Matching Tracksuits

Month: February 2020

Discovery

Monday 10 February 2020

The Boy discovered an old sugar lamb from Easter — last Easter or perhaps the previous one.

It had turned various unnatural colors and looked almost moldy. How long does it take sugar to mold? Does sugar mold?

So maybe it wasn’t last Easter; perhaps it was even further back. I’ve no idea.

I just came home and found him working on it — cutting it with random blows from the knife.

It’s one of those random events that I might think of at some unexpected time when the Boy is not the Boy but the Man, and K and I are wondering where the time went…

The constant thought of parents…

Finishing Basement

Sunday 9 February 2020

We woke to foggy weather. In Lipnica, that always meant a gloriously sunny afternoon. Here — I’m not so sure. It stayed cloudy most of the morning before turning sunny.

It might mean sleepiness if it’s Sunday. Everyone was tired this morning: L because she’s a thirteen-year-old; E because he’s sick; K and I because that’s how we normally wake up.

Or it might mean more work in the basement.

And then snow

Saturday 8 February 2020

They say weather in South Carolina is ridiculously unpredictable. It can be forty degrees colder today than it was yesterday; it can go from cloudless to monsoons to cloudless in no time; it can rain today and snow tomorrow.

We’ve had weather like that the last few days.

Thursday we flooded; Friday was cloudless and windy; today, it snowed.

I first noticed the smallest of flakes when I came up from the basement where I’ve been sealing holes drilled years ago for termite treatment and sealed only with about an eighth of an inch of concrete: I can push through with my finger, it turns out. Yesterday and today I patched 21 such holes, and it’s a time-consuming process: each hole has a cavity under it from erosion (I guess), and it takes an unbelievable amount of hydraulic cement to patch each hole.

“Ohe thing about a flood like that is that it will show you your weaknesses,” said my neighbor. And one weakness exposed: a crack in the slab beside the fireplace. Water was pouring in through that crack Thursday — probably about a gallon a minute at its worst.

So after an hour or so of drilling and chiseling this evening, I finished the last bit of patching. Until I remembered one more wall in the other room that I hadn’t checked. A quick check revealed what I knew was the case: still more holes…

And of course, I didn’t finish the crack…

The Flood of 2020: Aftermath

Friday 7 February 2020

Today we got to see what the county looked like while the rain poured yesterday. It was pretty much as you might expect.

We also go to see what damage the food did to our backyard. It was pretty much as you might expect.

I was on my way to school when K called to say that school had in fact been canceled, so returning, I stopped by our favorite park to see how the dam looked. It was pretty much as you might expect.

Finally, I searched for video footage of what people were experiencing in the county and Google delivered to me a couple of videos of what people have done in previous floods in the area.

It was pretty much as you might expect.

The Flood of 2020

Thursday 6 February 2020

We knew the storm was coming: the forecast for our area was around two inches. “That’s enough to flood our basement if it comes fast enough,” I thought.

When I left for work, it wasn’t raining; when I got to work, it was. Still, I thought we might be able to squeak through without much harm.

K took L to the doctor in the morning and then went back to the house before heading to work. She texted me at 10:36: “I’m back home. I am working from home today. It looks pretty bad. I’m going to keep an eye on the basement.”

At 10:42, she sent me another text: “I just saw the sump pump turn on and pump out a little bit of water. There is a little water under the plastic [vapor barrier in the crawl space]. It doesn’t look good for today.”

She sent me a picture a minute later:

“Oh, there’s no way we’re going to escape a flooded basement,” I thought. Still, it’s usually no big deal: we work for a couple of hours with a shop-vac and everything’s fine.

“Those hammocks will get destroyed,” I replied. Then ten minutes later at 10:54, I text: “Can you see water going into the pump basin? A trickle from the basement side perhaps?”

At 11:04 she sent me another picture.

And then two minutes later, at 11:06, the next text from K: “The basement is flooding.”

The trouble was, I couldn’t just dash away. We at school were having our own adventure: not a drill but an actual shelter-in-place reality. Three hundred eighth graders huddled against the wall in the corridor for almost forty minutes.

At 11:25, I texted our neighbor: “You guys flooding?”

“Creeks are bad…house is fine,” he responded. With pictures.

“K said we’re flooding,” I texted. “I’m stuck here because we’re in a tornado lockdown.”

“Want me to go help her?” he immediately replied. And that, ladies and gentlemen, would be exhibit 344,038 for the argument that he is the best neighbor one could have.

Finally, when we had everything under control at the school and the kids fed and watered, I got a text from K at 12:35: “I have been pumping for an hour and a half now. G[, our neighbor,] is here to help. I think you should come home as soon as possible. The rain is not going to stop and water is coming in like through a faucet.”

I went to the cafeteria and found the eighth-grade administrator. “My wife just said that our basement is flooding. I’m heading home. Someone’s going to have to cover my last three classes.”

“Go,” he said.

I went to the front office, where the sixth-grade administrator was talking to the receptionist. “My wife just said that our basement is flooding,” I began. “And you need coverage,” the receptionist said. “On it.”

“Go,” said both the administrator and receptionist.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, along with the calm way they implemented the tornado shelter-in-place lockdown would be exhibit 344,038 for the argument that our school faculty knows how to work an emergency.

“Water is coming through the termite treatment holes,” K texted me on the way home. A few years I’d dug out the “filler compound” with which whoever did that patched the wholes. The material crumbled under the lightest touch of a screwdriver blade. I had cleaned out all the holes on the out-facing walls and patched them. “Guess I didn’t do a good job,” it thought, stopping at the hardware store on the way home to buy some rubber plugs for the holes.

But this water was coming from holes in the inner basement walls — where I hadn’t touched any of the holes. “What can possibly happen here?” I thought.

A lot.

The water was jetting out of the holes, making little fountains just about two to three inches high — that’s how much hydrostatic pressure had built up under our house. We plugged the holes, moved some shelves and found more fountains, plugged those, and vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed.

It was a first: both rooms of our half-basement were flooding. And so we vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed.

K went to get the kids. I stayed behind and vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed.

We finally got everything under control around dinner time. At 5:48, I texted our selfless neighbor, “I can only just now say that I think we’ve got both rooms completely under control.”

And now, at 9:46, I hear the sump pump kick in for about the tenth time since I began writing this, so I guess it’s about time to head downstairs and see if it’s flooding again — it’s not supposed to stop raining until after midnight…

But we’re not the only ones on our street, or even the worst off. And this flood seems to have enveloped much of the South itself.

At one point in the evening, shortly after dinner, the power flicked off and stayed disconnected for a good fifteen seconds — long enough that I’d started running options through my head. When the lights came back on, K and I looked at each other, thinking about all the reports of downed trees and power lines, realizing just how much worse it could have been.

We had it worse than we’ve ever had it, but we could have had it worse still.

Previous Floods

Flood 2018

Water

Flood 2014

Flood

Passing

Wednesday 5 February 2020

I learned this evening that the pastor who led our local little congregation of the WCG when I was a teenager died recently. Nana and Papa had heard years ago from their connections that the man had Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia, and that’s what one obit said about him:

R spent his life in the ministry, lastly in the Living Church of God. Due to his ailment, he was retired but continued to attend until his condition did not allow him that freedom.

The church I grew up in held some fairly heterodox beliefs, including the one that its members (at most 150,000 worldwide) were the only true Christians and everyone else, unbeknownst to them, was worshipping Satan and through his “counterfeit Christianity.”

When I read Peter Berger’s work on the sociology of knowledge (especially his books The Social Construction of Reality and The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Social Theory of Religion), I felt he’d looked directly into my youth and described what I’d experienced. When you hold a view that’s in the cognitive minority, Berger explained, it’s difficult to maintain that view. Everyone else says you’re wrong. You either adopt the prevailing view or you insulate yourself with what Berger called plausibility structures — rituals and such that reinforce the heterodox ideas you hold and make them seem plausible in the face of a majority who says you’re wrong. One of the most basic plausibility structures is the cognitive ghetto: you isolate yourself from others physically and mentally to avoid contact with contaminated “others,” who might introduce new ideas that lead to doubt.

Our church did this exceptionally well. We had our own little culture with its own vocabulary, customs, retreats, and other structures that kept the perverted world with their Satanic ideas at bay.

Ministers in this church enforced this isolation with varying degrees of severity and using various leadership methods. It was not uncommon to find very authoritarian and controlling people drawn to the ministry of this organization as a result.

Growing up, I had contact with a number of these ministers and heard about others. Some of them ruled as an autocrat. Many of them were controlling, manipulative, and destructive.

R was none of these.

Certainly, he enforced the rules of the main organization, but there was a gentleness about him that was unlike many of the other ministers. He didn’t seem like he was on a power trip like so many of the pastors in the church did. He seemed humble, and he could certainly laugh at himself — a rarity in ministers in that sect. One online memorial expressed it succinctly: “He brought a new way of looking at things, he encouraged the entire congregation to try new things.”

I became close friends with his sons and spent countless weekends with their family in high school. He and his wife were always kind to me and the other teens in the church.

In the early- and mid-90s, the main organization went through some doctrinal changes that led ultimately to the breakup of the church. “It turns out, we were wrong — we aren’t the only Christians” seemed to be the overriding theme. “All these heterodox beliefs — they’re pretty daft as well.” Several groups splintered off in efforts to hold fast to the truth once delivered.

My parents accepted the changes; R and his family did not. For years I never heard from any of them.

I found myself thinking, “How could our friendship mean so little to them? How could they just let that all disappear? Were we friends only because we believed the same things?” I knew the answers. Instantly we were outside their cognitive ghetto; we were the other; we were heterodox, unkosher, unclean. Dangerous.

Then in the early 2000s, I found R’s email address on the internet and had a brief exchange with him. I was curious about why he stayed with the original beliefs; he was curious about why we left. We had a few exchanges and then as often happens, it ended rather suddenly for no real reason. What really did we have to say to each other, after all?

When Nana passed, I wondered if he and his wife (rumor had it they’d separated, even divorced, but the obituary I found indicates otherwise — or at least that she kept his name) had found out about her passing. My folks were close with them, and I know the dissolution of their friendship due to no-differing theological views pained them greatly.

In my interactions with R, though, I came to see that it pained them too, though in a different way. How could we turn our back on the truth we’d once held? How could we come out of the world (“the world” was the generic term for the non-member hordes) and then go right back into it? How could we hold the key to becoming God as God is God (but not quite — hey, I said it was quite heterodox but you probably weren’t thinking that heterodox) and then give it away?

In truth, it was the church that brought us together and provided the catalyst that we used to break ourselves apart. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. But is that really any different from how other friendships come and go? Except for the handful of true, deep friendships we have, don’t we all move through relationships in the same way, regardless of religious belief or other baggage?

I do this on a smaller scale with 130+ students every single year. I get to know them; I get to like them; I don’t consider them friends, but they’re more than just students. And then they’re gone. And truth be told, I can’t remember most of their names initially when the handful comes back for a visit. “What’s your name again?” I ask with some embarrassment.

Soundtrack

Tuesday 4 February 2020

The kids and I stumbled into a new little game this evening. The Boy and I were playing cars, and I’d taken my phone with us to listen to some music. He made a request for “Kid A,” a Radiohead song that he finds amusing.

As the music played, I asked him, “Which of these cars goes with that music?” He picked one out, and we talked about why it seemed to fit.

And that was the game…

The Girl heard us and came into E’s room to join us. Some of the choices were obvious: a Billie Holiday song led to fingers straight to the ’40s roadster in the collection; Creedence Clearwater Revival pulled everyone to the pickup truck; a Gorecki string quartet led to the oddest car in the collection.

The real blessing of it all was not only that we were encouraging the use of musical and visual imagination but also that we were spending that time together — the three of us. It’s a rare thing these days with our crazy schedules.

A Tale of Two Books

Monday 3 February 2020

About a year ago I read Treasure Island to the Boy. It took us a long time because I read the original, unabridged version. E loved it.

“Daddy, can we read Treasure Island again?” he asked the other day. I thought it might be a good idea to try to read another classic adventure tale instead of re-reading that one, so I suggested Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

I read the opening to him:

The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Not to mention rumours which agitated the maritime population and excited the public mind, even in the interior of continents, seafaring men were particularly excited. Merchants, common sailors, captains of vessels, skippers, both of Europe and America, naval officers of all countries, and the Governments of several States on the two continents, were deeply interested in the matter.

For some time past vessels had been met by “an enormous thing,” a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale.

He was hooked.

“What was it?” he asked.

“Well, that’s what the whole book is about.”

In the course of the opening pages, the longitude and latitude of various sightings. I tried to explain to him what the coordinate system was, but he was a little lost. This evening, after dinner, we looked on Google Earth and mapped out the precise locations of all the sightings of the mysterious creature.

While he was eating his snack, I read another chapter to him. It’s kind of slow going: he asks for definitions of a lot of words, and the sentences are so long, with so many embedded subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases, that it’s hard for him to follow. Here’s an example:

Taking into consideration the mean of observations made at divers times–rejecting the timid estimate of those who assigned to this object a length of two hundred feet, equally with the exaggerated opinions which set it down as a mile in width and three in length–we might fairly conclude that this mysterious being surpassed greatly all dimensions admitted by the learned ones of the day, if it existed at all.

That’s one sentence — it would give my own students fits.

It is in these sentences, though, and the challenging vocabulary that I find the lasting value in the reading. Sure, we’ll have great memories to share; certainly, we’ll enjoy the book. But when it’s time to tackle things like this on his own in school, he’ll have some experience with it because he’ll have heard me reading Jules Verne and Robert Stevenson and eventually Twain and Dickens.

After the Boy was in bed, I was in L’s room, talking to her about the books she’s reading. I’d had in my mind that I wanted to start reading to L again, and I thought A Tale of Two Cities might be a good start. So I asked her if I could read her something.

“Sure,” she said fairly emotionlessly — it’s a thirteen-year-old thing, I’m discovering.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way– in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

As I was reading, she jumped up, skipped over to her bookbag, and dug out her social studies notes. “We went over that in class!” she said excitedly.

She looked through her notes and I saw a heading “The Reign of Terror.”

“That’s where it will be,” I said.

We talked about it for a bit, and that was it. Will we go through with this reading? Does she even want to? I don’t know. I understand less and less of her thirteen-year-old mind, but I know that just being there is often enough. Do I do that enough? It’s the worry of every parent, I suppose.

Patterns

Sunday 2 February 2020

Some random thoughts that had bounced around my head during the day having nothing whatsoever to do with the photos…

We are a pattern-seeking species. We see them everywhere, and when they don’t occur naturally, we make them appear magically.

Take, for example, all the chatter online and off about the significance of today’s date: February 20, 2020. “It’s the same forwards and backward!” L explained cheerfully. “A palindrome!” I guess she learned that word from some social media post or other about the date, but there it is:

02022020

It even works if we write the year first, which I do when name files:

20200202

Of course, this only works if we’re writing the day and month with leading zeros. Otherwise, it’s just 222020 or 202022 — not nearly so exciting.

If you use the Hebrew calendar, it would be 07055780 or 05075780, depending on whether we’re to put the day or month first. In the Islamic calendar, it’s 06081441 or 08061441, again depending on whether day or month is to come first.

All of that is to say the obvious: it’s an arbitrary, meaningless day made somehow special because of an equally arbitrary way of numbering the day. There is no pattern there. We make the pattern and then feel special when it “appears.”

Sometimes, when people see patterns, they read prophetic significance into it. Take, for example, today’s reading in mass:

Thus says the Lord GOD:
Lo, I am sending my messenger
to prepare the way before me;
And suddenly there will come to the temple
the LORD whom you seek,
And the messenger of the covenant whom you desire.
Yes, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts.
But who will endure the day of his coming?
And who can stand when he appears?
For he is like the refiner’s fire,
or like the fuller’s lye.
He will sit refining and purifying silver,
and he will purify the sons of Levi,
Refining them like gold or like silver
that they may offer due sacrifice to the LORD.
Then the sacrifice of Judah and Jerusalem
will please the LORD,
as in the days of old, as in years gone by. (Malachi 3.1-4)

Fr. Longenecker suggested that this first portion is a prophecy that was fulfilled when Jesus was presented in the temple. In the day’s gospel reading, we find:

The child’s father and mother were amazed at what was said about him;
and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother,
“Behold, this child is destined
for the fall and rise of many in Israel,
and to be a sign that will be contradicted
–and you yourself a sword will pierce–
so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

And so this is seen as a proof of providence, a proof that God controls everything. Except that the Old Testament source says he will “purify the sons of Levi, / refining them like gold or like silver.” Since the majority of the Jews of Jesus’s time did not convert to Christianity, it seems the sons of Levi weren’t immediately purified — if that’s what it means, and that’s not clear either. Perhaps it’s about corruption: was there less corruption among the “sons of Levi” after the appearance of Jesus? Hard to say, but doubtful. (I don’t even know if there was corruption — I’m just working under the assumption of people being people.)

So this whole thing presents a pattern of prophecy and it’s fulfillment. But it doesn’t. It only creates that pattern if we accept certain interpretations (which I don’t) and go into it with certain presuppositions (which I don’t). For that matter, we don’t even know if this Simeon bloke said these things or even if he existed — the only evidence we have is the scriptural reference, and for many of us, that’s dubious at best.

In other words, there is no naturally occurring pattern there. We create the pattern and then feel special when it “appears.”