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Swim Team

Tuesday 25 May 2021

E has joined a swim team at a local pool, primarily because his three best buddies from school have joined the same team. I am naturally thrilled because competitive swimming was an important part of my life. I began swimming competitively in elementary school when I competed for the small community pool to which we belonged.

In high school, the swim team was my only athletic endeavor. I certainly would not have gone out for football or basketball, and while I ran track during my freshman year, an awful case of tendonitis made running more than a quarter of a mile excruciatingly painful: I quit after the first year. But swimming had always been kind to me, and even though I was always mildly frustrated that the swim team never got the kind of recognition that the basketball, football, or even baseball teams received, I would have continued swimming competitively even if the other swimmers and I were the only ones in the pool.

It’s not that I wanted to be seen as a jock — certainly not — but a little recognition for the amount of work we put into our sport would have been nice, I thought.  We did have one occasion to bask in a little attention. It was during my junior or senior year, and the head swim coach arranged for some of the cheerleaders to come to support us. A cheerleader stood behind the starting blocks for the home swimmers and cheered us on from there. That I can’t remember whether it was my junior or senior year and that I am only partially certain they were standing behind the starting blocks to cheer us on (that just doesn’t seem right) show how relatively insignificant the event was for me, so I suppose I really didn’t care that much about that recognition.

For the most part, what I liked about swimming was its solitary nature. Except for relay events, swimming was just the swimmer in the water. Everything else seemed to dissolve into the muffled yelling of the few spectators — mainly parents, boyfriends, and girlfriends — who came out to support the team. To train or to compete, we didn’t need anything other than a body of water.

I also found that training had a certain meditative quality to it: back and forth and back and forth. One two three breath; one two three breath; one two three breath. Count the strokes in each lap. Count the breaths in each lap. Get a song going in your head and just let it run in cycles. I lost myself in swimming many times.

The Boy, though, is just beginning. He doesn’t have a good breathing pattern. He takes as many strokes as he can and then pulls his whole head out of the water to gulp air for a few seconds, then plunges his head back under and goes at it again. There are so many kid on the team (probably close to 30) that I doubt he’ll get much one-on-one stroke help, so I’ll have to do that as soon as school is out, and we start heading to the pool together on a regular basis.

He also stops swimming when he gets too tired. That means he swims the first length entirely. In the second length, he stops at the 15-foot red markers. After a few more lengths, he’s stopping almost midway.

“That’s when you’ve really got to push it,” I tell him. “You’ve got to ignore that pain and push through it. That is how you get stronger.”

It looks like we’ve got a summer goal cut out for us.

In the Backyard

Tuesday 20 April 2021

I sometimes feel guilty when E asks to spend some time with me, and all I end up doing is sitting and directing him. Today, for example, he wanted to work on a little project he devised some time ago. He’s got it in his head that he can dig a pool in our backyard like he has seen done on YouTube by those Filipinos who carve magnificent structures in the hard clay of their country. He settled on merely making it deep enough to soak one’s feet, and he decided that he wanted to line the sides and bottom with bamboo.

Yesterday in the time I had between coming home from school and heading back to school to photograph the girls’ soccer game, the boys’ soccer game, and the boys’ baseball game, almost all simultaneously, we went out to the woods behind our house cut down one cane of bamboo and brought it back.

Today, he wanted to split it down the middle. His first idea was to partially bury it in order to stabilize it and then use the saws-all to cut it in half. Knowing that wouldn’t work, I suggested that we use clamps to clamp it to something to stabilize it, and he readily agreed to that. Yet everything we tried initially failed. I say everything “we tried,” but the truth of the matter is he did all the work and I simply sat and directed him.

And this is where my dilemma comes in. I was giving him suggestions, photographing him occasionally as he worked. I could’ve just as easily worked with him. Apparently, I saw more value in him having a little practice following instructions and working things out for himself. Or was this just me making excuses for my laziness?

Comforting the Boy

Wednesday 31 March 2021

The Boy and I are finishing up the classic Where the Red Fern Grows. I remember my fifth-grade teacher reading that to us, and I knew how it ends: both Old Dan and Little Ann, the protagonist’s beloved hounds, die. We reached that part today, and it brought the Boy to tears.

“I’m just remembering Bida and Nana,” he said. “I miss them. I want them back.” He sobbed for a while as I comforted him, continually talking about memories he had with them.

After a while, when he was calming down, I asked the Girl to bring in a box of tissues.

“What?” she asked.

“A tissue box.”

“What?!” she asked again, incredulously.

“A tissue box!”

“Oh, I thought you said ‘a fishy box.'”

And like that, the tears turned to laugher.

Friday Evening

Friday 26 March 2021

The Boy has decided he needs to do more conditioning to improve his soccer game. Tonight, he ran a series of interval training exercises that we kind of made up as we went along. Then he decided he wanted to make up his own.

He struggles a bit this year in soccer. He’s one of the youngest on the team, and as a result, he’s less aggressive/experienced than others and a bit slower than many of them. To his credit, he’s not giving up, though he wanted to at first. The thing is, he actually likes playing soccer, and that makes all the difference.

In the evening, I took the dog for a walk and discovered our neighbor had started his weekend backyard fires. Perhaps I’ll go over for a visit tomorrow night.

February Evening

Thursday 25 February 2021

I head out for a walk with the dog as I listen to one of Sam Harris’s latest editions of the Waking Up podcast in which he discusses the nature of time with physicist Frank Wilczek. We like to think of time as this little moving slice of now that’s passing through the past into the future, but it’s really not like that at all. Time in a sense is the measure of change, and basically clocks things that change predictably and regularly against which we mark the seeming passing of time. In that sense, then, everything that changes is a clock, Wilczek points out.

Everything is a clock. I stopped in mid-stride to think about that. It’s so profound and yet so simple at the same time, an observation that’s been staring us in the face all our lives but eluding us at the same time. Simple, elegant.

As I continue my walk, I pass a man standing in his garage talking on the phone. I raise my hand in greeting. It’s a Southern thing — we wave at everyone — but he doesn’t wave back. “Perhaps he didn’t see me,” I think. Then, noticing some of the flags hanging in his garage indicating a political persuasion diametrically opposed to mine, a little thought experiment begins in my head. “What if we could read each other’s minds? We’d know where the other stands on so many issues that we otherwise keep to ourselves. We’d really, truly know one another. Would we be less likely to wave at each other?” And that’s a terrifying thought.

About this time, I grow tired of the podcast and switch to a playlist I’ve created called “Nostalgia” — songs to induce just that. The first song up: “Private Universe” by Crowded House. What a strangely perfect song. It’s not at all about the private universe I’ve been contemplating, but what a coincidence. Private universes — the physicists’ idea of a multiverse is a reality, because we all live in our own private universe. It sounds lonely, but it’s much more comfortable for us to live in these little walled-off universes because they afford some privacy that a non-private, evening-walk-thought-experiment mind-reading universe would render impossible. Even if that means we never truly know one another, it’s better in our private universes. We’re passing our experiences and memories, emotions and impulses through our own filters as we share them with others who then pass them through their interpretive filters. There are so many layers separating us that it’s a miracle we can claim to know anyone at all.

But there’s a hint of tragedy in this, because even with those with whom we’d be most willing to share such a non-private universe, it’s impossible. I will never truly know my children because of all the things they don’t, won’t, or can’t share with me, and they will never really know me. In a sense, we live with strangers, each and every one of us. The only thing we truly have in common is the fate that awaits us all — when the clock that is our body wears down and stops recording time for us as conscious individuals and begins to be a measure of unconscious decay.

It’s about this time that the next song comes on: Billy Joel’s “Lullabye (Goodnight My Angel).” This song has always made me think of Natalia, a student I taught in Poland who died before her senior year in the summer of 1999. “That’s almost 22 years ago now,” I think. “Had she not died, she’d now be old enough to have children older than she was when she died.” The song winds down:

Someday we’ll all be gone
But lullabies go on and on
They never die
That’s how you
And I will be

How did I never notice that nod to mortality at the end of the song? And how is it that a talk about physics can end with such nostalgia? I feel like I should have an answer, but I also feel like none is needed. I’ve done what I set out to do: record some thoughts I had one February evening as I walk our silly dog, and that’s really all this is for. Billy Joel writes his songs that will never die; I write a blog a decade after they ceased being hip.

Reputation

Wednesday 3 February 2021

The last question for the act three study guide was to complete a paraphrase of lines 94-103. It was one of the few questions I actually check — the rest of them, I skim and make sure they put something close to correct. This one I read.

One young lady (we’ll call her Lisa) turned in the following:

I’m so upset about my cousin’s death that I’ll never be satisfied with Romeo until I see him dead. Mother, if you could find a man who sells poison, I would mix it myself so that Romeo would be dead. My heart hates hearing his name and not being able to go after him, not being able to avenge the love I had for my cousin.

The second part wasn’t as simple: explain the paradoxical/ironic phrases in this passage.

This passage is ironic because Juliet has to pretend that she hates Romeo and wants to kill him even though in reality she loves him and wants to protect him. Juliet says that she will never be satisfied until she sees Romeo dead when in reality she won’t be satisfied until she sees Romeo and can hug him and be with him. Juliet tells her mother that she wants to mix up the poison to kill Romeo but she really wants to mix up the poison so she can protect Romeo and make sure that the poison doesn’t kill him. Also, Juliet hates to hear Romeo’s name and not go after him, but she says that she hates hearing Romeo’s names and not being able to avenge Tybalt’s death to cover-up that fact that she loves Romeo.

My comment: “Good work. A thorough examination of all the levels of irony.” Lisa is, in all respects, a star student. She never gives less than 115%, and she absolutely hounds me to death for extra feedback and additional help. As a result, she finished the second quarter this year with an eye-popping grade of 100. She had a 99 without the extra credit for the quarter, but she did every possible bit of extra credit so I was more than happy to give that one point, though she didn’t have to do everything to get that point. But she would have done it all even if I’d told her she didn’t have to. “I just want to make sure,” she’d likely say.

A couple of students later, I was skimming through the answers, thinking how much more complete these answers seem than what I’m used to receiving from the boy (we’ll call him James). Then I get to the paradox question and read his answer:

This passage is ironic because Juliet has to pretend that she hates Romeo and wants to kill him even though in reality she loves him and wants to protect him. Juliet says that she will never be satisfied until she sees Romeo dead when in reality she won’t be satisfied until she sees Romeo and can hug him and be with him. Juliet tells her mother that she wants to mix up the poison to kill Romeo but she really wants to mix up the poison so she can protect Romeo and make sure that the poison doesn’t kill him. Also, Juliet hates to hear Romeo’s name and not go after him, but she says that she hates hearing Romeo’s names and not being able to avenge Tybalt’s death to cover-up that fact that she loves Romeo.

A few more students later, I read another boy’s work. We’ll call him Nate. Nate has been struggling with the class, but he’s constantly saying he wants to do better. I read his paradox answer:

This passage is ironic because Juliet has to pretend that she hates Romeo and wants to kill him even though in reality she loves him and wants to protect him. Juliet says that she will never be satisfied until she sees Romeo dead when in reality she won’t be satisfied until she sees Romeo and can hug him and be with him. Juliet tells her mother that she wants to mix up the poison to kill Romeo but she really wants to mix up the poison so she can protect Romeo and make sure that the poison doesn’t kill him. Also, Juliet hates to hear Romeo’s name and not go after him, but she says that she hates hearing Romeo’s names and not being able to avenge Tybalt’s death to cover-up that fact that she loves Romeo.

At this point, there was only one thing to do: go back through all the other papers and check. Nothing else seemed suspect, but these Lisa’s, James’s, and Nate’s study guides were, upon closer inspection, identical. Completely. Perfectly. A medieval scribe would be jealous of the letter accuracy.

I was puzzled, though. I couldn’t get a single thought out of my mind: “This just does not seem like something Lisa would do.” James and Nate — maybe. Conceivably. But Lisa? Never.

I took the three papers to Mrs. D, the eighth-grade vice principal, and she sweated a couple of more names out of them. I got a call during my planning period asking if I’d print out Sam’s and Jacob’s paper. I did so, but they were identical to the other three. Mrs. D applied a little more pressure while I stood there: “You want to tell me what happened or should I immediately just start suspending people?” It turned out that both James and Nate had gotten the study guide from Jacob.

While they were providing details, I looked down at Lisa. Her brow was furrowed in confusion; her eyes glistened; her chest was heaving slightly. She was utterly terrified.

It wasn’t difficult to understand why: here was a girl who’d probably never gotten in trouble at school. Ever. For anything. She’s chatty because she’s so very bright, and she just wants to share all the thoughts she has. (She puts Post-It notes on her article of the week in addition to all the marginal comments. “I just have a lot to say,” she explained with shrug of the shoulders when I asked her why she was doing so much more than was required.)

I left the room to get ready for class — their class. Students began filing in, and I heard the talk:

“Who else got called to the office?”

“Lisa’s in there.”

“Then it must be some star student thing or something.”

“No, I think she’s in trouble.”

Just before class started, the vice principal came down to my room to tell me that Jacob had rather casually admitted that he’d swiped the study guide from Lisa. While she had gone to the restroom, he noticed the study guide was up and quickly jumped on her computer to send a copy to himself. He then shared it.

Poor Lisa, I thought.

I went back into the classroom and made sure everyone was working, then called Lisa outside.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yes. Did Mrs. D tell you what happened?”

“Yes, and I’m glad it all came out. I’m sure you were quite confused.”

“Very,” she said, shaking her head vigorously.

“Well, this should serve as a lesson to you that’s a little different than the lesson the boys are going to learn.” I asked her if Mrs. D had told her what I’d said initially.

“No, not really.”

“Well, I told her that it just didn’t seem like you. That I doubted you’d just shared this. I didn’t have any way to explain it, but I really didn’t think you would do something like this.” She smiled, and I continued, “So the lesson I hope you learn in a very real way is how valuable the reputation you’ve created for yourself is, how important it is to maintain such a reputation because it will serve you well in ways you probably didn’t previously imagine.”

She smiled again, and we went back inside and had a great class, making a decision tree of Juliet’s concerns about taking Friar Lawrence’s potion.

Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again.
I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,
That almost freezes up the heat of life:
I’ll call them back again to comfort me:
Nurse! What should she do here?
My dismal scene I needs must act alone.
Come, vial.
What if this mixture do not work at all?
Shall I be married then to-morrow morning?
No, no: this shall forbid it: lie thou there.

Laying down her dagger

What if it be a poison, which the friar
Subtly hath minister’d to have me dead,
Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour’d,
Because he married me before to Romeo?
I fear it is: and yet, methinks, it should not,
For he hath still been tried a holy man.
How if, when I am laid into the tomb,
I wake before the time that Romeo
Come to redeem me? there’s a fearful point!
Shall I not, then, be stifled in the vault,
To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,
And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?
Or, if I live, is it not very like,
The horrible conceit of death and night,
Together with the terror of the place,–
As in a vault, an ancient receptacle,
Where, for these many hundred years, the bones
Of all my buried ancestors are packed:
Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,
Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,
At some hours in the night spirits resort;–
Alack, alack, is it not like that I,
So early waking, what with loathsome smells,
And shrieks like mandrakes’ torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad:–
O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught,
Environed with all these hideous fears?
And madly play with my forefather’s joints?
And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud?
And, in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone,
As with a club, dash out my desperate brains?
O, look! methinks I see my cousin’s ghost
Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body
Upon a rapier’s point: stay, Tybalt, stay!
Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee.

I’ve always loved this lesson: the decision tree helps them literally see how increasingly irrational Juliet is becoming:

Lisa was classic Lisa: she took control of her group; she offered her ideas enthusiastically but humbly; she listened to others and helped everyone synthesize their thoughts. Back to normal. Classic Lisa. The Lisa everyone was thinking of, scratching their heads, wondering, “Lisa, in trouble?”

And the boys? Well, I didn’t talk to them. After all, what could I say that Mrs. D hadn’t already said?

Play Date

Sunday 31 January 2021

The Girl has, for all intents and purposes, outgrown play dates. Her friends come over occasionally, and they sit on the bed and talk. Or play games on the Chromebook together. But they’re not play dates. But we call them that anyway.

L’s best friend N came over yesterday and one of the highlights for them was walking together down to the CVS near us to buy snacks. K told me that after L told her friends about doing that, all her friends want to come for a visit to walk down to the CVS.

What a change from the summer L experienced in Poland a couple of years ago. She met with her newly-made village friends for pizza, went shopping with them, met them for ice cream, walked to their houses for visits. So much independence for a then-twelve-year-old. So relatively incomprehensible for American children.

Spendings

Friday 15 January 2021

The Boy loves to spend money. He has a million and one ideas about what he’s going to buy, and it changes from day to day. We protected his first communion money and steered him toward spending it on something useful: a new bike. However, his allowance is a different story.

This week, he decided he wanted to buy a prank kit. He spent $15 on kit that included

  • a whoopee cushion,
  • a small plastic finger that one pulls to create a sound that I think is supposed to sound like flatulence but instead sounds like just wildly chaotic noise;
  • slime, and
  • some kind of strange little bouncy rubber ball.

Four items that probably cost a total of $2 to make, and he paid $15 for it. K advised him that it was not the best way to spend his money. It was especially ill-advised since the last time he bought a whoopee cushion, it burst the first time he sat on it. (I always thought the idea was that someone else sat on it, but I guess I was wrong.)

Today, at dinner, he had an epiphany: “I wasted that money!” The realization caused great stress, but K reassured him: “If you learned a lesson from it, it’s money well spent.”

Chess with the Boy

Tuesday 5 January 2021

He’s improving. He’s thinking in terms of potential. He’s looking at my last move and giving it consideration.

Tonight, he moved his rook to the semi-open file — always a good development strategy in the opening 8-15 moves.

“Why’d you do that?” I asked.

“So I could attack that,” he replied matter-of-factly, pointing at one of my pawns.

“How many defenders does it have?”

“Three.”

“How many attackers?” I enquired further.

“Two.”

“Is it safe to take?”

“Nope.”

I looked over at K. “He’s going to be able to beat you sooner than later,” I said.

“I’m sure,” she smiled.

Then his tummy started hurting — but that’s a different story.

Beaufort Day 5

Thursday 31 December 2020

The Boy finally found his shark teeth. We went back to the beach famed for its shark teeth and within seconds, he’d found his first. It wasn’t his last.

“Once I found one, I was in my prime!” he declared shortly before asking, “Daddy, what does it mean to be ‘in my prime’?”

Photo by K on her iPhone

“I love when you use words you don’t really know!” I laughed.

“What?! It was on Cupcake and Dino. I’m just not sure what it means.”

I explained. It pleased him that he’d used it correctly.

Photo by K on her iPhone

Beaufort Day 2

Monday 28 December 2020

“Daddy, I have one dream for this trip,” the Boy has been saying since we arrived. “I want to go shark tooth hunting.” We watched a couple of videos on how to do it, and it seemed entirely possible that the Boy could find a number of them during an hour or so of searching.

After a little hunting, we asked someone who seemed to know what he’s doing. “You just have to look for black triangles,” he explained, shaking out of a small bottle the small black fossilized teeth he’d found during the morning. “Like that one,” he continued, reaching down and plucking up a small tooth that he’d just discovered.

If it was that easy to find, we all thought it would be a simple enough matter for the Boy to discover one.

“It’s my dream to find a shark tooth,” E reiterated. Multiple times.

Soon enough, L found one. Then K found one. Then L found another. But E found nothing.

“Maybe we can come back later today and look again,” E suggested. It was, after all, not quite low tide yet.

We headed off to the historic district of Beaufort for a little lunch and exploring. We found a charming church with an old cemetery that had a few graves from Revolutionary War soldiers. E was impressed with the age of the graves, impressed with the size of the church, but still thinking about that shark tooth he still hadn’t found.

We finished up our time in Beaufort with a walk along the waterfront where marveled at the homes of the rich, large mansions that spoke of fortunes beyond our own considerations and imagination. (We got echoes of that in the evening when we watched Pride and Prejudice.)

Finally, we found a good spot for a few portraits.

Then we headed back to the beach where we’d started the morning searching for shark teeth.

The tide had risen, and the search was all the more difficult for it. Everyone searched for teeth; everyone found shark teeth. Everyone except the Boy.

It crushed him.

The whole way back to the car, he was on the verge of tears. “Everyone found a tooth! Everyone! Even L found a tooth, and she was not even interested in it until this morning!”

When we got back to the place we’re renting through AirBnB, he threw himself into the corner of the couch and fought back the tears. “It was my dream to find a shark tooth!” he whimpered. “My dream!”

Earlier in the day, in a gift shop, we’d bought a small bag of shark teeth. He bought them because they were cool; I encouraged him because I knew after that morning that finding a tooth is not a guaranteed adventure. I used this to try to reason with him: “Look, you wanted to look for shark teeth. You wanted to find a shark tooth. And you wanted to go back home with a shark tooth. You’re accomplishing two of your three desires.”

I knew it was a long shot, and he saw right through it. “But I wanted to find a tooth!” If he’d managed that one simple feat, the other two would have automatically been fulfilled. My cleverness might have soothed a younger boy, but not an eight-year-old E.

These are the silly things that happen in the course of parenting that seem both highly significant and completely trivial. His pain and frustration were highly significant: I recall wanting something so badly at that age, how I used to get my heart so set on it that if it didn’t come to fruition, I might as well have died, so bleak seemed my prospects afterward. Yet it was at the same time so trivial: he’s going home with thirty to forty shark teeth in his bag. In a few weeks or a few months at most, this will be an almost-disappeared memory. It will be a foggy memory he recalls as his own son deals with similar frustration.

Cleaning

Saturday 19 December 2020

Today’s task with the Boy — make some serious improvements in his room. Specifically, in its cleanliness. This meant, in part, going through toys and throwing out things that were broken, packing away to Goodwill things he no longer played with, and generally taking stock of the toys he has and what he needs.

We took out three garbage bags of stuff from his room, including probably 40 cars. We dumped all his cars out into a pile and ran the wheel test: if all four wheels roll, it’s a keeper; if not, toss it.

He was at times somewhat reluctant to give up this or that car. But we tried to be brutal. Heartless. “It’s broken, buddy,” I said I don’t know how many times. “You can’t play with it. You can’t do anything with it…”

“Yeah, but…”

Next, we cleaned out under his bed. Once we got everything taken care of, he decided he wanted to be the monster under the bed. That’s an improvement.

And toward the middle of the afternoon, L made her way into E’s room to clean the windows. K has hired her to do a lot of the Christmas cleaning because she’s saving up for a phone. That’s right. We’ve finally given in. The Girl, at age fourteen, is getting her first phone.

And, in truth, she does need one at times. She called me from volleyball practice once because they’d ended early. “Let’s go ahead and delete that number from the history…” I suggested, handing her the phone when we got in the car.

Growing and Writing

Wednesday 9 December 2020

My classes are growing. More specifically, they grew today — doubled, in fact. Today was the first day we had all students back at the same time. Sixth grade has been doing it for a couple of weeks now; seventh grade began last week; this week was eighth grade’s turn. So each class had 18-24 students in plexiglass-enclosed quad-desks, each six feet apart. “Remember,” I said countless times, “these plexiglass shields only serve as protection for you and your neighbor if you have your masks on.” This mean that it was the first day for everyone wearing masks all day.

How long will we stay like this? What effect will the Thanksgiving surge, now in full swing, have on it? I really don’t know.

As part of my promise to K about my beard (“I’ll get rid of it when we’re back in school 100%.”), I had the Boy shave me last night.

That was how we had some of our Daddy-E time. Tonight, it was writing: the Boy has discovered fountain pens,

and that discovery has inspired him to write short stories. We’re working on a tag-team zombie story now.

Treble Clef

Wednesday 2 December 2020

Today the Boy had music for his related art class in school. They’re working on the treble clef.

“I took the after-lesson quiz,” he explained, “and I got 3 out of 20 right! I took it again and only got 4 out of 20 correct!” His frustration was mounting to the level I’m sure it achieved when he was struggling with the material in class.

Checking school lunch. “Daddy, this is what I’m having tomorrow! It’s delicious!”

After dinner, I printed out the old methods of memorizing the treble clef: “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge” and “FACE.”

We went through his work together, and he made a perfect score. “That was easy,” he decided.

He noticed, though, that there are two D notes on the treble clef: one just beside middle C, and one almost up at the top of the clef.

“Two Ds?!”

So we went to the piano and started poking around. We talked about the patterns of the black keys and used that as a way to show which keys corresponded to which note.

“This is D,” I said. “See how it’s between the two black keys? Now show me another D.”

Trying Coffee

Sunday 29 November 2020

The Boy is often eager to try new things.

Today, he tried a sip from my coffee.

It wasn’t a hit.

Forbidden Island

Saturday 28 November 2020

Out of the blue this evening, the kids decided they wanted to play Forbidden Island. At least that’s how I understood it by the time they made it down to the livingroom with the game. I’d wager it was more L’s initiative than the Boy’s, but they were both excited about it when they came down.

I was less excited. About playing the game, that is. I don’t understand the game. It just seems to be a bunch of randomness pawned off as a prize-winning game. “How many drugs did they do before coming up with the arbitrary rules that make up that game?” I laughed with K once the Boy was in bed and the Girl had retreated to her friends on Facetime.

But none of that really mattered — here we were spending time together without any fussing, without any arguments. The kids are at a tough age: E is young enough to derive joy from irritating people and the Girl is not quite old enough to be patient with it all. These moments, while increasing in frequency as the kids grow up, still feel relatively rare some days. So we make the most of them when they are here.

Family Game

Chatting

Tuesday 10 November 2020

Living with a thirteen-year-old is a challenge. “I don’t know how I survived your eighth-grade year,” Nana told me when I got my job teaching eighth graders. Now that I’m teaching them and living with one, I see her point. Their astounding knowledge puts to shame everything I ever thought I knew, and often they realize it’s just not worth it talking to an idiot like me.

Until they do.

Until they sit at the dinner table and chatter on and on about their school day simply because I told a story about playing dodgeball as a kid with the hard, unforgiving kickball balls we used.

“Don’t worry,” I tell L when her behavior frustrates me. “You won’t always be thirteen.”

“You always tell me that!” she responds.

“I’m not saying it for you; I’m saying it for myself.”

Those moments sometimes seem like the dominant moments in a family with a thirteen-year-old. And then, out of nowhere, a perfect dinner conversation that’s amusing and warm.

“They turn normal again,” one of my colleagues said to me today when she asked how school was going for our kids and was shocked to realize/learn that L is now in the eighth grade. But this is normal — for her age. And it is frustrating — sometimes. Yet we know we’ll miss this version of L, so we hold on while we can.

Finishing the Toolbox

Tuesday 13 October 2020

Yesterday was the cut day; today we assembled everything. I struggled to figure out how much to do and how much to let him do, to decide how many mistakes to correct and how many to let slide.

“Oh, Daddy, that nail is actually coming out of the bottom.” That’s one to correct.

“Daddy, I didn’t evenly space these nails.” Just pat him on the head and say, “It’s not a big deal, buddy.”

In the end, it wasn’t perfect, but he’d done almost all of it — a good reason to do your best Dr. Seuss character imitation. (“Daddy, why do so many of the characters go around with their eyes closed?” he once asked. I’d never really noticed that.)

Scouts

Thursday 8 October 2020

Coming home from scouts tonight, the Boy and I had a conversation about friendship. He talked to me a bit about what happened to Malfoy in the third book of the Harry Potter series, which K is currently reading to him. Apparently he got mauled by some creature.

“Oh, that’s not good,” I said.

Practicing his two half-hitches

“But Malfoy is bad!” E clarified.

“Yes, but that’s no reason to wish ill of him. Besides, he might not turn out that bad by the end of it all.” I knew this from conversations I’d had with L about the series, but I didn’t want to give anything away to the boy.

“Yeah, L told me that he and Harry become friends in the end.”

Learning how to use a handsaw

So much for not giving it away.

“That’s sort of like T and me,” the Boy continued. “We didn’t use to like each other. Well, we really didn’t know each other, but then we got to know each other and decided to become friends.”

I thought about that for a moment, pondering the choice of words: “decided” to become friends. I imagined this conversation between the two boys, a negotiation of sorts.

It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?

T might not even be aware that in E’s eyes, they “decided” to become friends. For all I know, T might not even consider E his friend but merely an acquaintance.

Sawing

Kids and adults see friendship differently, I think. I feel I’m more jaded than I can imagine him ever being. That’s the magic of childhood, I guess.