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the girl

Day 9: Conferencing

Tuesday 24 March 2020

Our admin staff held the first video conferencing session today at 9:30 on Google Meet. We’d had an informal one earlier in the week, but with everyone talking, it was far too chaotic for me. I thought I’d lose it. Very hard to follow. It seems everyone learned from the experience: the principal was unmuted, everyone else was asked to mute themselves. Questions went in through the chat box option.

E’s class had their first video conferencing session on Zoom today. At 12:30 everyone logged on and the chaotic chatter began. The teacher had a clever idea: use classroom management techniques for quieting everyone. “If you can hear me, touch your nose.” Everyone got a chance to chat and tell everyone what they were up to. The Boy seemed awfully quiet. When his turn came, he simply passed.

I held my first online conferencing session with students just after the Boy’s. I used Google Meet. It stinks. After participating in a Meet and leading one, I’ve determined that it is useful for chaotic nonsense only unless everyone is muted but one or two. Next time, Zoom.

Still, it was a relief to see the kids again. It’s only been a little over a week, but it feels like so much longer. “It’s so much different than, say, spring break,” I told them. “During a break, you know that in a week or two, you’ll see your students again. Here — who knows when we’ll meet in person again?”

Afterward, once it finally stopped raining, I suggested to the kids that we take the dog for a walk. They jumped on it enthusiastically. The simple pleasures are becoming pleasures for them again. If there’s one bright side to this whole pandemic, it’s that.

On the walk, the Boy and I got to talking about favorite books and authors. “I think my favorite author is Roald Dahl,” he said, then asked me about my favorite books.

“I think Absalom, Absaom! is the best book ever written,” I said, wondering how he’d respond.

“Is that a book a kid could read?”

“No, most definitely not.” I wouldn’t even suggest to my best readers in honors classes to tackle that book. It’s beyond challenging the first time through. Perhaps not as bad as Finnegan’s Wake or even Ulysses, but quite a challenge.

“What other books do you like?” he asked when I’d finished explaining all that.

“I’m partial to Charles Dickens,” I said.

“Didn’t he write Moby Dick?” asked L.

“No, that was Herman Melville. But now that I think about it, I believe I see a little similarity between Dahl and Dickens.”

E raised his eyebrows as he does when he’s excited.

“They both tend to give characters names that somehow reflect their character.” I explained how “Trunchbull” from Matilda seems to be a portmanteau of “truncheon” and “bull.”

When we got back, I introduced E to “Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems.” “Do you know how he is?” I asked.

“Yeah, he wrote the pigeon books and pig and elephant.”

Then, at a little past three, I get this statement from the governor:

At this time, students, parents, and families should plan for South Carolina’s schools to remain closed through the month of April. Our dedicated teachers and school administrators have done a tremendous job in making it possible for our students to learn at home. We understand that the prospect of schools remaining closed for an extended period of time places stress and strain on parents and children. Rest assured, if there is any way to safely open our schools earlier, we will do that, but schools must remain closed to protect the health and safety of South Carolinians.

So it seems our adventure is just beginning. The worries will build, I’m sure, as the cases rise in our little state, and as our president begins to make noises that indicate he thinks money is more important than lives, I wonder if a crisis in government might accompany the crisis in our national well-being.

But as long as everyone ends up safely tucked in their beds at night, my primary anxiety is assuaged.

Day 8: Rain

Monday 23 March 2020

It was supposed to rain all day today. It was also supposed to be a day off school today, which would have made the rain seem particularly dreary as we would probably have gone out and done something on this early spring day. Since this is the sixth day without school, it just felt like the new normal.

In the morning, while K was reading with E, I spent some time working on a couple of web sites I’m creating, one for a friend’s about-to-be-launched home organization company and the other an online guide for the church we usually attend (the parish built a new church just a few years ago). The virus, though, has put a damper on both projects: no one would start a business right now, and the church is closed.

Once I completed what I wanted to do, it was nearing lunch. And it was also about time that I help hang L’s pegboard that she got from Ikea two months ago. I don’t like to rush into anything. And I didn’t have the appropriate drywall anchors. And I kept forgetting to get them in Home Depot.

Of course, there had to be some playtime. The Boy and I worked with Legos: he built a car; I built a suspension bridge. When she saw it, K laughed that I should have been an architect. (Forget for a moment that it’s actually civil engineers who design bridges — I knew what she meant.)

“Actually, I did. For several years.” I took drafting in high school to that end. “But then I realized I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. And besides, if I’d gone that route, who knows if I would have ended up in Lipnica?” Which is to say, who knows if we would have met? A change in career choice determined who I married? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It’s impossible to say.

It’s that kind of dumb luck — or lack thereof — that has me worried now. Our family is largely isolating itself, but someone has to go to the store occasionally, as I did this morning. (Only one dozen eggs per customer, I learned at checkout.) How many asymptomatic people are walking around? We take precautions, but in the end, it’s just a crapshoot in a sense. Just like so many other things in life that seem inevitable, I suppose.

Finally, in the afternoon, it stopped raining for a while. The kids and I went out to walk the dog. In the evening, it seemed like it had stopped again, but by the time we’d gotten ready and headed outside, it had started misting again. And then stopped. And in crawled L, rollerblades still on, to tell us, “Come on! It’s stopped! Let’s go!”

Day 7: Sunday

Sunday 22 March 2020

With the diocese of Charleston making the decision to close all churches in the current emergency, today had a different feel from most Sundays and a somewhat different feel from the previous six days.

Previous six days? Has this only been going on a week? It was indeed a week ago that we learned the governor of South Carolina was closing all schools for the rest of the month, but I swear it feels like that was weeks ago. I know it’s been going on for several months now with the original outbreak in China, and while I’m tempted to go on a rant here about how much time we wasted between that initial outbreak in China and even a week ago when everything started shutting down all because our narcissistic shallow president views everything as if it’s about him and went so far as to call the pandemic a hoax at one of his rallies and still behaves as if this will all blow over because he’s now taking it seriously and pretending to put some resources into it — no, I’ll resist that urge and simply point out that it feels like it’s been longer than a week.

First, there was no church — no Mass at a church, that is. Second, there was church — something like it, a series of readings and a recorded homily that Kinga, the kids, and Papa did while I was out taking the dog for a walk. It just didn’t feel like a Sunday.

Is it possible that someone could look at this and understand how much exponentially worse it could get with a different virus with, say, a 60% death rate and understand that something like that could very well lurking in our future and still, understanding that a belief in God would necessitate an acceptance that God would have also created such a virus, it would have been in his plan, part of his mysterious ways — could someone hold all this in their head and still believe in a benevolent god? Thinking how relatively mild this is compared to what could be or even has been makes it all but impossible for me.

Another change: we got a new hot water heater installed today. We’ve been wanting to do it for some time, and I’ve had a feeling that our old heater was going to malfunction any day. The guys who did the installation for us — the guys who did the renovation of the carport, turning it into Papa’s room — were going to come next week, but with so much uncertainty, they decided to come today. We’re expecting a significant drop in our power bill as this was our last power-hungry appliance/system in our house. Changing the HVAC system cut our power bill by 30-50% (depending on the usage); this change should result in additional significant savings considering the heater dates from 1992 — the year after I graduated from high school.

Why am I so negative about all this? Why do I see only gray to any silver lining? It’s my eternal battle.

In the afternoon, the kids and I went out in the backyard to — guess — shoot. The dog does not like when we shoot as she gets stuck up on the deck for her own good…

E and I have figured out that if we fire toward something a little bit darker than the surrounding area, we can actually follow the flight of the bb, so we’ve taken to firing into the forest behind our neighbor’s house on occasion. We’ve also been trying to shoot from various positions in the yard, all of them significantly farther away from where we normally shoot. And we still take shots at the dog’s fetch ball because, well, why not?

After shooting, the Girl decided to bake a cake. The aesthetics were something like I would produce, but that comes with time. The taste is all that matters, and I think we all agreed: it was delicious.

Random day, random thoughts.

Day 5: Toilet Paper

Friday 20 March 2020

We had TP from the last time we purchased it — we tend to buy in bulk from one of the warehouse stores a few times a year. It’s amazing how long 48 rolls of TP will last. But all things come to an end, and we were nearing the end of our collection, so this morning, there was only one must-do item on the agenda: get toilet paper.

Working on her argumentative essay

I headed to the Publix down the street just before seven. “Get there when we open at seven,” a cashier had told K a few days earlier, so that’s what I did. Only to discover that in the intervening days, they’d changed their hours and were now opening only at eight.

In the meantime, I went to a couple of other stores just in case. Nothing.

It’s the second international crisis, a crisis of inconvenience (and incontinence, I suppose).

Getting ready for dinner outside

I returned just before eight to find several people waiting outside. The doors opened and we all headed to the same aisle. There was a fair amount of toilet paper, and everyone could get two packages, but I decided one twelve-roll package would last. “Let’s not behave like the other people who caused all this,” I thought.

Day 4: A Walk in the Park

Thursday 19 March 2020

We’ve been going on walks with the dog as a family every evening. It’s probably the best thing that’s come out of this pandemic for us. What we’ve noticed, though, is that a lot of other people are doing the same. Going out for a walk used to be an isolating experience: we would walk a mile, a mail and a half together and not meet a single other person. Not one.

When we went for walks at Conestee, our favorite local park, we’d encounter people, but sporadically. A couple here; a jogger there; a family around that corner. Nothing major.

Last night, however, we encountered several people along our 1.5 mile walk. Tonight, while out jogging, I encountered two or three couples out walking. This afternoon, when we were at Conestee, we saw more people there than we probably ever have.

Everyone was out. The turtles were out on the logs,

the snakes were out sunning themselves.

And people were everywhere.

“Perhaps this will bring about a change in people,” K suggested. “Perhaps we’ll all get back to enjoying the simple things in life.”

Perhaps.

Day 3: First Day of School

Wednesday 18 March 2020

The day started out foggy and stayed dreary — it could be a kind of metaphor for everyone’s mood, I suppose. But we’re fortunate: we have food; we have (a bit of) toilet paper; we have money in the bank; we have a home; we have a family that’s together. That’s what’s most important.

Today was our district’s first day of online learning. There’s a vast spectrum of what this means. For E, it was a 90-page packet of reading, math, social studies, and science work. He took on the reading first, making it through a fairly long retelling of Goldielocks with relative ease and breezing through the questions.

“We’re not seeking to further their education,” was the mantra as teachers in my school prepared for our own students earlier this week. “We’re just tasked with providing work that will keep them from slipping.”

That seems like a fairly succinct description of the work E got.

I helped him with some of it; K helped him with some of it; he did a fair amount of it on his own without direct help. Helping him usually just means giving a nudge when he gets overwhelmed and frustrated — a kind encouragement, a hint. Sometimes it becomes too much, though, and we need a break. Such was the case today.

Still, we managed to work through all the challenges and completed the work just after lunch.

L had video conferencing with teachers and they went over some new material. Of course, she goes to a charter school, which means there is a bit of a semi-natural selection process involved in the enrollment.

As for my kiddos, I got a few emails, exclusively from honors kids and mostly about outstanding assignments.

“When is that paper due?”

“When can I take my makeup test?”

As for the rest of them? I’m not sure. I didn’t hear from them. And I got word today that if kids are not doing the work within two days, I need to be contacting parents. That ought to be fun.

Not as much fun as our little fire this evening, but fun.

Virus

Thursday 12 March 2020

And like that, everyone is living with the effects of a pandemic. The Girl’s tournament this week will almost certainly be canceled, and we aren’t going even if it isn’t: our club owner made an executive decision that no Excell teams will be playing there. USA volleyball recommended the cancellation of all tournaments, but the tournament organizers didn’t cancel. “I put the girls’ safety above everything else,” he said in a team meeting this evening after practice. “The NBA has stopped playing; universities have virtually closed down; schools are closing. It’s just not responsible to go.” And we all shook our heads in agreement.

It also puts into question our summer trip to Poland. It’s still three months away, but who knows how this will play out.

It’s gotten me to thinking macabre thoughts, though, about a potential pandemic a few years in the future that seems inevitable. A pandemic that, if it comes to pass, will have been completely preventable. The permafrost is melting due to rising temperatures, which in turn are due to our shortsightedness, past and present. Trapped within that permafrost are microbes that have been locked away from immunological history for millennia. When they get out, what will happen? In my mind, the worst-case scenario would make the present fears about coronavirus seem like the naive good old days.

Always the pessimist…

Still Shooting

Tuesday 10 March 2020

The kids have grown positively obsessed with shooting in the backyard — the Boy, his bb gun; the Girl, her bow and arrow. They really have no interest in trading.

Today’s adventure: find the arrow that ricocheted off the fence post and soared into the wild. (Slight exaggeration: it didn’t go more than thirty feet away, and was never in danger of landing in a dangerous way.)

The Girl fired it; the Girl found it. I would have half-expected her to give up sooner than she did. She’s dealing with frustration better than she was a few years ago. But she loves jumping as much as she always has:

The discovery of the day: the bbs bounce right off the archery target.

We could pick them up and reuse them, just like the arrows…

Changes

Wednesday 4 March 2020

Our daughter now leaves the bathroom trailing a Monet scent of blossoms and linens, the mingling of surf and grass — the thousand and one scents of a young teenage girl. She started out smelling of “pinkness and warmth and contentedness,” a warm mix of comfortable and soft scents that came from her effortlessly, naturally. It was who she was; it was how old she was, or rather how young.

Now, too, her scents bloom from her age, though now from deliberate choice and purposeful will. They come from body washes and facial scrubs, hand creams and lip balms, shampoos and exfoliants. They are from her will and a representation of her will — a desire to be pleasant, to be sweet, to be pretty.

To what end? As far as I can tell, she’s not seeking the eye of anyone, not interested in any such things, and though the time is right for such interest to begin budding, we’ve not heard a word.

But realistically speaking, would we? Didn’t I try desperately to hide from my parents the fact that I no longer found girls foreign and frightful? Didn’t I try desperately to hide from my parents the fact that this girl or that had caught my eye? Didn’t I try desperately to save myself from that embarrassment, because how could they possibly understand?

Shooting in the Back Yard

Saturday 29 February 2020

In the afternoon, after almost all the day’s necessities were behind us — shopping, a photoshoot at a local church for the diocesan newspaper, a soccer game (that I didn’t attend because I stayed behind to keep an eye on Papa, hence the lack of photos) — we went out to shoot L’s bow and arrows. K had gone to drum up some clients for her new venture in real estate, but the kids and I were, for all intents and purposes, done. Sure, I still had a consultation call with a client for a web site I’m building for her, but that was easily put off to the evening.

The Girl hadn’t lost her touch. Which is to say that she didn’t put a lot of arrows near the center of the target, but she didn’t miss the target entirely — which was the case when she first started shooting.

For the Boy, though, it was a different matter. He hit the target a few times — many shots fell ineffectually short, but he did hit the target a number of times. The problem was, though, that the bow was just a little too big for him, so he was not able to get enough pull on it, so not enough energy went into the arrow. So every single shot that did hit the target bounced off.

Understandably enough, it was a source of great frustration.

“Daddy, I can’t make any of them stick!”

What to do when your boy is frustrated and wants to quit? Make a joke of it.

“It’s almost like the target is against you, like it has a will of its own. Like it has some kind of Jedi power. ‘Nope,’ it says as your arrows strike. ‘Nah, not this time,’ it says the next shot.” And so on. Soon he was laughing and making his own jokes when the arrows flopped off the target.

“That one slammed into reverse and backed up!”

Changes

Thursday 27 February 2020

Photo by susanjanegolding

A kid makes a decision to sell something at school and soon, every part of her life is sucked into the whirlpool of consequences that follows. Another kid makes a comment about violence in school and soon, every part of his life is not sucked into the whirlpool of consequences because of parental denial.

Both these kids intersect my own life, and those intersections coincide with other intersections making this web that moves on one end when you tug on the opposite end. Both these changes affect me only coincidentally and fairly significantly — the paradox of the nature of modern life.

Both these changes get me thinking about our own daughter, the same age as these two non-hypothetical kids who go to schools not all that different from our daughter with peers not all that different from our daughter’s friends. So much of these three families’ lives line up, and it leaves me thinking, “There but for the grace of God go we…”

I want to say it’s not grace. I want to say it’s better parenting. But I know that’s not necessarily the case. And I add “necessarily” because to think otherwise is almost unbearable.

Savannah, Day 3

Monday 17 February 2020

During the first match today, the girls slipped out of the convention center, found ten girls roughly their same age, gave them their volleyball uniforms, and sent them in to play. Which is to say they played poorly, losing in straight sets 25-14 and 25-15.

What happened there? Nothing that hasn’t happened before: they seem to do poorly on the first match of the day. They last their first two on Saturday before winning one on Saturday and the only two they played on Sunday.

And their second match today? They won in straight sets: 25-19 and 25-13. They’re not the only ones that fall apart, it seems.

Afterward, we went for a walk in Savannah. We couldn’t do this yesterday because it was raining — what a shame, we both thought. We made up for it today, probably doing three miles in the loveliest city in the South.

Savannah, Day 2

Sunday 16 February 2020

Yesterday started poorly; it ended with a lithe of hope. We lost the first two games; we won the third game.

Today, we won our two matches and finished before lunch. Tomorrow, we play three more games and refereed one more. (I went for a walk around the venue while they ran the game.)

Why only two games today? Simple: it’s a pay-to-play tournament, which means we had to stay in a hotel from a list provided by the tournament organizers, who get a kick-back from the hotels. It’s in their best interest to stretch things out as much as possible: the longer we have to stay here, the more they make.

Sound like a mafia-type move to you? To me, too.

Savannah, Day 1

Saturday 15 February 2020

It seems we have to start with a bang or a whimper. Our last tournament, two weeks ago, started with a bang: we won the first four matches and got second place in the gold bracket. (Does that mean we got silver? No. Why not? I don’t know — I don’t even have the slightest idea how brackets are determined: it seems to be a mysterious mixture of matches won, sets won, and point differentials.) It only stands to reason, then, that we should start this tournament with a whimper: we lost the first two matches in straight sets (despite being up 16-6 at the start of the first set of the first match) and looked like we were on track to lose the first set of the third match until the girls decided finally to start communicating a little and stop playing Y ball (no offense to the YMCA).

I believe the team we beat in the final match lost all three of their matches. It looked for a while like that might be us. In a four-team bracket, I suppose there’s a fairly substantial statistical possibility of this happening on a fairly regular basis depending on the skill spread of the various teams. In short, someone on days like today has to lose them all. I’m glad it’s not us, but I know also how that must hurt to be the other team.

After the games and some rest, it was time for some dinner. Of course, being this near the beach, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to walk on the beach for at least ten minutes.

And being this near the ocean, we couldn’t not go out for seafood.

Soundtrack

Tuesday 4 February 2020

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

Monday 3 February 2020

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.