Nana died on Memorial Day in 2019, which was May 27 that year. This year, however, it’s four days later. So the two-year anniversary of her passing was on Thursday, but today was the day we felt it. We spent some time this morning at her grave, cleaning her bench/marker, reminescing.
We spent the evening with friends.
The day began with a ride. It was unplanned in every way imaginable: we hadn’t planned on going for a ride today, and when we decided to go, we really didn’t make a plan where we would go. We simply got on our bikes and started riding. The only criterion: “I want to go somewhere we’ve never been,” the Boy said.
We started out going to a little neighborhood about two miles from our house that includes a really significant climb. When we finished, we were close to the back route that I take to work, which leads right by Nana’s and Papa’s old place.
“Want to ride to Nana’s and Papa’s old place?” I suggested.
“Sure.”
And so we headed over to the old townhouse. We explored here and there coming back, and in the end, discovered we’d been gone for two hours and had ridden over 27 kilometers.
In the afternoon, we went to Polish Mass. After this particular Mass, though, the Polish community gathered for the first time for a little socializing.
The mothers got roses for Polish Mother’s Day, which was this week.
And naturally, there were speeches and singing.
I’ve said it often before: you can’t get a bunch of Poles together and not expect a speech.
At the end of every school year, I have students write letters to the rising eighth graders who will have me in English.
“Don’t lie, and don’t exaggerate too much,” I tell them, “but I want you to give them advice and scare them. Just a bit.”
I also use excerpts from these letters on my class website, Our English Class.
Some of the excerpts I selected:
To read these things makes me feel that I finally have reached the goal as a teacher I have always sought: to be demanding but fair; to be challenging but just.
It’s been two years since our school held an awards night. This year we held a drive-by awards night.
The swim team worked on backstroke today. The Boy was fairly confident that he’d mastered backstroke until he had to swim a full 25-yard lap of it.
He struggled. Mightily.
And then they had to swim back.
And then they repeated it.
By the last lap, each stroke was little more than plopping his arm behind his head and pulling a little bit. It was heartbreaking to watch because he was so far behind everyone else. He’d do a couple of strokes, stop, and turn around to see where he was. Then he’d repeat it.
But he never stopped. He never gave up. He kept plugging away at it until he’d made it to the wall.
“Work on backstroke” I added to my list of notes for when we go to the pool as a family for the first time.
E has joined a swim team at a local pool, primarily because his three best buddies from school have joined the same team. I am naturally thrilled because competitive swimming was an important part of my life. I began swimming competitively in elementary school when I competed for the small community pool to which we belonged.
In high school, the swim team was my only athletic endeavor. I certainly would not have gone out for football or basketball, and while I ran track during my freshman year, an awful case of tendonitis made running more than a quarter of a mile excruciatingly painful: I quit after the first year. But swimming had always been kind to me, and even though I was always mildly frustrated that the swim team never got the kind of recognition that the basketball, football, or even baseball teams received, I would have continued swimming competitively even if the other swimmers and I were the only ones in the pool.
It’s not that I wanted to be seen as a jock — certainly not — but a little recognition for the amount of work we put into our sport would have been nice, I thought. We did have one occasion to bask in a little attention. It was during my junior or senior year, and the head swim coach arranged for some of the cheerleaders to come to support us. A cheerleader stood behind the starting blocks for the home swimmers and cheered us on from there. That I can’t remember whether it was my junior or senior year and that I am only partially certain they were standing behind the starting blocks to cheer us on (that just doesn’t seem right) show how relatively insignificant the event was for me, so I suppose I really didn’t care that much about that recognition.
For the most part, what I liked about swimming was its solitary nature. Except for relay events, swimming was just the swimmer in the water. Everything else seemed to dissolve into the muffled yelling of the few spectators — mainly parents, boyfriends, and girlfriends — who came out to support the team. To train or to compete, we didn’t need anything other than a body of water.
I also found that training had a certain meditative quality to it: back and forth and back and forth. One two three breath; one two three breath; one two three breath. Count the strokes in each lap. Count the breaths in each lap. Get a song going in your head and just let it run in cycles. I lost myself in swimming many times.
The Boy, though, is just beginning. He doesn’t have a good breathing pattern. He takes as many strokes as he can and then pulls his whole head out of the water to gulp air for a few seconds, then plunges his head back under and goes at it again. There are so many kid on the team (probably close to 30) that I doubt he’ll get much one-on-one stroke help, so I’ll have to do that as soon as school is out, and we start heading to the pool together on a regular basis.
He also stops swimming when he gets too tired. That means he swims the first length entirely. In the second length, he stops at the 15-foot red markers. After a few more lengths, he’s stopping almost midway.
“That’s when you’ve really got to push it,” I tell him. “You’ve got to ignore that pain and push through it. That is how you get stronger.”
It looks like we’ve got a summer goal cut out for us.
I’m not sure how it happened, but everyone — L, E, and K — took turns going through Nana’s old jewelry. It’s been stowed away in Papa’s room since they moved in two years ago, and I think it’s only now that they’ve gone through it.
The Boy returned to scouting this year after a year’s absence (or was it two?), this time joining a troop that includes his three best friends from school. He moved from Bear to WEBELOS (We’ll Be Loyal Scouts).
It was a strange scouting year, an abbreviated scouting year, due to covid, but we made it through, learned a thing or two, and most importantly, strengthened friendships.
As our last group of starters, we began some sentence diagramming today. Most classes spent about 15 minutes on it before moving to Great Expectations character presentations.
In school, I always felt a little like a freak because while everyone else was complaining about diagramming sentences in school, I enjoyed it. Taking a jumble of words and placing each one in its own slot to indicate its precise function in the sentence felt like drawing meaning and order out of what would otherwise be near chaos. Sentences are a jumble of words that we comprehend without giving it much thought (if we’re fluent), yet within that apparent jumble is a simplicity that we can demonstrate graphically, even if it is a bit tricky to find that order for some sentences. Other kids groaned and complained about it, but for me, each sentence I had to diagram was a little puzzle I could crawl inside with a tool belt and take the whole thing apart as if it were a toy the inner workings of which had entranced me for ages. I knew, though, that I could put the sentence all back together, and I didn’t have that kind of assurance when pulling apart toys.
Yet even today, there are a number of sentences that flummox my diagramming ability. Look at that last sentence, for example. Had I not originally written “when I was pulling apart toys” I wouldn’t have seen the subtle, almost-hidden clause in the revised “when pulling apart toys.”
It’s these little idiosyncrasies of language that I hope to help students discover by going over sentence diagramming with them as a starter these final days.
The Girl gets some recognition: “This person almost won [the most improved] award in tryouts.”
Although I haven’t listened to a Bible in a Year podcast in over a month now, I’m still following a couple of groups on social media. Every now and then, I’ll see something that interests me: someone expresses a doubt or a worry, and I immediately begin listing the ways people will try to help. Sometimes, I make my own comment.
Today I read,
Although I had a lot of children’s bibles growing up, went to catholic school, and go to Sunday church so I know the stories of the Bible for the most part – this is my first time really “reading” the Bible all the way through with BIAY.
And honestly – I’m struggling. Every day it just seems like one depressing story after the next. Every day it’s just horrifying tales, little Joy, and lists of names. Men being awful and women’s lives being ruined. […]
I decided to use the line of reasoning that’s not entirely true at this point in time but was true some months ago:
I had similar problems. So much of the awfulness comes with God’s tacit approval or, worse, at his command. I’ve taken a break, but it’s done serious damage to my faith.
Granted, I’ve rejected faith altogether (again), but I did go through this process. I was wondering (again) how people would respond. Typically, there are a few responses to “Oh, that gory stuff in the Old Testament is troublesome.”
Eric jumped right in with the tried and true “just because it’s in the Bible doesn’t mean acceptance” argument, almost word for word:
Assuming the existence of tacit approval is a dangerous move to make. It assumes that because a bad thing is recounted, it is recounted with approval, but that’s just not how biblical texts are written. I’m sorry to hear your faith is wounded, but rest assured God does not approve of immoral actions, even when He brings good out of them.
This reply always frustrates me because it misses the point. I’m not saying that the immoral behavior of various characters is troubling: I’m saying the immoral actions and commands of God are troubling. I replied:
Just look at all the awful punishments he commanded. Look at the genocides he commanded. That goes well beyond tacit approval.
His response? The classic “God said to do it, so that makes it acceptable” line. He didn’t ask me directly “Who are you to judge God,” but it was implicit:
OK so for those, did people other than God make those commands, or was it God, who after all does decide, every day, who lives and who dies? If I commanded that, or my national leader, that would be wrong, but when God commands punishment of people that are very clearly morally in the wrong, isn’t that the one time it’s OK?
It’s important to point out that according to this theory, the only thing that Islamic suicide bombers got wrong was the god. The reasoning behind what they’re doing is sound: God commands it; that makes it right.
Still, I didn’t go that line. I simply asked, “To punish by stoning?”
At this point, Eva jumped in:
God had to do a cleansing, just as he will when Jesus comes again. After all the evil in the world God still gave his son for our salvation. How much more can we ask of God? The world is lucky God is making the decision not mortal man because I as a human would have given up on humans a long time ago.
“God had to do a cleansing” sounds an awful lot like “God had to do an ethnic cleansing,” and that’s because it’s exactly what he does in the Bible. He commands the Israelites to wipe out whole nations. The Bible says it’s because they’re so immoral, but that just sounds like propaganda to me. Add to it the fact that there’s no evidence any of this immorality that keeps appearing in apologist arguments (namely, that the Canaanites burned their children alive as offerings to Ba’al). There’s simply a claim in scripture, which sounds a lot like after-the-fact justification.
Eric also replied, using another of the popular arguments: it’s a gradual movement to a more moral society:
Remember that God was leading his people gradually to an end point. The original moral framework He gave was just the 10 commandments. But when Moses came down Mt. Sinai and the people had sinned, God gave more laws—a lot more. And those extra laws are the ones that contain more age-specific laws that we rightly shake our heads at today.
Jesus himself made this exact point when he said that Moses had allowed things like divorce, it was not b/c that’s how things should be, but b/c that’s what the people were capable of at the time, but it was not always so and hence that’s not the rule now. Laws and commands for a people in 1000BC were tailored by God for them at that time. They weren’t His vision for How Society Should Work; they part of a larger plan for guidance, so they only needed to be Better Than What Came Before. Case in point: the lex talionis “an eye for an eye”. This sounds terrible compared to today, but the comparison we should make is with what proceeded it. “An eye for an eye” was *limiting* revenge to something approaching proportionality. And so on with other decrees of the law of Moses. You absolutely have to judge them in comparison to the societies Israel was surrounded by.
I’m sorry, but stoning someone is not a moral step up from anything. I can’t think of anything that would rank below that. Still, it shows how people fall back on familiar tropes to justify the unjustifiable because the alternative (rejecting the Bible, even in part) is utterly unthinkable.
He’s been begging for it for ages now.
“I really want an electric guitar!” became the Boy’smantra. Yet we were afraid that, like so many other interests, it might just fade away, so we told him to use L’s old pink guitar to show that he’s really interested in playing, committed to playing, disciplined enough for playing.
I’m not entirely sure he proved all those things, but he made a valiant effort. He learned a few chords (really mastering a couple of them) and got to where he could switch back and forth between them. He practiced chromatic scales to get single-string control along with finger sequencing. And he talked about it a lot.
Of course, he had a point: an electric guitar, with its lighter gauge strings, is easier to play than a steel-string acoustic. A nylon-string acoustic/classical guitar would be the easiest and the gentlest on his fingers, but he wanted an electric guitar. Passion is important, and he was passionate about this, and we want him to keep that passion.
We’ve played soccer in the front yard for countless hours. We’ve fired innumerable shots into our neighbors’ yards. We’ve retrieved every single ball, no matter where it’s gone. Until tonight. L’s shot went wide, sailed into the neighbors’ yard, rolled down the ditch, passed into the culvert, and disappeared, for his culvert doesn’t just pass under his driveway: it empties into a basin with another culvert and the drains into the creek behind our house. That basin is covered with an enormous concrete cover that we could not possibly move to retrieve the ball, so chances are, it’s gone.
That wouldn’t have been a big deal if it had been his old, beat-up, scratched, and scared ball. The ball we’ve kicked into the same neighbors’ yard countless times. But this was his new ball. His birthday gift ball. Which he got only on Friday.
He’s heartbroken about it.
Today, the Boy turned nine. It’s his last year in single digits, and we’re all wondering how we got to this point so quickly. That’s the same old story every birthday, though.
This year, most of the gifts from us are soccer-based: a new ball and new nets. He and the Girl tried them out after dinner.
Happy Mess Day
Second Time Around
Third Party
Celebration Day
Birthday
Fifth Birthday Party
Sports and Ice Cream
Seventh Birthday
On May 11, Governor McMaster issued an Executive Order to provide a mask opt-out process for families, and this in conflict with pandemic recommendations from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SCDHEC), the CDC, as well as state and local medical health systems. In other words, our Republican governor, an attorney by training, has decided that he knows better than agencies filled with pulmonologists, epidemiologists, virologists, and other public health experts. It’s a fairly typical Republican, science-doubting response, I think. If Republican scientific ignorance and skepticism doesn’t kill us one way, it will kill us another.
This all happened at the same time the GOP removed Liz Cheney from her leadership position because she had the audacity to recognize reality regarding the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the Capitol. In doing so, the GOP essentially ceased to exist and the GQP took its place, substituting Qanon conspiracy theories for common sense and trading fealty to a narcissist for the rule of law.
These two events make it clear: the Republican party, as it currently exists today, is in fact an existential danger to our republic. They are not only willing but eager to welcome back into the highest office a man who encouraged a seditious attack against his own country. They have chosen fealty to a man who puts himself above the common good of the country time and time again over the constitution and the rule of law. They have chosen to rally around a man who could, without much hyperbole, be labeled a traitor to his country.
It’s at this point that the parallels to Hitler actually start to come into shocking focus.
After leading a violent attempt to overthrow the government, he not only retained his leadership roll but in fact rallied many people around him. The antecedent of “he” in that sentence is, of course, Trump, but it is an equally accurate description of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. The only difference: at least Hitler did nine months’ time in prison.
How many kids would come to school with the required parental consent form and no mask? It was the question on my mind the whole way to school. The answer:
Eighty students out of 655 enrolled in person. That’s about 15%, which is the district average:
With 87 schools reporting, 7,877 students have opted out of the mask requirement, Waller said. That’s 15% of all Greenville County students. (Source)
And then today, the CDC says that vaccinated individuals can, it seems, go back to business as usual.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can forgo their masks and social distancing in many indoor situations.
“Today, CDC is updating our guidance for fully vaccinated people,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said Thursday at a White House COVID-19 briefing. “Anyone who is fully vaccinated, can participate in indoor and outdoor activities, large or small, without wearing a mask or physical distancing. If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic.”
It makes me wonder — will teachers be able to go back to maskless normalcy soon? And how exactly do I feel about that? I was fussing this morning to a colleague that our governor seemed to say “CDC be damned — we’re going our own way.”
“I will do what the CDC recommends,” I said.
And then today, the CDC relaxes the guidelines.