then disappear into its constituent parts into the growing box of Legos that now must contain well over a thousand blocks, what with all the sets he’s gotten and the Lego windfall he got from his sister a year or so ago when she decided she was too old for Legos. Of course, you’re never too old for Legos, but there is a period called adolescence when you might think you are.

In the early afternoon, we all went to spend Christmas lunch with Nana. We ate some split pea soup and chatted while the children took turns rolling about in the wheelchair in Nana’s room.

Back home for the afternoon, we passed the afternoon at the table with talking with Papa while the kids played in the backyard, E still in his nice Christmas clothes that required some work when he returned because there was no way he was going out to play and not wind up at the creek that forms our rear property line. If you’re a six-year-old who has a creek in your yard, you use it.

Finally, around four-thirty, we headed to our closest friends’ house, the godfather of E (and he’s proud to remind us of that regularly)  taking with us E’s godmother — K’s sister in everything but name and DNA and so for many reasons, the closest thing we have to Polish family here.

P, the godfather
M, the godmother

And so the evening just began slipping away, punctuated by grand food, silly kids, discussions of camping and finding cheap flights to the Old Country, hot toddies and black coffee, jokes, singing, and just enjoying the fact that we have such good friends.

(Click on images for larger view.)

But the Boy didn’t make it. He put up a fight, tried to stay awake the entire party, but there was just no way.

Wigilia 2018

Monday 24 December 2018

Some things never change on Christmas Eve. Some things simply can’t. There must always be barszcz z uszkami. Always. Other things can come and go — trout as the main course; scallops as a side; mushroom soup (though it pains me to say it) can fail to appear — but barszcz z uszkami. It would be sacrilegious not to have it. Some type of kompot as well. Must be on the menu. The rest? Well, in the end, all of those things are just food — nothing more. Yes, food is more than food. There’s a communal element to it, but any food that’s prepared with care will produce the same effect.

The most significant element that can never change is family. The Christmas season without family is unimaginable, yet it’s a reality for thousands upon thousands every year. Many people in the service spend Christmas with their brothers in arms rather than their brothers in blood. Some spend Christmas alone from choice due to family tension or a highly dysfunctional family that is a family in name only.

Experimenting as the final flourishes were added

Such was our change this year: with Nana in rehab after an extended hospital stay, we tried to carry on as usual in as much as was possible, but it wasn’t the same. You can see it in the pictures — something’s just not quite right there.

Everything was a little off from the start. We all went to Mass before dinner rather than after. No one was sure they wanted to go to midnight Mass, and since L was singing with the girls’ choir for the 4pm Mass, we all took care of our Christmas duty before dinner was even on the table.

Before Mass, the girls gave a little concert. I dutifully recorded the audio on my phone, but when it was time for the Girl to sing her solo — a Polish-language introduction to a Polish carol, which was translated for the rest of the choir into English — I fumbled about trying to switch to video and got neither. What remains? A bit of my all-time favorite carol, “In the Bleak Midwinter.”

They sang another favorite — “Angels’ Carol” by John Rutter — and a couple of others.

They also during the Mass — another Gabriel Fauré piece.

Everything else was the same and yet different: the well-wishing had a bittersweetness to it this year that’s usually lacking.

The gift sharing was lovely as usual, watching the excitement of the kids. But not seeing Nana and Papa “fight” over our family yearbook meant things were, once again, just a bit off.

But even in such moments tinged with temporary loss, there was a bit of brightness — we’ll appreciate it all the more next near when Nana is back with us.

Previous Years, Most with Nana

Wigilia 2003

Wigilia 2004

Wigilia 2005

Wigilia 2006

Wigilia 2007

Wigilia 2008

Wigilia 2009

https://matchingtracksuits.com/2010/12/25/wigilia-2010/

Wigilia 2011

Wigilia 2012

Wigilia 2013

Wigilia 2014

Wigilia 2015

Wigilia 2016

Wigilia 2017

Santa

Sunday 23 December 2018

While waiting for breakfast — a delicious quiche that a lovely student gave me as a Christmas gift — the Boy asked a simple question: “Daddy, does Santa even exist?” The question took me unawares.

“Well, if he doesn’t, how do you think you get those presents?” I asked in response after a pause.

“You guys do it!” he shouted with a grin.

I’ve always been a little reluctant about the whole Santa thing. On the one hand, it’s harmless fun. On the other, it does necessitate misleading your child. I decided that this was the opportunity for which I’d been waiting to encourage critical thinking.

“Well, how could we figure it out? What kind of an experiment could we run to see?” I remembered Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining the experiment his daughter ran with her friend to test the existence of the Tooth Fairy: they decided they simply would keep secret any lost teeth and see if the TF showed up. She didn’t. Simple.

E couldn’t think of anything, but we went through the logic behind the Santa story — or rather, the lack thereof. Using a Socratic-type questioning method, reached the following conclusions:

  • The North Pole is real, but that doesn’t prove much.
  • People in Brazil don’t have chimneys, but they still get presents.
  • The size of the average chimney makes it all but impossible for a human to slide down it with a sack of toys.
  • The dirt in the chimney (I didn’t get into soot) might make the toys dirty, but the fact that they’re in a sack might keep them clean.
  • The dirt in the chimney would definitely pose a problem when it came to leaving without a trace — there would be dirty footprints everywhere.
  • It doesn’t seem possible to visit all homes in the world in a single night.
  • The size of the sack needed to carry all the toys is unrealistic.
  • Reindeer can’t fly.

When L joined us at the table, the Boy relayed the whole conversation to her, and she began apologetics for Santa.

I’m still not sure where the Girl stands on Santa. Surely she doesn’t believe anymore, but we’ve never had a conversation about it. And it’s just like the Girl to play devil’s advocate in such a situation.

In the end, the Boy stood more skeptical on the issue, and we decided that, even if Santa doesn’t exist, it’s fun to pretend he does. Perhaps that’s the best stance.

Opłatek

Friday 21 December 2018

As a teacher, I often don’t always say the things I want to say. Most would interpret that negatively: “He doesn’t call kids jerks when he thinks they are.” That’s certainly the case, but for not so obvious reasons. Most obvious is the lack of professionalism such a pronouncement would exhibit, not to mention cruelty. More to the point, though, I don’t really experience that because I rarely — not never, but very, very rarely — hold such an opinion of a kid. They are, after all, kids. They’re still learning, still growing, and their impulse control and social skills are often simply not up to par because of a lack of maturity or a lack of consistent examples. I could count on one hand all the kids, over twenty years of teaching, that I just didn’t like as people. I haven’t met such a kid in several years now.

What I had in mind is the flip side of that — as a teacher, I don’t always tell a kid when I’m absolutely in love with some part of his journey, some portion of her personality, some facet of his persistence, some element of her youthful excitement.

I certainly tell a lot of kids a lot of positive things. But those moments seem relatively few and far between.

Why don’t I say those things? Probably because of a sense of vulnerability that seems to include for myself. Possibly because of a worry of how it might be taken. Perhaps because of a lack of time.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to have some sort of occasion, some sort of event, that seemed actually to encourage such things?” I thought. And thinking back to my seven years of teaching in Poland, I realized such an occasion exists, just not in American culture.

In Poland, though, a tradition that invites such honesty has existed for centuries: sharing the opłatek.

I’ve done it for several years now, explaining it to the kids with a slide show and a bit of explanation about Christmas in Poland and substituting pizzelle from Aldi for the actual wafer.

This year, instead of just taking pictures, I participated. I always had a pizzelle in hand, but I waited for students to come to me; this year, I went to them. And told the shy kids who were coming out of their shell how exciting it was to watch them, to hear them assert themselves, to see the faces of other students as they share their often-striking ideas. I told the troubled students how much growth I’d already seen, how much I was rooting for them, how much it irritated me when I had to ask them to leave the classroom because their disruptive decisions were robbing others of opportunities. I told the kids who had started doing their work after a quarter, perhaps a quarter and a half of apathy, how proud I was of them.

And in return today, I got the loveliest Christmas card I have ever received from a student, thanking me for my words, thanking me for my encouragement and motivation, and assuring me that she was my favorite student.

Perhaps, but she’s tied with 120 others this year.

Slow Eaters Club

Monday 17 December 2018

We should probably all be members of this club…

Twelve

Sunday 16 December 2018

We’re on the brink. I know, I know — we’ve already into the teen years in a lot of ways. She has teen interests (some, not all), a nearly-teen body, a teen attitude at times. She has no more toys in her room. The birthday presents she wants to buy when she goes to parties come from Bed and Body Works and similar shops. She has a whole slew of favorite music, which I find myself thinking about in a way that my parents probably thought about my music. But her age is still not appended with “teen.”

For one more year.

Today we had the annual pre-Christmas Polish gathering, which always includes a nativity play (jasełka) put on by the children of the Polish community. The Girl has been participating in this since she was four, making this the eighth year she’s done it.

Many of the children who used to participate are no longer children. They were young teens when they first did it, and now they’re in college, one in med school. They gather together during these performances and sit at a table, one of the islands of English in a largely Polish crowd. The other island — the young children who are today’s stars.

So to watch L perform on her birthday when sitting nearby are yesterday’s children who are now young adults is a jarring experience in some ways. “They grow up so quickly,” we all say, but we never really see it because their changes occur daily, and that daily exposure blurs the changes. But every now and then…

When I first arrived, I saw a young lady walking out of a door that I didn’t recognize immediately. Tall, graceful, with tastefully done makeup and a flawless face — it took me half a second to realize that it was my own daughter.

To see one’s own daughter, for the briefest of moments, as a stranger is to be, for the briefest of moments, a time traveler: I would not have immediately recognized twelve-year-old L were she to walk through the door eight years ago; were thirty-year-old L to walk through the door now, I might not realize it for a moment.

That is what we mean when we say “They grow up so fast.” They cease being the little girls and boys we’re comfortable with before we’re ready for it, before we even realize it’s happened.

Previous Years’ Birthday Posts

2009: Three
2011: Big Sister’s Birthday
2012: Six and Jasielka
2013: Birthday Party
2014: 8
2015: Nine
2016: Ten
2017: Eleven

Playing with The Boy

Wednesday 12 December 2018

The Boy got several new toy trucks today, adding to his already-extensive collection of toy cars, trucks, bulldozers, tractors, and the like.

Only one thing to do after dinner…