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Borders, 2013 — Part 2

Friday 14 February 2020 | 0 Comments

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

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

"Gdzie pan mieszka?" he asked.

"I live in Lipnica," I replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Borders, 2013 — Part 1

Carbs

Thursday 13 February 2020 | 0 Comments

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

"Eat a couple more bites of spaghetti," I said.

"But I ate all the meat!" he protested. "Now it's just carbs!"

"Well, you need some carbs, too."

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

Categories

Wednesday 12 February 2020 | 0 Comments

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

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

"She said no YouTube and no television," he confessed.

"Well, let's generalize that to 'no electronics' and say 'No,' okay?"

"Okay." A pause. I knew what was coming. "What's 'generalize'?"

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

"Fruit!"

And there we had it.

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

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

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

Progress

Tuesday 11 February 2020 | 0 Comments

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

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

Constantly.

No, constantly.

No, I mean constantly.

No, I really mean constantly.

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

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

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

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

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

"K, have you been making good choices today?"

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

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

"See? It wasn't that hard, was it?" I said.

"No, sir."

"And the whole conflict -- it just vanished instantly, didn't it?"

"Yes, sir," he smiled.

Next step: get him to repeat it. Often.

Discovery

Monday 10 February 2020 | 0 Comments

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 09 February 2020 | 0 Comments

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 08 February 2020 | 0 Comments

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 07 February 2020 | 0 Comments

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 06 February 2020 | 0 Comments

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 05 February 2020 | 0 Comments

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.