Matching Tracksuits

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Fifth Grade Questions

Tuesday 11 June 2019

This week’s project: clean out the basement. Again. To be fair (to us), the last time I did this was in 2015 when I was alone as everyone else cavorted in Poland. It’s a bit more time-consuming this time around because everything has a layer of concrete dust on it from having our windows replaced. Why didn’t they clean it up? Why did I raise hell about them not cleaning it up?

In today’s work, I made a few discoveries, including several pictures stuck in bins that had nothing to do with photography, memorabilia, or anything similar. One was my fifth-grade class picture.

I look at the faces of my classmates and realize I can remember more names than I would have expected. Granted, I went with most of these kids from first grade through high school graduation, but still, my last memory of them is of them seven years older.

In fifth grade I got in trouble for cheating. We traded test papers with a peer, marked it, then went back over it with our own tests to make sure there were no mistakes in the marking. Lo and behold, Brett, who’d graded mine, had made more mistakes than he’d gotten right — so naive was I that I didn’t think. So little experience did I have cheating that I didn’t even give such things as thought. How do you cheat without making it obvious? I had no idea. I still remember the conference with the teacher and both my parents. I don’t remember the punishment; I remember the tension of the meeting.

I look over the faces, remembering names of kids, then look at the teachers. There’s Dr. Hale on the far right. Beside her? I can’t remember. At the other end is Mr. Eades, the first male teacher I ever had. And beside him? My mother.

“How did Nana get in that picture?” I think she was a class mother or something like that. And then it happened — I realized that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do most: ask her about it.

How many times will this happen? Doubtlessly, countless.

Building

Monday 10 June 2019

A legacy of Nana: she kept so many of my old toys, and we’ve recycled them, giving them to our own kids. L was never interested in most of them; the Boy, though is a different story.

What does that say about gender differences? Our son is interested in his father’s old toys; our daughter isn’t. Is that nature? Nurture? Both? We’ve never told our kids “this is a boy’s toy” or “this is a girl’s toy,” but they’ve gravitated that way. Perhaps it’s so saturated in our culture that it’s impossible to escape.

The Boy’s latest interest: my old Girder and Panel building set. I was about his age when I got it, and I loved it immediately. The Boy had a similar reaction.

It took him a while to get the hang of snapping the girders together, and the windows were as frustrating for him as they were and still are for me, but his verdict was unequivocal. “I love it.”

L

Wednesday 5 June 2019

L headed to Poland alone today. I still am surprised that she doesn’t look like this anymore.

Another End

Tuesday 4 June 2019

Tomorrow I will say goodbye to 110 or so eighth-graders I have been teaching, comforting, battling, frustrating, encouraging, and 147 other -ings for the last 180 days. The tears will be flowing, the end of the world approaching, and there I’ll be, smiling at their innocence.

Garden

Monday 3 June 2019

This is the first year we don’t have any kind of garden.

At all. It’s liberating.

What We All Would Want

Saturday 1 June 2019

I’ve always liked the idea of an Irish wake as a way to say goodbye to someone close. What better balm for sadness than the nearness of close friends and family with everyone talking, laughing, sharing memories. It makes sense on the one hand, if one is a believer in the afterlife: the departed have only moved to a more perfect plane of existence. That should take the tragic sting of death and turn it into a friendly caress, a pat on the shoulder, a bracing hug.

Today’s memorial for Nana, while not quite an Irish wake, was in the same spirit. (Pun not really intended.) Friends and family from Tennessee, Virginia, and both Carolinas gathered to honor Nana had lend the immediate family much-needed support.

The pictures, taken by the oldest daughter of E’s godmother M, tell the story better than I could.

Ending

Thursday 30 May 2019

I’ve never been good at endings. I’ve always grown sentimental, nostalgic.

Creating the long-longed-for gnome garden

When I was young and our annual church festivals came to an end, I had a hard time letting go. Always a mix of vacation and something just a bit more meaningful, they were the highlight of the year for me, and when the final day came around, I often had difficulty enjoying it because it knew it was just that — the end. Still, there was the comfort that it would come again next year, and I could always look to that future with the hope that it would be even better than this year’s. It rarely was. It was different — not better, not worse, just different.

Fine tuning

When I returned from Poland in 1999, the nostalgia led me to return to Poland two years later, which eventually led to my marriage to the only woman so amazing that I feel I don’t deserve her in any sense of the word. Arriving again in the small village I’d called home for three years, though, I found that it was so much different than the first experience. Not better, not worse, just different.

When the school year ended when I was a beginning eighth-grade teacher in the States, I was always a little sad about the fact that I’d most likely never see those kids again. In Poland, I knew I’d see them all again — most likely, even the seniors. It was, after all, a small village. Experience has taught me, though, that I’ll fall in love with the next year’s class just as much as I did with this year’s class, that there will be kids who drive me nuts in that class, that there will be kids that break my heart in that class. The numbers will be different, the personalities will be different, but that’s not better or worse. Just different.

Papa looks on

Nana’s passing has haunted some corner of my imagination for the last few days — has it really only been three and a half days since she passed? it seems an eternity — in a way that I couldn’t explain until I was out for my walk with Clover this evening, listening to Sufjan Steven’s absolutely brilliant album Carrie & Lowell. This is not an ending that has any hope of return, any hope of a re-do, any hope of a change that is simply different. It’s not different; it’s not better; it’s just worse.

Sifting Through the Layers

Wednesday 29 May 2019

I spent the better part of today going through pictures, digital and print, looking for images of Nana to use during Saturday’s memorial. I scanned about 30 images and found about 60 others in our digital collection, and I’m only through 2013. It was much like looking at old pictures of our children: we always feel like our children have always looked like they do today even though we know they haven’t. The changes are so gradual that it takes an image from the somewhat-distant past to jar us into understanding — realizing — anew that our children are on an ever sliding spectrum, that they in fact don’t look like this for very long at all.

Nana in first grade

So it was with Nana. I got used to what she looked like now and forgot all about the Nana of my youth, when she was simply “Mom.” And then I began going through pictures and rediscovering images of Nana before I even existed, images of Nana when she was my age, images of Nana when she was the Boy’s age.

I saw Nanas I never knew. I saw Nana as a young lady, about to go out for a night on the town, looking every bit like someone off the Mad Men series.

Nana in 1963

I saw Nana as a senior in high school, just a little older than most of my students, and wondered what she was like in class.

The graduate

I saw Nana when she was a mother but younger than I am now, with a version of me that’s probably about E’s age. It’s as hard to imagine Nana climbing up into a barn as it is to imagine her bedridden and frustrated.

In the loft of her brother’s barn

And now that she’s passed, all these versions live on in various people’s memories. “That was about the time I met your mother,” Papa explained about the Mad Men photo. Her best friend since forever likely remembers first-grade Nana as they went to school together from kindergarten through graduation.

The rest of the day I spent working on Nana’s obituary. Ever the English teacher, I examined examples before starting to write hers and I noticed I finally have an answer to students’ common question when learning the difference between active and passive voice: “Mr. Scott, when do we use passive voice?”

“In obituaries, children, almost exclusively.”

On Monday, May 27, Naomi Ruth Williams Scott, wife, mother, sister, and grandmother, passed away peacefully at home surrounded by her family after a six-month struggle. Naomi will be lovingly remembered by her husband of nearly 55 years, Melvin; her son, Gary; her daughter-in-law, Kinga; her grandchildren, Lena and Emil; and sisters-in-law Laverne Williams, Diane Mathis, Yvonne Van Seeters, and Mary Barnes, as well as many nieces and nephews, and countless friends. She was preceded in death by her father, Lewis Williams; her mother, Ruby Gordon Williams; and her two brothers, Nelson and Wallace Williams.

A native of Indian Land, South Carolina, Naomi graduated from Indian Land High School and married Melvin Scott in 1964. They lived for several years in the Charlotte/Rock Hill area relocating to the southwest Virginia/northeast Tennessee area, where they lived for over thirty years.

Versatile and skilled, Naomi worked various jobs through her life, including jobs in a flower shop, a printing and finishing shop, a travel agency, later in life, her own business. She would have argued, however, that her most important job by far, her only truly important job, was being a mother. She was a dedicated and loving mother who provided all who knew her a clear example of what it really means to be a mother.

Naomi was a very active church member in all the congregations she attended. She served as a deaconess in the Worldwide Church of God, where she also sang in the choir and provided quiet leadership through example for members. A firm believer in Jesus, she never wavered in her faith and leaned heavily on His love and promises.

The memorial service for Naomi will be this Saturday, June 1 at 3 PM at Woodruff Road Christian Church, 20 Bell Road, Greenville, SC. Following the service, there be time for fellowship and visitation with light refreshments to give everyone an opportunity to share with each other their memories of Naomi.

As Naomi felt special tenderness to all children but especially her son and grandchildren, the family requests instead of flowers memorial donations to the Shriners Hospital for Children and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Since her faith was so important to her and because the church has shown so much support in this time of need, the family would be honored with donations in Naomi’s memory to Woodruff Road Christian Church.

But bottom line, I look at these pictures, especially the most recent, of Nana and Papa, and it hits me again and again:

Probably my favorite picture of my parents

I simply can’t believe she’s gone. I imagine we’ll all be experiencing that for many months.

The Day After

Tuesday 28 May 2019

Normal is a relative thing. We are constantly, it seems, redefining and adjusting our normal. Most of those adjustments are relatively small; throughout our lives, we, at least a handful of times, have to reorient our lives in ways that are inconceivable until we’re living through them.

We’re all going through the latter now, dealing with Nana’s passing and all the changes that come with that.

We go through things for the first time, like sitting in a mortuary discussing options, choosing things we’d never really considered, like which urn, how many death certificates, which guest book.

We write things we’d never written, which sometimes break rules we’d always followed — an obituary is absolutely filled with passive voice: “She is survived by…” “She was preceded by…” “She is remembered by…”

We have conversations we’d never had, like discussions about what songs we might like at a memorial, when to have a final moment with someone, when to have a memorial.

And yet in the midst of all these experiences we’d never want to have, little changes sparkle with joy. Papa steadfastly stayed by Nana’s side for the last several years as her condition worsened, giving up church, giving up concerts, soccer games, and other things because he refused to leave her side. Now, with the thought that Nana’s most basic wish would be that he get out and live, those things are happening. Sitting around the small fire as the Boy makes smores; going to a small, end-of-the-year award ceremony; sitting on the back deck with me, sipping some scotch and reveling in fond memories.

We begin to catch our breath and move on. It is, after all, what Nana would want.

First Week

Friday 24 May 2019

The first week is over. Nana and Papa moved in last Saturday, and we began setting up a new normal. The morning ritual is different: in the past, K worked on everyone’s lunch as I worked on breakfast. Now, we both get up a bit earlier, and I work on lunches as K takes care of Nana’s early morning needs. The evening ritual is a bit different: I tend to put the Boy to bed more often as K takes care of Nana’s evening needs. Afternoons have been in flux as we still try to get everything in its new order. There are still things that linger, but the Boy positively loves having Nana and Papa to visit with after school. He’s parked his large box of Legos, with Nana’s and Papa’s blessing, in their room and plays there every day after school.

A gentle slide into our new reality.

Evening Shooting

Wednesday 15 May 2019

The renovation project is nearing its end. The final exterior painting was completed today, but K decided she wanted to change one color — the trim around the new windows will soon match the color of our newly-painted shutters.

The brown shutters seem to tone everything else down. Those old, peeling, white shutters just made the house look unplanned and neglected. With freshly-washed brick and newly-painted shutters, the house doesn’t really look like it’s from the late sixties — except for the architecture, that is.

In the evening, some shooting.