Matching Tracksuits

Month: May 2020

Day 58: The Ball, the Berry, the Photo, and the Border

Tuesday 12 May 2020

Kicking the Ball

Clover loves to play fetch with balls: tennis balls, volleyballs, basketballs — whatever. She prefers anything over a basketball because she cannot grasp it in her teeth and has to herd it up the hill of our backyard with her nose. This is why I personally prefer a basketball with her because it is much more amusing to watch her bring the ball back.

However, as enjoyable as playing ball with Clover is, she can really turn it into an annoyance. Any time anyone comes into the backyard, she thinks they’ve done so expressly to play with her. No other options are conceivable. So she runs to get the ball and drops it near your feet and backs off expectantly. She looks at the ball, looks at you, looks back at the ball. If you don’t kick it, she’ll run up, give it a little nudge with her nose, then back off again, ready to streak down the hill after the ball.

This is cute if you’re just out with your son, doing this or that. It’s less cute when you’re trying to do something, like build a fire or finish a swing. I try to accommodate her even then, occasionally kicking the ball for her or simply shove it away from me with the vague hope that it will roll down the hill that is our backyard and distract the dog for at least fifteen seconds.

I shouldn’t complain, though: I love our dog, even though I joke that I don’t. She’s stubborn and overly hyper; she gets jealous of any dog which is receiving giving attention; she plays rough and tries to boss smaller or large and more docile dogs about. Despite these minor shortcomings, it’s hard not to adore her: her jealousy just comes from her love. Her pestering just comes from a desire to play, which she rightly realizes we often enjoy as much as she.

Shooting and Berries

During our morning break, the Boy and I went shooting in the backyard. He’s become quite the shot with his bb gun. While we were retrieving an errantly kicked ball (over the fence to the driveway, rolling down to the blueberry bushes), he decided to take a few shots at the archery target at the other end of the yard. From where we stood, though, he was shooting only at the side, a target of about 15-18 inches wide. He hit it the first time; he hit it the second.

“Man, I’m good,” he said.

Yes, he certainly is. Sometimes we have to work on that modesty a bit, though. Yet, on the other hand, he is so lacking in confidence about some things — especially academic tasks — that perhaps a bit of bragging is a good thing. I don’t know.

I do know that he was impressed with the number of berries on our bushes and wondered what would happen if we were to try them now, long before they’re ripe.

“Go ahead and try one — but you probably won’t like it,” I suggested.

He tried one.

“Oh, oh! Yuck! It’s so hard and sour!”

Photo Walk

After school was finished, the Boy was eager to go on a photo walk together. “I’m not so into photography anymore,” he explained, “but it’s still fun.” So I gave him the old D70 and took our little X100 for myself and off we went.

We passed the house where, for whatever reason, the owners are storing an old toilet on the back deck. The Boy loves the idea of a toilet on the back deck. “That way you can poop and be in nature!” That’s one way of looking at it — a very seven-year-old way at that. When we got to the house, he tromped boldly up to the fence, took a moment to compose his shot, and walked calmly back down. In the past, he didn’t really want to do that.

“What if they see me? What if they say something?”

I tried to explain: “The most they would do is to tell you not to take a picture of their house. In that case, you just smile, apologize, and say, ‘Sorry — I’ll delete it.’ Simple.”

And where are the pictures he took? I haven’t taken them off the camera. I’ve been trying to teach him to use Lightroom and use his edits as well, but we didn’t have time today to complete the whole project.

We had to hurry home for dinner.

My Hometown

I grew up in Bristol, which is a unique city as it sits on the Virginia/Tennessee border. The border runs right down the middle of the main street downtown, State Street. A divided city such as Bristol has unique features: for instance, sales tax in Virginia is much lower than that in Tennessee because Tennessee doesn’t have an income tax. Smart folks, then, live on the Tennessee side and shop on the Virginia side.

Back before Daylight Savings Time was an almost-nationwide phenomenon — I don’t know what else to call the arbitrary changing of the clock — one state used it and the other didn’t. That meant you could cross the street and gain or lose an hour.

When I first went to Poland in the Peace Corps, I stayed with a Polish host family in Radom for twelve weeks during training. The son was fascinated with State Street: “Does that mean if you commit a crime on one side of the city and the police chase you and you cross the border, they have to stop chasing you?”

The two-state status of the city is relevant now in the time of COVID-19 as Tennessee and Virginia are taking different courses through the pandemic. CNN had a story about it yesterday.

Day 57: Math, Mowing, Painting, and the Missionary Society

Monday 11 May 2020

Math

The Boy was having trouble this morning with three-digit subtraction, things like 352-178. He was thinking a little too much, mixing prior knowledge with current practice. For example, in the number above, he would know he had to borrow a 10 from the 10s place in order to subtract 8 properly, but then that would leave him with 4. Instead of writing 4 above the crossed-out 5, he wrote 40. Which is technically correct. But the be was subtracting 7 from 40 and coming up with 33, and before long, he was subtracting one three-digit number from another three-digit number and coming up with a six-digit answer.

I remember the frustration of borrowing numbers in subtraction. I, too, experienced it in second grade: I just couldn’t figure out how those numbers were shifting around, 5 becoming 4 so I could subtract something from the 1s place. Everyone tried explaining it to me: my teacher, mom, dad, the girl who babysat me from time to time. It just didn’t make any sense to me no matter how often and how many different ways it was explained.

So I understood the Boy’s frustration this morning. I sat with him a while, taking a break from my own work, and tried to help him through it.

“Yes, but Daddy, that’s the 10s place, so it’s not just 4, it’s 40.”

“Technically, you’re correct, but…”

“What do you mean ‘technically’? What does that even mean?!”

It was another moment that I found myself in awe of elementary school teachers. I don’t teach many new skills: I mainly take existing skills and improve them. The kids can write when they come to me; I just help them write better. They can read when they come to me; I just give them tricks for comprehending more challenging texts: things like “make sure you keep track of your pronouns’ antecedents — you need to know who ‘he’ is when the author uses that pronoun,” or “determine the part of speech of that unknown word — that will help you a lot in inferring a possible meaning.” But just taking a kid who doesn’t know at all how to read and turning her into a reader? I haven’t got the slightest clue how to do that. I know it’s just a matter of training: I minored in education in college, but in secondary education — not primary. An entirely different field of study.

Still, having experienced that frustration myself, I had a certain patience and understanding of his frustration.

This is why some feel that teachers who teach subjects they were always good at isn’t as effective as alternatives. We — for I was always good at literature and decent at writing — know how to do these skills seemingly instinctively. It’s hard to teach someone how to do something that you can do, relative to the struggling student, without thinking. It’s better to teach something that you yourself have struggled with, goes the thinking. But the problem with that: where’s the passion? I don’t teach English just because I want to teach and happened to choose English. I teach it because I myself enjoy writing; I teach it because I love reading. I teach it because I have a certain excitement about certain books, certain poems, even certain reading skills that I love to share with students. I struggled with math, and the only passion I feel about it is a certain kind of revulsion.

Mowing and Painting

The Boy loves working in the yard. We bought a battery-powered weed eater just so he could help (which is now out of trim line, which we don’t have). Today, after scolding me a little bit about still not having the right line, he asked if he could help mow.

When we first started doing this, I would let him do the little flat, straight portion in the front yard just between the flower bed and the crape myrtles. Today, I let him tackle some of the more challenging areas.

“Make sure you keep the line of uncut grass just on the inside edge of your outside wheel,” I explained, demonstrating just what I meant.

He tried, poor fellow, but he just couldn’t stop drifting inward, leaving slivers of uncut grass with every row.

Still, I can’t help but be pleased that he’s still willing to help. At some point, the job will be his entirely.

Saturday in the Yard

The Girl finished up the afternoon with a little more painting: the swing I’d started Saturday for K’s Mother’s Day gift is nearing completion.

The Missionary Society Meeting

It’s always a chapter that confuses students: the 24th chapter in To Kill a Mockingbird feels like someone took a chapter out of a completely different novel, changed a few names to match a few characters’ names in Mockingbird, and just slipped it into the stream of the story. The only connection it seems to have with the rest of the book is the news of the death of Tom Robinson toward the end of the chapter. I contend that in many ways it’s one of the most important chapters in the book as it fully develops one of the book’s major themes: the hypocrisy of Southern white Christians.

Most of the chapter centers around Aunt Alexandra’s hosting the Maycomb Alabama Methodist Episcopal Church South Missionary Society meeting. Scout attends as “a part of [Alexandra’s] campaign to teach [Scout] to be a lady.” Poor Scout is lost from the beginning: she asks about what they studied and gets confused immediately:

“Oh child, those poor Mrunas,” [Mrs. Merriweather] said, and was off. Few other questions would be necessary.

Mrs. Merriweather’s large brown eyes always filled with tears when she considered the oppressed. “Living in that jungle with nobody but J. Grimes Everett,” she said. “Not a white person’ll go near ‘em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.”

Mrs. Merriweather played her voice like an organ; every word she said received its full measure: “The poverty… the darkness… the immorality—nobody but J. Grimes Everett knows. You know, when the church gave me that trip to the camp grounds J. Grimes Everett said to me—”

“Was he there, ma’am? I thought—”

“Home on leave. J. Grimes Everett said to me, he said, ‘Mrs. Merriweather, you have no conception, no conception of what we are fighting over there.’ That’s what he said to me.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I said to him, ‘Mr. Everett,’ I said, ‘the ladies of the Maycomb Alabama Methodist Episcopal Church South are behind you one hundred percent.’ That’s what I said to him. And you know, right then and there I made a pledge in my heart. I said to myself, when I go home I’m going to give a course on the Mrunas and bring J. Grimes Everett’s message to Maycomb and that’s just what I’m doing.”

A skilled reader with a moderate amount of background knowledge immediately understands: this J. Grimes Everett is a missionary to the Mrunas, who, in turn, are clearly an African tribe (“Not a white person’ll go near ‘em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett”).

The reason the author includes the Mrunas is clear only toward the end of the missionary society meeting, when Mrs. Merriweather begins talking about Atticus’s decision to represent Tom:

Mrs. Merriweather nodded wisely. Her voice soared over the clink of coffee cups and the soft bovine sounds of the ladies munching their dainties. “Gertrude,” she said, “I tell you there are some good but misguided people in this town. Good, but misguided. Folks in this town who think they’re doing right, I mean. Now far be it from me to say who, but some of ‘em in this town thought they were doing the right thing a while back, but all they did was stir ’em up. That’s all they did. Might’ve looked like the right thing to do at the time, I’m sure I don’t know, I’m not read in that field, but sulky… dissatisfied… I tell you if my Sophy’d kept it up another day I’d have let her go. It’s never entered that wool of hers that the only reason I keep her is because this depression’s on and she needs her dollar and a quarter every week she can get it.”

“His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?”

Miss Maudie said it. Two tight lines had appeared at the corners of her mouth. She had been sitting silently beside me, her coffee cup balanced on one knee. I had lost the thread of conversation long ago, when they quit talking about Tom Robinson’s wife, and had contented myself with thinking of Finch’s Landing and the river. Aunt Alexandra had got it backwards: the business part of the meeting was blood-curdling, the social hour was dreary.

“Maudie, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Mrs. Merriweather.

“I’m sure you do,” Miss Maudie said shortly.

Yet this is where students really get lost. In typical Southern gentile fashion, Mrs. Merriweather won’t deign to gossip about anyone — how uncivilized — so she simply makes talks about Atticus in the third-person plural. And everyone in the room knows exactly who she’s talking about — everyone but Scout. And our young readers.

Today, my English I students started the adventure of figuring out this marvelous chapter. I always read the relevant passage aloud in class. It’s one of the most enjoyable things I do all year. I lay on the Southern accent, dropping final rs (“squalor” becomes “squala”) and altering the cadence and tone of my reading. How to do that when in lock-down? Simple: record it. My favorite part — that passage above.

Day 56: Mother’s Day and Conspiracies

Sunday 10 May 2020

Two radically different thoughts that rattled around my head today, completely unconnected other than the fact that I thought about them during the same 12-hour period…

Mother’s Day

It’s the first Mother’s Day without Nana. A year ago, we were just about ready to move Nana and Papa into the almost-completed living space, and we had a Mother’s Day dinner at Nana’s and Papa’s. We all sat around Nana’s bed as we ate, and L and I gave her a small succulent that was small enough to sit on her bedside table. I don’t remember what we ate; I don’t remember what we talked about. Had we known then that it was our last Mother’s Day with her, we probably would all remember those details, but that’s the problem with most lasts — we don’t know they’re the last this or last that.

It reminds me of how a priest once explained how he avoids becoming complacent and (did he say this? He might have used this word) even bored with the Mass, saying the same thing day in and day out, over and over again. “I try to treat every Mass as if it’s the first, last, and only Mass I’ll ever celebrate.” When we know it’s the last time we do something, we tend to slow down and savor it.

I used to get very upset at lasts. I wanted, as Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz sings, “to hold on to these moments as they last,” and when it’s the last one, it doesn’t last long. (That’s an odd little thing, isn’t it? “Last” as a verb and “last” as an adjective. “How long does the last one last?”) When I knew the last moments of some experience were approaching or the last time I would do something was nearing, I always grew just a touch melancholy.

The last day of school, for instance, used to be a little sad because I found myself thinking that I’d never see these kids in whom I’d invested so much. I’d forged relationships with them, some of which were hard-won and very frustrating as they developed. It had taken me a long time with some of them to convince them that I was, indeed, on their side, that even when I was giving them a hard time about their behavior, doling out consequences that they felt were unfair, I was still on their side.

From K’s iPhone

But endings are often beginnings. I think of Eliot’s “East Coker,” which ends, “In my end is my beginning.” It is, of course, a reference to the afterlife, but all endings are also beginnings — an old, time-worn truth. The end of every school year promises the beginning of the next.

That is where I differ from the rest of the folks in our household: they all believe that Nana’s end was her beginning; sadly, I have my doubts. It’s a lovely thought, and one that of course I hope is true in a sense because Papa, for instance, has so much invested emotionally in that idea. But if I’m right, we’ll never know; we’ll only know if I’m wrong.

It was with all these thoughts in my head that I drove the family to visit Nana’s grave today for Mother’s Day. Papa bought a couple of new bouquets of artificial flowers — lovely ones of multiple shades of blue with yellow and white roses to off-set the sea of blue. Nana would approve, no doubt. Blue was her favorite color, and there are enough shades of blue in the bouquets to fill the sky.

Conspiracy

I’m currently reading Stalin: In the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a book about Stalin’s Great Terror ( I love the Russian name, Большой террор — makes me think of the ballet!). At its heart, the Great Terror was unimaginable without Stalin, but it was also impossible without others. Many others. How do you get so many people to go along with that? Simple: conspiracy theories.

Today it seems impossible that virtually every factory and railway line was being sabotaged by Trotskyite terrorists within their management, but Soviet industry was riddled with mistakes and cursed with thousands of accidents thanks to poor management and the breakneck speed of the Five-year Plans: for example, in 1934 alone, there were 62,000 accidents on the railways! How could this happen in a perfect country? “Enemies” among the corrupt elite had surely caused the failures. The arrest of saboteurs and wreckers in the industrial factories and railways spread.

By the time the Terror turned to the army and the Party itself, Stalin was most definitely in complete, unquestioned control. At his word, people lived and died, and very few people questioned his decisions.

Reading this got me thinking about the current situation in America and the conspiracy theories that seem to be popping up like mushrooms are growing positively dangerous.

Some people belittled her, others suggested she was a paid actor or was a healthcare professional who had no direct involvement with the treatment of Covid-19. Others accused her of being an abortion doctor.

“It was heated, people were very fired up about what they had to say,” she told CNN. “A lot of the top comments we got were about us being fake nurses, there was a huge majority of them that still believe this virus is fake, that it’s a hoax and not real at all. They were convinced that we’re fake nurses and that’s why we weren’t talking.”

Quite the opposite of a fake nurse, Ms Leander volunteered to work at her hospital’s Covid-19 unit full time, and has been on the front line working with infected patients for the past month.(Source)

I saw footage of this on Now This but can’t find it now. There is a definite political element to this: all the protestors were wearing “Trump 2020” paraphernalia, and I would bet that every single one of them believes the Deep State conspiracy nonsense. So I read the passage in Montefiore’s book and started wondering what it would take for something like that to happen in America.

Could these people support wholesale executions of people they see as participating in anti-state conspiracies? I don’t know.

We all want to say, “No, no — we’re better than that.” We think about our neighbors and even those nameless faces we see in our own towns and think it impossible. Would Vasili Blokhin’s neighbors or acquaintances have thought he was capable of the acts he committed? He was a prolific executioner who killed many during the Great Terror but most infamously executed over 7,000 Polish officers personally in 28 days in the forest of Katyn.

Just as we never know when an end of this or that is coming, we never know how current events are going to play out. COVID-19 was a problem in China, over there, far away until it wasn’t. With quarantines being lifted around the country before we even really have adequate testing capabilities in place, it’s not inconceivable that we might experience a sharp increase in the number of cases, forcing states to decide whether or not to reimpose restrictions. What will these protesters do then? We’ve already seen armed protesters storm the Michigan statehouse; what else are they capable of? If something happens that results in bloodshed, how will protesters (i.e., rabid Trump supporters) react in other states? We already see signs reading “Give me liberty or give me COVID.”

That’s not a far cry from the original formulation that encouraged revolution.

Day 55: The Swing, the Dog House, and the Bench

Saturday 9 May 2020

I don’t know how it inevitably happens, but projects with me just seem to swell completely out of proportion from my original estimates. Sometimes it’s simply that my estimates are wrong. No, that’s most of the time. I tend to underestimate the time required because I tend to overestimate my skills. Today, though, my estimation of the time required to make K’s Mother’s Day present was just about dead on. True, it took me longer in the end, but that’s because I decided to pull out the router and round over every edge. Why? Because I have a router and quite honestly don’t have that many opportunities to use it.

From K’s iPhone

I also decided as I was working to countersink all the screws and go back with wood filler and hide them all. That added a bit of additional time. But the raw building itself took just about as long as I anticipated.

What got me off track was not the time it took to make the bench but rather the time it took to gather the needed materials. The wood was the real trick.

I went to Lowe’s expecting to be back fairly quickly. All I needed was a bit of additional chain for the swing, a few hooks to connect the swing to the chain, and some 2x4s for the framing of the swing. The chain took quite some time — probably more than twenty minutes — because I pressed the “Press here for assistance” button and no one came for what seemed like an eternity.

From K’s iPhone

Finally, I was ready to pick up the lumber and haul it back to the in-store sawing station to have them cut the 96″ studs down to 48″ pieces that would fit in K’s Rogue. The first trick was to find a lumber cart. I finally gave up looking for one, went to the cashier, paid for the hardware, took it out to the car, and returned with a lumber cart from the parking lot. I loaded my six 2x4s and headed to the cut station. Where I found a sign that read, “Saw not functioning.”

I felt like I was in the film Nie Lubię Poniedzialku except that I was in Greenville not Warsaw and it was Saturday not Sunday.

I just left the cart there with the lumber on it. It was a somewhat crummy thing to do — I could have at least taken the lumber back.

From K’s iPhone

After dropping off the hardware at the house (because it was on the way), I headed to Home Depot. The saw there was completely functional. The studs I picked out, though, were not 96″ but only 93″. So when I told the shop assistant to cut them at 48″, adding “I just need them in half-size pieces,” he did just that: he put one end of the board on 48″ and cut. And the resulting pieces were of a significantly different length. That’s when I measured and saw they weren’t 96″. I could have checked. I didn’t. I just sighed.

While all of this was going on, the Boy alternated between helping me and helping the Girl, who was painting the dog house and the bench.

From K’s iPhone

In the evening, we watched Nie Lubię Poniedzialku. We’ve been trying to expose the kids to some of the classics, and we decided it was time for Poniedzialku. I love that film. It’s probably my second-favorite Polish film, right behind Miś. The story, such as it is, is charming: we all laugh at the horrid Monday everyone is having even though none of their trials rise above irritation. There’s no shadow of any real tragedy — just the annoyance of plans going awry.

What I really love about the film, though, is the views of the Warsaw of the early 1970s. Just a quarter of a century after the Second World War, much of the city is still under construction, and what has been completed has the look of 60s communist architecture that was still prevalent in Warsaw when I arrived in 1996.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M2386VX0Po

Papa decided he’d watch the film with us. “There are no subtitles,” we warned him, but he wasn’t fazed. We explained critical dialogue, but most of it really didn’t require a whole lot of explaining.

The Boy disagreed. “I don’t get any of the funny parts, even when you explain them,” he fussed.

Perhaps he’ll find the next one we’ve planned a little more enjoyable: the classic Sami Swoi. We found it on Netflix DVDs, which means it will have subtitles. “Kargul, podejdź no do płota!”

Day 54: That Old House

Friday 8 May 2020

I passed that old house just about every day, especially when I first arrived in Lipnica and made daily trips to the post office to mail a letter. It had been abandoned long before I arrived. An ancient, traditional home, made entirely of wood, it was a jarring contrast to most of the other homes constructed of concrete block. I seldom passed it without wondering what it would take to restore it and if anyone would even be interested.

The location was less than ideal, though. Just beside it was the old communist-era bar with a large area above it that had been converted into a discotheque. Every Saturday night, there were dozens and dozens of people milling about with loud techno music that would have been impossible to shut out. Often one could see a couple just around the back corner locked in an embrace or a line of young men leaning against the long wall of the home facing the bar, smoking and laughing loudly.

Still, growing up in suburbia, I found the old house utterly enchanting. Nothing in the neighborhood where I grew up was older than a couple of decades. The houses were cookie-cutter similar: directly across the street from our house was a house built from the identical plan, which had been flipped to create a mirror image of our home. To the left of our house was a home with an identical floor plan with minor exterior design changes. To the left of that house was still the same house a third time. That same house was scattered throughout the neighborhood — at least a dozen more times, I’m sure.

I doubt anyone would worry much about the loss of such a house from a historic point of view. Certainly, it would be a great tragedy for the house to be destroyed while it was still in use, but had it been sitting unoccupied for decades, most would probably consider its removal a positive development.

Taking down a house like this, though, and so very unceremoniously, seemed to me, an outsider, to be almost sacrilegious. We are such a young country, the United States, that something that’s a century-and-a-half old is of automatic interest and significance for anyone with a sense of history.

In the end, I never learned what became of all the timber from that house. It lay stacked in haphazard piles by the road for several months and then disappeared. I heard from someone that the owner of the old house had burned it for winter warmth.

That somehow makes it both more and less tragic.

Tearing Down History

Stories

Day 53: Changes

Thursday 7 May 2020

Schedule

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from my principal. It read, in part,

We are working on the schedule for next year, and I wanted to run something by you. In an effort to simplify people’s assignments and avoid teachers having 3 preps, we are looking at the possibility of you teaching all of the English 1 sections. […] My one hesitation is that 4 sections of E1H is a lot for one person. A lot to grade and be responsible for.

English I Honors is indeed a handful. Each class is about 30 students usually, and whereas 60-65% of students in English 8 turn in a given assignment, it’s something like 90% in English I. Many English 8 students often have issues with time management and apathy, so it’s rare for a student in those classes to turn in all assignments in a given quarter. English I is exactly the opposite thought: it’s rare to have more than two or three students in a given class not turn in a given assignment.

Another element adding to the E1 workload is the simple fact that, compared to English 8, it’s two classes combined into one: reading and writing are separated into two classes for English 8, and I have always taught the reading/literature portion. English I isn’t, so I have to teach both, which means a lot of writing to assess.

So I was hesitant to accept such an offer. At the same time the idea of working with students who have almost no serious behavior problems, who are all working hard most of the time, who all see the value of education, is pretty hard to resist.

My other concern was regarding the fact that having all the English 1 classes would mean Mrs. H, the other English I teacher, would have none. I knew how she enjoyed teaching that class, and if the tables were turned, I would not want to give up English 1 even for the tempting offer of having only one prep. I expressed my concerns to the principal, and he, in turn, discussed those concerns with Mrs. H. It turned out that for her, the thought of having only one prep was indeed enticing enough to give up English I. In fact, she was somewhat worried about the workload that I would be facing, and she emailed me about those concerns. Receiving this email and having assurances from my principal that Mrs. H would not feel as if I were somehow taking these classes away from her (because that’s how I felt: if I to take these classes, that means she loses them, and I can always say no), I agreed to take the 4 English I classes.

Yesterday the official master schedule for the 2020-2021 school year was released.

And there I am back-to-back-to-back-to-back English 1 classes.

I’m happy about this for a number of reasons, not the least of which that I will have very few behavior issues to deal with. It’s also a great joy to work with students of actually do want to learn and you actually do put forth their best effort on a consistent basis.

On the other hand, working with a class that includes a significant number of at-risk students has its own rewards. I often feel I have the opportunity to teach them even more important skills like anger management, delayed gratification, empathy, impulse control, and appropriate self-efficacy.

The change will be significant. The increased workload will be noticeable. The rewards? Well, it is indeed a trade-off.

The Fort

L decided today that she wanted to get involved in the fort.

“You guys did the hardest part,” she said, “But still — I want to help.”

She brought an interior design eye to the project, bringing ground covering (old towels), decorations (old silk flowers), entertainment (books, a chess board, and more), and snacks.

Day 52: A Fort of Sympathy

Wednesday 6 May 2020

The Fort

Work continued this evening on the fort. We needed some more bamboo canes, so we headed over to our neighbor’s stand of canes and selected four after school was over. By the time we got them back on our property, it was nearly dinner (school for me went really late today), and it was raining, making it impossible to continue working.

After dinner, though…

The process has been one of evolution. We start with a design idea, discover it works, continue for a while, then have another idea. We try to incorporate it into the old idea; it sometimes works; it often doesn’t. We see if a third idea will bond the two original ideas a little more firmly. And so on.

E is discovering that the men who do all the primitive building on YouTube are in fact deserving of quotes: “primitive” building, for there’s nothing primitive about it except the tools they’re using. I could have tried to explain that to the Boy, but I don’t think it would have convinced him. Working on it himself, though, has certainly done that.

Sympathy

I went for a run this evening. It’s been a while. I get in these phases that I feel certain that a fitter, healthier G is just within reach: I simply have to get a regular exercise routine going and monitor what I snack on (or eliminate it altogether). It’s easy — nothing at all to it. And then I put the Boy to bed and find that I almost fell asleep with him and reason, “I’m already almost asleep. It would be a shame to waste it.” Or I just decided a glass of wine and some chess online is a better way to spend my time. Or occasionally (this is a cycle I’ve been going through for about 18 months now), I get this routine going and then some injury or previous pain flares up and I have to stop running for a week or more, and my motivation is back to where it usually is, which is to say near zero.

So I went out for a first run in probably two weeks, cueing up my running soundtrack on Spotify. The first song shuffled out: Beck’s “Devil’s Haircut.” I wasn’t in the mood for it, so I swiped on to the next song: the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” (One run, Spotify played “Sympathy for the Devil” followed by Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil,” and concluding with “Devil’s Haircut.” A more superstitious person would read something into that.) The second verse began, and it got me thinking:

And I was ’round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate

It reminded me of the scene in Mel Gibson’s take on the passion story. During Jesus’s scourging, a very androgynous Satan crying a child who looks surprisingly old walks through the crowd, looking as if he’s somehow winning a victory by having Jesus crucified.

In both these examples, and in general Christian thought, Satan is presented as having had a part in influencing humans to kill Jesus. But why in the world would he do that if Christian claims that Jesus was foretold for millennia? Christian theology teaches that through the crucifixion, Jesus somehow defeated Satan and ultimately saved our souls, and that this plan was in place from the Fall in Eden.

That is kind of confusing as well: if God is omnipotent, he knew that was coming, and so it was part of the plan to begin with. But if it was part of the plan to begin with, it seems like a bad plan, as if the failure implicit in the Fall is integral to the whole scheme. Which means we were made to fail. Odd plan, that.

At any rate, I was wondering why Satan is always shown to be crafty and yet an idiot at the same time. Evangelical views make Satan even more of an idiot: he’s going to try to overthrow God in Armageddon, yet he’s doomed to fail. All Evangelicals know this. It’s preached every Sunday. And yet somehow Satan, a being who is supposedly so much more powerful than humans in every way imaginable, doesn’t know about this.

More questions about the devil: why would he torture people in hell? Wouldn’t he want to reward them for choosing him over God? Wouldn’t he make it a paradise to rival Christian views of heaven just to thumb his nose at God? He’s literally an instrument of God’s punishment in the Christian view, yet he has free will and hates God. Why in the world would he be God’s pawn like that? That’s the whole reason he got tossed out of heaven in the Christian story.

And that’s another thing: how did this war in heaven happen? How do spirits battle? Wars have to do with one thing: inflicting more death and carnage on your enemy than he can on you. How in the world would immortal spirits fight then? It just doesn’t make any sense. Maybe that’s why we should have sympathy for the devil: in the grand scheme of things, he’s just a schmuck doing God’s dirty work in punishing souls who reject God. What a crappy job.

So I was jogging along, all these thoughts bouncing about in my head, and it struck me that perhaps that’s as good an argument as any against going for a run: I roll about in silly, useless speculation…

Day 51: Seeing Anew

Tuesday 5 May 2020

Atticus Finch — what a hero. What a fantastic lawyer. That’s what we all walk away thinking the first time we read To Kill a Mockingbird. We read his cross-examination of Bob and Mayella Ewell and think, “He did a really good job establishing Tom’s innocence,” and can’t understand how Tom could be found guilty– though we can understand it because it’s Depression-era Alabama.

The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence to the effect that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place. It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross-examination, but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant.

Nailed it — keep hammering on the fact that no doctor was called, Atticus.

She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man. Not an old Uncle, but a strong young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards.

Her father saw it, and the defendant has testified as to his remarks. What did her father do? We don’t know, but there is circumstantial evidence to indicate that Mayella Ewell was beaten savagely by someone who led almost exclusively with his left. We do know in part what Mr. Ewell did: he did what any God-fearing, persevering, respectable white man would do under the circumstances—he swore out a warrant, no doubt signing it with his left hand, and Tom Robinson now sits before you, having taken the oath with the only good hand he possesses—his right hand.

There it is — that brilliant evidence that someone lefthanded inflicted the bruises on the right side of Mayella’s face. Tom’s left arm was mangled in a cotton gin when he was young — he couldn’t have done it. Case closed.

And then that impassioned closing:

Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal, a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the Executive branch in Washington are fond of hurling at us. There is a tendency in this year of grace, 1935, for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious—because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe—some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others—some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.

But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.

I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty.

What a perfect defense! What insight! What an amazing job defending a man in a hopeless situation!

That’s what we think when we’re not lawyers, though. But what about a trial lawyer who’s had twenty years’ experience in the courtroom? Someone who’s represented defendants against charges of rape and murder?

During the 2018/2019 school year

Every year, as the kids finish up Mockingbird, I have Jim Bannister, a local defense attorney, come in and walk the kids through the details of the trial and evidence. He’s been doing this presentation for some years, ever since a friend’s daughter read the book. The friend asked him what he thought of Atticus’s defense and, not having read the book since middle school, Bannister reread the chapters dealing with the trial.

“I would have handled things a little differently,” he remarked. “To be fair,” he’s always added when talking to the kids, “Atticus seems to be a tax and/or estate lawyer, so he was not in his area of specialization at all.” Still, he helps the kids see the mountains of evidence that Atticus could have brought into the trial that doesn’t even get a mention.

The most damning evidence does appear in the book, but Atticus doesn’t push it hard enough: no doctor was ever called.  This means there’s no evidence that the crime even took place. But there’s so much more than that.

What about clothing the accused and supposed victim were wearing? How could Tom, who’s left arm is all but useless, hold down Mayella as she claimed, take off his clothes, take off her clothes, and rape her while using only one arm? It doesn’t make sense — it’s physically impossible.

What about defensive wounds on Tom? Mayella said she fought him “tooth and nail.” There should have been scratches all over Tom’s face.

What about the window through which Bob says he saw the rape in progress? Earlier in the book, the Ewell house is described and we discover that there’s cheesecloth over the windows instead of glass panes. How clean was that cheesecloth? How much could Bob actually see?

And if his daughter was being raped and all that stood between him and the rapist was a bit of cheesecloth over a window no more than three feet above the ground, why didn’t he dive through the window and attack Tom? Instead, he claims he witnesses the rape in the front room and runs around the entire shotgun house and enters through the back door.

All these were failures on the part of Heck Tate, the sheriff, who did absolutely no investigation at all. “I would tear him apart on the stand,” Bannister laughs.

For me, though, the most jaw-dropping piece of evidence was a little gem hidden in Tom’s account of the event.

“Mr. Finch, I was wonderin’ why it was so quiet like, an‘ it come to me that there weren’t a chile on the place, not a one of ’em, and I said Miss Mayella, where the chillun?”

Tom’s black velvet skin had begun to shine, and he ran his hand over his face.

“I say where the chillun?” he continued, “an‘ she says—she was laughin’, sort of—she says they all gone to town to get ice creams. She says, ‘took me a slap year to save seb’m nickels, but I done it. They all gone to town.’”

Tom’s discomfort was not from the humidity. “What did you say then, Tom?” asked Atticus.

“I said somethin‘ like, why Miss Mayella, that’s right smart o’you to treat ’em. An‘ she said, ’You think so?‘ I don’t think she understood what I was thinkin’—I meant it was smart of her to save like that, an‘ nice of her to treat em.”

Why in the world didn’t Atticus call to the stand that ice cream salesman?! Everybody in the town knows the Ewells; everyone knows how poor they are. To see all seven of them come traipsing up with nickels in hand to buy ice cream would have been a once-in-a-lifetime, always-remember-it moment.

So he comes every year to lead students through these pieces of evidence, suggesting at the outset that they pretend like he’s the lead attorney and they are his paralegals, investigators, and co-attorneys. “Let’s see if we can’t put together a better defense for Tom Robinson.”

Except he couldn’t come this year for all the obvious reasons. Yet when I asked him if he’d be willing to give it a shot on Google Meet, he didn’t hesitate: “What dates are we looking at?”

And so he sat in his study and led several of my students through a discussion via Google Meet, and my eighth-grade vice principal (well, she will be next year after our current, much-loved vice principal retires) popped in eagerly when I told her what we were planning.

Despite the frustration of the lockdown, it was a good day to be a teacher.

The Day’s Adventures

The Boy has wanted to build a bamboo structure of some sort for some time now. He had in his mind a large and grand structure, perhaps with a swimming pool beside it and a diving platform coming out of the second story.

Heading down to play in the creek after “school”

Today, I suggested a little more modest structure: “We could simply use the corner of our fence and Mr. F’s fence and build it there.

Looking for minnows

And so we went out into the stand of bamboo growing in Mr. F’s back yard (more or less — not really sure of property lines there) and took a few canes.

Dew-laden web, photo by the Girl

We stripped off the small branches on which grow the leaves, cut them to length,

dug a few holes, and we had our basic frame. A little more work and we had a functional structure.

A good day to be a dad.

Day 50: Death In the Creek?

Monday 4 May 2020

During the warmer months, the creek that runs through the backyards of our street becomes a frequent destination for us. Of late, this has been because of the minnows that flourish in the small stream.

I find myself wondering how in the world the little fish survive. What do they eat? According to one site, “Bluntnose minnows eat algae, aquatic insect larvae, diatoms, and small crustaceans called entomostracans.” I don’t know if these are bluntnose minnows, but that was the first thing Google turned up when I asked, “what do minnows in streams eat.” That makes sense.

Their presence also solves another mystery: what do the snapping turtles in the creek eat? That and frogs, I guess.

We were in the creek three times today. The first was in the morning, a session that included a bit of minnow netting and some bamboo harvesting.

The Boy has been watching videos on YouTube showing young men in some south Asian country (Malaysia? Indonesia?) who dig vast underground spaces or build impressive bamboo houses using only the most primitive of tools and resources. He has decided that he wants to do the same. This morning, then, we cut down a couple of bamboo canes for this project. The Boy wanted to get more, but I put him off, hoping his obsession with this project would wane a bit when he realized it’s impossibility for a seven-year-old boy. Still, I want to encourage him to try, hence today’s harvest.

After we took down the canes, it was time for a little minnowing. The Boy as a curious and amusing approach that seems counterintuitive but works: he sneaks up to where the minnows are gathering, then leaps into the water, thrusting the net in before him and waving it about violently in the water.

It seems like it would never work, but it does.

Occasionally, the minnows have caused a bit of consternation in the house. The first minnows he caught spent the night in a Mason jar on the kitchen counter. When K went down in the morning, one of the two minnows was floating on the surface of the water. Not wanting to risk the other’s life, K took the jar and sprinted down to the creek to release the survivor.

This prompted a new rule: minnows can be held in captivity until bedtime. When the Boy comes up for his bedtime ritual, the minnows need to be back in their own habitat. That worked for a couple of days until yesterday, when one of the minnows leaped out of the jar as it sat on the deck, flopped about on the deck board, then slipped in between two boards to its death in the leaves and chaos that exists under our deck.

“Minnow murderer!” the Girl exclaimed.

So now the jar stays in the house and minnows are released only moments after they’re caught.

Today, though, we discovered much more than minnows. During our afternoon session, we decided to head to the waterfall that’s just upstream. This means a short jaunt through the woods, approaching the stream from above. E started out toward the rocks and then suddenly started yelling.

“Daddy! Daddy! Come quick! It’s a snake! A snake! And it’s eating!” There was excitement and fear in his voice: he loves snakes, but he’s terrified of the thought of encountering a venomous one. He seems to think they’re conscious of their deadly venom and somewhat maleficent to boot. “What if they just chase me down and attack me?”

I try to reassure him when he says things like that, and today was no different: “Buddy, to him, you’re a huge, terrifying monster!”

“But how? They’re packed with venom.”

“They don’t know that.”

“They don’t?!” The Boy was having trouble comprehending that. How can a snake be so deadly and yet not realize its power?

I’m no snake expert to say the least, but I was fairly sure it wasn’t a venomous snake. The eyes, the shape of the head, its markings. But what about those markings? They’re awfully close to a cottonmouth’s markings except the dark triangles rest fat side on the belly of the snake — the whole pattern of this snake inverted.

Still, no need to take chances. We left the snake to its dinner and headed home.

I did a little research when we got home and came to the tentative conclusion that it might be a plain-bellied water snake, which is not venomous. Still, it got me thinking: what if it had been a cottonmouth and the Boy was bitten? Cottonmouths don’t have venom that kills humans, but it can make one very sick. But what about a little boy? We’ve tromped about those rocks where the snake was eating dinner countless times.

Explaining

It was another one of those realizations that threats lurk around us constantly and we’re mostly unaware of them. Our current global reality is a reminder that we are far from the top dogs on the planet in a number of ways, and yet we’re the only species that could burn the whole thing to a radioactive cinder.

While I was cooking dinner over an open flame in our new fire pit, I listened to The Scarlet Letter again, and once again, an echo of the day:

Much of the marble coldness of Hester’s impression was to be attributed to the circumstance, that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone in the world,—alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected,—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable,—she cast away the fragments of a broken chain. The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged—not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode—the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door.

Two hundred years had passed from the events of the book to the narration of the book, and in the meantime, the country had grown a little less Puritanical and a little more tolerant. Hawthorne seems to see some hope in this. Perhaps we all should

Day 49: Honking Adventure

Sunday 3 May 2020

Today was a somewhat low-key day. We went for a walk or two; we did a little work around the house; K led an in-house Mass substitute for the kids. But overall, it was a very lazy day.

In the morning, I took E on a walk with the dog. Well, I was planning on going alone, but he tagged along anyway. I was glad to have him.

“I want to hear the car honking!” he proclaimed, so we went back to the neighborhood where I’d heard it last week.

“Why do they do that?” he asked.

Why indeed. What’s the point of all those “amens” and “hallelujahs”? I think it has to do with social bonding. It’s like Catholics kneeling and standing and praying together, like Miloszcz said. I wanted to say, “It makes them feel good,” but I didn’t. And it probably isn’t all that simple, either.

Clover’s new ball

After the walk, I took care of a couple of little tasks left over from yesterday. I use construction adhesive to connect the landscaping timbers on which I mounted the composter to solid concrete blocks to give it a bit more weight. I wanted to make sure that, if when another flood washes through the backyard, the composter will stay put. (I also set it behind two trees, which will help break the flow of the water.) I used the rest of the adhesives on the fire pit, gluing pairs of bricks together to make it a little more solid but not completely permanent. (To be sure, I have no idea how long the adhesive can handle the heat in the fire pit before failing, so it might have been a waste of time. Still, I didn’t have anything else to do with the remaining adhesive.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl’s eyes, and her face, as she glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr. Dimmesdale’s, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.

He looks up toward the heavens, and we know what will happen: he will see something; he will hear something; he will have some revelation. What’s startling is the narrator’s take on this:

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows, seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of this nature.

From a modern perspective, what’s most interesting is the little side comment in the opening lines: “in those days.” Were the people of Hawthorne’s day any different? Are we any different? After all, it was the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet that led 39 people to take their own lives.

Which is a volleyball, much to L’s delight

It’s really one of the many God-of-the-gaps situations: we don’t understand this, therefore God. At some point, earthquakes or comets were the antecedents, the “this” which we don’t understand. Science comes along, explains it, closes one gap, and believers searching for evidence of God’s existence move on to other gaps. The complexity of DNA and the seeming impossibility of cosmology are the biggest gaps now, and they will not likely be closed for some time. Will science ever unravel those mysteries? I don’t know. I’m not worried about it. As someone put it, I would rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question.

Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the colored, magnifying, and distorting medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people’s doom upon. The belief was a favorite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar intimacy and strictness.

This problem is at the heart of all religious revelation: Joseph Smith discovered the plates that he translated into the Book of Mormon all by himself; Muhammed received his revelation alone, in a cave; Moses saw the burning bush all by himself; Mary was all by herself when the angel appeared. These revelations that started large religions later developed ways to deal with the problem that Hawthorne mentions (there were individuals who signed affidavits that they had seen Smith’s golden plates in person, for example). The smaller revelations, which lead to smaller followings, don’t: David Koresh alone heard God’s voice. At that point, short of working miracles, how do such people convince followers?

But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate!

Some people go further than this: David Pack, leader of a little sect of a few hundred to a couple of thousand followers, literally sees himself prophesied in the Bible. As such, he says things like “I have to be the most hated man on the planet,” which he claims in one of his sermons.

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter,—the letter A,—marked out in lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil of cloud; but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in it.

So it’s remarkable to me that Nathaniel Hawthrone, writing The Scarlet Letter 170 years ago, created such commentary. And I wonder what he would have to say about contemporary Evangelical worship, with its rock-concert feels and amen-ing. And what he would have thought about nearly-sequestered worshippers replacing it with claxons.

First fire in new firepit

Day 48: Scarlet Projects

Saturday 2 May 2020

This morning I had a little epiphany that I should have had months ago: “I’ll bet there are lots of audiobooks on Spotify.” I know — an obvious thought I should have had long ago, but I am sometimes a little slow on the up-take. I did a quick search and discovered that almost any classic one could imagine is there. Shouldn’t have been a surprise.

A month or so ago, I’d pulled from the bookshelf a novel I’ve been wanting on and off to re-read since college, The Scarlet Letter. I hadn’t really liked it a lot then, and I liked it even less in high school, but I reasoned that, being twenty-five years older than when I’d last read it, I might see something more in it.

For one thing, it’s been a different read because I finally made it through the opening section, “The Custom House.” When we read it in college, we were supposed to read that seemingly disconnected introduction but I didn’t. Today, I listened to it while I worked on our broken smoke, cleaning off the base blocks before screwing down the barrel that serves as the body of the smoker and then covering all the base in concrete. The job took about an hour and a half because I spent some time trying to pry off the leaking quick-connector on the hose before mixing the concrete, to no avail; the intro itself took considerably longer to complete.

And what of “The Custom House”? It’s a fictionalized attempt at making the story seem authentic by making it something of a found-footage type novel (mixing media there, I know). Was that novel (no pun in intended)? I really don’t know.

When the novel began, I was back in familiar territory. I’d initially forgotten about that opening, with the rose outside the jail door, but once that portion began, it was like hearing a long-forgotten-but-once-loved song again after twenty years:

[O]n one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,—or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,—we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to[53] issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

While I was working on the smoker, the Boy was working to remove the last bit of flaking paint from the bench we brought from Nana’s and Papa’s to use by our firepit.

I went inside to get the drill and impact driver and by the time I came back out, he’d disappeared.

“It’s too hard!” he exclaimed. I think he understood that I expected him to get all the paint off.

By the time I was ready to work on the next project of the day, the novel was introducing its heroine, Hester Prynne.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,—so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,—was that Scarlet Letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

The scarlet letter is a double symbol: it is a symbol to the characters in the novel of Hester’s sin and depravity as well as a symbol for Hester herself of her resistance. For readers, it’s both these things, but it also represents the hypocrisy of Puritans, among other things.

At this point, I’m about halfway through the novel, though completely through the day’s projects (as is L). More thoughts coming later, I’m sure.

Day 47: Quartets and Cars

Friday 1 May 2020

Quartets

This afternoon, while cleaning up the kitchen, putting away groceries, and just generally puttering around the house, I discovered a BBC culture podcast that talks about, among other things, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a cycle of four poems that have, from the very first time I encountered them during my freshman year in college, utterly enthralled me. Naturally, I listened to it; naturally, halfway through, I was rooting around in the bookcase where we store such books for my thin volume of the poems.

Some passages of those poems seem pulled from the very fabric of existence itself, so fully do they capture the experience of being a finite human. In “Burnt Norton,” the first of the poems, Eliot writes of the frailty of the one thing that links us humans one to another: language.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

I read those lines in college at a time when I was growing very distrustful of language having been in a relationship that I ended largely because I felt like the young lady was lying incessantly, for no reason whatsoever. Was it compulsive lying? Was it even always conscious lying? Was it even lying? I could never figure that out, but I learned I couldn’t trust her, and when that happens, there’s only one thing to do.

The second poem in the cycle, “East Coker,” returns to this motif:

So here I am, […]
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

“Is he reading my mind?” I thought. The poem seemed to be a summary of my growing interest in the idea of language itself. Such a strange thing — it’s the only thing we have that connects us to other people, yet it’s such a fragile connection, so easily manipulated and bent.

The Buried Car

This evening, as I was reading the poems again after dinner, the Boy brought me a little car he’d found buried in the backyard.

“I found it buried in Mommy’s flowers,” he explained.

“It was my car,” I said, wondering if he would remember that it had been among the mass of cars that Nana had saved from my childhood just to give to a grandchild.

“Really?!” He couldn’t believe it. “Why did you bury it out there?”

It’s so rare that we can see someone’s entire faulty thinking process from just one sentence, the entire line of thought backing up neatly, step by step, until the whole story is clear, and it was so different from reality. That was such a moment. I knew I could utterly perplex him with one short sentence.

“I didn’t bury it out there; you did.”

I could almost hear the gears clicking. He wrinkled his brow, cast his eyes upward, and his breathing quickened. “I did?”

Back to Eliot — the very next lines:

And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I had not really lost the car; he had not really gained it. He discovered something that he himself had owned, had played with, had possibly even treasured.

“Yes, you must have been playing with it when Mommy was working out in the flowers and you accidentally left it there. Or maybe you even buried it on purpose, and you just don’t remember.” More thinking.

“I did?”

“Yes.” And I could even imagine how it happened: E, with more than a handful of cars, following K around as she planted flowers or pulled weeds, never willing to let her get very far away from her, picking up everything to follow closely behind.

Nana told me I was the same way. Probably, we all are.

“You must have been playing with it when Mommy was working in the flowers.”

He shrugged, not convinced, still wondering, I think, how I knew it was mine. “Was it one of your favorites?”

True, I think I can remember when I got that car, which means an event likely forty years ago. When we went to our church’s annual fall retreat, we had two-hour church services every day. To keep me quiet when I was a child, Nana and Papa gave me a new Matchbox car every day at the start of the service. I believe that’s where this one comes from. But it could simply be that I just remember playing with that old car.

Are there any of my old toys I wouldn’t recognize? I rather doubt it in a way. Toys are so precious to children — at least they were to me and to my own children — that they form an integral part of our identities. Like the music we listen to as adolescents, the toys we love as children reflect our interest and how we see ourselves.

I didn’t tell him all that, though. Too much back story, and so much of it so very different from the reality the Boy experiences.

“Two-hour church every day?! Why would you do that?” I can hear him ask. Why, indeed.

Back to the Quartets, this time, from “Little Gidding”:

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.

It’s attachment to things that makes us remember those toys, I guess, and the sense that they are part of us — thus, attachment to self.