Matching Tracksuits

Month: February 2020

Shooting in the Back Yard

Saturday 29 February 2020

In the afternoon, after almost all the day’s necessities were behind us — shopping, a photoshoot at a local church for the diocesan newspaper, a soccer game (that I didn’t attend because I stayed behind to keep an eye on Papa, hence the lack of photos) — we went out to shoot L’s bow and arrows. K had gone to drum up some clients for her new venture in real estate, but the kids and I were, for all intents and purposes, done. Sure, I still had a consultation call with a client for a web site I’m building for her, but that was easily put off to the evening.

The Girl hadn’t lost her touch. Which is to say that she didn’t put a lot of arrows near the center of the target, but she didn’t miss the target entirely — which was the case when she first started shooting.

For the Boy, though, it was a different matter. He hit the target a few times — many shots fell ineffectually short, but he did hit the target a number of times. The problem was, though, that the bow was just a little too big for him, so he was not able to get enough pull on it, so not enough energy went into the arrow. So every single shot that did hit the target bounced off.

Understandably enough, it was a source of great frustration.

“Daddy, I can’t make any of them stick!”

What to do when your boy is frustrated and wants to quit? Make a joke of it.

“It’s almost like the target is against you, like it has a will of its own. Like it has some kind of Jedi power. ‘Nope,’ it says as your arrows strike. ‘Nah, not this time,’ it says the next shot.” And so on. Soon he was laughing and making his own jokes when the arrows flopped off the target.

“That one slammed into reverse and backed up!”

Lost Stories

Friday 28 February 2020

In 1986, I went to Austria with a group of about 120 teenagers from various congregations of our church. We didn’t go as part of a mission trip — our church members didn’t proselytize, for that was the responsibility of the leader through his television program. (Members’ job was to support him, i.e., pay for his TV time.)

The program was called the Winter Education Program, and it was intended to teach us kids who went about two things: winter sports (like the church’s SEP did for summer sports) and theology (which could more aptly be called programming since questioning was out of the question). It was, in reality, an extended ski trip for the kids whose parents could afford it.

I really remember very little about it other than two salient points: first, I never really connected with anyone there and didn’t develop any close friendships. When I went to the summer equivalent a few years later, I made great friends, some of whom I’m still in contact with. Second, I bought my first Pink Floyd cassette on this trip, A Momentary Lapse of Reason. My father, taking his duty to protect me very seriously, had to approve a given band before I could buy anything by them, and I had a suspicion that Pink Floyd wouldn’t make the cut. (There’s a double pun in there for anyone familiar with their discography.)

I hadn’t even thought of this whole adventure in probably 25 years when going through photos we took from Nana’s and Papa’s condo, I found these images. It’s a significant event (in a sense) of my youth, and it’s something my wife and children know nothing about. And that realization is what really got me thinking.

I’m forty-seven years old now. That’s roughly 17,155 days and change. By any conservative estimate, I’ve had thousands of little experiences that I remember to some degree or another, making them at least slightly significant, about which my family knows nothing about. They were insignificant at the time, but I remember them years later — that provides some degree of import, I think. There is, of course, no way or reason to share all these experiences with them, but that means much of my life is a mystery for them.

The same, though, is true for my own parents. I know only what they’ve told me, and now that Nana has passed, there are stories upon stories that I will never know.

Changes

Thursday 27 February 2020

Photo by susanjanegolding

A kid makes a decision to sell something at school and soon, every part of her life is sucked into the whirlpool of consequences that follows. Another kid makes a comment about violence in school and soon, every part of his life is not sucked into the whirlpool of consequences because of parental denial.

Both these kids intersect my own life, and those intersections coincide with other intersections making this web that moves on one end when you tug on the opposite end. Both these changes affect me only coincidentally and fairly significantly — the paradox of the nature of modern life.

Both these changes get me thinking about our own daughter, the same age as these two non-hypothetical kids who go to schools not all that different from our daughter with peers not all that different from our daughter’s friends. So much of these three families’ lives line up, and it leaves me thinking, “There but for the grace of God go we…”

I want to say it’s not grace. I want to say it’s better parenting. But I know that’s not necessarily the case. And I add “necessarily” because to think otherwise is almost unbearable.

New Normal

Thursday 27 February 2020

“Normal” is a relative thing. When Nana went down into a mass of struggling breath, wild eyes, and confusion in the bathroom doorway in December 2018, we thought it was just a brief interlude in “normal.”

“Things will get back to normal,” we all said. “She’ll spend some time in the hospital; we’ll work out a plan; things will get back to normal.”

She came back home largely bedbound but still able to get up and move about. “You’ll be out of this bed in no time,” we said. Physical therapists came daily, and she was standing and walking — until she wasn’t.

“We’re taking Nana back to the ER,” K texted. “She fell during her therapy.”

This was when the mini-stroke happened. She sat in the ER bed, mumbling incoherently, unable to name the year or the president. She said things like, “We have to get home soon because Mama will get mad.”

That stay was longer. More stressful.

But we still thought things will get back to normal.

Then came the shingles and the pain associated with them. In rehab she was unable and/or unwilling to do anything other than lie in the darkened room, the shingles hurt her so much.

By then, we were beginning to realizing that “normal” had shifted. That what we hoped would be our everyday reality was not what it had been in early December before everything started. “Normal” kept changing. And it kept changing until “normal” no longer included a living, breathing, laughing, fussing, loving Nana.

We knew the same process would happen with Papa. The only question was when.

Well, “when” seems to be now. This week, he’s taken such a turn that it’s difficult to imagine how he’ll ever get back to where he was.

The changes are staggering:

  • He can’t walk even with his walker more than a few feet — literally.
  • When he’s trying to walk with his walker, he reaches a point when he just freezes. He stops walking; he stops responding; he becomes a statue.
  • We’ve resorted to using a wheelchair Foy lent us to move him anywhere.
  • He doesn’t even go to the bathroom by himself: we have to wheel him in there.
  • We have to get him ready for bed: wheel him into the bathroom; help him with his hygene; wheel him over to the toilet; help him change clothes for bed.
  • He forgets things almost instantly.
  • There’s so much weakness in his body and motions that it’s difficult for me to believe that just a week ago he was able to do all these things by himself.

We keep saying that once Dr. McFarland figures out what’s causing all this, we’ll get the situation stabilized and things will go “back to ‘normal.'” But tonight, watching him feebly try to brush his teeth, I thought, “No, this is the new ‘normal.'”

Blood Pressure

Wednesday 26 February 2020

When Nana first went to the hospital in December 2018, I was out walking the dog. K called: “Where are you? You have to get back quickly — Papa had to call 911. Nana’s going to the hospital.”

That was the start.

We go through life never knowing when one event — a conversation, an accident, a fender-bender — will be the start of something entirely new, something good, something bad, but new. Different.

With Papa’s blood pressure now jumping all over the place — a high of 217/102 at the ER last night with a low while standing of 124/63 — and other challenges at home after discharge early this morning (around 2:30), I think it’s safe to say that Papa is worried that things have made a change. We’re concerned. E and L are worried.

But in the end, we all take a deep breath and adjust, relieved that tomorrow we have a follow-up appointment with his primary care physician. Lots of questions; lots to talk about; but she’s a fantastic doctor, so we go to bed with some hope.

3 Hours

Friday 21 February 2020

We had a three-hour delay today, which meant classes lasted less than half an hour and were for all intents and purposes useless unless, like me, teachers had something from previous days that could logically wrap up in that little bit of time.

And the conditions that prompted this? Dry roads…

Decisions

Thursday 20 February 2020

There was supposed to be a horrible storm coming through the area. Or there was the possibility of a terrible storm. Or at least the potential for bad conditions that might make driving unsafe for those unaccustomed to wintery weather. Or something like that. Here in the south, we have snow days without any actual snow because the district calls off school if the forecast is bad. That’s not an exaggeration.

Now, I’m not complaining about this. The district is looking out for its students’ safety when making these decisions, and to some degree minimizing the potential for lawsuits as well. That’s cynical, that last comment, but I don’t mean to be terribly cynical: I do honestly believe the schools have their students’ safety in mind.

The real fun comes in looking at social media reactions to this. Today, for example, the district implemented an early dismissal and the Facebook announcement has almost 700 comments, many of which leave one feeling a little hopeless for humanity:

20 Years Ago, Chinese New Year

Wednesday 19 February 2020

Twenty years ago this month, I headed to Chinatown in Boston on a Saturday morning with several coworkers to video, photograph, and interview participants in the community’s Chinese New Year celebration.

We were all working for Digital Learning Group, shortened to DLG in conversation, which would soon be rebranded DLI (Digital Learning Interactive), a company making interactive textbooks for college courses. This was 2000 — pre-social media, pre-almost-everything-we-call-the-internet-today. There was really innovative thinking behind that company, but we all seemed to be figuring it out as we went along.

I volunteered to take photos, and I didn’t even have a digital camera at the time. I took my Nikon FG, my best lense, and a lot of optimistic hope on that photoshoot.

My job had nothing to do with technology at that time, though. A graduate student in philosophy of religion, I’d been hired as the editor for the intro to religious studies book that was just under development.

At the time, I was studying at Boston University and writing things like this in my journal:

I’ve been reading Durkheim for class next week and I have to admit that he’s a little frustrating. I sometimes feel as if he takes me on great, circular arguments that assume points vital to that which he is trying to prove. For example, he talks about the fact that society needs an ideal to create itself (Elementary Forms of Religious Life 422), yet he’s not quite clear whence comes this ideal. He seems to indicate that it comes from the sacred/profane distinction, hinting at some kind of epiphany the believer experiences during some religious ritual. Yet whence comes the sacred/profane distinction? As I understand Durkheim, this comes from society. Yet religion, he indicates, in a way gives birth to society (418). In fact, religion and society are all but indistinguishable, yet he uses one to discuss/prove the other, and then a few pages later, the other to prove the first. It’s incredibly annoying.

We honestly really didn’t know how we were going to use the material: we had authors creating content for the sections on Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, but nothing for eastern religions.

The author for our Judaism section was Jacob Neusner, who sent in a 50+ page resume. At that time, he had 500 book publications to his name, and by the time he passed in 2016, had over 900 books published. How on earth did he do that? I wrote about it in my journal:

That seems completely impossible — five hundred books? I think he was born in the 30’s; finished his grad work in the 60’s. That gives him forty years of academic life. But let’s say he began writing as undergrad, when he was twenty. So that’s fifty years, which comes up to ten books a year, or a book every 36.5 days. That has got to be a slight misrepresentation; it has to include books he’s edited and such.

I can attest to the man’s speed: I was unable to keep up with editing his work while he wrote it. He sent in a new chapter every couple of days, and because I was working on a number of other projects, I was taking about a week per chapter.

I look back on that time, and I don’t recognize myself. I read my journal from that time — I was still writing daily — and I don’t see myself in my concerns. That’s always the case, I guess.

Still, I enjoyed working that job. I enjoyed being part of the .com explosion, of working on something that seemed so innovative.

Ultimately, though, I quit the job. Poland had sunk its hooks in me more deeply than I’d initially realized. I was getting letters from students (“Czy mogłabym pisac do Pana po polsku, bo wiem, że jak piszę po angielsku to robię dużo będów i Pan się może denerwuje czytając list z takimi bądami.”) and finding that I missed it all so terribly.

Plus, by then I’d moved to the tech side and was getting great money for essentially making a computer jump through hoops. I was learning much but accomplishing little, I felt.

Now, twenty years later, I’m back in America with a big slice of Poland here with me, teaching again, feeling like it was all so inevitable, this path I’ve taken.

Savannah, Day 3

Monday 17 February 2020

During the first match today, the girls slipped out of the convention center, found ten girls roughly their same age, gave them their volleyball uniforms, and sent them in to play. Which is to say they played poorly, losing in straight sets 25-14 and 25-15.

What happened there? Nothing that hasn’t happened before: they seem to do poorly on the first match of the day. They last their first two on Saturday before winning one on Saturday and the only two they played on Sunday.

And their second match today? They won in straight sets: 25-19 and 25-13. They’re not the only ones that fall apart, it seems.

Afterward, we went for a walk in Savannah. We couldn’t do this yesterday because it was raining — what a shame, we both thought. We made up for it today, probably doing three miles in the loveliest city in the South.

Savannah, Day 2

Sunday 16 February 2020

Yesterday started poorly; it ended with a lithe of hope. We lost the first two games; we won the third game.

Today, we won our two matches and finished before lunch. Tomorrow, we play three more games and refereed one more. (I went for a walk around the venue while they ran the game.)

Why only two games today? Simple: it’s a pay-to-play tournament, which means we had to stay in a hotel from a list provided by the tournament organizers, who get a kick-back from the hotels. It’s in their best interest to stretch things out as much as possible: the longer we have to stay here, the more they make.

Sound like a mafia-type move to you? To me, too.

Savannah, Day 1

Saturday 15 February 2020

It seems we have to start with a bang or a whimper. Our last tournament, two weeks ago, started with a bang: we won the first four matches and got second place in the gold bracket. (Does that mean we got silver? No. Why not? I don’t know — I don’t even have the slightest idea how brackets are determined: it seems to be a mysterious mixture of matches won, sets won, and point differentials.) It only stands to reason, then, that we should start this tournament with a whimper: we lost the first two matches in straight sets (despite being up 16-6 at the start of the first set of the first match) and looked like we were on track to lose the first set of the third match until the girls decided finally to start communicating a little and stop playing Y ball (no offense to the YMCA).

I believe the team we beat in the final match lost all three of their matches. It looked for a while like that might be us. In a four-team bracket, I suppose there’s a fairly substantial statistical possibility of this happening on a fairly regular basis depending on the skill spread of the various teams. In short, someone on days like today has to lose them all. I’m glad it’s not us, but I know also how that must hurt to be the other team.

After the games and some rest, it was time for some dinner. Of course, being this near the beach, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to walk on the beach for at least ten minutes.

And being this near the ocean, we couldn’t not go out for seafood.

Borders, 2013 — Part 2

Friday 14 February 2020

It was a lovely spring afternoon, and I was done with school early, so a bike ride was in order. I decided to go on one of my favorites: dip down into Slovakia that loops back to Lipnica, where I lived.

Crossing into Slovakia was no problem. I made my way around Orava Lake, through Trstena and to the border at Sucha Hora (“Dry Mountain”), where I duly handed over my passport to the border guards. The Slovak guards stamped it and gave it to the Polish guard.

“Gdzie pan mieszka?” he asked.

“I live in Lipnica,” I replied.

The guard thumbed through my passport like the bloke in Mis, and then he looked at me with a puzzled look. “But how?”

At the time, I didn’t have a valid work visa: I was in the process of renewing it, following all the protocols the fine folks in Krakow had laid out, and they had assured me I had nothing to worry about. And yet here I was, on the border, starting to worry.

I explained my situation to guard, but he insisted he couldn’t grant me entry. “You don’t have a valid visa,” he said.

“Yes,” I explained, “but you can’t keep me out for that reason. Perhaps you could suggest I can’t live and work here, but you have to let me in on at least a tourist visa, which means a stamp of the passport and off I go.” I didn’t say exactly that — I used much more diplomatic terms, but that was the general idea.

“But you don’t have a visa,” he insisted, waking into his little office and punching some things up on the computer.

I stood there, dressed in my Lycra shorts and top for cycling, having only a bit of cash in my jersey pocket, and wondering what I would do if this guy seriously didn’t let me in. A friend of mine was one of the head border guards at the Chyzne border crossing, so I thought I would just ride back there. But what if he wasn’t working? How could I pull this all off? I was tired; it was nearing sunset; I had very little money. Disaster seemed just over the next hill.

The guard came back and gave me my passport, waving me through with a smile. “We’ll let you through this time,” he said, “but it would have been a different story for me if I were flying to America without a visa, wouldn’t it?” His smile grew.

“That’s what this is about,” I thought. “Someone in your family — a sister, a brother-in-law — got turned away from the States on some technicality, and now you’re having a little fun.” Naturally, I said none of this. I simply thanked him, took my passport, and rode as fast as I could over the border, which was actually another half-kilometer or so from the crossing station.

In 2013, we drove through that crossing, which was empty due to Poland’s and Slovakia’s mutual EU membership. It looked exactly as it had a decade earlier.

Borders, 2013 — Part 1

Carbs

Thursday 13 February 2020

The Boy was eating dinner — spaghetti and meatballs because of volleyball practice and the need to eat by five — and asked if he could be excused.

“Eat a couple more bites of spaghetti,” I said.

“But I ate all the meat!” he protested. “Now it’s just carbs!”

“Well, you need some carbs, too.”

“I’ve had a ton of carbs today!” he insisted. “Bread with lunch! My cereal in the morning!” A pause. “Daddy, what are carbs?”

Categories

Wednesday 12 February 2020

“Daddy, can I play on my iPod?” The Boy had called my old phone that he uses for games an iPod for as long as I can remember. Sometimes he just calls hit his phone. For a seven-year-old, some details are unimportant.

“What did Mama say before she left?” I asked. I’d just gotten home, and K had just left for a showing. We like to be consistent, to make sure kids don’t start playing one off the other. Not that our angels would ever do that.

“She said no YouTube and no television,” he confessed.

“Well, let’s generalize that to ‘no electronics’ and say ‘No,’ okay?”

“Okay.” A pause. I knew what was coming. “What’s ‘generalize’?”

“It’s when you take something specific, a detail, and make a broader category from it. Like if I were to say, ‘apple’ and ‘orange,’ what category would those both fit into?”

“Fruit!”

And there we had it.

“Daddy, can we do this for a long time? Can we play this game for a long time?”

I love how so many things become a game for him. We played the generalization game for a while, each taking turns listing two items and having the other figure out what category they fit into.

No bigger themes; no lessons learned. Just a fun little game that we might never remember to play again but got us both smiling for a few minutes today.

Progress

Tuesday 11 February 2020

Working with eighth-grade kids, I’ve learned to accept progress in small steps. Behaviors don’t change overnight. They don’t even change over-week or over-month. But small changes can happen suddenly. Small changes that can grow. Small changes that serve as a foundation. Small changes that aren’t so small.

I have a student that I love. And hate. And hate to love. And love to hate. He’s got potential. He’s got a great personality. Everyone loves him. But he talks.

Constantly.

No, constantly.

No, I mean constantly.

No, I really mean constantly.

That is almost not an exaggeration. A slight exaggeration, but only very slight. He loves gossip. He loves knowing something someone else doesn’t know about someone they know in common. He loves telling people things they don’t know. He loves being a clearinghouse of useless personal information about others.

In the midst of this gossiping, this chatting, this constant sharing of information, he often gets called down. And this behavior he consistently exhibits makes him the focus of teachers’ attention so that they call him down for everything. And that frustrates him. Leads him to argue. Leads him to be disrespectful. Leads him to making very bad decisions sometimes.

I have him in homeroom and English class. Almost every day as he leaves, I tell him, “K, make good decisions today.”

“Yes, sir,” he says. (Did I mention he can be a perfect example of Southern manners?)

Later in the day, before eighth-grade students came back from related arts, I saw him again.

“K, have you been making good choices today?”

“Yes.” He proceeded to tell me about an instance when a teacher called him down and told him to close his Chromebook. “I was going to argue with, but I just closed my Chromebook.”

Two little actions from one decision: to do one thing and not do another. Two actions that most of us would do without thinking about it when told to do so by an authority figure. Two actions that would go unnoticed in other students. Two little actions; one little decision. And so much pride.

“See? It wasn’t that hard, was it?” I said.

“No, sir.”

“And the whole conflict — it just vanished instantly, didn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” he smiled.

Next step: get him to repeat it. Often.