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COVID-19 quarantine

Day 50: Death In the Creek?

Monday 4 May 2020

During the warmer months, the creek that runs through the backyards of our street becomes a frequent destination for us. Of late, this has been because of the minnows that flourish in the small stream.

I find myself wondering how in the world the little fish survive. What do they eat? According to one site, “Bluntnose minnows eat algae, aquatic insect larvae, diatoms, and small crustaceans called entomostracans.” I don’t know if these are bluntnose minnows, but that was the first thing Google turned up when I asked, “what do minnows in streams eat.” That makes sense.

Their presence also solves another mystery: what do the snapping turtles in the creek eat? That and frogs, I guess.

We were in the creek three times today. The first was in the morning, a session that included a bit of minnow netting and some bamboo harvesting.

The Boy has been watching videos on YouTube showing young men in some south Asian country (Malaysia? Indonesia?) who dig vast underground spaces or build impressive bamboo houses using only the most primitive of tools and resources. He has decided that he wants to do the same. This morning, then, we cut down a couple of bamboo canes for this project. The Boy wanted to get more, but I put him off, hoping his obsession with this project would wane a bit when he realized it’s impossibility for a seven-year-old boy. Still, I want to encourage him to try, hence today’s harvest.

After we took down the canes, it was time for a little minnowing. The Boy as a curious and amusing approach that seems counterintuitive but works: he sneaks up to where the minnows are gathering, then leaps into the water, thrusting the net in before him and waving it about violently in the water.

It seems like it would never work, but it does.

Occasionally, the minnows have caused a bit of consternation in the house. The first minnows he caught spent the night in a Mason jar on the kitchen counter. When K went down in the morning, one of the two minnows was floating on the surface of the water. Not wanting to risk the other’s life, K took the jar and sprinted down to the creek to release the survivor.

This prompted a new rule: minnows can be held in captivity until bedtime. When the Boy comes up for his bedtime ritual, the minnows need to be back in their own habitat. That worked for a couple of days until yesterday, when one of the minnows leaped out of the jar as it sat on the deck, flopped about on the deck board, then slipped in between two boards to its death in the leaves and chaos that exists under our deck.

“Minnow murderer!” the Girl exclaimed.

So now the jar stays in the house and minnows are released only moments after they’re caught.

Today, though, we discovered much more than minnows. During our afternoon session, we decided to head to the waterfall that’s just upstream. This means a short jaunt through the woods, approaching the stream from above. E started out toward the rocks and then suddenly started yelling.

“Daddy! Daddy! Come quick! It’s a snake! A snake! And it’s eating!” There was excitement and fear in his voice: he loves snakes, but he’s terrified of the thought of encountering a venomous one. He seems to think they’re conscious of their deadly venom and somewhat maleficent to boot. “What if they just chase me down and attack me?”

I try to reassure him when he says things like that, and today was no different: “Buddy, to him, you’re a huge, terrifying monster!”

“But how? They’re packed with venom.”

“They don’t know that.”

“They don’t?!” The Boy was having trouble comprehending that. How can a snake be so deadly and yet not realize its power?

I’m no snake expert to say the least, but I was fairly sure it wasn’t a venomous snake. The eyes, the shape of the head, its markings. But what about those markings? They’re awfully close to a cottonmouth’s markings except the dark triangles rest fat side on the belly of the snake — the whole pattern of this snake inverted.

Still, no need to take chances. We left the snake to its dinner and headed home.

I did a little research when we got home and came to the tentative conclusion that it might be a plain-bellied water snake, which is not venomous. Still, it got me thinking: what if it had been a cottonmouth and the Boy was bitten? Cottonmouths don’t have venom that kills humans, but it can make one very sick. But what about a little boy? We’ve tromped about those rocks where the snake was eating dinner countless times.

Explaining

It was another one of those realizations that threats lurk around us constantly and we’re mostly unaware of them. Our current global reality is a reminder that we are far from the top dogs on the planet in a number of ways, and yet we’re the only species that could burn the whole thing to a radioactive cinder.

While I was cooking dinner over an open flame in our new fire pit, I listened to The Scarlet Letter again, and once again, an echo of the day:

Much of the marble coldness of Hester’s impression was to be attributed to the circumstance, that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone in the world,—alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected,—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable,—she cast away the fragments of a broken chain. The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged—not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode—the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door.

Two hundred years had passed from the events of the book to the narration of the book, and in the meantime, the country had grown a little less Puritanical and a little more tolerant. Hawthorne seems to see some hope in this. Perhaps we all should

Day 49: Honking Adventure

Sunday 3 May 2020

Today was a somewhat low-key day. We went for a walk or two; we did a little work around the house; K led an in-house Mass substitute for the kids. But overall, it was a very lazy day.

In the morning, I took E on a walk with the dog. Well, I was planning on going alone, but he tagged along anyway. I was glad to have him.

“I want to hear the car honking!” he proclaimed, so we went back to the neighborhood where I’d heard it last week.

“Why do they do that?” he asked.

Why indeed. What’s the point of all those “amens” and “hallelujahs”? I think it has to do with social bonding. It’s like Catholics kneeling and standing and praying together, like Miloszcz said. I wanted to say, “It makes them feel good,” but I didn’t. And it probably isn’t all that simple, either.

Clover’s new ball

After the walk, I took care of a couple of little tasks left over from yesterday. I use construction adhesive to connect the landscaping timbers on which I mounted the composter to solid concrete blocks to give it a bit more weight. I wanted to make sure that, if when another flood washes through the backyard, the composter will stay put. (I also set it behind two trees, which will help break the flow of the water.) I used the rest of the adhesives on the fire pit, gluing pairs of bricks together to make it a little more solid but not completely permanent. (To be sure, I have no idea how long the adhesive can handle the heat in the fire pit before failing, so it might have been a waste of time. Still, I didn’t have anything else to do with the remaining adhesive.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl’s eyes, and her face, as she glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr. Dimmesdale’s, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.

He looks up toward the heavens, and we know what will happen: he will see something; he will hear something; he will have some revelation. What’s startling is the narrator’s take on this:

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena, that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows, seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to Revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of this nature.

From a modern perspective, what’s most interesting is the little side comment in the opening lines: “in those days.” Were the people of Hawthorne’s day any different? Are we any different? After all, it was the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet that led 39 people to take their own lives.

Which is a volleyball, much to L’s delight

It’s really one of the many God-of-the-gaps situations: we don’t understand this, therefore God. At some point, earthquakes or comets were the antecedents, the “this” which we don’t understand. Science comes along, explains it, closes one gap, and believers searching for evidence of God’s existence move on to other gaps. The complexity of DNA and the seeming impossibility of cosmology are the biggest gaps now, and they will not likely be closed for some time. Will science ever unravel those mysteries? I don’t know. I’m not worried about it. As someone put it, I would rather have questions I can’t answer than answers I can’t question.

Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the colored, magnifying, and distorting medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea, that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expansive for Providence to write a people’s doom upon. The belief was a favorite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar intimacy and strictness.

This problem is at the heart of all religious revelation: Joseph Smith discovered the plates that he translated into the Book of Mormon all by himself; Muhammed received his revelation alone, in a cave; Moses saw the burning bush all by himself; Mary was all by herself when the angel appeared. These revelations that started large religions later developed ways to deal with the problem that Hawthorne mentions (there were individuals who signed affidavits that they had seen Smith’s golden plates in person, for example). The smaller revelations, which lead to smaller followings, don’t: David Koresh alone heard God’s voice. At that point, short of working miracles, how do such people convince followers?

But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate!

Some people go further than this: David Pack, leader of a little sect of a few hundred to a couple of thousand followers, literally sees himself prophesied in the Bible. As such, he says things like “I have to be the most hated man on the planet,” which he claims in one of his sermons.

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart, that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter,—the letter A,—marked out in lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil of cloud; but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it; or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in it.

So it’s remarkable to me that Nathaniel Hawthrone, writing The Scarlet Letter 170 years ago, created such commentary. And I wonder what he would have to say about contemporary Evangelical worship, with its rock-concert feels and amen-ing. And what he would have thought about nearly-sequestered worshippers replacing it with claxons.

First fire in new firepit

Day 48: Scarlet Projects

Saturday 2 May 2020

This morning I had a little epiphany that I should have had months ago: “I’ll bet there are lots of audiobooks on Spotify.” I know — an obvious thought I should have had long ago, but I am sometimes a little slow on the up-take. I did a quick search and discovered that almost any classic one could imagine is there. Shouldn’t have been a surprise.

A month or so ago, I’d pulled from the bookshelf a novel I’ve been wanting on and off to re-read since college, The Scarlet Letter. I hadn’t really liked it a lot then, and I liked it even less in high school, but I reasoned that, being twenty-five years older than when I’d last read it, I might see something more in it.

For one thing, it’s been a different read because I finally made it through the opening section, “The Custom House.” When we read it in college, we were supposed to read that seemingly disconnected introduction but I didn’t. Today, I listened to it while I worked on our broken smoke, cleaning off the base blocks before screwing down the barrel that serves as the body of the smoker and then covering all the base in concrete. The job took about an hour and a half because I spent some time trying to pry off the leaking quick-connector on the hose before mixing the concrete, to no avail; the intro itself took considerably longer to complete.

And what of “The Custom House”? It’s a fictionalized attempt at making the story seem authentic by making it something of a found-footage type novel (mixing media there, I know). Was that novel (no pun in intended)? I really don’t know.

When the novel began, I was back in familiar territory. I’d initially forgotten about that opening, with the rose outside the jail door, but once that portion began, it was like hearing a long-forgotten-but-once-loved song again after twenty years:

[O]n one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,—or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,—we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to[53] issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

While I was working on the smoker, the Boy was working to remove the last bit of flaking paint from the bench we brought from Nana’s and Papa’s to use by our firepit.

I went inside to get the drill and impact driver and by the time I came back out, he’d disappeared.

“It’s too hard!” he exclaimed. I think he understood that I expected him to get all the paint off.

By the time I was ready to work on the next project of the day, the novel was introducing its heroine, Hester Prynne.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which, indeed, she had wrought for the occasion, in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer,—so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time,—was that Scarlet Letter, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

The scarlet letter is a double symbol: it is a symbol to the characters in the novel of Hester’s sin and depravity as well as a symbol for Hester herself of her resistance. For readers, it’s both these things, but it also represents the hypocrisy of Puritans, among other things.

At this point, I’m about halfway through the novel, though completely through the day’s projects (as is L). More thoughts coming later, I’m sure.

Day 47: Quartets and Cars

Friday 1 May 2020

Quartets

This afternoon, while cleaning up the kitchen, putting away groceries, and just generally puttering around the house, I discovered a BBC culture podcast that talks about, among other things, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a cycle of four poems that have, from the very first time I encountered them during my freshman year in college, utterly enthralled me. Naturally, I listened to it; naturally, halfway through, I was rooting around in the bookcase where we store such books for my thin volume of the poems.

Some passages of those poems seem pulled from the very fabric of existence itself, so fully do they capture the experience of being a finite human. In “Burnt Norton,” the first of the poems, Eliot writes of the frailty of the one thing that links us humans one to another: language.

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

I read those lines in college at a time when I was growing very distrustful of language having been in a relationship that I ended largely because I felt like the young lady was lying incessantly, for no reason whatsoever. Was it compulsive lying? Was it even always conscious lying? Was it even lying? I could never figure that out, but I learned I couldn’t trust her, and when that happens, there’s only one thing to do.

The second poem in the cycle, “East Coker,” returns to this motif:

So here I am, […]
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

“Is he reading my mind?” I thought. The poem seemed to be a summary of my growing interest in the idea of language itself. Such a strange thing — it’s the only thing we have that connects us to other people, yet it’s such a fragile connection, so easily manipulated and bent.

The Buried Car

This evening, as I was reading the poems again after dinner, the Boy brought me a little car he’d found buried in the backyard.

“I found it buried in Mommy’s flowers,” he explained.

“It was my car,” I said, wondering if he would remember that it had been among the mass of cars that Nana had saved from my childhood just to give to a grandchild.

“Really?!” He couldn’t believe it. “Why did you bury it out there?”

It’s so rare that we can see someone’s entire faulty thinking process from just one sentence, the entire line of thought backing up neatly, step by step, until the whole story is clear, and it was so different from reality. That was such a moment. I knew I could utterly perplex him with one short sentence.

“I didn’t bury it out there; you did.”

I could almost hear the gears clicking. He wrinkled his brow, cast his eyes upward, and his breathing quickened. “I did?”

Back to Eliot — the very next lines:

And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I had not really lost the car; he had not really gained it. He discovered something that he himself had owned, had played with, had possibly even treasured.

“Yes, you must have been playing with it when Mommy was working out in the flowers and you accidentally left it there. Or maybe you even buried it on purpose, and you just don’t remember.” More thinking.

“I did?”

“Yes.” And I could even imagine how it happened: E, with more than a handful of cars, following K around as she planted flowers or pulled weeds, never willing to let her get very far away from her, picking up everything to follow closely behind.

Nana told me I was the same way. Probably, we all are.

“You must have been playing with it when Mommy was working in the flowers.”

He shrugged, not convinced, still wondering, I think, how I knew it was mine. “Was it one of your favorites?”

True, I think I can remember when I got that car, which means an event likely forty years ago. When we went to our church’s annual fall retreat, we had two-hour church services every day. To keep me quiet when I was a child, Nana and Papa gave me a new Matchbox car every day at the start of the service. I believe that’s where this one comes from. But it could simply be that I just remember playing with that old car.

Are there any of my old toys I wouldn’t recognize? I rather doubt it in a way. Toys are so precious to children — at least they were to me and to my own children — that they form an integral part of our identities. Like the music we listen to as adolescents, the toys we love as children reflect our interest and how we see ourselves.

I didn’t tell him all that, though. Too much back story, and so much of it so very different from the reality the Boy experiences.

“Two-hour church every day?! Why would you do that?” I can hear him ask. Why, indeed.

Back to the Quartets, this time, from “Little Gidding”:

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.

It’s attachment to things that makes us remember those toys, I guess, and the sense that they are part of us — thus, attachment to self.

Day 46: Snakes, Dogs, and Balls

Thursday 30 April 2020

Some years ago, there was a little flu epidemic here in the upstate. I’d forgotten all about it until I read the entry from the “Time Machine” widget at the bottom of the page.

Pandemic Education

I wrote,

Students come running into the classroom, desperate not to touch anything but the bottles of hand sanitizer that they’re most eagerly sharing amongst themselves. They sit down and put their hands in the air as if they’re being held up at gun point. They open doors with their feet and they laughingly refuse to touch the copies of Much Ado About Nothing we’ve been using in class.

A quick look around the room confirms my suspicions: I won’t be able to accomplish anything without dealing with this first.

That was 11 years ago now, and it seems so insignificant compared to what we’re living now. Our flu outbreak affected a small part of the state; this viral reality is affecting the entire world. Magnify something and its significance seems often to increase exponentially like the curve of new cases in many places. That curve seems to have reached its summit in some areas. Everyone seems eager for that to be the reality, though. Do we have the maturity and self-control needed to keep the curve from turning back upwards again? I don’t know.

Looking for the snake E and our neighbor saw

I know the kids have simply settled into the new rhythm and joke about it. The Girl is having an easier time than the Boy in some ways because she’s in more constant contact with her friends through Facetime — they sometimes just leave it on while they’re doing other things, as if to have a companion near.

The Boy gets to see his friends daily with their whole-class Google Meet. (An aside: It’s amazing the difference between elementary students and middle school students when it comes to these online meetings. When E’s class meets, almost everyone is there; when my classes meet, almost no one is there. I suppose there’s more parental involvement in the younger children’s lives.) Still, that’s hardly a substitute for their usual day together, which includes a bit of down-time to talk and of course recess.

Another entry from the nostalgia widget:

Almost May

I wrote,

My reaction over the years has changed. In the past, I was just trying to survive at this point in the year. Perhaps that was because of a lack of clear and clear-headed goals for students; maybe that was a result of my inexperience and ineffectiveness; possibly that was because I had some exceptionally challenging students. Or perhaps it was all that and more. At any rate, I find myself eager, after a short break, to begin again. A sufficient “short break” in this case would be about three weeks or so, but I’m fortunate that we get about four times that.

That short break I was referring to was a hypothetical three-week summer break before getting back to school. I was suggesting that perhaps the whole summer is necessary. Indeed, it’s a luxury. But now — we’ll have a break from mid-March until mid-August, and even then, I doubt we’ll get back to normal.

In the end, “normal” will have to shift. Our state superintendent is already talking about possibly going to school in shifts to maintain an appropriate distance. I’m assuming that would mean dividing the eighth-grade student body in half: group A goes Monday and Wednesday and group B goes Tuesday and Thursday. Friday? Who knows. Who knows anything at this point. It’s odd that the longer this stretches out, the more the uncertainty in some sense.

Day 44: Chess and the Mess

Tuesday 28 April 2020

“Daddy, let’s play chess!” Normally, I wouldn’t say no to this. I enjoy sharing chess with the kids, so when the Girl suggested we play this afternoon, I was more than willing. She went out on the deck, where Papa was taking his afternoon fresh air, and began setting up the board. And then I had the idea.

“Why don’t you ask Papa if he‘d like to play?” I suggested.

Papa used to be obsessed with chess. He taught me how to move the pieces and then nothing more. This was because, by the time I came along, he’d given up chess. It was taking over his life, he said. He was lying in bed thinking of lost games. I know that feeling. So I wasn’t sure if he would play a game with her. But of course, I knew he would — he’s not going to turn down his granddaughter.

It was an up and down game. I sat by them, reading Paul Auster’s The Locked Room, looking over every now and then to see how things were going. Papa was up; L was up; Papa was up; L was up. It was a very uneven game until the end, when L just fell apart.

During all this, E was Facetiming his best friend from school. They were talking about Pokemon, baseball cards, favorite cartoons — second-grader stuff. He’d suggested it to his friend while the whole class was having a Google Meet in the morning.

“E, do you have a question?”

“Yes! I want to ask N when he can Facetime because it’s been ridiculously long since the last time.” And so we set it up for this afternoon.

Once he came outside and saw the chess game, though, he wanted to play Papa.

Things didn’t go much better for him — Papa went undefeated today. Which was good for Papa.

In the evening, L decided she wanted to bake cookies and try a formula for homemade Playdough. One might think this is something that would thrill parents, but K and I have learned: the Girl is not the best cleaner. She talks fast, walks fast, and cleans fast, which means she cleans poorly. It’s a thirteen-year-old thing, I’m certain. Tonight was no different. So I called her back down to the kitchen and pointed out the little things she’d missed.

She fussed; she argued; she pouted. But in the end, she did it.

Day 43: Cooperation

Monday 27 April 2020

School in the morning. 

Pierogi in the afternoon.

Games in the evening.

Day 42: The Sermon and the Wall

Sunday 26 April 2020

The Sermon

I went out for a walk this morning. It was sunny and warm, and everyone else was busy doing something, so I couldn’t resist. Listening to The Brothers Karamazov as I walked, I heard an amplified voice over the reader’s voice. Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, we hear the announcer at the local high school’s football games. Of course, there are no such games now, and there wouldn’t be any on a Sunday anyway. I paused the recording, stopped walking, and listened carefully. It took a moment, but I realized that it was a preacher delivering a Sunday morning message to the faithful as they sat in their cars. Drive-in church service.

As I walked a little further, I heard a little later furious honking coming from that direction, as if twenty or thirty cars were all randomly honking their horns. I took the earbuds out again and listened for some time.

Through the trees, I heard, “But we don’t have to fear death! Christ Jesus has conquered death!” Fairly typical evangelical formulation. “Isn’t that wonderful?” And then the horns began again, and I realized what was going on.

“They’re honking their amens,” I muttered to myself.

The Wall

The kids have taken the back corner of the house as their practice area: the Boy kicks his soccer ball against the wall; the Girl uses it for volleyball. They decided to use chalk to make some targets to practice accuracy.

The Girl had it all planned out. Colors, target shapes, everything. And then the Boy “messed it all up,” using colors at random for no other reason than wanting to use that particular color. And so they cleaned it and began again.

Day 39: Rain

Thursday 23 April 2020

It rained today. Almost the entire day. Being stuck at home is not that bad when we can go outside, but being stuck in the house makes for a long day. In the grand scheme of things, that’s a petty issue, I realize. But such was our reality today.

What’s more, E swears he’s tired of all the games.  Sorry? “No!” Monopoly?  “No!” Uno? “No!” He was up for chess, but one can hardly play three-person chess.

Well, it exists, but I’ve never played it, and we don’t have a board.

Day 38: Hybrid Walk

Wednesday 22 April 2020

This evening’s walk was a hybrid: the kids wanted to go exploring; we wanted just a normal walk. So we began in the woods, then emerged in the adjacent neighborhood and headed back to the house the long way.

Photo by the Boy

The Boy snapped pictures most of the way. And, somewhat predictably, the Girl, seeing E having all the fun, wanted to take a few pictures herself. Well, that sounds a little too cynical: she has expressed a slight interest in photography, but there is always that thirteen-year-old aspect to her that, well, I don’t know. She’s thirteen. That’s really all we need to say.

Photo by the Girl
Photo by the Girl
Photo by the Girl
Photo by the Boy
Photo by the Boy

On the way back, so much silliness. I can’t remember the last time L, E, and K were so silly with each other, laughing at nonsense, making more nonsense just to make everyone laugh all the harder.

Photo by the Boy, obviously

And Clover and I the only ones keeping things serious. Sort of.

We got back with time to spare before I had to start getting the Boy ready for bed. For our reading, we continued with what we’ve been slogging through for some time now: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It’s not that it’s a bad book: E insists that Verne is a master of cliffhangers. But he does seem to get a little carried away with himself. For example, one chapter begins thusly:

The Mediterranean, the blue sea par excellence, “the great sea” of the Hebrews, “the sea” of the Greeks, the “mare nostrum” of the Romans, bordered by orange-trees, aloes, cacti, and sea-pines; embalmed with the perfume of the myrtle, surrounded by rude mountains, saturated with pure and transparent air, but incessantly worked by underground fires; a perfect battlefield in which Neptune and Pluto still dispute the empire of the world!

It’s not a passage for a seven-year-old. “What’s ‘par excellence mean?” “Who were the Hebrews?” “What are Greeks?” “‘Mare nostrum’ — what’s that?” “What does ’embalmed’ mean?”

The next chapter — the very next chapter — begins thusly:

The Atlantic! a vast sheet of water whose superficial area covers twenty-five millions of square miles, the length of which is nine thousand miles, with a mean breadth of two thousand seven hundred—an ocean whose parallel winding shores embrace an immense circumference, watered by the largest rivers of the world, the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Plata, the Orinoco, the Niger, the Senegal, the Elbe, the Loire, and the Rhine, which carry water from the most civilised, as well as from the most savage, countries! Magnificent field of water, incessantly ploughed by vessels of every nation, sheltered by the flags of every nation, and which terminates in those two terrible points so dreaded by mariners, Cape Horn and the Cape of Tempests.

“Jules, you’re killing me!” I wanted to yell. But it did give us some laughs.

In truth, though, I’ve been skipping — sometimes rather liberally. Take this passage from tonight’s chapter, for example:

Two hours after quitting the Nautilus we had crossed the line of trees, and a hundred feet above our heads rose the top of the mountain, which cast a shadow on the brilliant irradiation of the opposite slope. Some petrified shrubs ran fantastically here and there. Fishes got up under our feet like birds in the long grass. The massive rocks were rent with impenetrable fractures, deep grottos, and unfathomable holes, at the bottom of which formidable creatures might be heard moving. My blood curdled when I saw enormous antennae blocking my road, or some frightful claw closing with a noise in the shadow of some cavity. Millions of luminous spots shone brightly in the midst of the darkness. They were the eyes of giant crustacea crouched in their holes; giant lobsters setting themselves up like halberdiers, and moving their claws with the clicking sound of pincers; titanic crabs, pointed like a gun on its carriage; and frightful-looking poulps, interweaving their tentacles like a living nest of serpents.

That got cut to this:

Two hours after quitting the Nautilus we had crossed the line of trees, and a hundred feet above our heads rose the top of the mountain, which cast a shadow on the brilliant irradiation of the opposite slope. Some petrified shrubs ran fantastically here and there. Fishes got up under our feet like birds in the long grass.

I’ve determined that I’m not a fan of such novels, which seem to be nothing but a litany of adventures leading to — to what? Aronnax, Ned Land, and Conseil want to escape, but thus far, there’s been precious little talk of it and a lot of chatter about all the marvels Nemo is showing them.

Fortunately, the Boy agrees in part: we can do without all the descriptive flourishes — let’s get to the action. And through it so we can read something else. Perhaps Tom Sawyer?

Day 37: Tuesday

Tuesday 21 April 2020

The Boy was at it again today — 177 photos spread through the day, from morning to evening.

Photo by the Boy; editing by the Daddy

Today, he got some really good shots. Part of that came from experimentation: I let him use a telephoto zoom, which helped him fill the frame more that he’s done the last two days. He liked it, but in the end, he preferred the little prime lens he’d been using. “It’s so much less bulky!” he exclaimed.

Photo by the Boy; editing by the author

He also learned a little lesson: not everyone whats to be photographed all the time. The Girl, for example, appears less frequently in here because she’s increasingly resistant to photographs. (What 13-year-old wants dad writing blog posts about her?) During dinner, then, he asked everyone who’s willing to let him photograph them. Only L opted out.

But he still snuck a few shots, much to her frustration.

“If you’re a spy, it’s okay to take pictures without permission. Otherwise, it’s not a good idea,” I said.

Excitedly, he heard what he wanted: “If I were a spy I could…”

“But you’re not.” I could envision him redefining that word to suit his own purposes.

Same credits again

I’m afraid, though, that I might have encouraged it the other day.

“What do you like taking pictures of, Daddy? What’s your favorite thing?”

“I like taking pictures that show people just being, just doing what they do every day without thinking about it.” If I had more guts, I might be able to parley that into a gig as a street photographer, which in its own way is a certain kind of spy.

Ditto

There was a little photo session after dinner, with the Boy getting a few poses out of K. He walked over to her and manipulated her arms into the position he wanted — something like a dab — and then took his position. “Perfect.”

Guess

Day 36: The Photographer!

Monday 20 April 2020

The Boy is hooked — for now. But still, hooked. I gave him our old Nikon D70s (older than L) and a 35mm lens, which on a crop sensor like the D70 is like a 50mm lens on a film camera (in other words, what all of us who learned to shoot with film started with), and told him to look for two things: interesting light and interesting lines.

He didn’t always take that advice — he did what everyone fascinated with photograph does in the beginning. He took pictures like crazy. 266 pictures, to be exact. I chose eight from them, chose a preset for each one in Lightroom and did no other editing.

This is probably the only post I’ve had here without a single one of my own pictures…

Day 35: The Photographer?

Sunday 19 April 2020

The Boy has been showing an interest in photography from time to time. It’s not an everyday thing, but he enjoys it when I give him the little Fuji to shoot with.

This afternoon, we went out on a photo walk, and he asked me if it would be possible for him to edit some of the photos in Paint.net, a free editing program that I use for quick things like cropping screenshots and the like. I’d taught him how to do gradient overlays with it, and he loved the idea of editing photos like that.

The Boy shooting
The Boy’s shot

“Do you use Paint.net for your photos?” he asked.

“No, I use Lightroom.”

“Can you put gradients on pictures in Lightroom?”

Technically, yes, I thought, but not the way he was thinking. “Not really, but you can in Photoshop.”

“Can you teach me how to do it in Photoshop?” The Boy loves to learn if it’s something he’s interested in — but then, doesn’t that describe us all?

The Boy shooting
The Boy’s shot

“Well, for what you were doing, it’s probably best just to keep using Paint.net.”

“Can you teach me to use Lightroom?” he pressed.

And I thought, sure. That’s entirely possible. There’s a lot less to overwhelm initially on Lightroom, and to be honest, it’s a less powerful program in a lot of ways: there’s nothing you can do in Lightroom that you can’t do in Photoshop, but there’s tons you can do in Photoshop that you can’t do in Lightroom. Still, for most photo editing, bringing Photoshop into the picture is like using a backhoe for gardening.

Some sweet honeysuckle along the way

So when we go home, I installed Lightroom on the computer we have upstairs, and we’ll start editing tomorrow.

Will he love it? At first, most definitely. I look forward to sharing some of his edited images.

Will he stick with it? We’ll see. But seeing how much he loves trying to copy me, I think there’s a good chance we might begin something long-lasting tomorrow.

Freshly cleared land
A newly-created trail
Whispers of vines now gone

Editing isn’t the only thing we’ll be starting tomorrow. Spring break is now over, so we’ll all head back “to school.” I have real reservations about the ultimate efficacy of what I’m doing with students. Are they learning? I doubt it. Are they slipping? I hope not — that’s really the only hope most of us educators have.

Day 34: The Edge

Saturday 18 April 2020

I read somewhere recently that sanitation workers are struggling to keep up with the amount of trash people are putting out during the quarantine. We’re all cleaning out our houses, I guess, because what else are we going to do with so much time on our hands?

We’ve been doing a little in the house but mostly in the yard. Today, for instance, I used the edger (we have an edger now — like a router, one tool I’ve always wanted to have) to clean up the stepping stones in our front yard.

Why?

Well, I woke up this morning and thought, “What can I do in the yard today? It’s an April Saturday — one must work in the yard.” But I’d already mowed for the week. And I’d already moved the composter. And I’d already cleaned out the weeds in our jasmine. And I’d already cleaned out the briars in the corner of our lot. And I’d already moved the elderberry bushes. And I’d already enlarged our mulched flower garden. And I’d already mulched everything. “What can I do?”

Saturday has its own rhythm, and even in these strange times, K and I try to keep all our rhythms and rituals as sustained as possible. We’ve introduced some new rituals (our almost-nightly family walks, lots more family board and card game playing, more family movies), but Saturday is Saturday — it must be spent outside.

By the time I was finished working on the stepping stones, each had a clean edge cut around it, several of the stones that had settled were elevated with a bit of gravel under them, and the last few stones that weren’t in line with the rest of them were shifted back into place.

As I worked, I listened to podcasts on cults: Heaven’s Gate, the Manson Family, the Branch Davidians, a couple I’d never heard of. They all make the little sect I grew up in seem fairly tame in comparison, but they all have one thing in common: a narcissistic man at the helm whom everyone views as being somehow a step above the rest of humanity.

An attempt at protecting our blueberries

Then there are the members and the obvious question: how do people allow themselves to be sucked into such groups? Take Heaven’s Gate, for example: their beliefs were so morbidly ridiculous that it’s difficult to imagine anyone taking them seriously. And members of that cult (and many others) left families behind in order to join them. They gave up everything for beliefs that sound like some sixth-grader’s science fiction story for his fifth-period creative writing class. Yet all religions have their little absurdities: Islam has Mohammed flying off on a magic stallion into heaven. Judaism has talking snakes and donkeys and a man surviving in the digestive system of a marine creature. Christianity has zombies immediately after Jesus’s death on the cross:

And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people. When the centurion and those with him who were guarding Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!” (Matthew 27.50-54)

Hinduism has Hanuman the monkey god — all religions have elements that just seem silly. The difference, comedian Bill Burr points out, is that most of us grew up with those more traditional religious stories and heard them all our lives: they’re party of the fabric of our childhood. These cults, though, we encounter as adults, more capable of critical thinking.

In the past, I’d probably write next that I found myself thinking about these things when I put the Boy to bed, thinking about possible lives we could have given him if we believed this or that, but I didn’t. I didn’t even think about it until now. Don’t know what to make of that, if anything.

Day 33: Celebration and Smothered

Friday 17 April 2020

Celebration

Today is Papa’s birthday. Seventy-nine. I remember when he turned forty. I was only eight then, and because of various religious interpretations, we didn’t actually celebrate birthdays, but I knew it was significant. He’s stayed forty or fifty in my mind’s eye ever since.

Sixty just seemed like an extension — a little older, maybe a little slower, but basically the same. Seventy? Now nearly eighty.

You know what’s coming — “Soon I’ll find myself almost eighty, wondering where the time went…”

This was a bitter-sweet birthday, though: the first one without Nana. A few days ago, K asked him what he’d like for his birthday dinner. He thought about it for quite a while and asked if we had Nana’s Chinese casserole recipe.

“Nope, but I’m sure we could find it.”

When was the last time we had that? It must have been twenty-five to thirty years since I’d had that. Still, I knew what the recipe must look like: I found something seemingly identical and K tried to fix it while I was pulling up the mass of briars that had grown where our composter used to be. Neither one of us are experienced casserole makers, so it turned out a little, well, moist. But it tasted just like Papa and I remembered.

“Brings back some memories, doesn’t it Pop?” I asked. (I don’t know why, but I’ve taken to calling him Pop again. I used to call him that when I was in high school, but since L was born, he’s just been Papa.)

“Sure does.”

Smothered

I used to say I could play chess when I really couldn’t. I could move the pieces around, sure, but I really had no deeper understanding of the game, and I didn’t even really know some of the basics. Give me a rook and the king against the opponents lone king and I would have had no idea how to mate.

Even now, there’s one mate I can only barely understand and probably couldn’t pull off: mate with one knight, one bishop, and the king. Here’s a good intro:

Yet there’s one mate that’s in the realm of mortals. “Probably the most popular checkmate pattern, the Smothered Mate often fascinates new chess players and retains its popularity even after one becomes proficient.” So says Chess End Games, and that’s no exaggeration. Every time I’ve taught someone the smothered mate pattern, I’ve gotten looks of amazed awe. The knight pops into a square and mates the king from a distance — beautiful

But Chess End Games is selling it short. There are several ways to achieve a smothered mate in chess, but the most satisfying is with a queen sacrifice. Any win involving a queen sac (chess-speak there) is satisfying because, well, you’re sacrificing your queen, the most powerful piece on the board — until it isn’t. Queen sac smothered mates are rare, though, because most decent players see it coming and resign beforehand.

In fact, I’ve only done it once — last night.

It was a wild game, and I had taken a gamble that wasn’t paying off. In fact, not just down an exchange but down an entire rook, I felt sure mate was coming. My opponent sacrificed the exchange, though, taking my knight on f4.

White to move

I took with the pawn thinking that I might be able to slide the rook over to g2 to put pressure on g7. It would have been easily mitigated with a pawn move g6, but it was the only thing I saw.

Black took my undefended d4 pawn, threatening my rook. My first instinct was to continue with my plan and move my rook to g2, but then I saw it: my queen and knight were perfectly placed, and with black’s rook pair gone, it looked perfect.

Queen took on e6 with check. From here, mate was almost inevitable. Almost. I thought black might resign or bock with his rook, which would have led to mate with black’s king on h8 and white’s queen on f8 or d8 after having taken the double-attacked rook.

But black moved the king to h8 and my heart went pitter-patter. Could I get the smothered mate or would black resign?

The first move was to pop the knight in for a check. If black took with the rook, I was in trouble: my next move would have been to take with the queen, then black’s queen would deliver a nearly-fatal check on f2 and mate would have been coming. But black didn’t see it.

King to g8. “It’s going to happen!” I thought.

Knight to h6 gave a double check, so black cannot take the  knight or simply block the queen,

Black had to move back to h8 — or resign. “Oh, please don’t resign!

No resignation! Next came the most seemingly crazy move ever: the queen slid into g7 for check. Black could not take with the king because the knight defended the queen; black had to take with the rook.

The only problem is, in doing so, black took away the king’s only remaining flight square. The king was boxed in completely.

Knight to f7 for mate.

I can’t remember the last time I smiled so after a simple chess game.

Day 32: Changes

Thursday 16 April 2020

We pulled out that hideously overgrown ornamental tree by our front door earlier this week (or technically last week, I guess, but everything’s mushing together like a cheap blended scotch), so we had to replace it with something. Well, K felt we had to replace it with something. I was rather okay with just leaving it, but I was also okay with replacing it — I was just okay with it. Today, I headed out to get the replacement and a few flowers.

The plan was simple: go to Home Depot for the replacement battery for my drill and a few other things, then head over to South Pleasantburg Nursery for the tree.

“Take a picture of what’s there and show the man what was there,” K said. “He’ll help you pick something out that will fill that space.”

L’s “Franken-cooking” from a couple of nights ago

L went with me. “Take L — she’ll pick out nice flowers,” K suggested.

Home Depot took much longer than expected. Ridiculously long.

Then we head over to the nursery only to discover it’s closed: order-by-phone only. So it was back to Home Depot.

Their tree selection is not stellar, let me tell you.

We decided on a relatively mature Japanese maple, but there was no price tag, only a bar code. The Home Depot app, hastily installed, couldn’t find the price, so I photographed the bar code and went into buy it. “How much could it cost?” I asked myself.

The answer: $170.

“Um, no, I don’t think we want that tree,” I managed to stammer out. We went back and found a less mature specimen that was only $95.

The question is, why does a tree cost $170? Or $95? Or any given price? I understand Home Depot’s mark up is fairly predictable, but what about their purchase price?

K and I talked about it this evening. Somehow that price must take into account the salaries of the nursery employees, the resources (food, water, electricity) applied to the sapling or necessary for the nursery itself, the taxes and other expenses the nursery pays — all that compounded over the amount of time necessary for the sapling to reach its desired height and divided by the number of saplings that reach that marketable state at the same time.

“Whatever the expenses, it’s a rip-off,” K laughed in conclusion.

Back home, K planted the tree while I embarked on a second project: moving the composter we got for free when friends moved north. It’s current location was much closer to the house, but the barrel had somehow gotten off the gears that turn the whole contraption, and that was simply because it was no longer level, thanks in large part, I think, to the dog’s digging.

Day 31: The Walk

Wednesday 15 April 2020

I’ve been reading Faulkner and thought it might be fun to emulate him. Forgive me.

Having cleaned up after dinner, a process that entails both the obvious cycling of dishes back to the dishwasher only hours after having taken them out to hide them neatly in stacks concealed behind cabinet doors only to place them on the table yet again in and endless cycle that is the bane of our children’s existence and the not so obvious assisting Papa in his regimen of oral hygiene procedures foisted on him by childhood dental neglect, a regimen that has become a comforting habit rather than a chore, we head out for our evening walk, a Covid-19-induced habit that might be the best outcome of a worst-case scenario. Tired of the usual routes, we’ve taken to walking a circuit that runs through the neighborhood just across from ours, a newer neighborhood without power lines snaked between crooked power poles but not so new as to have sidewalks, a neighborhood with a slightly more eclectic mix of architecture. For about a year now this has been our favorite route, in part because K likes the feel of the neighborhood more than others, in part because of its distance — almost exactly a mile — and in part because of the long, straight, flat stretch that it includes where the kids, L on her rollerblades and E on his bike, play a strangely frustrating version of tag that includes time outs and random rules that E is convinced — and I am likely to agree — are L’s on-the-spot inventions intended to keep her from being tagged.

Enough — how that man could write like that, though what I did was just a pale imitation, lacking the lugubrious flourish he put into every sentence as if it were the habit of a card cheat. See? Once you start writing like that, start thinking like that, once you start piling phrase upon phrase, clause upon clause, it’s almost impossible to stop, so maybe that’s how he did it: just a big push and off he went, heedless of periods, question marks, semicolons, and anything else resembling in its vaguest form something that someone could accuse of being an ending, a final mark on the paper to suggest “Stop.” The result, in all seriousness, is nothing short of breathtaking. His greatest achievement, Absalom, Absalom!, just sings right from the opening sentences.

From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that-a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty- three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust. Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and oversweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house.

Four sentences weighing in at just a little over 400 words, with three of the sentences doing most of the work: that third sentence is so perfectly short (“Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish.”) that it creates the perfect rhythm, a little pause in the thinking that gives both authenticity to the voice and rest to the reader.

I’m reading Absalom now, probably for the tenth or twelfth time, and each time I read it, I notice a little something that had escaped my attention previously: some little piece to the puzzle (for the book is, at its heart, a puzzle to match the puzzle that is living itself), some lovely phrase, some little something. I don’t think I will ever tire of that book, and every time I finish it, I look forward eventually to starting it again: “From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office…”