Our three teams on the eighth-grade hall are having a contest to see who can decorate their portion of the hallway the most elaborately — which means simply quantity. Our team took matters into their own hands today, or rather on their own shoulders.
Coincidentally, the scouts today also did some decorating — after they got the badges and pins. The decoration pictures are still on the phone, which is still upstairs. So we’ll have to settle for our imagination on that one.
The Boy claims he hates — hates — reading. It’s hard. It’s exhausting. It’s boring. Yet there are some strange quirks about him.
For example, he loves reading — if someone else is doing it. He will sit for hours and listen to you read a book to him. One of his favorite things to listen to is an audiobook.
He also enjoys certain books. The Dog Man series is an eternal favorite for him.
Most strikingly, he scores very high on his standardized reading tests — in the 90th percentile as I best recall, which means he’s very good at reading for his age.
But we still have to force him to get his nightly twenty minutes of reading in. Yet he was so engrossed that he didn’t even notice I’d snapped this picture.
Our first day back after the break, and we had quite a change: for the first time since March 2020 we ate lunch in the cafeteria. By “we” I mean our team, which constitutes one-third of the eighth-grade students. And it’s a one-day-a-week gig only: we can’t get everyone in there and maintain social distance, so we get Mondays.
Such a strange thing to return to what was a taken-for-granted reality for so long after such an extended break.
Back home, though, it was a return to familiar routines that paused a little during the extended break: a small dinner (barszcz ukrainski — the first time in ages that we’ve had that wonder of the culinary world), a bit of reading, an early bedtime.
We played Ticket to Ride tonight — a favorite game for all of us. L and K enjoy it because they actually play to win; E and I love it because we play to stop them from winning. Not to win ourselves — just to get in their way. It means there’s a lot of laughs, a bit of frustration from time to time, and lots of memories.
I’ve always associated games with the extended Thanksgiving break. When we went to Nashville to visit Nana’s brother for Thanksgiving, one of the highlights for me was digging through their game closet. They had everything — games we had of course like Scrabble but also games I’d always wanted to play but never owned like Life and Battleship. And of course Monopoly. I loved it as at E’s age just as much as he loves it, and I’m sure everyone else put up with it just like we put up with it.
Thanksgiving for fifteen years always included Nana and Papa. We went to Nashville to visit Nana’s brother our first Thanksgiving back in the States in 2005. Less than a year later, he’d passed away. We haven’t been back to Nashville since.
From that point, we went to Papa’s side of the family every year. There were various cousins, aunts, and uncles there — never the same group — but there were always two that never changed: Nana and Papa.
During our first Thanksgiving without Nana in 2019, we all went for a portrait and took Nana with us — the wound was still raw for everyone, but especially Papa. His first Thanksgiving without Nana in forever.
This is our first Thanksgiving without either of them. The plan to go visit Aunt D, who helped take care of Nana when she first came back from rehab, fell through as did our plan to visit with cousins. Our Polish family from North Carolina — family in all ways that count, at any rate — had other plans for Thanksgiving, so we spent it just the four of us. Without turkey.
But with games. What’s Thanksgiving without games?
Thanksgiving 2020
Thanksgiving 2019
Thanksgiving 2018
Thanksgiving 2017
Thanksgiving 2016
Thanksgiving 2015
Thanksgiving 2013
Thanksgiving 2012
Thanksgiving 2011
Family and Food: Thanksgiving 2010
Interrupted
Fourth Thursday
Thanksgiving Games
Thanksgiving 2006
Thanksgiving 2005
It’s been such an odd Thanksgiving Eve. The only thing I did today that was in line with every other day-before-T’giving was to mow. That only makes sense if you’re in the south, I guess.
In the evening, the kids played chess. The Boy won the first game on time; that did not sit well with the Girl, who promptly paid more attention to her time management and checkmated him in the second game.
“She is so competitive,” K said.
“But look at it this way,” I said. “She could have pouted when he won and refused to play with him again. Instead, she was angry and wanted another shot.”
My best friend D and I took the Boy to his first concert last night: Genesis. With that show, I’ve achieved the concert trifecta the two of us always dreamed of: U2, Pink Floyd, and Genesis. D is missing the Floyd, but he last night was his second time seeing Genesis, so I guess we’re more or less even.
After the show, the Boy and I had a final memorial picture:
Of course, I took a few short videos and stitched them together:
Then I did it again with my friend’s clips included.
The Boy wanted to go to the bookfair. For someone who doesn’t like reading, or at least claims he doesn’t like reading, he certainly does get excited about getting new books.
The trick, as with every reader, is to find books he likes — and in his case, that means books that make him laugh. The Dog Man series is a favorite, so he bought the newest installment, Grime and Punishment. Yes, it is making the allusion you’re thinking. Other books in the series include:
I don’t know how many other kids know the allusions, but I explained them all to the Boy. I couldn’t talk intelligently about two of the books, though: For Whom the Bell Tolls (which I’ve never even attempted to read) and Catch-22 (which I tried to read in high school but just never got into).
Afterward, a bit of guitar practice. D, my best friend since forever (as my kids would say), is coming to town next weekend for a Genesis concert in Charlotte: it will be a boys’ night out, just the three of us. The Boy’s first concert. He’s preparing a little concert for D with a few little surprises sure to make him smile.
As for the girls this evening? They’re at L’s third and final club tryout. She’s been offered positions in the top teams of the other two clubs she tried out for this weekend, and I expect the same from this club. It is, after all, Excell, for whom she’s played for two years now, playing sand, grass, and indoor with them. I have a feeling, though, that she’s not going to go with them this year.
It’s nearly the end of the fall soccer season: we’re in the final week of practice before the final game on Saturday. It’s been a tough season: no wins except through forfeit (does that even count?) and only one tie (last week thanks to E’s hat-trick). There’s been a little tension within the team as a result of it all. One boy, arguably the strongest player on the team, started taking things into his own hands (or rather, feet) and trying to be a one-boy show at times, not passing or even appearing to be aware of the other players. This frustrated some boys and comforted some boys: as long as he had it, things rose or fall on his shoulders. A win would be due to him, but a loss could also be attributed to him. Perhaps they didn’t think that, but I’ve no doubt it was at least an unconscious relief for some when it was A that was losing the ball in a move that ultimately ended in an opposing team’s goal rather than their “screw-up.” But now A has been out for a few weeks due to injury, so the boys have had to gel without him. As a result, there’s been better team play, and now that everything has gelled to some degree, it’s almost over.
That’s a fairly frequent pattern in life, though: as soon as everyone gets used to the year’s teachers, for instance, and everything is clicking seamlessly, the year ends. This is even more the case in block scheduling, like at L’s high school, where classes meet for 90 minutes a day but only for one semester. By the time everyone really knows how the class works and has found their place in it, the class is over.
In the repetitions of the seasons and holidays, it’s the same. As soon as we’re comfortable in the hustle of the Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s quartet, it’s over and we’re all exhausted from it.
“In my beginning is my end,” wrote TS Eliot
I forgot about the pictures we took in and of the new little tent we used last week.
To call it “cozy” is quite an understatement.
We had to store the gear in the cabin in which some of the other boys slept.