the boy
Carbs
The Boy was eating dinner -- spaghetti and meatballs because of volleyball practice and the need to eat by five -- and asked if he could be excused.
"Eat a couple more bites of spaghetti," I said.
"But I ate all the meat!" he protested. "Now it's just carbs!"
"Well, you need some carbs, too."
"I've had a ton of carbs today!" he insisted. "Bread with lunch! My cereal in the morning!" A pause. "Daddy, what are carbs?"
Categories
"Daddy, can I play on my iPod?" The Boy had called my old phone that he uses for games an iPod for as long as I can remember. Sometimes he just calls hit his phone. For a seven-year-old, some details are unimportant.
"What did Mama say before she left?" I asked. I'd just gotten home, and K had just left for a showing. We like to be consistent, to make sure kids don't start playing one off the other. Not that our angels would ever do that.
"She said no YouTube and no television," he confessed.
"Well, let's generalize that to 'no electronics' and say 'No,' okay?"
"Okay." A pause. I knew what was coming. "What's 'generalize'?"
"It's when you take something specific, a detail, and make a broader category from it. Like if I were to say, 'apple' and 'orange,' what category would those both fit into?"
"Fruit!"
And there we had it.
"Daddy, can we do this for a long time? Can we play this game for a long time?"
I love how so many things become a game for him. We played the generalization game for a while, each taking turns listing two items and having the other figure out what category they fit into.
No bigger themes; no lessons learned. Just a fun little game that we might never remember to play again but got us both smiling for a few minutes today.
Discovery
The Boy discovered an old sugar lamb from Easter -- last Easter or perhaps the previous one.
It had turned various unnatural colors and looked almost moldy. How long does it take sugar to mold? Does sugar mold?
So maybe it wasn't last Easter; perhaps it was even further back. I've no idea.
I just came home and found him working on it -- cutting it with random blows from the knife.
It's one of those random events that I might think of at some unexpected time when the Boy is not the Boy but the Man, and K and I are wondering where the time went...
The constant thought of parents...
Soundtrack
The kids and I stumbled into a new little game this evening. The Boy and I were playing cars, and I'd taken my phone with us to listen to some music. He made a request for "Kid A," a Radiohead song that he finds amusing.
As the music played, I asked him, "Which of these cars goes with that music?" He picked one out, and we talked about why it seemed to fit.
And that was the game...
The Girl heard us and came into E's room to join us. Some of the choices were obvious: a Billie Holiday song led to fingers straight to the '40s roadster in the collection; Creedence Clearwater Revival pulled everyone to the pickup truck; a Gorecki string quartet led to the oddest car in the collection.
The real blessing of it all was not only that we were encouraging the use of musical and visual imagination but also that we were spending that time together -- the three of us. It's a rare thing these days with our crazy schedules.
A Tale of Two Books
About a year ago I read Treasure Island to the Boy. It took us a long time because I read the original, unabridged version. E loved it.
“Daddy, can we read Treasure Island again?” he asked the other day. I thought it might be a good idea to try to read another classic adventure tale instead of re-reading that one, so I suggested Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
I read the opening to him:
The year 1866 was signalised by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and puzzling phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Not to mention rumours which agitated the maritime population and excited the public mind, even in the interior of continents, seafaring men were particularly excited. Merchants, common sailors, captains of vessels, skippers, both of Europe and America, naval officers of all countries, and the Governments of several States on the two continents, were deeply interested in the matter.
For some time past vessels had been met by “an enormous thing,” a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale.
He was hooked.
“What was it?” he asked.
“Well, that’s what the whole book is about.”
In the course of the opening pages, the longitude and latitude of various sightings. I tried to explain to him what the coordinate system was, but he was a little lost. This evening, after dinner, we looked on Google Earth and mapped out the precise locations of all the sightings of the mysterious creature.
While he was eating his snack, I read another chapter to him. It’s kind of slow going: he asks for definitions of a lot of words, and the sentences are so long, with so many embedded subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases, that it’s hard for him to follow. Here’s an example:
Taking into consideration the mean of observations made at divers times–rejecting the timid estimate of those who assigned to this object a length of two hundred feet, equally with the exaggerated opinions which set it down as a mile in width and three in length–we might fairly conclude that this mysterious being surpassed greatly all dimensions admitted by the learned ones of the day, if it existed at all.
That’s one sentence — it would give my own students fits.
It is in these sentences, though, and the challenging vocabulary that I find the lasting value in the reading. Sure, we’ll have great memories to share; certainly, we’ll enjoy the book. But when it’s time to tackle things like this on his own in school, he’ll have some experience with it because he’ll have heard me reading Jules Verne and Robert Stevenson and eventually Twain and Dickens.
After the Boy was in bed, I was in L’s room, talking to her about the books she’s reading. I’d had in my mind that I wanted to start reading to L again, and I thought A Tale of Two Cities might be a good start. So I asked her if I could read her something.
“Sure,” she said fairly emotionlessly — it’s a thirteen-year-old thing, I’m discovering.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way– in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
As I was reading, she jumped up, skipped over to her bookbag, and dug out her social studies notes. “We went over that in class!” she said excitedly.
She looked through her notes and I saw a heading “The Reign of Terror.”
“That’s where it will be,” I said.
We talked about it for a bit, and that was it. Will we go through with this reading? Does she even want to? I don’t know. I understand less and less of her thirteen-year-old mind, but I know that just being there is often enough. Do I do that enough? It’s the worry of every parent, I suppose.
Patterns
Some random thoughts that had bounced around my head during the day having nothing whatsoever to do with the photos...
We are a pattern-seeking species. We see them everywhere, and when they don't occur naturally, we make them appear magically.
Take, for example, all the chatter online and off about the significance of today's date: February 20, 2020. "It's the same forwards and backward!" L explained cheerfully. "A palindrome!" I guess she learned that word from some social media post or other about the date, but there it is:
02022020
It even works if we write the year first, which I do when name files:
20200202
Of course, this only works if we're writing the day and month with leading zeros. Otherwise, it's just 222020 or 202022 -- not nearly so exciting.
If you use the Hebrew calendar, it would be 07055780 or 05075780, depending on whether we're to put the day or month first. In the Islamic calendar, it's 06081441 or 08061441, again depending on whether day or month is to come first.
All of that is to say the obvious: it's an arbitrary, meaningless day made somehow special because of an equally arbitrary way of numbering the day. There is no pattern there. We make the pattern and then feel special when it "appears."
Sometimes, when people see patterns, they read prophetic significance into it. Take, for example, today's reading in mass:
Thus says the Lord GOD:
Lo, I am sending my messenger
to prepare the way before me;
And suddenly there will come to the temple
the LORD whom you seek,
And the messenger of the covenant whom you desire.
Yes, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts.
But who will endure the day of his coming?
And who can stand when he appears?
For he is like the refiner’s fire,
or like the fuller’s lye.
He will sit refining and purifying silver,
and he will purify the sons of Levi,
Refining them like gold or like silver
that they may offer due sacrifice to the LORD.
Then the sacrifice of Judah and Jerusalem
will please the LORD,
as in the days of old, as in years gone by. (Malachi 3.1-4)
Fr. Longenecker suggested that this first portion is a prophecy that was fulfilled when Jesus was presented in the temple. In the day's gospel reading, we find:
The child’s father and mother were amazed at what was said about him;
and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother,
“Behold, this child is destined
for the fall and rise of many in Israel,
and to be a sign that will be contradicted
--and you yourself a sword will pierce--
so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
And so this is seen as a proof of providence, a proof that God controls everything. Except that the Old Testament source says he will "purify the sons of Levi, / refining them like gold or like silver." Since the majority of the Jews of Jesus's time did not convert to Christianity, it seems the sons of Levi weren't immediately purified -- if that's what it means, and that's not clear either. Perhaps it's about corruption: was there less corruption among the "sons of Levi" after the appearance of Jesus? Hard to say, but doubtful. (I don't even know if there was corruption -- I'm just working under the assumption of people being people.)
So this whole thing presents a pattern of prophecy and it's fulfillment. But it doesn't. It only creates that pattern if we accept certain interpretations (which I don't) and go into it with certain presuppositions (which I don't). For that matter, we don't even know if this Simeon bloke said these things or even if he existed -- the only evidence we have is the scriptural reference, and for many of us, that's dubious at best.
In other words, there is no naturally occurring pattern there. We create the pattern and then feel special when it "appears."
Snow and a Change
It began snowing this morning. It started and stopped during the two planning periods that begin eighth-grade teachers’ days, and we were all hopeful — teachers that is; I don’t know about the students because they were in related arts, but it’s reasonable to include them as well — that we might have an early dismissal. The temperature kept dropping; the snow kept falling; and then it all stopped.
“Well, there was our snow for this school year,” I joked during dinner. In truth, I’m glad we haven’t had a snow day this year: it means that the built-in make up days remain free, and since they all fall in March, that’s when we really need them.
In the evening, the Boy finally got his new desk — a hand-me-down from big sister.
Sunday
Procedures
The Boy decided he wanted to have a snack. "I want a burrito," he declared.
He still had to take his medicine, though.