Matching Tracksuits

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Day 8: Rain

Monday 23 March 2020

It was supposed to rain all day today. It was also supposed to be a day off school today, which would have made the rain seem particularly dreary as we would probably have gone out and done something on this early spring day. Since this is the sixth day without school, it just felt like the new normal.

In the morning, while K was reading with E, I spent some time working on a couple of web sites I’m creating, one for a friend’s about-to-be-launched home organization company and the other an online guide for the church we usually attend (the parish built a new church just a few years ago). The virus, though, has put a damper on both projects: no one would start a business right now, and the church is closed.

Once I completed what I wanted to do, it was nearing lunch. And it was also about time that I help hang L’s pegboard that she got from Ikea two months ago. I don’t like to rush into anything. And I didn’t have the appropriate drywall anchors. And I kept forgetting to get them in Home Depot.

Of course, there had to be some playtime. The Boy and I worked with Legos: he built a car; I built a suspension bridge. When she saw it, K laughed that I should have been an architect. (Forget for a moment that it’s actually civil engineers who design bridges — I knew what she meant.)

“Actually, I did. For several years.” I took drafting in high school to that end. “But then I realized I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. And besides, if I’d gone that route, who knows if I would have ended up in Lipnica?” Which is to say, who knows if we would have met? A change in career choice determined who I married? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It’s impossible to say.

It’s that kind of dumb luck — or lack thereof — that has me worried now. Our family is largely isolating itself, but someone has to go to the store occasionally, as I did this morning. (Only one dozen eggs per customer, I learned at checkout.) How many asymptomatic people are walking around? We take precautions, but in the end, it’s just a crapshoot in a sense. Just like so many other things in life that seem inevitable, I suppose.

Finally, in the afternoon, it stopped raining for a while. The kids and I went out to walk the dog. In the evening, it seemed like it had stopped again, but by the time we’d gotten ready and headed outside, it had started misting again. And then stopped. And in crawled L, rollerblades still on, to tell us, “Come on! It’s stopped! Let’s go!”

Day 7: Sunday

Sunday 22 March 2020

With the diocese of Charleston making the decision to close all churches in the current emergency, today had a different feel from most Sundays and a somewhat different feel from the previous six days.

Previous six days? Has this only been going on a week? It was indeed a week ago that we learned the governor of South Carolina was closing all schools for the rest of the month, but I swear it feels like that was weeks ago. I know it’s been going on for several months now with the original outbreak in China, and while I’m tempted to go on a rant here about how much time we wasted between that initial outbreak in China and even a week ago when everything started shutting down all because our narcissistic shallow president views everything as if it’s about him and went so far as to call the pandemic a hoax at one of his rallies and still behaves as if this will all blow over because he’s now taking it seriously and pretending to put some resources into it — no, I’ll resist that urge and simply point out that it feels like it’s been longer than a week.

First, there was no church — no Mass at a church, that is. Second, there was church — something like it, a series of readings and a recorded homily that Kinga, the kids, and Papa did while I was out taking the dog for a walk. It just didn’t feel like a Sunday.

Is it possible that someone could look at this and understand how much exponentially worse it could get with a different virus with, say, a 60% death rate and understand that something like that could very well lurking in our future and still, understanding that a belief in God would necessitate an acceptance that God would have also created such a virus, it would have been in his plan, part of his mysterious ways — could someone hold all this in their head and still believe in a benevolent god? Thinking how relatively mild this is compared to what could be or even has been makes it all but impossible for me.

Another change: we got a new hot water heater installed today. We’ve been wanting to do it for some time, and I’ve had a feeling that our old heater was going to malfunction any day. The guys who did the installation for us — the guys who did the renovation of the carport, turning it into Papa’s room — were going to come next week, but with so much uncertainty, they decided to come today. We’re expecting a significant drop in our power bill as this was our last power-hungry appliance/system in our house. Changing the HVAC system cut our power bill by 30-50% (depending on the usage); this change should result in additional significant savings considering the heater dates from 1992 — the year after I graduated from high school.

Why am I so negative about all this? Why do I see only gray to any silver lining? It’s my eternal battle.

In the afternoon, the kids and I went out in the backyard to — guess — shoot. The dog does not like when we shoot as she gets stuck up on the deck for her own good…

E and I have figured out that if we fire toward something a little bit darker than the surrounding area, we can actually follow the flight of the bb, so we’ve taken to firing into the forest behind our neighbor’s house on occasion. We’ve also been trying to shoot from various positions in the yard, all of them significantly farther away from where we normally shoot. And we still take shots at the dog’s fetch ball because, well, why not?

After shooting, the Girl decided to bake a cake. The aesthetics were something like I would produce, but that comes with time. The taste is all that matters, and I think we all agreed: it was delicious.

Random day, random thoughts.

Day 6: A Realization

Saturday 21 March 2020

While working in the yard today, I got to thinking about the rumor I heard from a neighbor that the rest of the school year was going to be canceled, moved to online learning. I’d thought this myself, but hearing another person say it made it seem like less like one of the silly thoughts that sometimes rumble around my brain and more like a possible outcome.

What a sad realization then when I thought, “It’s a very real possibility that the last time I saw those kids was that Friday, just over a week ago now.” In some ways, this has been my favorite group of students: a fun mix of varied personalities with relatively few high-maintenance (i.e., poorly behaving) students. Sure, there are some talkers, but that’s nothing compared to issues I’ve faced in the past.

And instead of saying goodbye to them, wishing them well, sending them on their way, it just came to an end.

That’s the fear — because deep down, despite the facade I wear at school, I’m a sentimental schmuck and things like this bother me…

Day 5: Toilet Paper

Friday 20 March 2020

We had TP from the last time we purchased it — we tend to buy in bulk from one of the warehouse stores a few times a year. It’s amazing how long 48 rolls of TP will last. But all things come to an end, and we were nearing the end of our collection, so this morning, there was only one must-do item on the agenda: get toilet paper.

Working on her argumentative essay

I headed to the Publix down the street just before seven. “Get there when we open at seven,” a cashier had told K a few days earlier, so that’s what I did. Only to discover that in the intervening days, they’d changed their hours and were now opening only at eight.

In the meantime, I went to a couple of other stores just in case. Nothing.

It’s the second international crisis, a crisis of inconvenience (and incontinence, I suppose).

Getting ready for dinner outside

I returned just before eight to find several people waiting outside. The doors opened and we all headed to the same aisle. There was a fair amount of toilet paper, and everyone could get two packages, but I decided one twelve-roll package would last. “Let’s not behave like the other people who caused all this,” I thought.

Day 4: A Walk in the Park

Thursday 19 March 2020

We’ve been going on walks with the dog as a family every evening. It’s probably the best thing that’s come out of this pandemic for us. What we’ve noticed, though, is that a lot of other people are doing the same. Going out for a walk used to be an isolating experience: we would walk a mile, a mail and a half together and not meet a single other person. Not one.

When we went for walks at Conestee, our favorite local park, we’d encounter people, but sporadically. A couple here; a jogger there; a family around that corner. Nothing major.

Last night, however, we encountered several people along our 1.5 mile walk. Tonight, while out jogging, I encountered two or three couples out walking. This afternoon, when we were at Conestee, we saw more people there than we probably ever have.

Everyone was out. The turtles were out on the logs,

the snakes were out sunning themselves.

And people were everywhere.

“Perhaps this will bring about a change in people,” K suggested. “Perhaps we’ll all get back to enjoying the simple things in life.”

Perhaps.

Day 3: First Day of School

Wednesday 18 March 2020

The day started out foggy and stayed dreary — it could be a kind of metaphor for everyone’s mood, I suppose. But we’re fortunate: we have food; we have (a bit of) toilet paper; we have money in the bank; we have a home; we have a family that’s together. That’s what’s most important.

Today was our district’s first day of online learning. There’s a vast spectrum of what this means. For E, it was a 90-page packet of reading, math, social studies, and science work. He took on the reading first, making it through a fairly long retelling of Goldielocks with relative ease and breezing through the questions.

“We’re not seeking to further their education,” was the mantra as teachers in my school prepared for our own students earlier this week. “We’re just tasked with providing work that will keep them from slipping.”

That seems like a fairly succinct description of the work E got.

I helped him with some of it; K helped him with some of it; he did a fair amount of it on his own without direct help. Helping him usually just means giving a nudge when he gets overwhelmed and frustrated — a kind encouragement, a hint. Sometimes it becomes too much, though, and we need a break. Such was the case today.

Still, we managed to work through all the challenges and completed the work just after lunch.

L had video conferencing with teachers and they went over some new material. Of course, she goes to a charter school, which means there is a bit of a semi-natural selection process involved in the enrollment.

As for my kiddos, I got a few emails, exclusively from honors kids and mostly about outstanding assignments.

“When is that paper due?”

“When can I take my makeup test?”

As for the rest of them? I’m not sure. I didn’t hear from them. And I got word today that if kids are not doing the work within two days, I need to be contacting parents. That ought to be fun.

Not as much fun as our little fire this evening, but fun.

Day 2: Mockingbird at a Distance

Tuesday 17 March 2020

I spent the morning preparing ten days of at-home work for my English I Honors kids, who were scheduled to begin To Kill a Mockingbird this week. Who knows when we’ll be back in the classroom — but I’m not going to wait until we do to start this book…

What to do? Put it all online…

Day 1

Read the opening pages of To Kill a Mockingbird. The first time through, read it to yourself. You’ll notice there are a lot of allusions you don’t understand. Make sure you look them up. Add comments in the document that explain the allusions.

Days 2 and 3

As you read the opening pages of the novel, you likely noticed that your inner voice gradually took on a Southern accent as you read. This passages simply sounds Southern. Today and tomorrow, we’re going to figure out why.

Step 1

Re-read the passage from yesterday. As you read, listen along with the SoundCloud audio recording attached.

Step 2

Look for one example of each of the following (as noted in yesterday’s document):

  • Long sentences
  • Diversions
  • Dated language
  • Folksy-sounding language
  • Exaggeration/embellishment
  • Understatement/deprecation

You might not understand all these ideas. Google them and figure them out the best you can. Then go back through the opening pages and try to find at least 1 example of each in the passage. Mark and identify them by highlighting the passage and creating a comment “Long sentence” or “Diversion” or whatever you might be identifying. (I’ve attached another copy of the opening for you to do this on.)

Step 3

Try to write a short paragraph using these techniques. Try to sound Southern in your writing. You can write about whatever you choose, but you must do your best to sound Southern. Write this at the bottom of the opening pages doc (see above).

Day 4

Finish reading chapter 1 and read through chapter 4.

Day 5

The story is told from Scout’s viewpoint. It is written in the first person. This means that Scout uses the pronouns I, me and the possessives my, mine to refer to herself. She does not confine the narrative to things that she has directly experienced – for example she recounts stories from the history of Simon Finch and repeats what other people tell her.

Later in the novel, she will make comments about how reliable other people’s accounts are.

How reliable is she as a narrator? With your learning partner, discuss how reliable she is as a narrator. Is she believable? Justify your response with a good explanation about why she is or is not reliable.

You’ll discuss this on Moodle. Make sure you respond to at least 3 other people as well, and make sure at least one of them is not in your period.

Days 6 and 7

Atticus says that you never really understand a person “until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Summarize the events in the novel that lead to this quote. In a separate paragraph, explain why you think climbing inside someone else’s skin may be a difficult task for Scout.

  • Summarize the Radley history. What can you infer about their standing in the town. What’s so spooky about them.
  • What does scout’s first day at school reveal about her personality?
  • How might scout have seen things differently if she’d walled around in others’ shoes? Whose shoes should she walked in?
  • What do you see in the interactions with the Radley house/family that the kids might not see?

Answer one question per day in a well-written paragraph, then respond to 3 other students’ ideas.

Days 8 and 9

Read through chapter 8 (i.e., finish chapter 8).

Day 10

Small towns thrive on gossip. A sensational trial like Tom Robinson’s will only add to the talk. Several of the older women in the novel categorize other citizens by social standing, heritage, etiquette, and manners, yet they rarely mention true moral or ethical values as the criteria for judging someone’s character. As a way to evaluate your own feelings about these characters, place them in rank order from the most moral to the least moral. Then write a paragraph explanation of why you placed him/her in the two extreme positions.

  • Mr. Dolphus Raymond
  • Miss Maudie
  • Aunt Alexandra
  • Reverend Sykes
  • Judge Taylor
  • Bob Ewell
  • Mayella Ewell
  • Heck Tate

Discuss your ratings with 3 others by responding to their ratings.

In the evening — something altogether different…

Day 1: Achievement Gap

Monday 16 March 2020

There was one overriding concern at today’s faculty meeting: we have to do everything we can to make sure that this national emergency does not expand the achievement gap any more than is inevitable. We spent the morning talking about how to prepare materials for students to work at home with one underlying assumption: vast numbers of kids won’t do anything during this time. The “high flyers” will do everything we give them; the middle-of-the-roaders will do some of it; the ones who need the most help will do the least.

“They don’t even do much work when we’re hovering over them” was the common refrain.

So as we embarked on our planning this afternoon, working to create ten days of material for students to work on while we’re closed, we kept that in mind — a frustrating project, planning materials that we know will most likely not be used by kids who really do need to use it.

And the common refrain during that planning process: “We need to go ahead and plan for the next ten days because there’s no way we’re coming back at the beginning of April.”

We’ll cross that Rubicon when we arrive at its banks…

The Beginning of Something Big

Sunday 15 March 2020

Perhaps it was because almost no one went to church this morning: Papa is still not feeling confident enough in his strength to risk it, L was sick, and K was worried that E would be too tough to control and keep in the same line she was planning for herself at church: touch nothing, nothing at all.

Perhaps it was the simple anticipation of an announcement we all knew was coming. “My guess is they’ll try to get through the next couple of weeks, then send everyone home for an early spring break,” K said last week. “Or at least through next week — it is a short week with Friday being a scheduled teacher work day.” Still, with all the alarm over the potential of this pandemic, we knew an announcement would likely come this afternoon or evening.

At any rate, when the announcement came at 2:30 that the governor would have a press conference at 4:00, we knew what was up.

Once that happened, I jumped on the computer and loaded up my book request queue to get some books from the local library system before everything shut down for good. Everyone else is hoarding toilet paper. I want to make sure I have something to read.

After that (and only after — priorities), I began checking my work email regularly. Finally, this: “The Governor has just announced all schools in South Carolina will close immediately in response to COVID-19. As you know, we have been preparing for this eventuality.”

What will we be doing? Is this vacation? Of course not, nor should it be:

At this point in the closure, teachers must be available during normal working hours throughout the closure to respond to student questions beginning Wednesday. Teachers are paid for this time and are required to be responsive and accessible via electronic means. […] During the closure teachers should catch up on paperwork, data entry, grading, or electronically delivered professional development. This will also be a great opportunity to plan for accelerating lessons upon students’ return.

Yet how much actual learning will be possible during this time? I have students who are motivated to work only when I’m standing over them, and one or two who don’t even work then. What will they do during this extended period of distance learning?

We’ll find out tomorrow.

Funerals

Saturday 14 March 2020

We went to Rock Hill for Papa’s sister’s funeral this afternoon, the “we” being E and I. L was sick; Papa was too weak; and K had to stay back to keep an eye on everyone. It’s been a tough eighteen months for Papa: two sisters and his wife passed, and the final heartbreak was his decision not to go today.

As E and I entered the funeral home, I reminded him of our plan: “Remember, no hugs or handshakes. We don’t want to take anything back to Papa.” Was this coronavirus-related? Not so much, but still — with an incubation period of several symptom-free days, it is best to extend precautions a bit further than one naturally would.

After the graveside service, my cousin D said he was going to head over to grandma’s and grandpa’s grave.

“We’ll tag along,” I suggested. The last time the Girl had a tournament in Rock Hill, I’d spent a good bit of time wandering through that cemetery, which was across the street from the sports venue, looking for this grave.

And this one, just beside it.

The uncle for whom I was named whom I never met.

“He was a lot of fun,” my cousin D, nearly twenty years my senior, shared. “Larry would always make you laugh, always make you feel better.”

Virus

Thursday 12 March 2020

And like that, everyone is living with the effects of a pandemic. The Girl’s tournament this week will almost certainly be canceled, and we aren’t going even if it isn’t: our club owner made an executive decision that no Excell teams will be playing there. USA volleyball recommended the cancellation of all tournaments, but the tournament organizers didn’t cancel. “I put the girls’ safety above everything else,” he said in a team meeting this evening after practice. “The NBA has stopped playing; universities have virtually closed down; schools are closing. It’s just not responsible to go.” And we all shook our heads in agreement.

It also puts into question our summer trip to Poland. It’s still three months away, but who knows how this will play out.

It’s gotten me to thinking macabre thoughts, though, about a potential pandemic a few years in the future that seems inevitable. A pandemic that, if it comes to pass, will have been completely preventable. The permafrost is melting due to rising temperatures, which in turn are due to our shortsightedness, past and present. Trapped within that permafrost are microbes that have been locked away from immunological history for millennia. When they get out, what will happen? In my mind, the worst-case scenario would make the present fears about coronavirus seem like the naive good old days.

Always the pessimist…

Still Shooting

Tuesday 10 March 2020

The kids have grown positively obsessed with shooting in the backyard — the Boy, his bb gun; the Girl, her bow and arrow. They really have no interest in trading.

Today’s adventure: find the arrow that ricocheted off the fence post and soared into the wild. (Slight exaggeration: it didn’t go more than thirty feet away, and was never in danger of landing in a dangerous way.)

The Girl fired it; the Girl found it. I would have half-expected her to give up sooner than she did. She’s dealing with frustration better than she was a few years ago. But she loves jumping as much as she always has:

The discovery of the day: the bbs bounce right off the archery target.

We could pick them up and reuse them, just like the arrows…

A View into a Mind

Monday 9 March 2020

It was a difficult poem, to be sure. But I’d adjusted accordingly.

First, I’d given students plenty of footnoted definitions. Words like “smouldered” and “pungence” (the poem used British English) would have left them flummoxed otherwise.

Additionally, I’d asked a fairly simple series of questions as part of our weekly inference practice: “What can we tell about this lady? What does she look like? Is she old or young?” As always, I expect the students to back up their answer with the text, and I’ve given them a simple formula to follow.

  • Make a claim: “The lady is x.”
  • Back it up from the text: “I know this because the text says…”
  • Explain your thinking with one or two sentences: “This shows she’s x because…”

I really don’t feel like it’s all that challenging. Besides, it’s something we do every Friday — inference work.

“It’s like shooting free throws,” I tell them. “It’s the most basic skill we do when we read, inferring.” It’s why we do it every Friday, week after week.

Thirdly, I’d cut the text: we were only working on the first stanza. The rest of the poem, I felt, might confuse them more.

Finally, I am always walking about the room as students work, offering help and answering questions, helping redirect or clarify thinking or ask questions that help them see the text in a new way, and there is a co-teacher in the room as well.

The text itself was a poem by Amy Lowell, “The Lady.”

You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colors.

So given the questions — “What can we tell about this lady? What does she look like? Is she old or young?” — and the formula we’ve been using all year, something like this was my objective for student achievement:

The lady in the poem is beautiful. I know this because the poem starts with the words, “You are beautiful.” The poem wouldn’t say “You are beautiful” unless the lady was beautiful. The writer might be joking, but I don’t think so.

Also, the lady in the poem is old. I know this because the poem says, “You are beautiful and faded.” I know from my own experience with clothes that usually it’s old things that fade. So if the writer says the lady is faded, she must be old.

Of course there would be varying degrees of writing proficiency with that (I don’t teach writing — I’m the literature/reading teacher), and I would have to help some students reach that second realization. Also, that final sentence of the first paragraph requires some evidence as it makes a claim. What in the poem suggests the writer Still, most of them saw these things and wrote something similar.

Many, but not all.

There are several students who receive special ed services in that class — it’s an inclusion class, and there’s a co-teacher in there for that very reason. Many of the inclusion students have behavior issues that accompany their learning disabilities, but some just quietly do the best the can.

One such student produced the following in reply to the above prompt:

we know about this woman that she is beautiful and she likes an old opera tune and the perfume of her soul and she is young and her appearance is a grow mad with gazing and eighteenth-century boudior and her personality is blent colors

The lack of punctuation and capitalization is fairly typical of average eighth-grade students these days, at least in my school. That’s not my concern with this excerpt. What initially fascinates (and saddens) me is the content: it simply makes little to no sense at all past the first two clause-like elements: “we know about this woman that she is beautiful and she likes an old opera tune.” Beyond that, it seems like just a random collection of elements from the original text.

There is, however, a pattern. She clearly referred back to the questions: she explains about “her appearance” and then “her personality.” So this was not an apathetic student just randomly grabbing some words and throwing them together. This was not a vindictive act of “I’ll just put complete nonsense there because…” It’s a genuine effort at answering what was for her an incredibly difficult question.

Yet there’s more than just that. Look closely: she links “appearance” with “gazing,” a verb connected to seeing. She links “personality” to “blent colors” because the poem says “your blent colors,” so she clearly recognized that possessive pronoun and made a stab that that might be related to “her personality.” It’s not a bad interpretation, to be honest.

It’s really a valiant effort, truth be told.

But I didn’t see that at first. Grading so many such assignments, week in, week out, I get to where I’m only scanning, truth be told. Which is to say, I read it, but I read it so very fast that I’m not really reading it in the truest sense of the word. I’m not reading it like I read a book that I’m really enjoying, or even an email from a colleague. I’m looking for specific things very quickly.

I’m doing what I tell my students not to do.

Review: Flights

Friday 6 March 2020

Do I have to actually finish a book in order to review it? Doesn’t the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to slog through another page constitute a review in and of itself?

I wanted to like this book. I went into it with such high hopes. After all, Tokarczuk just won the Nobel, and this is her most-recommended book.

I found it to be a collection of random, vapid, and shallow “observations” — thoughts that anyone who has traveled at all has had a million and one times — strung together in a random mess of I-don’t-know-what.

A more eloquent Goodreads review put it thusly:

Gosh. What a load of disjointed tripe.

Not a novel. Not a book. More like the author collected all kinds of things: personal notes, FB statuses, random thoughts, more random scramblings and mixed it all together into some sort of text.

Extremely dull, disjointed ramblings on all sorts of things.

It could be read but personally I don’t find it very interesting or illuminating.

Overhyped graphomania, nothing more, nothing less.

If this is her best, I’d hate to see her worst.

It really reminds me of modern visual art. Take a jar, urinate in it, toss in a crucifix, take a picture — voila! Piss Christ. Paint a picture of the Madonna. Add some elephant dung. Voila! Art! Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary. I get it — it’s postmodernism and post-postmodernism.

It’s still just nonsense to me.

Speech

Thursday 5 March 2020

Since I’ve managed to hoodwink and bamboozle all my fellow teachers into thinking I know a thing or two about teaching, they chose me as the teacher of the year this year, for which I politely thanked them and promptly forgot about it. The head of the school’s Beta Club chapter didn’t forget, though, and started asking me in December if I would be the keynote speaker for the induction ceremony.

I said no thank you. She asked again a week later. I said no thank you. She asked again a few days later. I said no thank you. She asked again the next day. I said no thank you. She asked again the next day again. I said no thank you. She asked again later that same day.

I started thinking the only way to get her to leave me alone was to agree to do it.

“Five to ten minutes,” she said. “Something about community service.” Here’s what I came up with:

Chapel was at nine in the morning Tuesdays and Thursdays. During my freshman of college year I didn’t have class until 11 on Thursdays. Since I didn’t live on campus, getting up and driving to the college two hours before I had to be there for a class was less than inviting to an 18-year-old. (You might have noticed I only made an excuse for Thursdays; I have no excuse for the Tuesdays I missed other than to say I was 18 and not terribly bright.) As a result, I failed to fulfill the Chapel requirements that my small Presbyterian college placed on all students. To make up for the missing chapel attendance, the college required community service. I chose a soup kitchen downtown where I went to spend an entire Saturday to make up for my missing chapel requirements.

I had heroic visions of what this would be like. I saw myself serving homeless veterans, giving them hope and soup and a smile. I saw myself giving joy to those who had no joy of their own simply by showing I cared. I saw myself bravely facing the cruelties and injustices of the world and making a difference. I saw myself battling back the apathy of society and showing these poor souls that someone cared. I saw myself changing a life or three just by handing out some beans. In short, I saw myself.

By the time that Saturday rolled around, I was more than ready. I was excited. I was optimistic. I was going to change the world through my heroic self-sacrifice!

So I was a little surprised when, on my arrival, the director of the homeless shelter led me to a small pantry illuminated by one dim dingy light bulb hanging from the ceiling.

“Our pantry needs reorganization,” he said. “That’s what we’d like you to do.”

It was true: the pantry shelves had cans of fruit next to cans hot dog chili and squeezed in between them were cans of condensed milk and packets of tuna. Mysteriously there was canned cat food hidden here and there. It was chaotic. And dark. And dirty.

“We also need you to check to see which cans have expired. Set them aside so we can throw them out,” the director said over his shoulder as he left.

I stood looking at the chaotic mess and wondered how anyone could find anything. There was no denying it: the pantry shelves needed reorganization.

Still, this was not how I was going to become a hero.

The first thing I discovered was that many of the cans were not just dusty but filthy: something had leaked on these; those were so ancient that they had a cake of dust on them; some were sticky; some were missing labels. Being somewhat OCD about such things, I couldn’t just re-stack them and leave them a mess, so I requested some water and rags and wiped off most of the cans as I worked.

All told I spent almost six hours in that pantry, not talking to a soul, not giving out soup to anyone, not listening with patience to anyone’s stories, not sharing a bit of comfort or joy with anyone.

It was the antithesis of what I’d anticipated.

And that’s probably why, nearly thirty years later, I still vividly remember that Saturday. I did more community service while I was in college, though for less-than-altruistic reasons: once I discovered how relatively easy it was to knock out a third or half of the chapel requirements on a single Saturday, I started skipping chapel with abandon. But I don’t remember much about those other occasions. Just that first one, when everything seemed to be the opposite of what I was expecting but just what was needed.

Today, you are becoming members of the Beta Club, which most people see as recognition for your academic effort and perseverance. And it is that. You have shown great resolve and fortitude in maintaining the grades you have maintained. It is a laudable achievement and a reflection of the character of both you and your parents. But this prestige is not the greatest benefit of being in the Beta club.

The greatest gift to you is the opportunity the Beta club provides to do community service regularly.

Throughout the school year, the club will provide you with many opportunities for service within the school community, and many of these projects will bring a smile to your face. You’ll go to Build a Bear to create teddy bears for Ronald McDonald House and Children’s Hospital. You’ll conduct the SouperBowl food drive in the school for the Samaritan House. You’ll participate in the Acts of Kindness week for the Department of Juvenile Justice. All of these activities will, in their own way, be fun.

But I would argue that you need to fulfill some of your community service hours by doing something that’s not fun, that is in no way Romantic (capital r — you’ll learn about Romanticism in American lit), that is in no sense enjoyable. Something hard. Something that gets you dirty and makes you sweat. Something practical. Something you most decidedly wouldn’t want to put on Instagram.

This is not because I think you should punish yourself, because such work is not punishment. Such work, especially when done surreptitiously, is the stuff of character because it is often not recognized and seldom lauded. Rearranging that pantry was in a sense miserably boring. But I know that I helped other people help other people. In organizing that pantry I made the job of the cooks easier, and they were the ones doing the real work, day in and day out, not some little college freshman hanging around on a Saturday because he’d been too lazy to go to chapel. It was a little thing, but that’s why I remember it. That’s why, in a sense, it was big, because it taught me that often it’s the little things that make the difference.

So go out and find the bigness that’s in those little moments of self-sacrifice accomplished by completing less-than-glamorous community service. Go seek out jobs that bring no glory, the little things that you don’t think anyone notices. Before you know it, that type of service will become a reward in and of itself. You’ll do these things not for the Beta club service hour credits you earn but for the sense of accomplishment and character they bring. And then you’ll stop doing it for those reasons as well: it will just be a habit. It will be something you do without thinking, something you do because that’s who you are. And when you reach that level of serving others, of helping those in need, you’ll be someone who really makes a difference, someone who changes the world, one grimy soup can at a time.

In the end, I cut some of it on the fly. (I indicated what I remembered cutting above.) An odd experience overall: my brain was calculating several different trajectories at the same time:

  • Am I speaking too quickly?
  • Do I know the speech well enough to make eye contact at this moment?
  • I need my notes! I need my notes! I have to break eye contact and gracefully let my eyes fall on the spot where I should be next — without panic.
  • Who does she look like? She looks like someone I’ve seen before.
  • Am I speaking too slowly?
  • Didn’t I teach his brother? He looks a lot like Z from two years ago…
  • Is this making sense?
  • Can I cut this part short? As I say it aloud, it doesn’t sound as good as I thought it would.
  • If I skip this next part, will I have transition problems?
  • Why the hell don’t they have a mic stand? I hate standing here holding this mic.

In the end, my final version felt like it lasted about eight minutes, but I really have no idea.

An interesting experience, but not one I’m keen on repeating, but it’s not because it terrified me or anything of the sort: I make little public speeches multiple times a day. I’m just used to winging the exact words and having only a general plan in mind.

Changes

Wednesday 4 March 2020

Our daughter now leaves the bathroom trailing a Monet scent of blossoms and linens, the mingling of surf and grass — the thousand and one scents of a young teenage girl. She started out smelling of “pinkness and warmth and contentedness,” a warm mix of comfortable and soft scents that came from her effortlessly, naturally. It was who she was; it was how old she was, or rather how young.

Now, too, her scents bloom from her age, though now from deliberate choice and purposeful will. They come from body washes and facial scrubs, hand creams and lip balms, shampoos and exfoliants. They are from her will and a representation of her will — a desire to be pleasant, to be sweet, to be pretty.

To what end? As far as I can tell, she’s not seeking the eye of anyone, not interested in any such things, and though the time is right for such interest to begin budding, we’ve not heard a word.

But realistically speaking, would we? Didn’t I try desperately to hide from my parents the fact that I no longer found girls foreign and frightful? Didn’t I try desperately to hide from my parents the fact that this girl or that had caught my eye? Didn’t I try desperately to save myself from that embarrassment, because how could they possibly understand?