COVID-19 quarantine

Day 71: Playing and Counting

Monday 25 May 2020

Games We Play

This morning, E and I decided to play a game we hadn’t played in ages: Pentago. It’s a simple concept: Get five marbles of your color in a row. But the challenge is that each of the four nine-by-nine quadrants can be rotated. It’s a great game for the mental manipulate of objects because players have to turn those quadrants in their heads and make plans to try to surprise their opponent with an unseen 5-row connection.

At first, the Boy just tried to connect five in a row. I showed him quickly how easily stopped that could be, and how I could simply build on my efforts to stop him and create my own row with a twist here or there. Then he got it.

Did I “let him win”? Well, not so much. Once he figured out the importance of the twist, I played a while without really paying attention to anything other than his obvious efforts and he sneaked one or two by me.

After each game: “Can we play again?”

Snack

In the afternoon, the kids brought the old Rummikub satchel out: “Can you teach us how to play this?” they asked.

Indeed — I could barely remember myself. Something about runs and threes- and fours-of-a-kind. That was about all I could remember, and there were no instructions in the game.

It’s moments like that which make me really appreciate YouTube. A quick search, three minutes of watching the video, and off we went, playing a game I hadn’t played in decades.

I last remember playing it in Nashville with Uncle N and Aunt L over the Thanksgiving weekend. We might have played it the last time we were there for Thanksgiving, which would have been 2005. Though we could have just played dominoes and Uno — that’s all I have photographic evidence for:

Uncle N passed away less than a year later from ALS, and we never went back there for Thanksgiving. So it might have been even longer since I played Rummikub. At any rate, the kids loved it. The Boy, less so because he couldn’t see all the combinations and such. L, however, fit into the game perfectly: that type of kombinowanie is just what she does best.

Yesterday

We watched last night the 2019 film Yesterday, in which a failing musician somehow enters an alternate reality in which only he knows anything about the Beatles. He subsequently recreates their catalog as his own. As expected, there are lots of Beatles songs in the film.

“Is that a Beatles song?” L asked as one started.

“Is that a Beatles song?” E asked with the next one.

“Yes, they’re almost all Beatles songs,” I explained.

“How many songs did they write?!” the Boy asked incredulously.

As a result, we listened to a lot of Beatles music this afternoon. They kind of liked it — we kind of encouraged them.

It did inspire some musicality from them. The Boy has a little guitar that he suddenly became interested in. However, it is missing strings, so I suggested he play my mandolin, which I bought in high school because R.E.M. had released Green, which featured the mandolin on a number of tunes. It’s a $100 plywood job that’s a perfect size for him.

Tonight, I worked with him on some basic ideas: pressing down strings just behind a fret to change the pitch. Chords? They’re a long way off. (Besides, I can only remember four or five chords on a mandolin.)

The Girl, who has been toying with a ukelele from time to time, gave it a try only to be shocked at how very different it was tuned from her uke. (When she first got the uke, I was surprised to find that, like a five-string banjo, the highest string is actually in the position where the lowest string is for most other instruments. They both just have that one out-of-place string that always gives me fits.)

We’ll see how this develops, but hopefully, the interest will remain.

When do I stop counting?

When is this quarantine officially over? When do I stop prefacing every post with “Day X”? I started the first day we were supposed to go to school and yet didn’t — March 16.

Day 1: Achievement Gap

Yet because we don’t have any coordinated national approach and since every state is easing restrictions step-by-step, there’s really no firm date for me to stop doing that. When we head back to school on a normal routine? (Will we do that in the fall?) I’ve decided that the most logical date to stop doing that is June 4, which would have been the last day of school were this a normal year.

On the other hand, I’m fairly certain that we will see an enormous uptick in cases after states have eased these restrictions. Just look at Cocoa Beach in Florida this weekend:

It’s concerning, to say the least:

On the Sunday talk shows, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, said she was “very concerned” about scenes of people crowding together over the weekend.
“We really want to be clear all the time that social distancing is absolutely critical. And if you can’t social distance and you’re outside, you must wear a mask,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.” (Source)

If we have an explosion of cases, the very thing we were trying to avoid, then this entire 70+ lockdown will have been for nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Are we smarter than that as a species? Most days I have my doubts.

Counting

I’m on a run: I’ve never posted so many consecutive days on this site. Not even close. I’ve posted daily since December 21, 2019. Counting roughly, that’s 130+ consecutive days. Why? Why not?

Not only that, but for the month of May, I’ve written an average of 1,047 words a day. That’s like my journal writing when I first arrived in Poland and everything — everything — fascinated me endlessly.

Of course, I have cheated a few times: I included long quotes from books I’m reading, in part because I was honestly interested in writing a little something about them, in part (at least once) because I just wanted to reach that arbitrary number (like I just did in this paragraph). One thousand words. At least. Every day.

I can’t possibly keep that up. The quarantine is helping with that. But daily posts? Could I make it a full year? Probably. Will I? No idea.

Day 70: Flood

Sunday 24 May 2020

It started raining around two this afternoon, first sporadic rain with fat, lazy drops, then steady rain, then torrential rain.

In the past, such rain worried me because of flooding in our basement. With the leak in our roof, I now have different concerns. As the storm grew and the wind blew harder, I wonder whether or not I’d secured the two tarps protecting our roof well enough to keep them in place with such a storm. There was really nothing I could do about it at the time, of course: it would not have been remotely safe to head onto the roof in a storm to put down additional weight to keep the tarps from flying off.

In the end, my worries were for nothing: the tarps stayed in place; the sump basin didn’t even have much water in it, so the basement wasn’t even close to being threatened.

Yet we still had a lake in our backyard: the creek didn’t crest but we had essentially one big puddle in the lowest part of our yard, so after we finished playing a game (“Ticket to Ride” — I never play to win; I play to block other players — you can’t lose if you’re not trying to win!), E and I struck out to see what was going on in the neighborhood.

We weren’t prepared for what we found:

To begin with, there is a house basically in a hole that has an enormous backyard — I thought it was a park when we first moved here.

The road that goes by it was closed because their yard, which is in reality just a drainage basin for the surrounding community, was completely flooded.

Completely.

So much so that the culvert under the road was completely submerged, creating a whirlpool as the water tried to drain.

We stood in the road looking at the whirlpool, right at the edge of the water. We’re past the time of E asking questions like, “Daddy, what would happen if I fell in that water?” He knows. He likes to show he knows. “Boy, Daddy, if I fell in that…” and his voice trailed off for effect.

It gave me a little shudder, the shudder of a parent having nightmarish visions of the worst possible outcome. Once such thoughts enter my mind, it’s hard to shake them. The Boy seemed to realize that. “Come on, Daddy, let’s go back to the other side.

All that water — undoubtedly the worst flooding we’ve seen there. It was still nothing compared to what we saw later, downstream. We walk by here almost every night — it’s K’s favorite walk.

The creek that was forming the whirlpool earlier joins with another creek at this point, and the two completely covered the flat land around it.

We headed back home, still having fun on the way.

In the evening, we went for a walk to show the girls what it looked like. Of course, most of the water had subsided, but there was still enough to be impressive, and just enough to enjoy safely.

Day 69: Training, Cleaning, and Reading

Saturday 23 May 2020

Our pup has come a very long way. I thought, when we got her, that since she’s a border collie (smartest breed on the planet, right?), things would be easy. She’d be easy to train, easy to control (after all, you can get those dogs to do the most amazing tricks herding sheep), easy to house-break — just easy. But it turns out that BCs are too smart for their own good: it makes them a little stubborn at times. And that describes our Clover perfectly: stubborn, stubborn, stubborn. But we didn’t give up on her: we took her for some obedience training, we left her a couple of times for one-on-one days with a trainer, and for the last year, things have been going great.

Now, we have a few tricks with her.

You can, for instance, drop a piece of the most tempting meat in front of her and she’ll just sit down at it, shifting her gaze from the meat to you and back to the meat, a pleading look in her eye, and she won’t touch it until you tell her, “Eat.”
In the morning, you can open the door and tell her, “Siusiu,” and she’ll go out and immediately relieve her self and come back inside.
You can call her and she comes and sits beside you.
If you want her on the other side, just say “Other side” and she’ll switch sides.
You can tell her to stay and then kick ever her most beloved ball and she won’t go darting after it until you tell her “free” or “go get it” or “release.”
“Heel” means “heel.”
When you’re taking her for a walk and stop moving, she sits — sometimes immediately, but usually after a bit of hesitation. (There’s that stubbornness.)

For her birthday, though, we got her an agility course. The Girl began training her yesterday. It was fairly simple: she figured out that she had to jump over the bar, had to jump through the hoop. Easy-peasy. She looked up at L like she looks up at me when we go for a run: “Was that supposed to be a challenge or something?”

Today, the Boy got in on the fun. He had a little difficulty getting her to jump without a leash on her to guide her, but soon enough, he’d worked out his own way of bribing her with a little treat.

My Ántonia

I finished reading My Ántonia today — or rather, listening to it on Spotify. I first read that book in college, and it astounded me, particularly one quote: “Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.” More than O, Pioneers! (the only other Cather book I’ve read), I really connected with the sense of nostalgia that pervades My Ántonia. That’s why I remember that quote almost a quarter of a century later: I read it shortly after some emotionally traumatic losses (not deaths, just losses) in my life, and I was wallowing in nostalgia about those lost relationships.

I had forgotten, though, about the ending:

This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is. For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

“What a little circle man’s experience is.” What a lovely notion, what a great truth.

Returning to Dickens

“What to listen to now?” I thought, as I finished the Cather novel early in the day and still had plenty of outside work to keep me occupied. Much of the morning I spent cleaning rocks. Yes, cleaning rocks. The drainage trough (for lack of a better term) I made at the base of our driveway has, over the years, become more and more clogged with dirt. Now instead of wicking water away from the drive, it just serves as a barrier and makes it puddle water. What’s more, with all that dirt, weeds had a great place to grow. So I pulled out all the rocks down to the landscaping fabric, washed the dirt off the rocks, and put them back. (Coronavirus quarantine has lent itself to long-ignored, not-necessarily-critical projects.) Anyway, I was still working on the rocks and the book finished.

Spotify is sort of hit-or-miss with audiobooks: there’s very little (that I’ve found) that’s relatively recent, and a lot of the older books are actually in translation — lots and lots of German audiobooks I’ve found.

When I lived in Poland, I had some difficulty finding affordable English-language books. Penguin Classis, though, were plentiful and relatively cheap. That’s how I read almost every Dickens book in the space of three years. There are a few that I never found, though, and I thought today might be a good day to return to Dickens.

I hadn’t really read him in almost twenty years. I teach Great Expectations some years to my English I Honors students, but that doesn’t really count: the last year I taught it (two years ago, I think), I didn’t even read it with the students.

So today I began Dombey and Son. I’d forgotten how clever and witty Dickens can be, and how gifted he can be at beginning a novel. Think of his most famous, A Tale of Two Cities:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Or my personal favorite Dickens beginning, which I’ve mentioned here before, Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Dombey, though, has a clever opening:

Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.
Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance, to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of course) an undeniably fine infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet. On the brow of Dombey, Time and his brother Care had set some marks, as on a tree that was to come down in good time—remorseless twins they are for striding through their human forests, notching as they go—while the countenance of Son was crossed with a thousand little creases, which the same deceitful Time would take delight in smoothing out and wearing away with the flat part of his scythe, as a preparation of the surface for his deeper operations.

Of course, Dickens can be tiring with all his subplots and sub-subplots (after all, the longer he stretched novels, which were always published in syndication in magazines, the more money he could make from a given book), but I’m thinking he’ll be a lot easier to listen to than read.

Day 68: Training Death and the Maiden for Exploring

Friday 22 May 2020

Death and the Maiden

My friend M grew up on a farm with his grandparents. His father passed away; I never really knew what happened to his mother. But from the time I met M, he lived with Ma and Pa as he called them, and as I came to call them.

Their farm was just outside the city limits, a place in the county that felt so different and distant from my suburban, cookie-cutter neighborhood that I felt I might be in a different state. In a different country.

We spent a fair amount of our time there shooting .22s and shotguns. We’d shot at birds and usually miss. We’d shoot at squirrels with the .22s and miss; we’d shoot at them with the shotguns and, well, it wasn’t pretty. We were stupid — what can I say?

One Sunday afternoon in 1990, just before I started my senior year of high school, Pa gave us a task. “There are raccoons that are just givin’ the garden a hard time. How about sittin’ up on the hill above the garden and seein’ if you boys can take care of the problem?” He needed to say no more. We took a bottle of Mountain Dew, Pa’s double-barrel 16-gauge shotgun and Papa’s bolt action 20-gauge (a bolt-action shotgun? really?) and took positions on the slope just behind the garden.

About an hour before sundown, the raccoons made their way into the garden. We waited until they were among the cornstalks, reasoning that they would sustain the least damage from stray pellets, then fired away. Papa’s shotgun had a two-shell clip and held one in the barrel. I discharged those in short order then reloaded as quickly as I could. M fired one then the other barrel, broke the gun over his knee, tossed out the spent shells, and was firing again before I knew it. I think we reloaded twice. M might have reloaded thrice.

All told, we killed three raccoons that afternoon and earned the gratitude of both Ma and Pa. And we had a hell of a good time.

I’ve long ago lost touch with M. I last saw him in 1998 during the summer I came home after two years in Poland and one more year waiting. He’d made some bad decisions, and the place of our meeting was something out of an O. Henry short story. After that, we corresponded a few times, but the last we communicated was in late 1999.

That was almost thirty years ago now, and I still think back on that day fondly. Not because of the death we dealt but because of the innocent friendship lost. I don’t feel guilty for killing those ‘coons, though: they were doing real damage to the garden, and we took care of the problem in the country-folk way. Sure, we probably could have trapped them and released them somewhere else, but Pa was not a sentimental man, and he would have regarded that as a waste of time.

Years later, I thought of this day when I read the poem “The Early Purges” by Seamus Heaney:

The Early Purges
I was six when I first saw kittens drown.
Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,
Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,
Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din
Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout
Of the pump and the water pumped in.
‘Sure, isn’t it better for them now?’ Dan said.
Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced
Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.
Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung
Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains
Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung
Until I forgot them. But the fear came back
When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows
Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks.
Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
I just shrug, ‘Bloody pups’. It makes sense:
‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.

Today, the Boy made his first kill. Birds were in our blueberry bushes, and the Boy had his bb gun. Somehow, he was close enough that one shot dropped a robin that was making an evening snack of our still-unripe berries.

The Girl was furious about it. She was literally in tears, shouting at him that he had no right to kill an innocent bird that had done nothing to us.

“In this time of the pandemic, we have to share,” she muttered as we ate dinner — fish our neighbor caught a couple of weeks ago when the governor let boat ramps open again before reclosing them due to a general failure to follow the newly-established guidelines.

I didn’t point out the obvious irony, nor did I point it out when she popped chicken nuggets into the toaster oven for her evening snack.

Training

The other day was Clover’s birthday. I think it was her birthday. L insists — positively and passionately insists — that it is the 21st of May. Or the 20th. Or maybe it was the 19th. I’m not sure. I’m not sure about her certainty. But we celebrated Clover’s third birthday this week nonetheless by getting her an agility course.

She’s already got a few new tricks up her, well, I guess tangled in the long hair on her hindquarters. (Cliches sometimes break down, I suppose.)

Exploring

E talked K into doing a little exploring after dinner. While K was still in her good clothes.

He was keen to show her how the plastic box his survival gear came in is, in fact, watertight.

Day 67: Cleaning, Surveying, Surviving, and Commenting

Thursday 21 May 2020

Cleaning Out

The end of the school year always brings a lot of cleaning and paperwork. We have an entire list of things we teachers have to do before going home for the summer.

We have to return materials to the media center.
Emergency guides need to go back to an administrator.
We have to make it easy for everything to be removed from our room, so that usually means packing up all the books on my bookshelves and storing them somewhere.
The plant engineer needs to check our room for any issues that will hamper the cleaning of our room over the summer.
We have extensive checks about grades as well as reports we have to print out for the office staff in case there are any questions about grades over the summer.
We have to return our keys to the a designated administrator.
We have to return our receipt books to the accountant.
We have numerous meetings about various things, some of which feel incredibly important and some of which feel not so important.
Prepare letters to go home with final grades.

The first year I was a teacher at this school, it took three days to get everything ready because, in addition to all this (and a lot of stuff I’ve forgotten/neglected to mention), we had to put copies of the final report cards in permanent records and then organize the permanent records based on which high schools students were attending. These last two steps are now out of our hands, but it still takes a while to get all this done.

Part of the challenge is getting signatures. At the end of the whole process, we are to provide the principal with a checklist that has been initialed by everyone involved to show that we’ve done all the steps above. Sometimes, it’s a bit of a trick tracking down a given administrator.

I went to the school today for the end-of-year checkout, arriving at around ten in the morning, and by twelve, I was done.

This is just another way that this year is exceptional.

I’m not complaining: I didn’t have to move my books at all because the custodial staff, in an effort to get a head start on the summer’s duties, has already cleaned my room, most significantly the floor (cleaned and waxed). Turns out they just worked around the bookshelves. The curmudgeon in me will forever after complain, “Why can’t you just do that every year? It’s not like I ever move my room around — everything goes back to the same place, year after year.” Still, I would have preferred a regular ending to this year, and for that, I would have willingly done the whole check-out procedure — twice, if necessary.

Surveying the Changes

Every time we have a significant rainfall that results in the creek behind our house rising to food or near-flood levels, the Boy and I like to go out and see what has changed. The surging waters bring new flotsam and jetsom after it washes away existing flotsam and jetsom.

It changes the flow of the creek, too. For example, the spot where we usually cross was just wide enough that I could step over it with one stretching step. Now it’s much wider. As I was wearing tennis shoes during our afternoon adventure, I was unwilling to take the chance of getting them wet. The Boy kindly built a stepping pylon out of the bricks we’d brought down last year to help with the crossing in another spot.

During our exploring, the made a grisly discovery: the raccoon we thought was just inexpertly hiding the other day was in the same spot.

“So it died there?” the Boy asked. “Did it attack something there? What could kill a raccoon?!” He related some video he’d watched in which a farmer explained how raccoons killed some of his chickens. “It would have to be something really big to take down a raccoon!” I could see the wheels turning: he was thinking about what type of enormous preditor could be lurking in that wooded area we explore with seemingly careless abandon.

I suggested that perhaps it was just sick and crawled in there to die.

“Or maybe the snake we saw bit it and that’s where it died,” the Boy intelligently suggested.

That sounds reasonable.

Survival Gear

The Boy is into survival skills. He’s been watching a couple of YouTubers who do survival stuff as their main content. The primitive building of two weeks ago, with plans to build a vast underground bunker complete with swimming pool — forgotten. Completely. Not a word about it.

He used some of his money this week to buy a survival kit.

He just had to try out the saw today.

The Comment

A former student shared a video on social media. I watched about 5 minutes of it. Bill Gates and 5G networks are conspiring to spread the virus. I made a comment: “This is just getting ridiculous.”

“Why?” someone asked.

My response was admittedly a bit barbed: “If I have to explain it, there’s no point. You’ve swallowed the conspiracy theory Kool-Aid.”

My former student took me to task:

You wrote something is ridiculous without explaining why, so it’s normal to ask ‘why?’
What did you think was ridiculous? Which one of the statements that this parliamentarian was providing was ridiculous? I know we don’t hear these statements in MSM but I think that it’s better to check all information available before ridiculing anyone. It’s too easy to discredit something just because it sounds ridiculous. There were many things in history that sounded absurd to many and yet with time they proved to be true.
Anyway wherever the truth is, it’s always a good idea to ask questions and there can be nothing and no one that should be unquestionable.

After the comment, I went back to watch the video, only to find it had been flagged by fact-checkers. I simply pointed them to a couple of articles and left it alone.

What I wanted to say:

“What did you think was ridiculous?” The whole thing. The idea that someone could possibly take this nonsense seriously.
“Which one of the statements that this parliamentarian was providing was ridiculous?” Every single one of them. Each sentence that came out of the woman’s mouth. They’re all demonstrably false and completely illogical.
“I know we don’t hear these statements in MSM” — there’s a reason for that: it’s called presenting facts as opposed to obviously false, idiotic statements. It’s like the old joke: there’s a name for alternative medicine that works — medicine.
“but I think that it’s better to check all information available before ridiculing anyone.” Point taken. Now, go check the facts.
“It’s too easy to discredit something just because it sounds ridiculous.” At least you’re admitting it sounds ridiculous. That’s a start.
“There were many things in history that sounded absurd to many and yet with time they proved to be true.” Other than quantum theory, name one.

I should be used to this kind of nonsense now, but I’m not. Nor should I be. It’s normal now but it shouldn’t be.

Day 66: Morning Ignorance of the Below and Above

Wednesday 20 May 2020

Morning

The morning, post-breakfast ritual during this time of lockdown and isolation:

The Boy works on his schoolwork. We try to pace it: whatever’s going to be more challenging for the day we tackle first. Lately, things have been fairly balanced: everything has been much easier, in short. Still, old habits persist, and he’ll start fussing if he gets the slightest bit frustrated some mornings.

Today, we made it through everything fairly quickly with minimal fussing.

Papa often takes a nap. He doesn’t necessarily intend to take a nap — he’s just comfortable, full, content, watching television or listening to a book, and what else is there to do?

K works on emails for her real estate clients. She’s trying to work two jobs now. We all tell her that she needs to focus on one or the other. We know which one she’d like to focus on. We also know that that job doesn’t have a set pay schedule.

I am usually either helping the Boy or working on my own school work downstairs. Or as in this case, taking pictures.

The Girl — well, she does what a teenager does best.

Below

Ever since we had our first flood in the basement several years ago, a heavy rainfall makes me just a bit nervous. I look at the puddles forming in the backyard. I check the weather. I duck into the crawl space to look in the sump pump basin. I repeat the cycle. I worry, worry, worry. Until our big flood in February, I’d gotten to the point, though, that I really fretted very little. It had gotten a little wet but it hadn’t flooded flooded. Still, I’m always probably going to be a little worried about water coming up from below, the hydrostatic pressure building to the point that it forces water through the smallest of cracks and starts filling our basement again. It will happen. And though I have taken steps to remediate the situation, there are no more steps I can take that don’t involve massive work and a sizeable fiscal commitment.

Option 1

Our neighbor up the street had a drainage system put in his basement recently: around the entire parameter of the basement, workers busted up the concrete and the applied perforated drain pipes that lead to a central sump pump. It was a five-figure job.

That might be the next step if the basement continues flooding. It’s the type of job that, having the summer off every year, I’d be keen on tackling myself. At the very least, I could rent a jackhammer and bust up the concrete and dig down to the footer, cutting the cost significantly, I would think. Or at least hope.

Option 2

The other option: when we pull out the landscaping front of the kids’ bedrooms, I could dig down to the footer there and re-seal the foundation, perhaps installing a French drain system there while everything is dug up.

And Above

I was playing pool with a friend in the basement probably almost decade ago when water started pouring onto the pool table. It turned out that the shower pan in the master bathroom had failed.

Count Me Out, In

We ended up renovating the whole bathroom as a result.

There was one other time when the water came from above instead of below: somehow, the water came in between the upstairs deck and the door sill and started dripping from the top of the door in the basement. I never figured out what caused that, but I caulked well around the door and it never happened again.

But most of our experience with water entering the house comes from below.

But tonight, the Boy was getting ready for his bath when he looked up and asked, “Daddy, is that a leak?”

Shit.

I went to get a chair so I could reach up and feel the dampness I knew would be there. Still, as I walked to the Boy’s room and returned with the chair, I found myself thinking, “Please, oh please just be a dark spot on the ceiling that I’ve never noticed though we’ve lived here almost thirteen years.”

I looked carefully at where the stain was and realized quickly what had likely happened: the roof vent flashing had somehow failed. Perhaps it had gotten cracked. Perhaps it was torn. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

“Maybe it’s just running down the sewer vent,” I thought.

I climbed on the roof to see if anything was amiss. “Perhaps the hail we had a few days ago damaged something and insurance will pay for an entire re-roofing job,” I thought both hopefully and sickeningly. Examining the flashing, I couldn’t see any sign of compromise. We covered it with some plastic and hoped for the best.

Still, I needed to check in the attic to see just how bad the problem was.

I don’t really know if that’s bad or not. Part of me says, “That’s horrible: it’s bad enough that it’s saturated the ceiling sheetrock enough to make a stain.” And yet, I really don’t know.

So tomorrow we’ll call the insurance adjuster and a roofer to see what they say.

When I got back down and talked to K about what I found, the Boy discovered my boots and couldn’t resist.

Later in the evening, K thought the spot is damper than it was earlier. We decided to go all out: we brought out the two tarps we use for camping, overlapping one with the other so that water can run under the tarp, weighing the whole thing down with bricks and cinder blocks. And doing all this in a light rain. At 10:30.

Lightroom Revisit

In August 2003, K and I rode our bikes south through Slovakia to Hungary to spend a week in Budapest. When we returned, we rode to Sturovo, a town in southern Slovakia, where we caught a train to Zilina, where we waited for another train to Trstena, just across the border from where we lived in southern Poland. We had to wait in the Zilina train station for most of the night to catch the 5:00 a.m. train to Trstena. This guy was waiting for a train, too.

This is one I’m particularly pleased with the Lightroom reworking. The before-and-after shows how much of a difference it makes to do selective editing:

Day 65: Inferring in the Rain

Tuesday 19 May 2020

Inferring

Authors often say a lot without saying much. A good author leaves a lot for the reader to piece together for herself, and that’s one of the things that can make a book engaging. But filling in those gaps is a skill that readers must learn. It doesn’t come naturally.

This is one of the things I spend a lot of time and energy teaching my eighth graders how to do. The honors kids are usually fairly adept at it, but the on-level students often struggle. I have to model it for them, doing think-alouds in which I say aloud all the inferences that are running through my head when I read. I infer; I predict; I connect to previous knowledge; I comment on what I read. I model, model, model, then turn it over to them to try as a class before they try it in groups and finally as individuals. Scaffolding, that’s called: model it, practice as a whole class, practice in groups, practice individually — the bread and butter of my teaching.

Tom Sawyer is providing ample chance for me to begin exposing the Boy to this kind of critical thinking.

Presently [Aunt Polly] stepped into the kitchen, and Sid, happy in his immunity, reached for the sugar-bowl — a sort of glorying over Tom which was wellnigh unbearable. But Sid’s fingers slipped and the bowl dropped and broke. Tom was in ecstasies.

I pause: “What do you think will happen?” I ask the Boy.

“Aunt Polly will think that Tom broke the sugar bowl,” he said after a moment’s thought.

“Right. That’s called predicting…” I begin.

“I know, Daddy. You tell me that every time we read something.” Perhaps not every time, but often enough.

We continue:

In such ecstasies that he even controlled his tongue and was silent. He said to himself that he would not speak a word, even when his aunt came in, but would sit perfectly still till she asked who did the mischief; and then he would tell, and there would be nothing so good in the world as to see that pet model “catch it.” He was so brimful of exultation that he could hardly hold himself when the old lady came back and stood above the wreck discharging lightnings of wrath from over her spectacles. He said to himself, “Now it’s coming!” And the next instant he was sprawling on the floor!

“What does ‘sprawling’ mean?” the Boy asks.

I explain, then ask, “Do you understand what happened?”

There is a lot going on in that passage, particularly in the final two sentences: “He said to himself, ‘Now it’s comin!’ And the next instant he was sprawling on the floor!” Missing from this is the fact that Aunt Polly slaps Tom so hard that it knocks him off his chair.

I explained it to the Boy. He thought it was horrible that someone would slap a child so hard that it knocks him out of his chair. I think that’s a fairly reasonable concern, to say the least. Why do we adults find that passage funny, though? I think it’s because of all the work Twain makes us do, all the thinking, all the blanks we fill in. Twain is a master of implication.

In the Rain

It rained all day today. K and I were concerned that it might turn out to be enough to threaten our basement again. Granted, I have filled all the termite treatment holes with hydraulic cement: those holes shouldn’t let any more water into our basement, let alone the geysers and fountains that were gushing in during our last storm. And the crack by the fireplace? I drilled it out completely and patched it with more hydraulic cement.

And then snow

So part of me was thinking, “Okay — bring it on. Let’s see if I’ve got you licked” (to employ a usage from Tom Sawyer that still tickles the Boy).

But most of me was just hoping that it didn’t come to that. When the Boy and I headed out in the morning to see how much rain had fallen, things were looking bad but not dreadful.

We went back out in the afternoon after more rain. We went ahead and crossed the creek at this point like usual: the water was only a few inches above our feet. I held the Boy’s hand, and we ventured up a bit further. The rain continued, and by the time we made it back to this point, the water was waist-deep for the Boy. I held his hand firmly, and we made it across easily, but it was a lesson: “See how quickly the water can rise?” That’s the epitome of flash-flooding.

Scare Politics

I noticed this particular meme this evening on social media:

I find it hard to imagine what kind of simplistic thinking could lead to something like this. Surely no one so naive as to believe that it’s as simple as this meme suggests. To think that we could go from Trump-istan to this worst-case-scenario, utterly exaggerated vision of progressive ideas run amuck in one election cycle — I just don’t get it.

What I do get is the fear buttons this kind of meme pushes. The left has their own versions of these memes, of course. I could probably browse the tweets of friends who lean much further to the left that an avowed centrist (don’t we all see ourselves as centrists? no — we certainly don’t) like me and find the equivalent: we’re one step away from living in a real-life Handmaid’s Tale. (Come to think of it, I believe there was a protest with women dressed as handmaids from the novel/movie/series.) Making decisions from fear is bad enough, but making them from a sense of fear that might very well have been intentionally manipulated — that in itself is terrifying.

The Dog

Two things: how can a dog get that dirty in a matter of seconds? And how can it seem to disappear as soon as she’s dry?

Day 64: Working, Ending, and Reading

Monday 18 May 2020

Working and Ending

We’re nearing the end of the year — only a couple of weeks to go. These weeks promise to be anything but typical. For one thing, I’m giving assignments with the understanding, on both sides, that I will provide minimal feedback and that the grade depends more on effort than accuracy. That’s the district policy during our quarantine teaching. It might be the state policy. So some kids do their absolute best, like this analysis of chapter 24 of To Kill a Mockingbird:

Chapter 24 is important because it shows how the town of Maycomb isn’t as “Christian” or as “nice” as they claim to be. For example, Mrs. Farrow Mentions how they can educate them and try to make them Christians but till there will be, “no lady safe in her bed.” The antecedent ambiguity that Mrs. Farrow makes using “them” as in the African Americans shows a sense of judgment she has towards them. Not only that but when she mentions how much they are fighting a losing battle and women still can’t be safe shows the hierarchy these white people have put themselves in showing that no matter what an African American will never be better as a person of white ethnicity. Similarly, Merriweather states how there are some, “Misguided people” in the town who think they were “Doing right”, but all they did was “Stir [them] up.” This second case of antecedent ambiguity this time towards Atticus shows the real hypocrisy of Mrs. Merriweather. Mrs.Maudie backs that up with a remark showing how Mrs. Merrieweather doesn’t feel any ounce of remorse talking trash, but eating Atticus’ food. Showing how really bad Mrs. Merriweather actually is.

Other students don’t turn in anything. Despite calls to parents. Despite emails. Despite encouragement. Despite the constant reminder that this the only time they’ll have to pull in a handful of 100s (nine of them, in fact) for simply doing the work. Just putting forth the most minimal effort. It’s frustrating, not to mention tiring.

The Boy, though, gets no mercy. Just try to skip something, or not do his absolute best — K is on him to get everything done, and when she’s not, I am. Truth be told, though, she’s done the lion’s share of the work with him — probably something like 95% of the work with him even if I’m being generous with myself. I have spent most of that time in the basement, “grading” things, sending emails, planning things, meeting on Google Meet. She has kept him on his toes, kept his nose to the cliche grindstone, which means she’s been keeping her own to the grindstone as well.

I am usually keeping my own students’ noses to the cliche at this time of year, especially the English I students. They’ll soon be writing their letters to next year’s students, and I have to make sure their final impressions of the class will help them create the appropriate first impressions in next year’s classes. They’re usually finishing up Great Expectations or Lord of the Flies at this point in the year. They’re out of breath, academic legs aching, making the last mad dash for the finish, and I’m there cheering them on and behind them whipping them faster, mixing metaphors left and right. The letter is supposed to be completed in one class period. That’s what makes it so impressive to the students next year.

“How would you rate this letter’s organization?” I ask. They usually are moderately impressed.

“How would you rate this letter’s length?” I ask. They usually are moderately impressed.

“How would you rate this letter’s persuasiveness?” I ask. They usually are moderately impressed.

“Last year’s students wrote these letters in one class period. These are, therefore, first drafts.” I pause for effect. Everyone begins looking at each other. “Whose opinion of these letters has risen noticeably?” Every hand — every single one — goes up.

And this year? How can I make sure each student only spends the equivalent of one class period on her letter? In short, I can’t.

Not the end of the world, but frustrating.

Reading

E and I finished Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea last night. After complaining about how he didn’t understand everything for the last couple of weeks, he changed his tune when I realized we wouldn’t find out what happened to Captain Nemo.

“Is there a sequel?”

“I think there is. Or at least he appears in another book,” I say.

“Can we read it?”

No — not now. Enough Jules Verne for now.

Our next book: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. We begin with a history and culture lesson: I talk to the Boy about the n-word. It appears in the book. There’s no escaping it. He’ll encounter it in one way or another soon enough.

Then we begin reading. I’m hoping he’ll find it amusing. If he doesn’t… well, I guess we’ll have to try something else. But soon enough, he’s laughing:

The summer evenings were long. It was not dark, yet. Presently Tom checked his whistle. A stranger was before him—a boy a shade larger than himself. A new-comer of any age or either sex was an impressive curiosity in the poor little shabby village of St. Petersburg. This boy was well dressed, too—well dressed on a week-day. This was simply astounding. His cap was a dainty thing, his close-buttoned blue cloth roundabout was new and natty, and so were his pantaloons. He had shoes on—and it was only Friday. He even wore a necktie, a bright bit of ribbon. He had a citified air about him that ate into Tom’s vitals. The more Tom stared at the splendid marvel, the higher he turned up his nose at his finery and the shabbier and shabbier his own outfit seemed to him to grow. Neither boy spoke. If one moved, the other moved—but only sidewise, in a circle; they kept face to face and eye to eye all the time. Finally, Tom said:
“I can lick you!”
“I’d like to see you try it.”
“Well, I can do it.”
“No you can’t, either.”
“Yes I can.”
“No you can’t.”
“I can.”
“You can’t.”
“Can!”
“Can’t!”

The Boy is laughing so hard by the time we get here. We reenact the dialogue a number of times, each time to more uproarious laughter. I’m not sure what he finds more amusing: the idea of “whip” meaning “to beat up” or repetition of assertion and denial.

We continue:

An uncomfortable pause. Then Tom said:
“What’s your name?”
“’Tisn’t any of your business, maybe.”
“Well I ’low I’ll make it my business.”
“Well why don’t you?”
“If you say much, I will.”
“Much—much—much. There now.”

The whole “much-much-much” just about doubled him over. It’s what an eight-year-old might do, after all.

After his evening dental hygiene session (what a way to describe an eight-year-old boy brushing his teeth), we embark on chapter two, the most famous of all Twain’s passages: the whitewashing scene.

Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart. And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to swing it with—and so on, and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn’t unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass door-knob, a dog-collar—but no dog—the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash.

The idea of “a dead rat and a string to swing it with” was just terribly amusing for the Boy.

As he was drifting off to sleep, he remembered another favorite line — once I explained key vocabulary — and muttered it one last time: “would have bankrupted every boy in the village.”

Day 63: First Mass

Sunday 17 May 2020

Today, parishes across the state were able to have public Mass for the first time in two months.

The local Catholic newspaper hired me to photograph Mass at a couple of locations.

A surreal scene, to be sure.

Day 62: Camping in the Backyard

Saturday 16 May 2020

We’ve gone camping as a family quite a few times: Stone Mountain, Deep Creek, Lake Jocassee, and Huntington Beach come immediately to mind. Memorial Day was always a great weekend to go camping, and we went most often to the beach. But then life got complicated, family got sick, schedules changed, and responsibilities grew so that now, even if there weren’t a pandemic to worry about, we would not be able to go camping as a family for quite some time. For how long? We really don’t know.

The Boy, though, wanted to go camping. So we did the obvious thing last night: we pitched a tent in our backyard and spent the night in it. There — camping.

Well, not quite. We took our pillows down with us. Somehow, we never remember to bring our pillows — or any pillows really — when we go camping.

Also, I went in to get E’s blanket in the middle of the night when I woke to find him only barely covered with the sleeping bag because he was sleeping under it instead of in it.

And we didn’t have to strike camp this morning. We just left it up, thinking we might go camping again.

Finally, and most significantly for me, I took a shower without flipflops this morning.

Yesterday afternoon, we also put up K’s new swing. It’s hanging a little wonky now, and I didn’t have a chance to figure out today why, but it’s there. And the dog even likes it.

As for today, other than the single picture from this morning, I never had occasion to take out the camera. Who wants to see pictures of bathrooms in the midst of weekly cleaning or the crawl space as I examine the water pipes to try to figure out why they’re banging and knocking?

Day 61: Fear, Faith, and Fun

Friday 15 May 2020

Fear and Faith

Imagine fear nestled into anxiety burrowed into terror, and all of that is supposed, in the end, to be a source of great joy. “In my beginning is my end” T. S. Eliot wrote, but for some evangelical Christians, it might be reworded, “In my anxiety is my comfort,” for they view their everyday reality through an apocalyptic lens. They post things like this on social media:

The single comment “Scary” reveals the paradox at the heart of this line of thinking.

On the one hand, there is a sense of terror at what’s coming. Such believers look at the Bible as a roadmap for the future, seeing all sorts of ideas that, to those of us on the outside looking in, seem patently ridiculous. They see a coming world-engulfing violent cataclysm that will wipe out wide swaths of humanity and subject the survivors to near-slavery under the rule of some world-dominating ruler known simply The Beast, who will rule in what they call The Tribulation. During this time, there will be mass executions of believers and worldwide oppression.

At this point, the vision starts fracturing. What will happen to Christians, to good Bible-believing Christians who saw all this coming and gave themselves over to the Lord long ago? Some suggest that these poor Christians will have to go through all this; others (most) believe firmly that they’ll all be whisked away to heaven before all this — the rapture.

I grew up being taught that, like the rapture, God would supernaturally protect all his faithful Christians from this onslaught of literal hell on earth, but instead of being taken away into heaven, we would escape to a location of protection, which got the name the Place of Safety. Our religious leader conjectured it would be in Petra, Jordan. There we would spend the three-and-a-half years that the devil, through his Beast, would rule and torment the world, emerging at the end when Jesus returns to put the devil in his place and us in charge of rebuilding the world. Sounds crazy — but not any crazier than being whisked away like the Left Behind book series narrates.

Whatever the belief, though, these groups have one thing in common: the believers — the right-believing faithful — will be saved. This, then, should be a time of joy for such Christians. The end is almost here, and because they believed the right things all these times, they won’t have to endure the horrors coming.

So why the fear? Just look at the thoughts that follow the original “Scary” comment:

These poor folks are genuinely scared about Bill Gates’s supposed plans to use this pandemic and the resulting vaccine, which they fear will be mandatory (which it should be), to implant chips into them.

There is an amusing irony in all this, though:

“The COVID-19 vaccine is a trick so they can put a tracking chip in your body!” they furiously tweet out from the tracking device they willingly carry everywhere in their pocket.
— Faith Naff 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🌹🦋 (@FaithNaff) May 9, 2020

Such a strange mix of confusion, and it’s driving thousands upon thousands to outright terror.

There is, of course, one thing that these fear-stricken Christians can do: they can pray about it.

Yet what is the effectiveness of this prayer? This verse from the Bible promises that “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray” that God “will heal their land.” If that doesn’t sound like a promise from omnipotence that is directly applicable to our current situation, I don’t know what does.

But we’ve tried this before:

pic.twitter.com/myUXPjD6ji
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) April 4, 2020

These Christians will point out that there are conditions: the petitioners must “turn from their wicked ways” before this promise will be fulfilled, so that’s probably the problem: America is still aborting pregnancies, fornicating, and tolerating homosexuality (the three biggies), so God is just waiting for that to stop.

On March 30 televangelist Kenneth Copeland must have decided he would not wait for the stubborn, God-hating Americans to repent and simply “exercised judgment” on the pandemic, thus ending it:

But four days later, he realized he had to try again:

And yet it’s still not over.

Here’s where another layer of anxiety enters: these poor souls must be wracking their brains and souls trying to figure out what they’re doing wrong. So it seems to me that this type of Christianity does not relieve anxiety but only heightens it. Instead of these beliefs calming you, they add another layer of anxiety when one’s prayer’s and petitions are either ignored or answered in the negative, and the natural response is to blame oneself: “God promised. I must have done something wrong.”

So by the time we get to this level, we have the following fears, some conscious and some less so.

The end of the world is literally around the corner. If I’m right with God, I’ll be spared. Am I right with God?
Even if I’m right with God, my interpretation of end-time prophecy might be a little wrong and Jesus might not return until after the tribulation. So if I go through this horror, how will I know I’ll be spared in the end?
I know God doesn’t always answer prayers, but his Word says he will if I repent and pray, so if I or someone close to me becomes infected, I’ll pray, but it might not be his will.
And even if it is his will, I might have done something wrong. Or my country might be doing something wrong.

For something that’s supposed to bring comfort, that’s an awful lot of sources of anxiety.

In a sense, these folks have a right to their anxiety. The First Amendment guarantees that right. But some of these anxiety-inducing conspiracy theories have long-reaching effects. They lead people to reject science for religious-based superstition:

Right-wing pastor Curt Landry tells his follower never to accept any eventual coronavirus vaccine because it’s a set-up for the Mark of the Beast: “That vaccine is from the pit of Hell. Do not pray for those vaccines, and do not take the vaccine. ” https://t.co/4oExoRqTbJ pic.twitter.com/OdePBeRaT1
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) April 2, 2020

Conspiracy theories have been around for ages, and fundamentalist Evangelical Christians have often been particularly willing to believe them. After all, their whole religion is a conspiracy theory: the devil is constantly trying to get humans to do his bidding unknowingly. The group I grew up in went so far as to call itself the only group of true Christians in the world: the rest of the “so-called” Christians were actually worshipping a Satan-created replacement Christianity. These “so-called Christians” were, for all intents and purposes, worshiping the devil himself. But even among the milder, less cultish groups, there is a sense of conspiracy. Indeed, this conspiracy goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, when the devil tried to usurp God’s control over humanity.

I’m certainly not the only one to notice this similarity:

Arthur Jones, the director of the documentary film Feels Good Man, which tells the story of how internet memes infiltrated politics in the 2016 presidential election, told me that QAnon reminds him of his childhood growing up in an evangelical-Christian family in the Ozarks. He said that many people he knew then, and many people he meets now in the most devout parts of the country, are deeply interested in the Book of Revelation, and in trying to unpack “all of its pretty-hard-to-decipher prophecies.” Jones went on: “I think the same kind of person would all of a sudden start pulling at the threads of Q and start feeling like everything is starting to fall into place and make sense. If you are an evangelical and you look at Donald Trump on face value, he lies, he steals, he cheats, he’s been married multiple times, he’s clearly a sinner. But you are trying to find a way that he is somehow part of God’s plan.”

So we’re at the point that we’re all living in different realities. The Atlantic has an article about this now: “The Prophecies of Q,” aptly summarized, “American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.”

The power of the internet was understood early on, but the full nature of that power—its ability to shatter any semblance of shared reality, undermining civil society and democratic governance in the process—was not. The internet also enabled unknown individuals to reach masses of people, at a scale Marshall McLuhan never dreamed of. The warping of shared reality leads a man with an AR-15 rifle to invade a pizza shop. It brings online forums into being where people colorfully imagine the assassination of a former secretary of state. It offers the promise of a Great Awakening, in which the elites will be routed and the truth will be revealed. It causes chat sites to come alive with commentary speculating that the coronavirus pandemic may be the moment QAnon has been waiting for. None of this could have been imagined as recently as the turn of the century.

Would could imagine a scenario in which a prankster began something like Q and then it quickly gets out of hand. The prankster tries to step forward and point out that he began it all. “Look, I have evidence!” He could have even had the foresight to record everything he did on video and through screen-recording software, yet that wouldn’t be enough once the conspiracy had gained a life of its own. One can only imagine what such a prankster would feel as he watched his creation ravage reasonable — a modern Frankenstein, with the conspiracy theory being his unnamed monster.

Yet Frankenstein could reason with his creation, and in fact did attempt to talk to him. Conspiracy theories are like memes: they’re elements of the brain that are belong to no one and are somewhat self-replicating. In short, there’s no reasoning with a conspiracy theory, and there’s little ability to talk to a believer in one:

Taking a page from Trump’s playbook, Q frequently rails against legitimate sources of information as fake. Shock and Harger rely on information they encounter on Facebook rather than news outlets run by journalists. They don’t read the local paper or watch any of the major television networks. “You can’t watch the news,” Shock said. “Your news channel ain’t gonna tell us shit.” Harger says he likes One America News Network. Not so long ago, he used to watch CNN, and couldn’t get enough of Wolf Blitzer. “We were glued to that; we always have been,” he said. “Until this man, Trump, really opened our eyes to what’s happening. And Q. Q is telling us beforehand the stuff that’s going to happen.” I asked Harger and Shock for examples of predictions that had come true. They could not provide specifics and instead encouraged me to do the research myself. When I asked them how they explained the events Q had predicted that never happened, such as Clinton’s arrest, they said that deception is part of Q’s plan. Shock added, “I think there were more things that were predicted that did happen.” Her tone was gentle rather than indignant.

There’s no reasoning with them because they often don’t even see themselves as conspiracy theorists:

“Some of the people who follow Q would consider themselves to be conspiracy theorists,” [David] Hayes[, one of the best-known QAnon evangelists on the planet] says in the video. “I do not consider myself to be a conspiracy theorist. I consider myself to be a Q researcher. I don’t have anything against people who like to follow conspiracies. That’s their thing. It’s not my thing.”

So in the end, it’s hard not to be at least somewhat depressed about all this, and that in turn tends to make me just a little pessimistic about our future as a species — yet again. I can help our children develop the critical thinking skills (the painfully basic critical thinking skills) to avoid falling into this trap themselves, but that’s two in a nation of millions. These ideas are gaining momentum, and the alternative cultures they spawn are growing.

Fun

The Boy and I went out exploring again today. He had to try his new gumboots. I warned him about deep water: “If the water goes over the top of the boot, your foot will be permanently soaked.” He stepped in water that was too deep. One foot got soaked. We laughed quite a while about the squishing sounds coming from his boot.

Day 60: Eighth Birthday

Thursday 14 May 2020

A proper birthday has to start with a proper birthday breakfast and a phone call from Babcia. For E, this meant an omelette for breakfast. Never mind that this was only the second time he’s ever had an omelet, a proper omelette, but he fell in love with it earlier this week, on Mother’s Day, and decided that it was his favorite breakfast of all time. Making omelets though is a time-consuming task, so although I layered the sauteed onions, sauteed peppers, and bacon bits very carefully for the Boy, the rest of us got it all mixed up in scrambled eggs.

“I could have it that way, I guess,” he confessed. “It’s the same thing, just all mixed up.”

The phone call from Babcia was a little less fluid. E is reticent to speak Polish, so although he understands everything Babcia says, he usually responds in English then turns to K, expecting a translation. Today Babcia tried to help him out, tried to ease his anxiety. She asked him simple questions like, “Are the flowers blooming?” or “What color are the flowers?” Yet he was still reluctant to speak Polish.

School today for him was relatively simple. At first, he wanted yesterday to complete as much of today’s work in addition to yesterday’s work as possible. But yesterday in the afternoon he decided that was not the best plan after all. He was ready for some free time. This meant of course that he had all the work for today to complete.

At the beginning of this quarantine, a day’s worth of work was just that: a day’s worth of work. The amount was greater than it is now, to be sure, but he fussed incessantly how about the frustrations he was feeling, about the difficulty of the math problems, about the length of the readings. We are half expecting such antics today, interspersed with cries of, “But it’s my birthday. Why do I have to work on my birthday?” However, he plowed through his work with relative ease, making it through math, which was subtracting three-digit numbers from three-digit numbers, each problem requiring regrouping and then word problems, in less than fifteen minutes. He wrote two more chapters of his frog/toad book and was done.

In the afternoon, we headed back down to the spot where we’d caught and inadvertently killed a minnow yesterday. I thought perhaps we might have a repeat, feared it in some ways — who wants to just go around killing little fish? Yet E was keen to try again. We did try again, and caught three fish. Two of them made it back to the water fine.

One of them — well, we didn’t quite hook him in the mouth but somehow hooked him through his body. He was already bleeding when we pulled him out of the water.

While we were down there, L came to the balcony and yelled across the yard, “You guys need to come back! Now!” At first, I was afraid that something had happened to Papa. Of late he’s been spending afternoons on the deck wallowing in nostalgia by exploring songs he hasn’t heard in decades, all thanks to Spotify.

Instead, we all got a pleasant surprise:

E’s best friend’s mother drove him by our house to wish the Boy happy birthday.

As for our celebration, we played a trick on him that Nana and Papa played on me a couple of times: give him something that’s relatively worthless without the other item. Like a cable to hook up a laptop to something suggesting that it might work with an old laptop, then giving a new one as a surprise (a la Nana and Papa).

We gave him a tablet case and screen protector. He’d been asking for a tablet for some time, and we thought we’d see what would happen if he got only the empty shell. “You can keep and maybe you’ll get a tablet next year,” I suggested. “Oh, that’s great,” he said very calmly — not really upset, not really thrilled.

Then, when he opened Papa’s present, lo and behold — an Amazon Fire, just for him.

Finally, there was the cake. L began working on the cake yesterday and decided to add to it today. A two-tiered cake, each with two layers.

The slices were impressive to say the least. K and I split one: she took the top tier, and I worked on the bottom one. The Girl is getting the flavors down — she’s still not thrilled with the presentation, though.

“Patience and practice,” K said to her. Though perhaps not quite so much practice while we’re all locked down.

Previous Years

Happy Mess Day

Second Time Around

Third Party

Celebration Day

Birthday

Fifth Birthday Party

Sports and Ice Cream

Seventh Birthday

Day 59: Morning Work Hooks the Companion

Wednesday 13 May 2020

Morning Work

Since I didn’t have much to do for school this morning, I took over the first part of E’s homeschooling adventure. Our first task: to write the first chapter or two of his book about frogs and toads. Six chapters will constitute the final product:

Introduction
Toads
Frogs
Similarities
Differences
Dedication

As we read, I saw the difficulties and frustrations lying ahead: when it would come time to write the book, he might fuss, “Now we’ll have to go back through the text again. We have to read it again!!” So I taught him a little trick as we read that I use with my students.

“As you’re re-reading, highlight facts you might want to rewrite in your own writing. Then put a number beside it to indicate which chapter you’ll use it in. When it comes time to write, then, you’ll just have to look at all the numbers for the chapter you happen to be working on.”

There are two reasons for this: first, it will help him with his writing later. That’s the most obvious way it assists him. Less obvious but more importantly, it helps him develop skills as a critical, analytic reader. My own students often have difficulty reading because they’re not reading for a particular reason. Giving kids a purpose as they read gives them a goal and a metric to measure comprehension and success.

As we read, E grew more confident about the whole process; as he began writing the first chapters, he realized the sense behind it all. That might lead to a little less fussing as he continues to work on the piece.

Hook

Mr. F, our neighbor, is a keen fisherman. He’s got a boat, countless rods and reels, and multiple tackle boxes filled with endless lures and hooks. Heading out to the lake regularly, he often comes home with enough fish for his family and some neighbors: he’s given us many, many pounds of fish over the year. He’s the type of fisherman that, as regards fishing equipment, if he doesn’t have it, it probably doesn’t exist.

The Boy often goes over to help Mr. F. He’s something of a third grandfather to E, which makes him really like a second grandfather since Dziadek passed before E was a year old and E knows him only from pictures.

When E and I discovered in the creek that runs behind our house a couple of pools that are deep enough for larger minnows — some looking to be three or more inches long, maybe even four inches long — I commented that they’re almost big enough actually to use a hook and bait. Recalling the little minnows we caught in Lake Jocassee with just a line, a hook, and some bread, I suggested that we could use a bamboo cane and make a real, old-fashioned playin’-hooky-to-go-fishin’ cane fishing pole.

After we were both done with school, we headed down, saw and net in hand. “I still want to try to net some minnow,” he explained. We found an adequately small cane and cut it after a bit of unsuccessfully netting attempts.

“Now we just need the line and a hook,” the Boy said as we headed back, adding as a sad afterthought, “but we don’t have any.”

“Why not ask Mr. F?” I suggested.

“Oh yeah!”

Then the real question as far as I was concerned: with Mr. F not out, he would have to go knock on the neighbors’ door, and I decided it was something he was going to have to do by himself. Would he do it?

“Just go knock on their door,” I said after he protested that Mr. F wasn’t outside at that moment.

“What if Mrs. P answers the door?”

“Just tell her that you have a favor to ask of Mr. F.”

He paused in thought. “Okay.”

When he came back, the Girl had joined us and was snooping about to figure out what was up. I explained. “Oh.” No protests about how awfully cruel it would be to catch a minnow with a hook. “With a hook!? Jabbed in its mouth?!” I could just hear her indignantly and incredulously asking.

When the Boy headed down for some fishing, I suggested that L might want to go with him. “Don’t let her talk you into letting her have the first turn because she will try to bamboozle you,” I warned.

He headed down by himself, though. I thought for a while that I should go with him at least to memorialize the moment photographically. Then I thought better of it: he needs some independence, and since he didn’t even ask me (with the explanation of being scared or worried about this or that) to go with him, I stayed behind.

He came back up a few minutes later, a scowl on his face as he stomped up the hill.

“Guess what?” he began, not waiting for a response. “I had one or two good tries and then the hook got stuck. When I tried to pull it out, the hook came off!” He plopped in a chair. “Now I can’t fish at all today!”

“Sounds like we might need to go get our own hooks,” I suggested.

More incredulity: “At the store?!” E is the most worried about cornavirus in our family. I think he’s convinced, despite our efforts to explain everything, that one can just get it, that it just lurks in the air waiting for unsuspecting victims.

In the end, we didn’t have to go get more hooks: the Boy remembered he had one small hook still on his fishing pole, so we cut it off and tied it onto the cane pole. We took some bread from a dinner roll we had, rolled it back into dough, and put it on the hook.

Soon enough, we had a minnow.

But our catch-and-release plan was thwarted by the difficulty of removing a hook from such a small fish. In the end, something terribly traumatic happened to the poor fish as we were removing the hook, and it went belly up immediately upon release.

The Companion

Clover has become a companion dog. She doesn’t wander around, looking to find what she can get into. She doesn’t sneak off to try to get on the couch. She doesn’t (always) go off searching for a toy. She plops down next to someone and just relaxes. When we’re outside and L is, for instance, in our fort reading and Papa is on the deck listening to music (he’s become a real Spotify fiend), the pup moves from person to person, spending a little time by my side, a little time by Papa’s side, and a little time with L.

Another sign that she’s no longer a puppy.

Then she goes over to the fence just to antagonize the neighbors’ dog, so many not so much…

Day 58: The Ball, the Berry, the Photo, and the Border

Tuesday 12 May 2020

Kicking the Ball

Clover loves to play fetch with balls: tennis balls, volleyballs, basketballs — whatever. She prefers anything over a basketball because she cannot grasp it in her teeth and has to herd it up the hill of our backyard with her nose. This is why I personally prefer a basketball with her because it is much more amusing to watch her bring the ball back.

However, as enjoyable as playing ball with Clover is, she can really turn it into an annoyance. Any time anyone comes into the backyard, she thinks they’ve done so expressly to play with her. No other options are conceivable. So she runs to get the ball and drops it near your feet and backs off expectantly. She looks at the ball, looks at you, looks back at the ball. If you don’t kick it, she’ll run up, give it a little nudge with her nose, then back off again, ready to streak down the hill after the ball.

This is cute if you’re just out with your son, doing this or that. It’s less cute when you’re trying to do something, like build a fire or finish a swing. I try to accommodate her even then, occasionally kicking the ball for her or simply shove it away from me with the vague hope that it will roll down the hill that is our backyard and distract the dog for at least fifteen seconds.

I shouldn’t complain, though: I love our dog, even though I joke that I don’t. She’s stubborn and overly hyper; she gets jealous of any dog which is receiving giving attention; she plays rough and tries to boss smaller or large and more docile dogs about. Despite these minor shortcomings, it’s hard not to adore her: her jealousy just comes from her love. Her pestering just comes from a desire to play, which she rightly realizes we often enjoy as much as she.

Shooting and Berries

During our morning break, the Boy and I went shooting in the backyard. He’s become quite the shot with his bb gun. While we were retrieving an errantly kicked ball (over the fence to the driveway, rolling down to the blueberry bushes), he decided to take a few shots at the archery target at the other end of the yard. From where we stood, though, he was shooting only at the side, a target of about 15-18 inches wide. He hit it the first time; he hit it the second.

“Man, I’m good,” he said.

Yes, he certainly is. Sometimes we have to work on that modesty a bit, though. Yet, on the other hand, he is so lacking in confidence about some things — especially academic tasks — that perhaps a bit of bragging is a good thing. I don’t know.

I do know that he was impressed with the number of berries on our bushes and wondered what would happen if we were to try them now, long before they’re ripe.

“Go ahead and try one — but you probably won’t like it,” I suggested.

He tried one.

“Oh, oh! Yuck! It’s so hard and sour!”

Photo Walk

After school was finished, the Boy was eager to go on a photo walk together. “I’m not so into photography anymore,” he explained, “but it’s still fun.” So I gave him the old D70 and took our little X100 for myself and off we went.

We passed the house where, for whatever reason, the owners are storing an old toilet on the back deck. The Boy loves the idea of a toilet on the back deck. “That way you can poop and be in nature!” That’s one way of looking at it — a very seven-year-old way at that. When we got to the house, he tromped boldly up to the fence, took a moment to compose his shot, and walked calmly back down. In the past, he didn’t really want to do that.

“What if they see me? What if they say something?”

I tried to explain: “The most they would do is to tell you not to take a picture of their house. In that case, you just smile, apologize, and say, ‘Sorry — I’ll delete it.’ Simple.”

And where are the pictures he took? I haven’t taken them off the camera. I’ve been trying to teach him to use Lightroom and use his edits as well, but we didn’t have time today to complete the whole project.

We had to hurry home for dinner.

My Hometown

I grew up in Bristol, which is a unique city as it sits on the Virginia/Tennessee border. The border runs right down the middle of the main street downtown, State Street. A divided city such as Bristol has unique features: for instance, sales tax in Virginia is much lower than that in Tennessee because Tennessee doesn’t have an income tax. Smart folks, then, live on the Tennessee side and shop on the Virginia side.

Back before Daylight Savings Time was an almost-nationwide phenomenon — I don’t know what else to call the arbitrary changing of the clock — one state used it and the other didn’t. That meant you could cross the street and gain or lose an hour.

When I first went to Poland in the Peace Corps, I stayed with a Polish host family in Radom for twelve weeks during training. The son was fascinated with State Street: “Does that mean if you commit a crime on one side of the city and the police chase you and you cross the border, they have to stop chasing you?”

The two-state status of the city is relevant now in the time of COVID-19 as Tennessee and Virginia are taking different courses through the pandemic. CNN had a story about it yesterday.

Day 57: Math, Mowing, Painting, and the Missionary Society

Monday 11 May 2020

Math

The Boy was having trouble this morning with three-digit subtraction, things like 352-178. He was thinking a little too much, mixing prior knowledge with current practice. For example, in the number above, he would know he had to borrow a 10 from the 10s place in order to subtract 8 properly, but then that would leave him with 4. Instead of writing 4 above the crossed-out 5, he wrote 40. Which is technically correct. But the be was subtracting 7 from 40 and coming up with 33, and before long, he was subtracting one three-digit number from another three-digit number and coming up with a six-digit answer.

I remember the frustration of borrowing numbers in subtraction. I, too, experienced it in second grade: I just couldn’t figure out how those numbers were shifting around, 5 becoming 4 so I could subtract something from the 1s place. Everyone tried explaining it to me: my teacher, mom, dad, the girl who babysat me from time to time. It just didn’t make any sense to me no matter how often and how many different ways it was explained.

So I understood the Boy’s frustration this morning. I sat with him a while, taking a break from my own work, and tried to help him through it.

“Yes, but Daddy, that’s the 10s place, so it’s not just 4, it’s 40.”

“Technically, you’re correct, but…”

“What do you mean ‘technically’? What does that even mean?!”

It was another moment that I found myself in awe of elementary school teachers. I don’t teach many new skills: I mainly take existing skills and improve them. The kids can write when they come to me; I just help them write better. They can read when they come to me; I just give them tricks for comprehending more challenging texts: things like “make sure you keep track of your pronouns’ antecedents — you need to know who ‘he’ is when the author uses that pronoun,” or “determine the part of speech of that unknown word — that will help you a lot in inferring a possible meaning.” But just taking a kid who doesn’t know at all how to read and turning her into a reader? I haven’t got the slightest clue how to do that. I know it’s just a matter of training: I minored in education in college, but in secondary education — not primary. An entirely different field of study.

Still, having experienced that frustration myself, I had a certain patience and understanding of his frustration.

This is why some feel that teachers who teach subjects they were always good at isn’t as effective as alternatives. We — for I was always good at literature and decent at writing — know how to do these skills seemingly instinctively. It’s hard to teach someone how to do something that you can do, relative to the struggling student, without thinking. It’s better to teach something that you yourself have struggled with, goes the thinking. But the problem with that: where’s the passion? I don’t teach English just because I want to teach and happened to choose English. I teach it because I myself enjoy writing; I teach it because I love reading. I teach it because I have a certain excitement about certain books, certain poems, even certain reading skills that I love to share with students. I struggled with math, and the only passion I feel about it is a certain kind of revulsion.

Mowing and Painting

The Boy loves working in the yard. We bought a battery-powered weed eater just so he could help (which is now out of trim line, which we don’t have). Today, after scolding me a little bit about still not having the right line, he asked if he could help mow.

When we first started doing this, I would let him do the little flat, straight portion in the front yard just between the flower bed and the crape myrtles. Today, I let him tackle some of the more challenging areas.

“Make sure you keep the line of uncut grass just on the inside edge of your outside wheel,” I explained, demonstrating just what I meant.

He tried, poor fellow, but he just couldn’t stop drifting inward, leaving slivers of uncut grass with every row.

Still, I can’t help but be pleased that he’s still willing to help. At some point, the job will be his entirely.

Saturday in the Yard

The Girl finished up the afternoon with a little more painting: the swing I’d started Saturday for K’s Mother’s Day gift is nearing completion.

The Missionary Society Meeting

It’s always a chapter that confuses students: the 24th chapter in To Kill a Mockingbird feels like someone took a chapter out of a completely different novel, changed a few names to match a few characters’ names in Mockingbird, and just slipped it into the stream of the story. The only connection it seems to have with the rest of the book is the news of the death of Tom Robinson toward the end of the chapter. I contend that in many ways it’s one of the most important chapters in the book as it fully develops one of the book’s major themes: the hypocrisy of Southern white Christians.

Most of the chapter centers around Aunt Alexandra’s hosting the Maycomb Alabama Methodist Episcopal Church South Missionary Society meeting. Scout attends as “a part of [Alexandra’s] campaign to teach [Scout] to be a lady.” Poor Scout is lost from the beginning: she asks about what they studied and gets confused immediately:

“Oh child, those poor Mrunas,” [Mrs. Merriweather] said, and was off. Few other questions would be necessary.
Mrs. Merriweather’s large brown eyes always filled with tears when she considered the oppressed. “Living in that jungle with nobody but J. Grimes Everett,” she said. “Not a white person’ll go near ‘em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett.”
Mrs. Merriweather played her voice like an organ; every word she said received its full measure: “The poverty… the darkness… the immorality—nobody but J. Grimes Everett knows. You know, when the church gave me that trip to the camp grounds J. Grimes Everett said to me—”
“Was he there, ma’am? I thought—”
“Home on leave. J. Grimes Everett said to me, he said, ‘Mrs. Merriweather, you have no conception, no conception of what we are fighting over there.’ That’s what he said to me.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I said to him, ‘Mr. Everett,’ I said, ‘the ladies of the Maycomb Alabama Methodist Episcopal Church South are behind you one hundred percent.’ That’s what I said to him. And you know, right then and there I made a pledge in my heart. I said to myself, when I go home I’m going to give a course on the Mrunas and bring J. Grimes Everett’s message to Maycomb and that’s just what I’m doing.”

A skilled reader with a moderate amount of background knowledge immediately understands: this J. Grimes Everett is a missionary to the Mrunas, who, in turn, are clearly an African tribe (“Not a white person’ll go near ‘em but that saintly J. Grimes Everett”).

The reason the author includes the Mrunas is clear only toward the end of the missionary society meeting, when Mrs. Merriweather begins talking about Atticus’s decision to represent Tom:

Mrs. Merriweather nodded wisely. Her voice soared over the clink of coffee cups and the soft bovine sounds of the ladies munching their dainties. “Gertrude,” she said, “I tell you there are some good but misguided people in this town. Good, but misguided. Folks in this town who think they’re doing right, I mean. Now far be it from me to say who, but some of ‘em in this town thought they were doing the right thing a while back, but all they did was stir ’em up. That’s all they did. Might’ve looked like the right thing to do at the time, I’m sure I don’t know, I’m not read in that field, but sulky… dissatisfied… I tell you if my Sophy’d kept it up another day I’d have let her go. It’s never entered that wool of hers that the only reason I keep her is because this depression’s on and she needs her dollar and a quarter every week she can get it.”
“His food doesn’t stick going down, does it?”
Miss Maudie said it. Two tight lines had appeared at the corners of her mouth. She had been sitting silently beside me, her coffee cup balanced on one knee. I had lost the thread of conversation long ago, when they quit talking about Tom Robinson’s wife, and had contented myself with thinking of Finch’s Landing and the river. Aunt Alexandra had got it backwards: the business part of the meeting was blood-curdling, the social hour was dreary.
“Maudie, I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said Mrs. Merriweather.
“I’m sure you do,” Miss Maudie said shortly.

Yet this is where students really get lost. In typical Southern gentile fashion, Mrs. Merriweather won’t deign to gossip about anyone — how uncivilized — so she simply makes talks about Atticus in the third-person plural. And everyone in the room knows exactly who she’s talking about — everyone but Scout. And our young readers.

Today, my English I students started the adventure of figuring out this marvelous chapter. I always read the relevant passage aloud in class. It’s one of the most enjoyable things I do all year. I lay on the Southern accent, dropping final rs (“squalor” becomes “squala”) and altering the cadence and tone of my reading. How to do that when in lock-down? Simple: record it. My favorite part — that passage above.

Day 56: Mother’s Day and Conspiracies

Sunday 10 May 2020

Two radically different thoughts that rattled around my head today, completely unconnected other than the fact that I thought about them during the same 12-hour period…

Mother’s Day

It’s the first Mother’s Day without Nana. A year ago, we were just about ready to move Nana and Papa into the almost-completed living space, and we had a Mother’s Day dinner at Nana’s and Papa’s. We all sat around Nana’s bed as we ate, and L and I gave her a small succulent that was small enough to sit on her bedside table. I don’t remember what we ate; I don’t remember what we talked about. Had we known then that it was our last Mother’s Day with her, we probably would all remember those details, but that’s the problem with most lasts — we don’t know they’re the last this or last that.

It reminds me of how a priest once explained how he avoids becoming complacent and (did he say this? He might have used this word) even bored with the Mass, saying the same thing day in and day out, over and over again. “I try to treat every Mass as if it’s the first, last, and only Mass I’ll ever celebrate.” When we know it’s the last time we do something, we tend to slow down and savor it.

I used to get very upset at lasts. I wanted, as Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz sings, “to hold on to these moments as they last,” and when it’s the last one, it doesn’t last long. (That’s an odd little thing, isn’t it? “Last” as a verb and “last” as an adjective. “How long does the last one last?”) When I knew the last moments of some experience were approaching or the last time I would do something was nearing, I always grew just a touch melancholy.

The last day of school, for instance, used to be a little sad because I found myself thinking that I’d never see these kids in whom I’d invested so much. I’d forged relationships with them, some of which were hard-won and very frustrating as they developed. It had taken me a long time with some of them to convince them that I was, indeed, on their side, that even when I was giving them a hard time about their behavior, doling out consequences that they felt were unfair, I was still on their side.

But endings are often beginnings. I think of Eliot’s “East Coker,” which ends, “In my end is my beginning.” It is, of course, a reference to the afterlife, but all endings are also beginnings — an old, time-worn truth. The end of every school year promises the beginning of the next.

That is where I differ from the rest of the folks in our household: they all believe that Nana’s end was her beginning; sadly, I have my doubts. It’s a lovely thought, and one that of course I hope is true in a sense because Papa, for instance, has so much invested emotionally in that idea. But if I’m right, we’ll never know; we’ll only know if I’m wrong.

It was with all these thoughts in my head that I drove the family to visit Nana’s grave today for Mother’s Day. Papa bought a couple of new bouquets of artificial flowers — lovely ones of multiple shades of blue with yellow and white roses to off-set the sea of blue. Nana would approve, no doubt. Blue was her favorite color, and there are enough shades of blue in the bouquets to fill the sky.

Conspiracy

I’m currently reading Stalin: In the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a book about Stalin’s Great Terror ( I love the Russian name, Большой террор — makes me think of the ballet!). At its heart, the Great Terror was unimaginable without Stalin, but it was also impossible without others. Many others. How do you get so many people to go along with that? Simple: conspiracy theories.

Today it seems impossible that virtually every factory and railway line was being sabotaged by Trotskyite terrorists within their management, but Soviet industry was riddled with mistakes and cursed with thousands of accidents thanks to poor management and the breakneck speed of the Five-year Plans: for example, in 1934 alone, there were 62,000 accidents on the railways! How could this happen in a perfect country? “Enemies” among the corrupt elite had surely caused the failures. The arrest of saboteurs and wreckers in the industrial factories and railways spread.

By the time the Terror turned to the army and the Party itself, Stalin was most definitely in complete, unquestioned control. At his word, people lived and died, and very few people questioned his decisions.

Reading this got me thinking about the current situation in America and the conspiracy theories that seem to be popping up like mushrooms are growing positively dangerous.

Some people belittled her, others suggested she was a paid actor or was a healthcare professional who had no direct involvement with the treatment of Covid-19. Others accused her of being an abortion doctor.
“It was heated, people were very fired up about what they had to say,” she told CNN. “A lot of the top comments we got were about us being fake nurses, there was a huge majority of them that still believe this virus is fake, that it’s a hoax and not real at all. They were convinced that we’re fake nurses and that’s why we weren’t talking.”
Quite the opposite of a fake nurse, Ms Leander volunteered to work at her hospital’s Covid-19 unit full time, and has been on the front line working with infected patients for the past month.(Source)

I saw footage of this on Now This but can’t find it now. There is a definite political element to this: all the protestors were wearing “Trump 2020” paraphernalia, and I would bet that every single one of them believes the Deep State conspiracy nonsense. So I read the passage in Montefiore’s book and started wondering what it would take for something like that to happen in America.

Could these people support wholesale executions of people they see as participating in anti-state conspiracies? I don’t know.

We all want to say, “No, no — we’re better than that.” We think about our neighbors and even those nameless faces we see in our own towns and think it impossible. Would Vasili Blokhin’s neighbors or acquaintances have thought he was capable of the acts he committed? He was a prolific executioner who killed many during the Great Terror but most infamously executed over 7,000 Polish officers personally in 28 days in the forest of Katyn.

Just as we never know when an end of this or that is coming, we never know how current events are going to play out. COVID-19 was a problem in China, over there, far away until it wasn’t. With quarantines being lifted around the country before we even really have adequate testing capabilities in place, it’s not inconceivable that we might experience a sharp increase in the number of cases, forcing states to decide whether or not to reimpose restrictions. What will these protesters do then? We’ve already seen armed protesters storm the Michigan statehouse; what else are they capable of? If something happens that results in bloodshed, how will protesters (i.e., rabid Trump supporters) react in other states? We already see signs reading “Give me liberty or give me COVID.”

That’s not a far cry from the original formulation that encouraged revolution.

Day 55: The Swing, the Dog House, and the Bench

Saturday 9 May 2020

I don’t know how it inevitably happens, but projects with me just seem to swell completely out of proportion from my original estimates. Sometimes it’s simply that my estimates are wrong. No, that’s most of the time. I tend to underestimate the time required because I tend to overestimate my skills. Today, though, my estimation of the time required to make K’s Mother’s Day present was just about dead on. True, it took me longer in the end, but that’s because I decided to pull out the router and round over every edge. Why? Because I have a router and quite honestly don’t have that many opportunities to use it.

I also decided as I was working to countersink all the screws and go back with wood filler and hide them all. That added a bit of additional time. But the raw building itself took just about as long as I anticipated.

What got me off track was not the time it took to make the bench but rather the time it took to gather the needed materials. The wood was the real trick.

I went to Lowe’s expecting to be back fairly quickly. All I needed was a bit of additional chain for the swing, a few hooks to connect the swing to the chain, and some 2x4s for the framing of the swing. The chain took quite some time — probably more than twenty minutes — because I pressed the “Press here for assistance” button and no one came for what seemed like an eternity.

Finally, I was ready to pick up the lumber and haul it back to the in-store sawing station to have them cut the 96″ studs down to 48″ pieces that would fit in K’s Rogue. The first trick was to find a lumber cart. I finally gave up looking for one, went to the cashier, paid for the hardware, took it out to the car, and returned with a lumber cart from the parking lot. I loaded my six 2x4s and headed to the cut station. Where I found a sign that read, “Saw not functioning.”

I felt like I was in the film Nie Lubię Poniedzialku except that I was in Greenville not Warsaw and it was Saturday not Sunday.

I just left the cart there with the lumber on it. It was a somewhat crummy thing to do — I could have at least taken the lumber back.

After dropping off the hardware at the house (because it was on the way), I headed to Home Depot. The saw there was completely functional. The studs I picked out, though, were not 96″ but only 93″. So when I told the shop assistant to cut them at 48″, adding “I just need them in half-size pieces,” he did just that: he put one end of the board on 48″ and cut. And the resulting pieces were of a significantly different length. That’s when I measured and saw they weren’t 96″. I could have checked. I didn’t. I just sighed.

While all of this was going on, the Boy alternated between helping me and helping the Girl, who was painting the dog house and the bench.

In the evening, we watched Nie Lubię Poniedzialku. We’ve been trying to expose the kids to some of the classics, and we decided it was time for Poniedzialku. I love that film. It’s probably my second-favorite Polish film, right behind Miś. The story, such as it is, is charming: we all laugh at the horrid Monday everyone is having even though none of their trials rise above irritation. There’s no shadow of any real tragedy — just the annoyance of plans going awry.

What I really love about the film, though, is the views of the Warsaw of the early 1970s. Just a quarter of a century after the Second World War, much of the city is still under construction, and what has been completed has the look of 60s communist architecture that was still prevalent in Warsaw when I arrived in 1996.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M2386VX0Po

Papa decided he’d watch the film with us. “There are no subtitles,” we warned him, but he wasn’t fazed. We explained critical dialogue, but most of it really didn’t require a whole lot of explaining.

The Boy disagreed. “I don’t get any of the funny parts, even when you explain them,” he fussed.

Perhaps he’ll find the next one we’ve planned a little more enjoyable: the classic Sami Swoi. We found it on Netflix DVDs, which means it will have subtitles. “Kargul, podejdź no do płota!”

Day 54: That Old House

Friday 8 May 2020

I passed that old house just about every day, especially when I first arrived in Lipnica and made daily trips to the post office to mail a letter. It had been abandoned long before I arrived. An ancient, traditional home, made entirely of wood, it was a jarring contrast to most of the other homes constructed of concrete block. I seldom passed it without wondering what it would take to restore it and if anyone would even be interested.

The location was less than ideal, though. Just beside it was the old communist-era bar with a large area above it that had been converted into a discotheque. Every Saturday night, there were dozens and dozens of people milling about with loud techno music that would have been impossible to shut out. Often one could see a couple just around the back corner locked in an embrace or a line of young men leaning against the long wall of the home facing the bar, smoking and laughing loudly.

Still, growing up in suburbia, I found the old house utterly enchanting. Nothing in the neighborhood where I grew up was older than a couple of decades. The houses were cookie-cutter similar: directly across the street from our house was a house built from the identical plan, which had been flipped to create a mirror image of our home. To the left of our house was a home with an identical floor plan with minor exterior design changes. To the left of that house was still the same house a third time. That same house was scattered throughout the neighborhood — at least a dozen more times, I’m sure.

I doubt anyone would worry much about the loss of such a house from a historic point of view. Certainly, it would be a great tragedy for the house to be destroyed while it was still in use, but had it been sitting unoccupied for decades, most would probably consider its removal a positive development.

Taking down a house like this, though, and so very unceremoniously, seemed to me, an outsider, to be almost sacrilegious. We are such a young country, the United States, that something that’s a century-and-a-half old is of automatic interest and significance for anyone with a sense of history.

In the end, I never learned what became of all the timber from that house. It lay stacked in haphazard piles by the road for several months and then disappeared. I heard from someone that the owner of the old house had burned it for winter warmth.

That somehow makes it both more and less tragic.

Tearing Down History

Stories

Day 52: A Fort of Sympathy

Wednesday 6 May 2020

The Fort

Work continued this evening on the fort. We needed some more bamboo canes, so we headed over to our neighbor’s stand of canes and selected four after school was over. By the time we got them back on our property, it was nearly dinner (school for me went really late today), and it was raining, making it impossible to continue working.

After dinner, though…

The process has been one of evolution. We start with a design idea, discover it works, continue for a while, then have another idea. We try to incorporate it into the old idea; it sometimes works; it often doesn’t. We see if a third idea will bond the two original ideas a little more firmly. And so on.

E is discovering that the men who do all the primitive building on YouTube are in fact deserving of quotes: “primitive” building, for there’s nothing primitive about it except the tools they’re using. I could have tried to explain that to the Boy, but I don’t think it would have convinced him. Working on it himself, though, has certainly done that.

Sympathy

I went for a run this evening. It’s been a while. I get in these phases that I feel certain that a fitter, healthier G is just within reach: I simply have to get a regular exercise routine going and monitor what I snack on (or eliminate it altogether). It’s easy — nothing at all to it. And then I put the Boy to bed and find that I almost fell asleep with him and reason, “I’m already almost asleep. It would be a shame to waste it.” Or I just decided a glass of wine and some chess online is a better way to spend my time. Or occasionally (this is a cycle I’ve been going through for about 18 months now), I get this routine going and then some injury or previous pain flares up and I have to stop running for a week or more, and my motivation is back to where it usually is, which is to say near zero.

So I went out for a first run in probably two weeks, cueing up my running soundtrack on Spotify. The first song shuffled out: Beck’s “Devil’s Haircut.” I wasn’t in the mood for it, so I swiped on to the next song: the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” (One run, Spotify played “Sympathy for the Devil” followed by Van Halen’s “Running with the Devil,” and concluding with “Devil’s Haircut.” A more superstitious person would read something into that.) The second verse began, and it got me thinking:

And I was ’round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate

It reminded me of the scene in Mel Gibson’s take on the passion story. During Jesus’s scourging, a very androgynous Satan crying a child who looks surprisingly old walks through the crowd, looking as if he’s somehow winning a victory by having Jesus crucified.

In both these examples, and in general Christian thought, Satan is presented as having had a part in influencing humans to kill Jesus. But why in the world would he do that if Christian claims that Jesus was foretold for millennia? Christian theology teaches that through the crucifixion, Jesus somehow defeated Satan and ultimately saved our souls, and that this plan was in place from the Fall in Eden.

That is kind of confusing as well: if God is omnipotent, he knew that was coming, and so it was part of the plan to begin with. But if it was part of the plan to begin with, it seems like a bad plan, as if the failure implicit in the Fall is integral to the whole scheme. Which means we were made to fail. Odd plan, that.

At any rate, I was wondering why Satan is always shown to be crafty and yet an idiot at the same time. Evangelical views make Satan even more of an idiot: he’s going to try to overthrow God in Armageddon, yet he’s doomed to fail. All Evangelicals know this. It’s preached every Sunday. And yet somehow Satan, a being who is supposedly so much more powerful than humans in every way imaginable, doesn’t know about this.

More questions about the devil: why would he torture people in hell? Wouldn’t he want to reward them for choosing him over God? Wouldn’t he make it a paradise to rival Christian views of heaven just to thumb his nose at God? He’s literally an instrument of God’s punishment in the Christian view, yet he has free will and hates God. Why in the world would he be God’s pawn like that? That’s the whole reason he got tossed out of heaven in the Christian story.

And that’s another thing: how did this war in heaven happen? How do spirits battle? Wars have to do with one thing: inflicting more death and carnage on your enemy than he can on you. How in the world would immortal spirits fight then? It just doesn’t make any sense. Maybe that’s why we should have sympathy for the devil: in the grand scheme of things, he’s just a schmuck doing God’s dirty work in punishing souls who reject God. What a crappy job.

So I was jogging along, all these thoughts bouncing about in my head, and it struck me that perhaps that’s as good an argument as any against going for a run: I roll about in silly, useless speculation…

Day 51: Seeing Anew

Tuesday 5 May 2020

Atticus Finch — what a hero. What a fantastic lawyer. That’s what we all walk away thinking the first time we read To Kill a Mockingbird. We read his cross-examination of Bob and Mayella Ewell and think, “He did a really good job establishing Tom’s innocence,” and can’t understand how Tom could be found guilty– though we can understand it because it’s Depression-era Alabama.

The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence to the effect that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place. It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross-examination, but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant.

Nailed it — keep hammering on the fact that no doctor was called, Atticus.

She was white, and she tempted a Negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: she kissed a black man. Not an old Uncle, but a strong young Negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards.
Her father saw it, and the defendant has testified as to his remarks. What did her father do? We don’t know, but there is circumstantial evidence to indicate that Mayella Ewell was beaten savagely by someone who led almost exclusively with his left. We do know in part what Mr. Ewell did: he did what any God-fearing, persevering, respectable white man would do under the circumstances—he swore out a warrant, no doubt signing it with his left hand, and Tom Robinson now sits before you, having taken the oath with the only good hand he possesses—his right hand.

There it is — that brilliant evidence that someone lefthanded inflicted the bruises on the right side of Mayella’s face. Tom’s left arm was mangled in a cotton gin when he was young — he couldn’t have done it. Case closed.

And then that impassioned closing:

Thomas Jefferson once said that all men are created equal, a phrase that the Yankees and the distaff side of the Executive branch in Washington are fond of hurling at us. There is a tendency in this year of grace, 1935, for certain people to use this phrase out of context, to satisfy all conditions. The most ridiculous example I can think of is that the people who run public education promote the stupid and idle along with the industrious—because all men are created equal, educators will gravely tell you, the children left behind suffer terrible feelings of inferiority. We know all men are not created equal in the sense some people would have us believe—some people are smarter than others, some people have more opportunity because they’re born with it, some men make more money than others, some ladies make better cakes than others—some people are born gifted beyond the normal scope of most men.
But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal—there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honorable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal.
I’m no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system—that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this defendant to his family. In the name of God, do your duty.

What a perfect defense! What insight! What an amazing job defending a man in a hopeless situation!

That’s what we think when we’re not lawyers, though. But what about a trial lawyer who’s had twenty years’ experience in the courtroom? Someone who’s represented defendants against charges of rape and murder?

Every year, as the kids finish up Mockingbird, I have Jim Bannister, a local defense attorney, come in and walk the kids through the details of the trial and evidence. He’s been doing this presentation for some years, ever since a friend’s daughter read the book. The friend asked him what he thought of Atticus’s defense and, not having read the book since middle school, Bannister reread the chapters dealing with the trial.

“I would have handled things a little differently,” he remarked. “To be fair,” he’s always added when talking to the kids, “Atticus seems to be a tax and/or estate lawyer, so he was not in his area of specialization at all.” Still, he helps the kids see the mountains of evidence that Atticus could have brought into the trial that doesn’t even get a mention.

The most damning evidence does appear in the book, but Atticus doesn’t push it hard enough: no doctor was ever called. This means there’s no evidence that the crime even took place. But there’s so much more than that.

What about clothing the accused and supposed victim were wearing? How could Tom, who’s left arm is all but useless, hold down Mayella as she claimed, take off his clothes, take off her clothes, and rape her while using only one arm? It doesn’t make sense — it’s physically impossible.

What about defensive wounds on Tom? Mayella said she fought him “tooth and nail.” There should have been scratches all over Tom’s face.

What about the window through which Bob says he saw the rape in progress? Earlier in the book, the Ewell house is described and we discover that there’s cheesecloth over the windows instead of glass panes. How clean was that cheesecloth? How much could Bob actually see?

And if his daughter was being raped and all that stood between him and the rapist was a bit of cheesecloth over a window no more than three feet above the ground, why didn’t he dive through the window and attack Tom? Instead, he claims he witnesses the rape in the front room and runs around the entire shotgun house and enters through the back door.

All these were failures on the part of Heck Tate, the sheriff, who did absolutely no investigation at all. “I would tear him apart on the stand,” Bannister laughs.

For me, though, the most jaw-dropping piece of evidence was a little gem hidden in Tom’s account of the event.

“Mr. Finch, I was wonderin’ why it was so quiet like, an‘ it come to me that there weren’t a chile on the place, not a one of ’em, and I said Miss Mayella, where the chillun?”
Tom’s black velvet skin had begun to shine, and he ran his hand over his face.
“I say where the chillun?” he continued, “an‘ she says—she was laughin’, sort of—she says they all gone to town to get ice creams. She says, ‘took me a slap year to save seb’m nickels, but I done it. They all gone to town.’”
Tom’s discomfort was not from the humidity. “What did you say then, Tom?” asked Atticus.
“I said somethin‘ like, why Miss Mayella, that’s right smart o’you to treat ’em. An‘ she said, ’You think so?‘ I don’t think she understood what I was thinkin’—I meant it was smart of her to save like that, an‘ nice of her to treat em.”

Why in the world didn’t Atticus call to the stand that ice cream salesman?! Everybody in the town knows the Ewells; everyone knows how poor they are. To see all seven of them come traipsing up with nickels in hand to buy ice cream would have been a once-in-a-lifetime, always-remember-it moment.

So he comes every year to lead students through these pieces of evidence, suggesting at the outset that they pretend like he’s the lead attorney and they are his paralegals, investigators, and co-attorneys. “Let’s see if we can’t put together a better defense for Tom Robinson.”

Except he couldn’t come this year for all the obvious reasons. Yet when I asked him if he’d be willing to give it a shot on Google Meet, he didn’t hesitate: “What dates are we looking at?”

And so he sat in his study and led several of my students through a discussion via Google Meet, and my eighth-grade vice principal (well, she will be next year after our current, much-loved vice principal retires) popped in eagerly when I told her what we were planning.

Despite the frustration of the lockdown, it was a good day to be a teacher.

The Day’s Adventures

The Boy has wanted to build a bamboo structure of some sort for some time now. He had in his mind a large and grand structure, perhaps with a swimming pool beside it and a diving platform coming out of the second story.

Heading down to play in the creek after “school”

Today, I suggested a little more modest structure: “We could simply use the corner of our fence and Mr. F’s fence and build it there.

And so we went out into the stand of bamboo growing in Mr. F’s back yard (more or less — not really sure of property lines there) and took a few canes.

We stripped off the small branches on which grow the leaves, cut them to length,

dug a few holes, and we had our basic frame. A little more work and we had a functional structure.

A good day to be a dad.

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