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Rose Hill Plantation Redux

Sunday 02 February 2014 | 0 Comments

So many changes since the last time we were here. The Girl was younger than the Boy, less than half his age, and the Boy, of course, was not even a thought yet -- at least not a thought in our minds.

The house of course hasn't changed.

It hasn't changed since before the Civil War, with wrought iron fencing surrounding two magnolias from the same era.

The magnolias certainly haven't grown as much in the intervening years as the Girl has grown. The last time we were here, with Dziadek, we took the Girl through the house tour in our arms.

Today, it's the Boy's turn, only he doesn't want to go on any quiet tours. He and I head out into the surrounding area, looking for sticks -- the Boy's newest obsession -- and pass the time while the girls explore the house.

After the tour, we take some portraits,

L and K dance a bit,

then L finds a tree to climb while the Boy continues looking for sticks.

Six years, many more changes. How different will we all be the next time we visit the plantation?

Snow Day 2014

Wednesday 29 January 2014 | 0 Comments

Concert

Pre-Snow Day 2014

Tuesday 28 January 2014 | 0 Comments

Having grown up in the South, I was amazed and enchanted with all the snow I encountered in southern Poland during my first winter there. "Snow" is a frequent word in my journal during that period. In January 1997, just six months after arriving, I wrote,

It has begun snowing steadily this morning, and the wind is making the snow fall at quite an angle, greater than forty-five degrees at times (or less, if you use the ground as a point of reference). The flakes are very large and wet, and they coat my jacket with white when I walk.

In Bristol snow never stays on the ground for longer than a few days. There might be spots of snow in heavily shaded areas, but not the continual blanket of Lipnica. The temperature is consistently below zero, so old snow remains as a foundation for the occasional flurries. Yet despite the amount of snow on the ground, it really hasn’t snowed that frequently. The bulk of the snow now on the ground is from two heavy snow falls, and it hasn’t done much more than flurry since then.

Heavy snow that stays on the ground for weeks, below-zero days, hoar frost, zero at the bone -- all these things were relatively new experiences for me.

Later in the month, I continued:

It is snowing, and has been since Tuesday night. Something like four to six inches has fallen, and I love it. The wind blows fiercely and the wet flying snow makes me have to look down anytime I go out. It’s a storm by my standards, but probably only an average snow fall in Poland. It will give me something to talk about back home. "You call this a storm?"

Over the years, though, the snow lost its novelty. Snow everywhere for weeks on end soon became as much a hindrance as a blessing. I knew I'd fully lost my fascination with snow when, walking to midnight Mass one Christmas with K and her aunt, I found myself overwhelmingly annoyed with the sound of shoes crunching and squeaking on the ice and snow.

Then K and I moved to the States, ultimately ending up in South Carolina, where snow is as much a rarity as ninety-degree weather in K's Polish hometown. Snow became a blessing again, but it is so rare. And so every winter, we wait in anticipation that we might get just a touch of snow.

Today in school, after the first two periods, when eighth grade students were heading off to their various third period related arts classes, the teachers spoke in a hush.

"Mr. M said we're going to be releasing at twelve today."

But it was all in anticipation of the storm bearing down on the South. It wasn't the first time I'd experienced an in-expectation snow day: several years ago, when we lived in Asheville, schools closed the day Babcia was supposed to arrive, also in expectation of a mother-of-all storms. That one never materialized, though. So today I was a little skeptical of the whole prognosis as we got the kids through lunch and hustled out to their buses. I arrived at home around two, and nothing.

Finally the snow started falling, but the flakes were so small that they were difficult to see, and after fifteen minutes, only the lightest of dusting covered the table and chairs on the deck.

"Can we go outside?" L asked, eager to play in the snow and checking the window periodically.

"Can we have a snowball fight? Can we build a snowman?" L has had so little experience with snow that she can't understand the amount of snow a simple snowball needs. She has no idea the difference between wet snow and dry snow and the impossibility of making snowballs and snowpeople from the latter.

The Boy, having been in Poland last January, has much more experience with snow. The only problem is, he doesn't remember it. So he too was fascinated with the white powder on our back deck.

L and the Boy returned to their cartoons, and finally the snow became significant, hiding the glass under its less-slight dusting and making significant inroads with the chairs.

Close, but not enough.

Finally, the Girl could stand it no longer. "Daddy, I'm going out!" And off she went, searching for snow to eat and a patch large enough to ball into a projectile.

I got the Boy and headed out shortly after. After marching about the yard for a while, he began scooping swirls of snow, leaves, and dirt in the backyard.

L on the other hand was working on a collection of snow in the cat's outside bowl.

Once K arrived and we'd stuffed ourselves with chili (what else to eat in such weather?), the four of us handed out for a family walk. The sun had set but the night was still bright with the sparse snow and gray sky reflecting street lights, and the stroller's wheels crunched in the snow: surely everyone who saw us thought us mad. Our stroll took us to the edge of our neighborhood, into a parking lot of a small corporate office. The Boy was convinced it was "babbas," a gigantic manifestation of the bubbles in his bath that have become a highlight of his day. He ran in the snow, occasionally calling "babbas!" The Girl chased him, chased K, chased me, obsessively calling, "You're it!"

So much joy from just a dusting of snow. Only finding out we could do it all again tomorrow made it better.

The Tooth Fairy’s Telescope

Sunday 26 January 2014 | 0 Comments

I heard the crying first thing in the morning. L was nearly panicked, her crying almost a heaving, desperate bawling.

"What's wrong, sweetie?"

"The tooth fairy! She didn't come!"

Uh oh.

The tooth came out unexpectedly last night. She came running to me, showing the new gap in her lower teeth, explaining that she'd just bitten into an apple and boom -- out it came. The first disaster of the experience occurred shortly after that, for we couldn't find the little circular plastic container that the dentist had given her for her lost teeth. We searched and searched, but no one could remember where we'd put it after the last lost tooth.

I suggested that she put it on a bookshelf. "The tooth fairy will be able to hone in on it then," I explained, thinking, "and that might make it a little easier for me to remember."

VIV_2229 — Making the "100th Day of School" shirt

In the end, she put it in a plastic bag, which she tucked under her pillow.

"Well," I said this morning, "perhaps the plastic bag somehow messed things up." I could almost sense the gears turning, could almost hear the response: "But Daddy, that can't be it. The last time, I put it in the little box the dentist gave me, and that was plastic!" So I made a preemptive explanation: "That's odd, because the fairy box the dentist gave you is plastic. Perhaps it's the type of plastic, or the fact that it's in a bag."

What a good thing that I didn't almost blow it with the tooth fairy like I almost did with Santa, when I called down to K, "When did we buy that telescope?"

"Wait, did you buy it or did Santa?" L had asked.

VIV_2231 — Making the "100th Day of School" shirt

So it could have been much worse. A forgotten tooth fairy night can be remedied with the explanation that even the tooth fairy needs a night off and a couple of bucks under her pillow the next night. But there's the question of whether one wants to do this: isn't it essentially lying to your child? I always thought that as a teen and young adult, when the thought of being a parent first flitted into by brain. Now, with a bit more experience, I see it differently: it's no more lying than telling a story is lying. We don't take the time to examine the veracity of each story we read to the Girl. We don't cultivate a sense of doubt in her simply for the sake of creating a skeptical daughter. We do it because a sense of the mysterious is not such a bad thing.

Yet as I left her room this evening, I realized that she could have peeked through one eye to see me sneaking out and I'd never know it. Maybe she'll let us believe we're still fooling her.

"Do your parents still believe you believe in the tooth fairy and all that?" a friend might ask.

"Yeah, it makes them feel good," she might respond. "It lets them think I'm still a little girl."

In a way, as long as she believes in the tooth fairy, as long as a missed visit causes tears, she is. But on the other hand, she put it behind her easily enough and soon was making her "100th Day of School" shirt, gluing anything and everything she could think of to her t-shirt. Had such a disaster occurred just a few months ago, I can't see her getting over it so quickly. Just more proof that L's imagined conversation contains the unavoidable truth: she won't be a little girl forever, nor would we want her to be.

Teaching My Girl

Wednesday 22 January 2014 | 0 Comments

Every day, I teach kids how to write better. I teach them how to organize their thoughts, how to plan their writing, how to improve their sentence variety, how to proofread effectively, and seemingly countless other things. As L has begun school, I’ve been thinking about what it will be like to teach L these things, at which age I might begin, how quickly we might progress. How fun it might be.

Last night, it began.

“I have a report to write for school. We had to choose an animal we don’t know anything about. I chose a sea turtle,” she said last night. And so we went off to the library to get some books on the subject. She devoured two of them during her evening reading ritual and was ready to go.

“Tomorrow,” I assured her.

Tonight, after dinner, we sat down at the computer and I began teaching the Girl how to make an outline. For practice, we worked on favorites: favorite animals, favorite foods, favorite books.

Then the first outline of the report itself. Some from her head; some from her books. It was slow going: we had to figure out how to spell words, how to type those words (“Where is ‘z’ daddy?”). And the end result?

Fort Pulaski and the Beach

Monday 20 January 2014 | 0 Comments

When you're with two full-blooded Poles and two half-blooded Poles and you're near a fort named after a Pole, there's only one thing to do: visit said fort.

Named for the Polish hero of the American Revolution, Kazimierz Michał Wacław Wiktor Pułaski, the fort named for him represented a turning point in the history of fortifications: it was the first real bombardment of a fort with rifled cannon fire, and compared to the traditional smooth-bore cannon, the new rifled cannon and bullet-shaped shot proved highly effective. The outer wall was breached with cannon fire from positions over a mile away, and the damaged area is still visible due to the different shade of bricks Union soldiers used in repairing the damage.

And still shells remain lodged in the wall.

Of course, none of this was of any interest to either the Boy or the Girl. They were happy just to run about the parade ground, climb on cannons, and investigate large mysterious openings in the fortifications.

We took a walk about the fort, heading out to the Cockspur Island Lighthouse, which has not been in use for over a hundred years -- a little bit of history sitting on an oyster- and mussel-shell bed.

Along the way, we saw why: with the river dredged for such huge container ships, a small lighthouse would be a joke today, and as the dredging began before the turn of the century, the lighthouses' useful days were certainly finite.

Still, none of this was of any interest to the kids. What was of interest, and what we regretted putting off until the very end, was the beach. Cold, windy, yet still irresistible.

Out and About in Savannah

Sunday 19 January 2014 | 0 Comments

A playground next to a cemetery with Revolutionary War era monuments, the monuments worn illegible by centuries of rain and wind, surrounded by live oaks, the playground itself surrounded by magnolias and littered with Spanish Moss, with church bells ringing in the distance -- it all seems prototypically southern. E and I spent an hour in such a playground this morning while everyone else was in Mass: the Boy just didn't want to cooperate, and the lack of a viable way to isolate his fussing (i.e., a crying room) left me with few alternatives. We walked out of the church and within moments found ourselves at a playground beside Colonial Park Cemetery. E climbed and swinged, jumped and slid, and then we went for a short walk along the oyster-shell paved walk of the cemetery.

An ironically unplanned place for E and me to start our second day in Savannah for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that our first site to see was Bonaventure Cemetery, the largest graveyard in the area and likely one of the largest in the south, famous from its staring role in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The plan was simple: the Boy could sleep, and indeed he drifted off as we drove there, and we would have a chance for a pleasant walk in a lovely cemetery.

Cemeteries always hold surprises, and Bonaventure didn't disappoint in that regard given the number of Jewish graves with Jewish and even Cyrillic inscriptions. L and I walked about with Babcia, commenting on the typically Jewish surnames we were discovering (Singer, Rosenberg, Goldstein, Cohn) and the tragic-comic nature of so much Jewish literature.

The sunlight filtering through the Spanish Moss hanging on the countless Live Oaks cast a soft hue on everything and made it a perfect place to sit and perhaps read a book or chat about things of real importance, but we had a schedule and, once he woke, a hungry boy, so after Babcia and K triangulated and positioned themselves (it was imperative that Babcia call and ask her now-famous question, “Gdzie jestescie?”), we headed to the historic district for lunch and a walk.

The former was a disaster at the over-price, over-rated Shrimp Factory that seemed to have irony on the menu (my jambalaya had microscopic shrimp that were few and far between) and slow service as the soup of the day. The latter was what could be expected in the most charming little city in the South. A riverside walk, wandering through streetside cafes (why didn't we eat in one of them?) with various buskers and plastic sculptures (what an odd combination, but there they were, opposite each other), and ice cream shops open in mid-January all soon put us in better spirits. What's not to love about Savannah, after all? It's the perfect tourist destination: small, wrapped in history, dotted with countless squares — and high real estate with no jobs for anyone, Babcia and K would add. Perhaps that's how the locals keep the average tourist from thinking the inevitable: what if we could move here?

As the sun cast increasingly longer shadows and the chill returned to the air, we realized we were back near the church where we'd begun our day. K and Babcia took the kids to the playground where E and I started the day and I headed back to the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, a church that actually looks, sounds, and feels like a church, with mult-level vaulted ceilings, sculptures of saints, stained glass, an enormous organ, and an echo.

I headed back to the others, played with the kids a bit, and returned to the cemetery, this time with a camera, the sun once again filtering through the Spanish Moss but this time from the opposite direction.

First Music

Friday 17 January 2014 | 0 Comments

The first album I ever bought is one I'm almost loathe to admit to now. The second, less so: Boston's Third Stage. I was in seventh or eighth grade when I bought those albums, and it was no small feat, for my father had made a rule that he had to investigate and approve any music purchase I made. At the time, I thought it was ridiculous. As a father myself, now I understand.

Recently, L made a discovery: portable music is highly convenient. She's been taking my iPod about, listening to whatever she finds on there that strikes her fancy. That's almost fine: most of my music I'd willingly play for her, but there is this and that which I don't think she's quite ready for. Fortunately, she was more drawn to jazz than anything else. Ben Webster's "Late Date" was a particular favorite.

Still, there's always the risk of accidental discovery of something she's not quite ready for. So when L suggested she buy her own MP3 player with the money she's saved up, it seemed a good idea.

It came Wednesday, and I loaded it up with Ben Webster, Sonny Stitts, Buena Vista Social Club, Beatles, and similar selections, and K bought her the Frozen soundtrack as a first album.

And yet, as I sit here listening to the newest John Mayer on Spotify, I realize that by the time she'll be the age I was when I first bought my first album, iPods will even seem old-school. All music available all the time.

What will she listen to?

I'm not so much worried about what she'll listen to as I am the music her potential suitors will be drawn to. A boy who listens to misogynistic rap will likely be somewhat affected by it -- at the very least, his disregard for what the man is actually saying will be worrying. Of course with the prevalence of free online porn, what the young man might be listening to might be of less concern than what he's streaming on his phone.

All of this flashed in my thoughts as I saw L dancing about, singing along as best she could to a song she barely knows, and I thought that perhaps Babcia is right: the nineteenth century was so much better...

Using What You’ve Got

Tuesday 14 January 2014 | 0 Comments

I arrive home and the Boy is in the backyard with Babcia, and he absolutely, positively doesn't want to come in. He's rediscovered the simplest toy, a found toy: a big pile of dirt. Add a couple of sticks, and he's positively in a daze of joy.

He digs a little hole, moves to a new spot, digs a little hole, moves to a new spot, digs, moves, digs, moves, digs -- a circle that seems endless.

Soon L stops illustrating the driveway with chalk sketches abstract and traditional and joins us in our digging. Soon, she has an idea: a stick forest.

E and I head deeper into the wild of the backyard to find more sticks. He tugs at exposed roots, drags sticks until something else attracts his attention, looks up trees until he loses his balance, picks up rocks and tosses them, and together, the three of us spend almost an hour together laughing, exploring, and playing completely toy-free.

The common regret of modern life: we're so spoiled that we're ruining ourselves. Imagination in kids today sometimes seems to be as illusive as quicksilver, but hopefully not in our children, and today, some evidence.

A stick forest.

Not a bad idea. Progress.

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matching tracksuits

Rose Hill Plantation Redux

Snow Day 2014

Concert

Pre-Snow Day 2014

The Tooth Fairy’s Telescope

Teaching My Girl

Fort Pulaski and the Beach

Out and About in Savannah

First Music

Using What You’ve Got

Time Machine

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