Matching Tracksuits

the girl

Sports Saturday

Saturday 14 February 2026

It was a little like old times today: the Girl had a volleyball tournament; the Boy had a soccer game. L is playing on something like a rec team at UF. They travel to various universities and play other rec teams, and this weekend they’re in Clemson, just down the highway from us.

The Boy had his first spring-season soccer game today. We had some worries that he wouldn’t be on the same team as the previous three or four seasons, but with some polite asking and a little string-pulling, we managed to get him back on that team. It’s a good coach with a good group of boys, and they should have a strong showing this season.

And so, as we so often did in the past, we had split duty today: K went to cheer on L while E and I stayed behind for soccer and youth orchestra make-up practice.

The Boy’s team dominated in the early minutes, quickly going up 2-0. After that initial surge, though, their dominance waned a bit, and they even allowed a goal. “We got too comfortable after that,” he explained as we were leaving after the first half to head to rehearsal. When I picked him up three hours later after rehearsal (“Oh, I forgot how awful those long rehearsals are,” he moaned as he got in the car), he told me that he’d gotten a text about the game: 5-2. An overall dominant performance.

The Girl’s team also had a dominant performance, not losing a single game and losing only one set. K said the Girl played as well as she’s played in a long time, with some really strong kills and overall aggressive play. They walked away with the tournament victory and big smiles.

Afterward, just like old times, the Boy and I went out for Mexican at our favorite restaurant. “We’ve tried other places,” I told the owner, “but we just keep coming back here.”

Sunday Music

Sunday 11 January 2026

We’ve heard the piece so many times that we all find ourselves humming it throughout the week. E’s been working on his district- and region-band music with the hope of a state band callback. His work on the solo element has gone from halting and angular to smooth, melodic, and emotive. The tone is rounder, fuller. 

Walking to the car yesterday after the regional auditions, he explained where he thought he had messed up. He missed a scale the first time through—one of the easiest scales, he noted—and also fumbled a brief independent passage. Still, he said he felt better about the solo overall. Not bad, but not great.

He talked about the sight-reading portion, realizing too late that he should have practiced using only the thirty seconds allowed to preview the score before playing. “I should’ve done that sooner,” he said quietly as we pulled out of the parking lot. 

Morning sun

It’s a familiar truth—for all of us—but especially for him: anything short of perfection can feel like failure. In that way, he reminds me of L. She would come home upset after a test and proclaim that she had failed, only for us to find out later she’d made a 93. “That’s failing for me,” she’d say. With him, it’s not academics so much as music. As long as his grades are solid, he’s content—but with performance, with auditions, the standard is relentless.

Earlier this week, he talked about one of his motivations for pushing so hard: making first chair at the state level. L, after all, was a state champion three times. In her sophomore year, her school volleyball team won the state championship. In her senior year she finished first in the state in high jump, third in javelin. K assured him there was no need to measure himself against his sister, that this competition existed mostly in his own head. He explained he understood: whether he believed that or simply said it to ease our worries about the pressure he puts on himself, I’m not sure.

What became clear this week is just how hard he is on himself—harder than assessors and judges are on him. This week, we received notification that, for the spring season, he will be playing first chair trombone with the Carolina Youth Symphony. “But it’s only in the Repertory Orchestra,” he said. I expected the news to thrill him. Instead, he was quiet again, focused only on the fact that there are two levels of orchestra above his. To him, this felt like another shortcoming: first year out, and “only” Repertory.

After one rehearsal, his school band teacher—who also conducts with the youth symphony—pulled me aside. “One year,” he said with a smile. “He’s making great progress. He sounds great.” It’s good to hear others say what you already know about your child, even if he himself can’t quite hear or admit it yet.

Later this week, we’ll find out two important things. First, whether E made All-Region Band. I’m certain he did. The amount of practice he puts in was impressive—even to me, a non-trombone player, I can hear the difference. The second is whether he’ll receive a state callback, a chance to audition for All-State Band—the most competitive of all the ensembles he’s aiming for. We’re not a big state, but still: thousands of middle-school trombone players. We really don’t know what’s out there.

Morning work

Still, I love to watch him want it. I love that his teachers encourage him, that his private instructor remains enthusiastic, reminding him that this curve is steep and that mistakes are not failures. And I love, even in the quiet drive home after auditions, that the music is still there—rounder now, fuller—filling the house once again.

Final Friday

Friday 9 January 2026

Tonight was the Girl’s final evening at home. She heads back tomorrow for her second semester of college. (Is it only her second semester? How is that possible? It seems she’s been studying forever, and we’ve only just begun this adventure in independence and eye-watering expenses.)

“What do you want for dinner that final night,” K and I asked her. She thought for a while and replied, “Fettuccine alfredo.”

“With shrimp?” It’s her favorite, and I would have been surprised if she said no, but “No” was indeed her response. “With chicken, I think.”

But how to spend our last evening together? We long ago realized that we are only a small part of our daughter’s circle, and that meant we’d only have a little time with her this evening. “I want to go visit M one last time,” she explained. M, her closest friend from high school, studies at Fordham; they only see each other when they both happen to be home. So a family movie was out, and besides, there’s not much socializing with a movie. Additionally, since the Boy has regional band auditions tomorrow, he would be more than reluctant to spend so much time away from his trombone on the evening before such a significant audition. In the end, we played cards.

One last free laundry

2025

Wednesday 31 December 2025

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

19th Party

Monday 22 December 2025

The evolution of the Girl’s birthday parties over the years has completed a full arc of planning and responsibility. Her first party doesn’t even hold a place in her own memory: we picked a theme, made the guest list, decided on the menu, chose the cake, determined the games and activities. It was less a party for her than a party around her.

As the years progressed, we brought her more and more into the planning aspect of her parties. Where do you want to have it? Who do you want to invite? What sort of cake do you want to have? 

Then, as she edged toward adolescence, she began taking a more active part. She prepared snacks, festooned the living room with balloons and ribbons, and took an overall more active part in the whole process.

Her last couple of parties were almost all her doing. She made all the plans, prepared all the decorations, went shopping for this or that element. We helped here and there, but it was mostly her party and her work.

Tonight was her nineteenth birthday party, and the only thing K and I did to help her was clean the basement den that served as the venue and help keep the kitchen clean as she baked the cupcakes she wanted and her birthday cake, prepared the charcuterie board, set the drink table, and the million and one little things she did to get everything just as she wanted it for her party.

There remains only one more step: the transformation from co-host to invited guest. That’s still a few years off, but it will be here sooner than we expect.

Birthday parties, then, serve as a sort of indicator of independence in one’s child’s life. 

19

Tuesday 16 December 2025

“My age still begins with a one! I’m not that old, E!” L was laughing at the Boy’s suggestion that she, turning nineteen today, is, in fact, old.

“When you’re nineteen,” K added, “thirty seems old. When you’re thirty, fifty seems old. And when you’re fifty, seventy seems old.” I understand the idea, but I think the perceived difference in ages is a exponential curve: Now that I’m in my fifties, for example, it’s not just the addition of twenty years that seems “old.” Truly “old” for me would be somewhere close to mid-eighties or even nineties.

Old in your teens means having a job and bills. In your thirties, it suggests kids in or barely out of college, and increase in fiscal responsibilities that hints, nonetheless, at relative financial freedom. In your fifties, with a kid in college and another approaching high school, I feel truly “old” is when mobility begins really declining, and that seems to me to be sometime in one’s eighties. When doctors’ visits are the primary reason for the ever-challenged mobility, that suggests advanced age.

Still, I understood the sentiment: an age seems old until we reach that age.

All of this seemed to receive a coincidental confirmation when, on L’s urging, we looked at our year-end Spotify summary — Spotify Wrapped. K’s listening age: 80. How L and I laughed! I knew with my recent re-obsession with Ghost and several similar bands, I had to be younger, musically. But alas, it couldn’t outweigh the jazz and classical music that forms the core of my classroom music. My listening age: 84. So my listening age is what I officially consider the very edge of old age, suggesting to some, I suppose, that I have an old soul.

The day as a whole was just as strangely out of sync with our standard daily routine as was this date nineteen years ago. We spent it in the hospital with the newly-born Girl and my parents. Today I took a personal day to appear in court regarding the still-unresolved accident roughly two weeks ago, but the office was not in the courthouse and would not be able to make it time, so everything got reschedule for Monday. K spent most of the morning sleeping: one of her projects was finishing up with the actual waterline tie-in, which is something that requires water to be shut off for a number of people and as such, is usually done at night. She got back home a little after four in the morning, just about an hour before her usual wakeup time.

In the afternoon, I helped the Girl bake some cookies. I broke up the candy canes as we chatted about anything, everything, and nothing of any real significance. College classes, politics, music, funny things we saw on the internet. Everything and nothing. Having those conversations with our daughter is still a relatively new development in our relationship, and, I think, a sign that she’s growing out of that teenage reluctance to go beyond monosyllabic responses to many questions much of the time. I was that way, too. Most of us are, I think. and see it’s a binder from

Random Advent Thoughts

Tuesday 2 December 2025

We’re into advent now, the first without the Girl living with us. She came for Thanksgiving and headed by that Friday because of a football game the next day. (I’m still not sure if she really cares for the game or if, more likely, it’s the social aspect of it all. She’s grown fond of tailgating, suggesting the latter.) It’s also the first year without an advent calendar. I think K was looking to get one for the Boy, but I haven’t seen one, so perhaps it never happened. Add to that all my ignorance about our advent-calendar-status and everyone’s apparent indifference to it and it’s obvious how much things have changed over the last few years.

One of the things that definitely has changed is this site: I rarely write anything here anymore and post pictures only sporadically. At first, I thought it was just a break. But it’s easy to slip out of the habit of daily reflection and the mental energy it requires. And as for the pictures, the Girl is gone, the Boy is an increasingly-reluctant subject, and honestly, I’m just getting tired of that whole process as well.

That’s not to say I’ve given up writing altogether. I spent some time in recent months working on my memoir about growing up in a fringe Christian sect, but even that has hit a jam: The more I read and listen to podcasts about growing up an Evangelical Christian, I realize my experience in a high-demand religion is par for the course here in America. We weren’t the only ones viewing ourselves as the only true Christians on the planet while relegating everyone else to The World — that big, bad anti-Christian amorphous society that seems to be everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. Evangelicals and we even referred to it identically: The World, while pointing fingers at each other and lumping the other into The World as well. Exclusivist religious views are hardly exclusive to fringe sects (though being on the fringe does help, sociologically speaking). So I reevaluated what I was writing, revised it heavily, then started again. And ran out of steam almost immediately. I poke at it every now and then, but it sits in a Google Doc festering now.

One positive change in all of this has been my new job. which I’ve not written about much at all. The difference is astounding: no stress about end-of-year testing or even lesson planning in a given format to a prescribed level of detail to be submitted by a specific day of the week. No stress about kids who are out of control and negatively impacting every other student in a given class. No stress about needing more time to complete a given topic juxtaposed against the ever-ticking clock of standardized testing. No more quarterly benchmark tests. No more tri-quarterly Common Formative Assessments. No more pretending administration is not telling us to teach the same thing on the same day when we all have to give the same CSA (Common Summative Assessment). No more mindlessly useless meetings to discuss “data” (quotes very intentional) as if it’s something we teachers have never done, some new revolutionary new pedagogical silver bullet. No more (almost) reports based on questions and prompts that seem to assume our cumulative classroom experience would be best measured in mere weeks. Not a single student has been disrespectful to me the entire school year. Not a single parent has taken her child’s account of events as gospel truth and verbally attacked me for disciplining the kid.

The Girl Returns

Friday 21 November 2025

After three months away from home, the Girl returned tonight for the first time. Such a novel experience: for eighteen years, she was a daily joy in our lives, and then suddenly, she was gone. And now she’s back. “At last, I get to take a shower in my bathroom.” Well, the Boy has taken over most of the bathroom now, but never mind that. We had a drink in celebration of her return, talked about school, future plans, current classes, and random trivialities, and simply enjoyed having L back home.

At one point, she noticed E’s math homework on the table. She glanced at it and sighed: “Oh, I’d love to have work this easy.” She pulled out her iPad and showed us some of her work in Calculus III.

“See? There’s not even numbers anymore!!”

She showed us some of her physics problems (not shown above — more calc), some diagrams from Chem II (“Just wait until next semester when you take organic chemistry — it’s all diagrams,” I laughed.) and reveled in the tastiness of the water.

The Boy, for his part, after making us all laugh by annotating his algebra homework to look a little more like L’s calc homework, brought down his ever-growing collection of trombone mouthpieces. Earlier, when L and I were in the basement, she noticed two of his three guitars down there.

“Does he play at all anymore?” she asked.

“Not so much. He’s focusing on trombone. But wait until you hear him play,” I replied.

A quiet, laughter-filled, joyful return. What more could we ask for?

L’s Last Sunday

Sunday 17 August 2025

I never do well with lasts, and one of the most significant lasts for our family has arrived today: L’s last full day at home. She’ll be heading to Gainesville tomorrow in the early afternoon to move into her dorm, meet her roommate, and settle into her new life. The move-in won’t be until Tuesday, but she’s leaving tomorrow.

“She’s leaving home” echoes in Paul McCartney’s voice as I type that. Such a different departure for our Girl tomorrow. No running away. No confused parents reading a note the next morning. No sense of an underlying, unseen, misunderstood neglect. The suggestion in the song is that the unnamed girl won’t be back to see her family for a long time, perhaps the longest of times. Our Girl will be coming back for Thanksgiving for sure, but those three months will be the longest time we’ve been without her. So in a sense, I guess I still relate to the parents in the McCartney song.

It resonates for another reason, though: the parents in the song in some sense or another failed their daughter, and they didn’t even realize that they had. It’s every parent’s nightmare: that you’ve somehow failed your children without realizing you’ve failed them. We’re sending our daughter out into the world, the first steps she’s taking to her freedom, and that fear haunts us both, I think. Parents always reassure each other when they express these fears, “Oh, you did a good job with her. She’s going to be fine.” But everyone says that, and everyone can’t be right. That’s what the song is all about: everyone would have reassured those parents that they did a fine job raising their daughter. I know we made mistakes — some big mistakes. But the effort itself counts for more than we realize, I think.

I understand that only now about my own parents. They made mistakes with me, no question. But I never doubted their motivations were pure. I never doubted the security they were trying to provide for me in ways that I know view as less-than-ideal.

I also understand how difficult it must have been for them when I left shortly after college for Poland. They know it would be months, possibly a couple of years, before they’d see me again. And when I came back to the States, I settled in Boston — a fourteen-hour drive from their town. And when I left Boston, I returned to Poland. From 1996 to 2005, I really only saw them a handful of times. That must have been more difficult for them than I even now can imagine. Certainly more difficult than what we’re facing with L leaving, for we have E still at home with us, and my parents had no other child to comfort them with his proximity.

Tomorrow our daughter is leaving for college. That sounds a lot less harsh than “tomorrow our daughter is leaving for good,” but in truth, I think that’s what’s happening. Certainly, she’ll come home for long visits (she’ll be here for almost a month for Christmas), but I doubt she’ll ever live with us again in the sense that she lives with us now. And has lived with us for eighteen and a half years. She is indeed leaving home in that sense. After college, there will be grad school or a job, and even when she’s done with all of that, she won’t want to come back to this little corner of the world. With a degree in biomedical engineering, she’ll have more opportunities in bigger cities with more universities and research facilities. She’s already talking about California So perhaps we’ll see after all what my parents went through.

In the meantime, we enjoyed the day the best we could. K made racuchy for breakfast and rosół for dinner. It’s been a pattern for the last few days: fixing her favorite foods (crab cakes for dinner Friday; K’s specially marinated chicken for dinner last night).

And then there was the final packing. L went to get a few favorites to take with her, including an entire bulk box of Cheez-Its. “I can’t live without my favorite junk food,” she laughed.

The Boy chipped in, washing L’s car for her as he listened to some podcast or another.

And then an early dinner.

Thus passed L’s final Sunday here.

Saturday Night Ice Cream

Saturday 16 August 2025

I took only one picture yesterday. Unfortunately, I caught L mid-bite. And you cant

L Leaving

Sunday 3 August 2025

After having L as a daily aspect of our everyday reality — a blessing, a source of joy, an occasional annoyance, a cause for worry, a source of pride, and everything else children represent in their parents’ lives — she’s about to leave for college. We have a handful of days remaining until she’s gone for good. Of course, there will be visits (some longer, others shorter), but chances are, she won’t live with us much after she leaves for the University of Florida. She’ll come for Thanksgiving and Christmas. She’ll spend a good part of summers with us. But she’ll always be returning, first to the U of F, then to wherever she pursues her graduate degrees. Then she’ll be getting her first post-college/grad school job, and the summer visits will all but disappear. She might be involved with someone by then seriously enough that Thanksgiving and Christmas will no longer be guarantees, either.

In other words, it’s nearly the end of our roles as parents of a growing girl and the beginning of a new role: parents of an adult, of a woman who is out finding her way in the world, her existence completely separate from ours in so many ways. No longer dependent on us for anything, she’ll learn to navigate the complexities of adulthood on her own terms, with as much or as little input from us as she herself chooses.

I’ve never been good with endings. They’ve always tugged at my nostalgia and regret, making me wonder if anything will ever be as good as whatever it is that’s ending. Leaving Lipnica in 1999 was so tough on me that I ended up returning. Leaving Hughes left a lingering worry that perhaps whatever followed would be somehow inferior to what I was leaving despite the advantages. Every year as a kid, the end of our week-long, vacation-like Feast of Tabernacles, which was essentially a Christmas replacement, was overwhelming: next year could never be as incredible as this year. Most visits to Poland leave me feeling a little nostalgic when we leave: “did we make the right decision coming back to the States?” I wonder for the briefest of moments while I’m still enthralled with the magic of Poland, forgetting about its drawbacks and all the opportunities living in the States provided our kids.

Logically, this ending should be the hardest of all for me. Our little girl (who is no longer a little girl) is leaving. Yet I’m strangely calm about it. Perhaps it simply hasn’t registered fully. Maybe I’m in such blinding denial that it doubles back on itself and poses as calm. It would be difficult to deny it to myself, though, as the signs are everywhere: nearly-daily trips to this or that store are producing an ever-growing pile of boxes in one corner of her room. Brief exchanges often begin, “Do we have…” and end with expressions of gratitude or furiously typing an addition to this or that shopping list on her phone. She has a growing interest in things like bedsheets and dehumidifiers, her quest for a refrigerator is entering is a recurring conversational motif. “Being an adult means paying for things one really doesn’t want to pay for” has been my refrain of the last few weeks as she complains about how much this or that costs.

The evidence abounds: why am I so relatively relaxed about L heading out to make the world her own, thus ending an eighteen-year reality for our family? Part of it certainly comes from the simple fact that she’s spent the last three or four years gradually creating her own world with her own friends, her own interests, her own passions. Pulling away, in other words. Not tugging violently (usually, though that has happened, too) but simply shifting her time from family to her own world. And K and I, in turn, have slowly released that firm grip we had on her as she starts to turn away. So in truth, we haven’t been holding hands with her (to continue the metaphor) for some time but rather walking beside her as she puts more and more distance between us. Now she’s heading down her own road as we continue down ours. Roads that will be parallel in some sense, to be sure, but not the same road.

We’ve known this was coming, in other words, and in that sense, we’ve been preparing both ourselves and her for this moment. We’ve done what we could: now it’s time to let her be L fully.