The girls had a tough day: lost everything but one set.
A learning experience, especially for L, who might have gotten a little too used to winning after an undefeated season.
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Confidence
It’s a perfect set: high, gently arching. L approaches, plants her feet, throws her body into the air, and comes down just below the ball, swinging ineffectually at empty air. She jumped too early.
Timing for beginning hitters is everything. Absolutely everything. And when they get that timing perfectly, the rest of the hit becomes just that much more effective, just that much faster, just that much more forceful and intimidating. When it’s off, the hit is anything but a hit: a swat, a push, a shove, an empty swing.
The coach sees L miss so completely and shakes his head ever so slightly. He’s as frustrated as she is.
It’s moments like this that experience and confidence takes over. The truly good hitters are not put off by a miss. Something goes wrong – they shake it off and keep going. They swing as hard the next swing as they did the last swing. If the last ball goes into the net, if the last ball sails a mile out, if the last ball fell pathetically to the ground, she swings the next time as if nothing happened, as if the last hit were a blistering kill, a spike so powerful and fast that it was a mere blur of white.
The setter gives the next ball to L again. She approaches, plants her feet, throws her body into the air, and gives it a nice gentle swing. It’s deliberate yet sure to go over the net. No heat, no sting – just get it over the net. And this is where her lack of experience shows.
A few more sets come her way. The club coach has, after all, made her an outside hitter, so she’ll be getting the majority of the sets, but tonight, at this moment, it feels like targeting – the best kind of targeting. The kind that will build her confidence as she swings and swings and swings. Finally, everything aligns and the Girl takes a big swing. The ball shoots across the court and pops the floor with a bang just inside the line.
She smiles. Is that a bit more confidence I see in her smile?
Concert
Ms. R was the children’s choir director for our parish for a long time. Most of L’s time in the choir was under her direction, and like all the other (mostly) girls, she loved Ms. R. When she had her third child, she decided it was time to call it quits.
Shortly after that, L decided to call it quits with the choir.
Now Ms. R is back to help the girls prepare some Christmas music. This evening, they were hired to give a concert in a swanky downtown hotel…
The Card and the Project
The Boy loves Pokemon cards. We play sometimes, but I’m not sure he understands quite how to play because the way he taught me seems a little overly simplistic. But we still have fun.
For some time now he’s been participating at the card trading table the teachers have set up for kids in after school. Every day he tells me about who wanted to trade what with whom, and sometimes he’s frustrated because someone didn’t want to make a given trade with him and other times he’s upset because he didn’t want to make a trade with someone — rarely are all parties happy, I fear.
During all this trading, he’s had a single-minded goal: to get some super-mega-ultra card with some ungodly number of damage points and virtual immortality. At least that what it sounds like in all his almost-hyperventilating hyperbolic descriptions.
Today, he finally managed to make that trade.
In the evening he had to work on a project that we somehow didn’t realize was a project and got swallowed up in the chaos that is our family life. He got another copy of the project and began working on it tonight.
As a teacher, I always view these things a little differently than K. I find myself sometimes judging work, thinking, “How useful is this really?” And other times I find myself thinking, “That’s a great idea. I’d use that if I were an elementary school teacher.” (God forbid!)
I also find myself a little less worried about our children’s grades. “This might drop your grade significantly!” K fussed at the Boy this weekend when we realized what had happened. My response: “Yes, and?” Grades in elementary school are not something I worry too much about. More importantly: did we make sure the Boy learned some kind of lesson about communication and organization with this adventure? Did we learn anything?
Toilet
There are few things as satisfying as fixing something. The toilet in Papa’s guest bathroom had a leak around one of the bolts that holds the tank to the toilet itself. In the process of determining that, I also figured that the valve itself needed replacing. So a trip or two to Home Depot and everything was set.
There are few things more frustrating than thinking you’ve fixed something only to find that something else in the meantime — like a slightly too-small tank gasket — has caused an even bigger problem. A test flush resulted in virtually all the water in the tank out the sides, onto the wall to the floor.
Outside Lighting
K and I decided we were going to forego the usual outside decorations this year and try something new. With two trees in the front yard, there seemed to be only one thing to do: transform them into Christmas trees.
“It should be faster than putting up the icicle lighting,” K said.
“Should be,” I agreed.
So while K was running her first open house as a real estate agent, the kids and I set about wrapping some 344 feet of lights (8 lines of 43 feet each) around our crape myrtles.
I wasn’t sure how it would turn out because of the random places we had to string a line from one branch to another, creating a strange horizontal bit in an otherwise verticle orientation.
In the end, I think it turned out fairly well.
“How long did it take?” asked K earlier this evening.
“About as long as the icicle lighting.”
Maybe next year we’ll do both…or neither.
Apartment
I sit in my parents’ apartment listening to Mozart’s Requiem looking around I completely empty room what was once so full life. The couch, the table, the chairs, the media equipment, the paintings, the photographs, the bookshelves and books, the kitchen utensils — everything is gone, sold for next to nothing or dumped in the trash.
Sitting in this empty house is not the same as sitting in my own empty apartment just before moving out. There’s more of finality about this. When you’re leaving your own apartment, you know you’re going to a new one. This apartment, we’re just leaving. Someone else will own it, someone else will live in it, someone else will bring new memories into it, and someone else will make new memories out of it. We, on the other hand, consolidated two houses into one with Papa moving in with us, so this is a period for us — an end stop. So many of the memories associated with this home have to do with our children. L playing and the castle that Nana and Papa bought for her when she was around four or five years old. E rolling around on the floor with Papa, rolling around on the floor with Lena, rolling around the floor with whoever was willing.
But some of the memories are more difficult. Every time I walk down the hall to get something out of the back bedroom or take something to the laundry room — a paintbrush to clean perhaps or a search for something absorbent — I pass by the guest bathroom from which Nana was emerging when it all started. I see her there again on the floor with paramedics around her, with Papa distraught, all knowing the situation but not realizing the gravity of it all.
That was now a year ago. Early December it all started. A trip to the hospital, a return trip home, some physical therapy, a collapse again, back to the hospital, back for physical therapy, to the rehab hospital, back to the hospital, all of it creating an enormous circle that seemed endless but most certainly was not.
Christmas Tree
Six years ago, on December 7, we put up our Christmas tree. It’s a fairly early time for us to put up a tree, I think. I haven’t gone back to check (i.e., look for posts here), but knowing my Polish wife and her desire to keep with the traditions of her youth as much as possible, it’s probably always been later than sooner.
Of course, an odd highlight of the night was liberating the Elf from E’s sleeping hold and deciding where to put him tonight…
The Elf
E’s class has an Elf on the Shelf. You know the gag: every morning, when the kids come in, the elf is sitting somewhere else. The kids all have a good time looking for him.
Of course, the Boy then wanted one for our house. Fortunately for him, K is Polish, which means we celebrate St. Nicholas’s Day, which is today, which meant lots of excitement in the morning when we left the elf behind, wondering when he’d start migrating through the house.
K texted Papa in the morning. “Please put Emil’s elf in a different location, maybe somewhere in your room. He is supposed to migrate through the house magically. That will make him very happy.” And it did.
When the Boy went with K for tennis lessons this evening, the elf took off again. This time, he headed to Papa’s bathroom and perched himself high on the medicine cabinet.
“We have to be systematic in our search,” I explained as we ate.
“What does that mean?”
I explained; he agreed.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he declared a few minutes later.
“Just go to Papa’s,” I suggested. “It’s closer.”
In he went; out he went — didn’t notice at all.
In our systematic search, he began going through all of Papa’s drawers.
“He’s an elf on a shelf, buddy, not an elf in a drawer,” I reminded, but he continued. Systematically.
We moved to the bathroom and he looked about, suggesting that perhaps the elf might have sought refuge in the washer or dryer. Nope.
He’d started moving to the living room when I pointed out that he’d forgotten one item with a shelf.
Our small X100 in hand, I jumped back as quickly as I could to frame the shot and managed to catch him just at the moment of discovery.
Volleyball Practice
I swear, it looked better on the phone…
Kolejka
The reality of life in Poland in the 80s was the line. The queue. People stood in line for everything. People stood in line not knowing why they were standing in line. A friend once told me, that she often ended up standing in the line just because there was a line. “If there was a line there must be something she reasoned and no matter what that something was it was something that her family could use or trade with someone else.”
Kinga told us of a story about waiting in line for shoes. “We didn’t even know what kind of shoes they were,” she said, “but they were shoes and we needed shoes.”
I had my own experiences waiting in lines in Poland in the mid-90s, but they were not due to the lack of goods. I mostly waited in line for bureaucratic reasons. When I would go to Krakow training my Visa, I would arrive at the office in question an hour or more before it opened to find the line already stretched halfway down the block.
What better thing to do then some 30 years after communism ended in Poland than to play a game based on this reality. That’s exactly what the game Kolejka is all about: all the frustration of communist Poland in your living room.
Family Reunion
Papa and his three sisters with friends and other family.
Thanksgiving 2019
That Log
My neighbor came over today to help me wrestle that log out of our creek. The problem is simple: it’s sitting in the water, so there’s no way to cut it into manageable pieces. The real problem: the thing probably weighs well in excess of 1,000 pounds.
We got some of it cut, but the vast majority still lies in the creek. We’ll try again Saturday with some kind of improvised wench system.
Overheard
Student 1: “Scylla and Charybdis — aren’t those names of Sirens?”
Student 2: “No, no — that’s the six-headed monster and the garbage disposal.”
At my request, Student 2 later illustrated her summary of that portion of the Odyssey.
14 Years Ago
When I was a kid, we went to one of two places for Thanksgiving: South Carolina to visit my father’s family or Tennessee to visit my mother’s. As a little kid, I preferred Tennessee. Not because of personalities or anything so silly — no, I preferred Tennessee because Uncle N and Aunt L had a farm, with a lot of land and a large barn.
It was fifteen years ago today that we last visited that space. K and I had just moved to the States, and it was our first Thanksgiving in America.
We’d already visited family in South Carolina in the summer, so we went to Tennessee to spend Thanksgiving.
It was shortly after this — a year or two — that Uncle N passed away, and Aunt L, unable to take care of that much property herself and unwilling to figure out a way to do so, sold the farm and moved. So this was the first and last time we were all together like this for Thanksgiving at their house.
Fourteen years ago. Everyone looks so young, so not-tired.
The Girl was over a year away. We were talking about starting a family, waiting for jobs and such to settle down. The Boy — not even an idea.
Fourteen years later and they’re here while Nana and Uncle N are not. It’s inevitable and unstoppable, this passage of time, but every now and then, I bump into something that reminds me just how much has changed in how little time.
Sunny Sunday
After all the rain yesterday, it was really a relief to us all to see the sun this morning. It made the autumnal trees in the backyard shimmer and shine.
The Boy and I decided to wander down to the stream to see what it looked like after such a long, heavy rain. I thought the little island we’d built up earlier this year might well be gone with that volume of water rushing through.
What we saw instead was that the tree that had fallen into the creek had been washed downstream a significant distance — thirty or so feet.
And our island was completely gone — it couldn’t withstand the several-hundred-pound tree’s attack.
Rainy Saturday Chores
Boston Street, Night
Library Day
