the girl | matching tracksuits

the girl

Changes

Wednesday 04 March 2020 | 0 Comments

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 | 0 Comments

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 | 0 Comments

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 | 0 Comments

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 | 0 Comments

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 | 0 Comments

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 04 February 2020 | 0 Comments

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 03 February 2020 | 2 Comments

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.

Volleyball in Rock Hill, Redux

Saturday 01 February 2020 | 0 Comments

The girls got second place in today's volleyball tournament.

Finishing Up

Wednesday 29 January 2020 | 1 Comment

The Girl has some new furniture. She asked me to help; I did, for a while. But I resisted as well. Not because I wanted to do something else. I thought that at her age, she might get more out of doing a lot of it herself — a sense of accomplishment is a valuable feeling.