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the boy

Adventuring and Exploring

Monday 20 January 2020 | 0 Comments

The Boy was keen on spending some time with me today.

"I missed you from the moment you left," he explained, "and I missed you the whole time you were gone."

"We were only gone a couple of days," I clarified. "In fact, it was only one full day that you didn't see me because we left on Friday and came back Sunday, so you saw us those two days."

"I know. But I missed you."

So when it warmed up a bit in the afternoon, we decided to go adventuring. We headed to one of our favorite spots, crossing the creek twice on bridges we'd built ourselves long ago, crossing it a third time in an entirely new location.

One of the things I like most about these adventures is the conversations we have along the way. I can't remember what we talked about today, and that's sort of the point: they're just carefree conversations about nothing in particular.

We have been coming to this area for years, in fact:

Exploring

Friday Exploring

Exploring with the Boys

Value

Sunday 12 January 2020 | 2 Comments

We were playing Monopoly this evening and the Boy bought his first railroad. It's always his plan to try to get all four railroads. When L landed on the next railroad, she bought it for $200, then offered to sell it to E for $400; he accepted the offer. I tried to explain to him why this was a bad deal, that paying double for this railroad was not worth it at this point, but he was stubborn and would not listen.

"It might be worth it if this were your final railroad," I told him. "As it is, it's certainly not worth this much money just for the second railroad. There's no guarantee that you'll get either of the other two railroads.

A couple of hours later we were looking through a box of old collector cards that I had. There were baseball cards, football cards, basketball cards, and even, strangely enough, some Star Wars cards that I have gotten from somewhere at some point in my childhood. E asked me how much these cards were worth I tried to explain to him that I really didn't have any idea because there was just no way of knowing.

A newly-discovered creek about a mile from our house

"Where on the cards does it show how much they're worth?" he asked.

"It's not on the cards," I explained. "It all depends on how valuable they are and that depends on how rare they are."

"How could we find out?" he asked.

"We would have to go talk to an expert."

"I think I know an expert." He told me of a friend at school so that's mini baseball cards. "A couple of them are worth a few million dollars."

"How do you know that?" I asked.

"Because he told me."

"Do you believe him?"

"No." He thought for a moment then changed his answer.

"Does that make sense?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

I tried to explain to him that if indeed the family had a card which is are several million dollars they certainly wouldn't let the seven-year-old child keep it.

"Why not?"

"Because remember what I told you about Star Wars characters and every other collector item:  they're only valuable if they're in perfect condition. If you bent it, or wrinkled it, or tore it, it would be worthless."

"Why?"

"It's just the way it is," I sighed.

It's all but impossible to explain to a seven-year-old how the scarcity of an item makes something valuable, something which otherwise would have no value, priceless. Baseball cards are just a bit of paper with a picture printed on them. Then again, change the word "paper" to "fabric" and it holds true for money: just a bit of material was a picture printed on it.

In the midst of all this, I've been re-reading Francis Spufford's fantastic book Red Plenty, set in Khrushchev's Soviet Union.

The premise is simple. When Khrushchev was ruling the Soviet Union. it seemed as if the Communist Utopia could indeed come to pass. A state-planned economy that would bypass all the uncertainty and unfairness of supply and demand capitalism seemed achievable. Vacuum tubes and algorithms made such calculations on such a scale achievable.

View at Good Reads

The book follows various characters as they weave their way through the creation of this Utopia, each playing their own part. Mathematicians, economists, biologists, Politburo members, Eisenhower, Khrushchev, and others all appear in the novel. All of the Soviet characters are searching for the formula that will make the magic Elixir of Plenty. Plenty of meat. Plenty of bread. Plenty of apartments. Plenty of cars. Plenty of everything.

Within all of this, the chief problem is how to assign value to both work and commodities. The book, which is part-novel, part-history, is filled with characters fictional and real; many events of the book are actual events in history. It's nearly 500 dense pages telling the story of just over 70 years of men and women working feverishly to determine a mathematical and certain way of deciding value.

If they couldn't do it, I'm not sure I can explain it to a seven-year-old in one evening.

Rainy, Sick, and Slow Saturday: Three Pictures

Saturday 11 January 2020 | 0 Comments

Picture One: The Medicine

The Girl has been fighting a sinus and ear infection for some time now; K has now come down with something as well. As such, they’ve amassed quite a little medicine collection: antibiotics, probiotics, decongestants, cough suppressants from the pharmacological side of things; oils, teas, syrups, and nose irrigators from the holistic side of things.

It’s all covered, literally and figuratively.

Picture Two: The Game

The Boy has grown crazy about Pokemon lately. He decided he wanted to buy a deck for himself and another for L using his final Christmas gift money.

“She’s going to teach me how to battle for real!” he declared. The way he’s been playing has been, shall we say, improvisational. The Girl knows how to play; she promised to teach him.

At $20 a deck, it’s quite the investment. I was hesitant to let him go through with it, but two things stopped me: first, it is, after all, his money. He needs to learn how to spend it wisely, so I gave advice, made suggestions, but in the end left it up to him. Second, I thought that if this gave them something to do together, just the two of them, it would be worth more than that $40 for the two decks. So we bought them while we were out today.

At first, he was terribly upset because we couldn’t find the decks. When we found them, there was only one. “But we checked on the computer and they said they had them!” he wailed, about to have a little panic attack there in the toy section. “They lied!” I tried to explain to him that just because they found them on the Walmart site doesn’t mean they have them in that particular store. I pulled up the site on my phone and showed him. In the end, though, he took the disappointment rather well.

As we were checking out, though, he decided to look in the checkout aisles. “They have them there, sometimes.” Sure enough, after we’d checked out, he found some, so we grabbed them and went to the nearest checkout, which was a self-checkout. Which I don’t like. Why should the store get free labor from me? Still, if the other checkouts all have long lines, I’ll go ahead to the self-checkout.

The gentleman in front of us was a prime illustration of the slow South. He picked up each item, turned it about in his hand to confirm where the bar code was, scanned it, placed it in a bag, took the individual bag with one item to his buggy, placed it carefully in the buggy, moving other bags as necessary to get everything just so, then repeated it. He looked to be in his mid-fifties so I couldn’t salve my impatience thinking, “Well, here’s this sweet old man, still clinging to his independence…” Of course, I really don’t know the guy’s story — there are any number of reasons why he moved so very slowly and deliberately. But it’s symptomatic of what I see as a slow Southern mentality. Don’t rush. For anything.

When the light turns green at an intersection, for example, most drivers don’t respond immediately. They wait, even to take their foot off the brake. Sometimes two or three seconds. Sometimes five. Sometimes ten. They creep into the intersection and take what seems like an eternity to get up to the speed limit, and there’s no guarantee they’ll even get to the speed limit: they often drive five, even ten miles an hour below it.

Anyway…

After dinner, the instruction began. And the first game didn’t go so well.

“Go easy on him!” I mouthed to L when she wasn’t looking.

“I did!” she mouthed in reply.

Picture Three: Rain

I spent about four hours working on end-of-the-quarter grades today. When lunch rolled around, I didn’t even have 1,000 steps. By the time shopping and dinner was over, I had just over 5,000.

“After I put the Boy to bed,” I said to Clover, “we’re going on a long walk.”

And then the rain started again.

Beyblade

Tuesday 07 January 2020 | 0 Comments

The Boy has wanted a beyblade for quite some time now. I didn't even know what it was, and even after he explained it to me, I was still a little fuzzy on the details.

It is, in essence, a gyroscope. With pretend blades. That it uses to battle other gyroscopes.

We had a little trouble getting it working, though. Rather, getting "them" working, because he bought a pair so we could battle. I think it's some knock-off version because absolutely nothing in the packaging was in English. That and the price. The whole process resulted in a lot of frustration for E because I wasn't at first helping him figure it out.

At his age, the Boy doesn't have a lot of coping mechanisms when frustration looms. We try to talk him through situations, and we try to get him to take breaks from frustrating situations, ask for help, try to approach the problem from a different perspective, but that's all very cerebral and that frustration, I know, burns with an almost physical presence in the body.

The Van

Thursday 02 January 2020 | 0 Comments

This is the backseat of our van. The backseat that held our children during trips here and there: to school, Nana’s and Papa’s, to Florida, to the beach, to the mountains, to soccer, to dance, to gymnastics, to basketball, to parties, to funerals, to church, to friends’ homes, to parks, to my school, to K’s office, to the airport, and always back home.

I’ll bet there was a time I would have been sentimental about the thought of selling this thing, but not now. Let it haul someone else’s kids somewhere else.

First Day 2020

Wednesday 01 January 2020 | 0 Comments

The house is, relatively speaking, a mess; everyone's tired; we went to Mass on a Tuesday evening -- it must be the end of the holidays.

2019

Tuesday 31 December 2019 | 0 Comments

"I for one will be glad to see 2019 behind us." That seems like a common sentiment, and it's one a number of people hold every year: I'm sure millions said a year ago, "I for one will be glad to see 2018 behind us."

I don't see the logic in that thinking. It's not as if a given year has some kind of sentience and will, bestowing wonderful gifts on those it loves and extracting horrific costs from those it doesn't. A year is a year -- a completely arbitrary thing.

Still, 2019 was a tough year for our family in a lot of ways.

It began with the passing of our loved Bida -- the old, ornery rescue cat that chose to stay with us for over a decade. She put up with two kids whose love, when they were little, was more like an assault than affection. She stood up to our silly dog and made Clover realize that among the pets, she was the boss. In the end, it was I, the one who said he hated her, to stayed with her to the end. It was late, and everyone else went to bed.

A couple of days later, a dear friend died from cancer. We were fortunate enough to be able to visit with him just about two or three days before he passed. "You've always been such a fighter," K assured him. "Well, this fight's over," he said, and I could tell that his wife took that hard, though she knew it well enough herself and had probably heard it multiple times. He seemed to realize that his time was very near: he'd been calling old friends for what turned out to be one last conversation, and we were very touched that he specifically wanted us to come by for a visit.

But these two events, tragic though they were, both occurred within the context of an even more personally brutal loss: the year began with Nana in rehab and ends with her out of our daily lives altogether. If someone asked me at the start of the year what I foresaw in 2019, I would have talked about the long process of rehabilitation that awaited Nana, about the stress all that would put on the family, about how it would undoubtedly bring us closer, about my hope for a return to some semblance of normalcy with perhaps Nana in a wheelchair or still largely confined to bed but still with us. I wouldn't have thought we would leave the decade without her.

Yet there were bright moments throughout the year. The renovation of our carport completed, Nana and Papa moved in, and Papa remains here still. It's good to know he's in a safe place, that he's near, that we can take care of him. Nana was here with us only a week: perhaps that assurance that Papa was safe was the last thing holding her back.

The Girl blossomed as a volleyball player. She was a starter on her school team, which went undefeated for the season and won the final championship tournament as well. It's a passion that's lasted several years now, longer than dance or gymnastics ever did.

A mixed year overall.

Slow Day

Monday 30 December 2019 | 0 Comments

The Boy had to go to the dentist to get some kind of protective covering over his molars. I don't remember ever doing that for the Girl, and I certainly didn't have it done to me. Then again, how would I know? That would have been almost 40 years ago.

K got some zurek going. Such a strangely wonderful soup -- only Eastern Europeans could think of something like that. Let rye flour ferment and then use that as a basis for soup. Genius.

The Boy did a little work on IXL. It's one of my favorite tools as a teacher -- one of the few things the district provides that I think is genuinely useful.

And then K and I made another baklava for tomorrow's New Year's Eve party. I think she and I have pretty much mastered it. The trick is not to follow the recipe: the syrup is only supposed to simmer as long as the pastry part bakes, but I found quite by accident that letting it cook twice as long makes it wonderfully gooey on the bottom. Then again, one has to thin it a bit before pouring it on the pastry. I used a little brandy this time. Again -- like life, don't follow that recipe too closely.

Post-Christmas Saturday

Saturday 28 December 2019 | 0 Comments

The Dog and the Game

Friday 27 December 2019 | 0 Comments

The kids played with the dog a bit this afternoon -- a good thing, because the pup, when neglected, pouts. And a pouting pup does things like dig massive holes in the backyard, run uncontrollably once inside, bark incessantly inside or out.

Afterward, another evening over the board. This time, possibly the most luck I've ever experienced in the silly game. Everything with buildings on it -- I owned. I made my own son cry when he landed on New York Avenue with a hotel and had to pay $1,000. He literally fell into the floor and began sobbing.

"Buddy, calm down. It's just a game. I'm lucky this time." No help. Then I had an idea: "If you can pull yourself together, I'll give you a surprise." I was planning on giving everything I had to him and letting him finish L off, but her turn was right after mine and she landed on Tennessee Avenue (See that? It also had a hotel.) and had to pay $950 one turn after she'd paid me something like $600. She had nothing left: she gave me her little bit of cash and all her remaining property with a pout and said, "You win."