Thing2, my six-year-old, is a miracle of motion.
I am watching him flit from couch to chair to table to hall with a soaring grace that would put any trapeze artist to shame.
Sadly, his first grade teacher has yet to incorporate acrobatics into any homework assignment. But I figure I can get another sip of soda before tackling my daily feat of daring – talking his head down to the kitchen table while making sure his spirit continues to soar to the ceiling and beyond.
We go to Bob’s Diner every Saturday for breakfast. It’s a ritual.
Sunday mornings, we have a different ritual that involves breakfast at home and chores, but company is on the way and the mess in the boys’ room is a def-con four, and we’ll need the energy from the fat and protein to tackle the job ahead. So we head to Bob’s.
The place is packed, but loyalty has its privileges, and we get table quickly. We sit, and the big guy hangs up our coats. We wait to five our drink order, enjoying a bit of people-watching as we wait for our beverages. There is a wonderful mix of people including retirees, families, and teenagers enjoying a bit of freedom on a Sunday morning.
At a table nearby there is a group of young people – they can’t be more than 18 or 19. They are happy and boisterous, but not so much that they disrupt anyone else’s enjoyment of the morning. Some of them are flipping through the songs on the nearby jukebox, and soon we hear the opening bars of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. At the other end of the diner, I can hear one or two patrons who look to be around my age humming along.
Then the comes the chorus.
“Mama!!” It’s belted out by the table’s entire population of teenagers, singing along with Freddie Mercury. The entire diner erupts with laughter. The next verse starts, and a few of the teens attempt to continue singing along with the song, but they don’t know all the words. It devolves into giggling, but now the entire restaurant is waiting for the next refrain, and we are not disappointed.
Again the kids sing out, a pitch perfect, “Mama”. They continue singing along with the parts they know better and mumbling the parts they don’t, and when the finale starts, I am almost tempted to light a lighter – stadium concert style .
Then the song ends, and the fun subsides. There are a few more giggles, but they are replaced with the soft din of conversation as people return their attention to their meals. But everyone is still smiling, and when the teenagers finish their breakfast a few minutes later and file out we can’t help but applaud them for reminding us how much a we all need a little disruption from our routines once in a while.
I got my lab/beagle/take-your-pick mix on the spur of the moment. I had been working at home for several months and wanted a companion during the workday when the kids were at school.
Katie now goes everywhere with me. From the minute I wake up in the morning, she’s there. She positions herself right at the head of the bed so she’s often the first face I see when I wake up in the morning (the big guy is long gone for work by then). By the time I’m loading the kids into the car school, she’s there in the parking circle at the bottom of our driveway waiting for us.
“You want to go for a ride?” I’ll ask, and she’ll wag her tail and hop in the car. Sometimes she’ll race us to the top of the driveway before wagging her tail and jumping in. When the weather’s not too hot, she and I will continue on after I drop off the kids and run my errands before work. For the the longest time I thought she just enjoyed sleeping on the seat by my side, but the last week or two got me questioning not just what I know about dogs (which isn’t much admittedly) but also how I might be dealing with human animals in my life.
It started a few weeks ago when we approached the park after dropping off Thing2. She was sitting on the seat next to me, watching the town go by, and suddenly her whole body started to quake. When it became evident that we were going to pass the park instead of turning in go for a walk, she began to whimper. I couldn’t understand it we hadn’t been there in months. Then I remembered an unplanned play date she’d had with another dog there back in June. Could she be remembering it too? I shook the idea out of my head and drove on.
Today, however, as we were driving the short trip between the middle school and the bank, I got a clearer picture what it is to travel that mile on her paws.
We’d dropped off the kids as usual, and as usual Katie jumped from the seat next to Thing2 into the seat next to mine. She curled up and seemed to fall asleep for a few minutes. Then we turned into the bank.
I pushed the talk button to ask for a deposit slip, and I saw her ears perk up slightly. When I pushed the button to send the canister to the teller, she sat right up. The tail started thumping just a tiny bit, and then I noticed that she was staring right through the glass at the teller with the limpid bedroom eyes she uses when she’s begging for scraps from the kids at the dinner table. That was when I noticed the bowl of dog biscuits on the counter next to the teller.
Then it hit me that, even though she had only been here once before, she had put in on her mental map faster than Pavlov’s dog. The teller nodded and waved and popped a biscuit into the canister before sending it back. Katie’s tail was now on full speed.
I don’t know much about dog behavior; everything I know comes from growing up with my parents dog labrador retriever and from raising Katie, and that ain’t much. Early in Katie’s life I did read advice from dog experts warning about the fallacy of projecting human emotions onto dogs. But as Katie’s thumping tail reminded me not to underestimate her memory, I wondered if our projection of those human emotions says more about us than it does about the animals in our care. And it got me wondering how often in human relationships, I project my preconceptions ,rather than widening my perceptions.
So apparently, I’m not Superwoman.
The meandering lines of my dreams and my life as it is diverged big time this week as holiday preparations (read: biennial cleaning) and work claimed most of my waking hours.
Still, there have been small victories. I haven’t picked up a pencil in a week, but there are a host of posts waiting for doodles, and, tomorrow, as the turkey slow roasts in its maple glaze and we wait for the rest of our family to arrive, I will indulge in down time in the living room with the kids and the Big Guy and a pad on my lap. And I will stake my banner there.
I may have surrendered a few battles this week, but I’m still in the fight.
My youngest son’s first grade teacher, Mr. M., passed away today. It was a life cut short by cancer. For many of these kids it is the first time they have had to face losing a loved one. And he was loved by these kids and by all the other kids whose lives he touched.
Some kids look forward to the first day of school – it’s a chance to reconnect with old friends and an excuse to buy new clothes. My youngest child did not this year. Faced with a crowd of still mostly older kids in the lunch room, his trepidation was very evident, and he clung to my hand. The principal approached, and, even though he knows and loves her, he still would not let go of me.
But she was ready for this. She bent down a little.
“Have you met Mr. M?” she asked. My son responded by turning his face to my stomach. “Come on over and meet him,” she said. She led us over to a tall man who was surrounded by at least dozen adoring, older children. “Mr. M,” she said, “This is one of your new students.”
Mr. M instantly turned his full attention to my son. He bent down a little to try and make eye contact. Then he spoke to both of us, and something about his thick New England accent got my boy’s attention. Mr. M. knew all the right questions to ask a five-year-old boy. They were more than ‘How was your summer?’ questions. They were questions that told the kids that there was still a very healthy kid inside this towering teacher.
He made a few more jokes, and my shy little boy quickly let go of my hand. The rest of the first grade soon arrived, and I watched him joke and comfort and make each of them feel as though they were the most special kid in the class.
He was not a pushover – rules were to be followed, and he believed in consequences. But during the brief month or so that he was running that First Grade classroom, I rarely had to rouse my son out of bed. Every morning I heard the same refrain: “I can’t wait to go see Mr. M.” And every night, I saw the results of Mr. M’s firm, loving presence as my youngest child began finding the joy in learning for its own sake. It is a gift he will take with him for the rest of his life.
Tonight I cry for what our community has lost and for what these children are feeling right now, but I know that even his youngest students have a sense of how much better it is to have had him in their lives, if only for a short time. The word hero is overused, but I don’t know what other word better describes someone who spends their last months on earth lifting people up and giving them their futures. And I do know that when the sadness subsides, he will live on in the kids who were lucky enough to have known him.
The year I turned nine and my sister turned seven, my parents invited my mother’s entire extended family to our house for Christmas. They planned it well in advance, and my mother decided that my sister and I should use the time to make stockings for everyone for Christmas. With Mom’s gentle, insistent guidance we cut out, decorated and hand stitched seventeen red felt stockings – each with the name of an aunt or uncle and one for Grandma and Grandpa. We didn’t know it at the time, but she wasn’t just teaching us to sew. She was teaching us about giving.
The family didn’t hold back on their praise of our work, but Grandma had outdone us, as we knew she would. Her Christmas creations were legendary. One year she had made life-sized stuffed dolls with snaps on the hands and toes that we could use to create all sorts of crazy shapes. Another year she sent cross stitch pictures to celebrate us getting our own rooms. And on each creation she would sew a label that sad ‘Made Especially for You by KVK’.
This Christmas she brought two large crochet afghans big enough to cover a full-size bed. Each blanket was made using our favorite color, and they quickly became our favorite wrap for watching TV or snuggling under the covers. The afghans also sparked my curiosity about how they were made. Grandma tried to get us started on crocheting that Christmas, but it took a few more years before either of our fingers were dextrous enough to let the lessons sink in.
It was only when our Grandparents moved to the same city as our parents that I discovered how much my Grandmother’s enjoyed creating these treasures – many of which I still have. My mother was (and still is) an expert seamstress and had made many of our clothes growing up, and, while both my sister and I did learn to sew (my sister’s expertise is pretty close to my mom’s), I loved the needlework.
For years I kept at least one project going, occasionally finishing one here and there, but my needlework projects were mostly fits of inspiration born of a visit to Grandma or Germany, where most girls still learned to knit at the time. But it wasn’t until just recently that the lesson my mom started teaching us all those years ago really sunk in.
We had recently moved to Vermont, and I had fallen in with a couple of quilters at my new job. My new employer was constantly offloading small samples of fabric from discarded product lines, and like a moth to a flame, I made sure nothing went to waste (Quilt fabric is officially more addicting than alcohol and nicotine combined). My first idea was to make a quilt for The Big Guy. I cut and pieced and cut and quickly realized I had bit off a little more than I could chew. That project still awaits completion, but I did manage to finish another quilt that had developed simultaneously.
Soon after my quilting addiction began, my mother was made president of the Ohio Academy of HIstory. The news came shortly before her birthday, and I decided to make her an Ohio star quilt. I gave it to her when we were all on vacation together, and it was the first time in my life I had made something like that for my mother (not counting Kindergarten clay ashtrays for a woman who never smoked), and when she cried, I began to understand what it meant to really give something of oneself.
We still buy presents for each other, but since then I’ve made a monster scarf for The Big Guy, hunting-colored scarves for the kids, and an afghan for Thing2 (Thing1’s specifications are still being sorted out). And when I finally get that first quilt spread out on The Big Guy’s side of the bed, it won’t have a label on it, but we will both know that it was made especially for him and no one else.
Thing2 is chattering happily about his latest superhero discovery. I’m trying to keep the sorted piles of laundry on the couch from ending up right back in the hamper again as he demonstrates his version of the Spiderman perch. Everything begins and ends with these piles.
I don’t know why I let the folding pile get so big, but it usually takes an event to get it all folded and put away in one sitting. This week it’s the impending arrival of our Thanksgiving crowd. One of my guest rooms doubles as our indoor laundry hanging area, and I need it cleared and ready (along with the other cleaning) before the mad rush of cutting and cooking begins.
Somewhere in this, I’ve committed myself to two posts a day, figuring if I can maintain my quota during the one time of the year when I clean on a daily basis, I will have broken through some literary ceiling I can’t see. Unlike the laundry, the writing will hopefully be a ray, each met goal a point on a rising line.
But to follow that ray; to clean and cook, first the piles must be sorted and folded and put away. And when the crowds disperse after the celebration, I’ll travel the next segment on the infinite laundry line, hoping the ray that runs beside it stays close enough to let me travel both.
Even the November of 2011 – several months after Hurricane Irene tried to drown Vermont, most of the state was still in recovery mode.
One coworker was still excavating almost a foot of mud from her basement – and still counting her blessings that the house had not been swallowed when the bubbling little creek that ran 20 or 30 feet from her house became a torrential river and in a matter of minutes. Another coworker had waited out the birth of his second child while Irene was raging overhead. In my neighborhood near Arlington, Vermont, homeowners along the Battenkill River and other low-lying areas were also recovering. Some homes would remain empty for months. The thing I remember most about those early months, however, is not the destruction, but the way, Irene brought out the best not only in our neighbors but in the people who came from other areas of the country to lend a hand.
I saw people who I knew were still cleaning out from their own messes deposited by overflowing rivers somehow finding time and resources to start collection drives for neighbors and neighboring towns in more dire straits. Through the grapevine we’d hear stories of people making trips over the mountain on four-wheel-drive vehicle or even horseback to collect much needed supplies for town that have been literally stranded by washed out roads. There were collection boxes at the country stores. People needed everything – furniture, baby supplies, food and drinking water – We scoured our home for anything we could donate.
In the week or so before and after the Election, we engaged in a bit of radio or media silence at our house. Unlike Irene, the campaign seemed to be bringing out the worst in competitors across the board, and, recognizing that watching the mayhem wouldn’t slow it down, we tuned it out. This also meant that we missed a fair amount of news related to Hurricane Sandy, and, aside from following Facebook to find out where to donate, I’ve been living under a figurative rock of late.
Then a few days ago, I clicked on one of my news sites. The election was over, and the people who govern us were still making me think Thing1 and Thing2 could work things out more equitably. Most of the photos coming from affected areas in New Jersey and parts of Queens still looked as if there had been a war. There were a few stories about looting after the storm, but they were did not dominate. What started to dominate, as I read more about the aftermath, were stories very much like the ones that had played out before us in Vermont just a year ago.
I saw the bit about the New York Marathoners morphing the race into an opportunity to race. I saw a group that was helping people collect sample sizes of much-needed toiletries. I saw Occupy Wall Street occupying Sandy and getting supplies out to people across the area. And mostly what I saw was confirmation that while the infrastructure may be damaged, our national social conscience that the media and politicians love to denigrate for one reason or another, is healthier than we are sometimes led to believe.
This is my kids’ world. It’s small and it’s a big as the outdoors. There are no sidewalks. There are no shopping malls. When I am too tied up to drive them to play dates, they are each others’ play date.
Like many kids these days, they have too many toys, but until recently when Thing1 began nurturing his inner nerd (with full encouragement from me), that swing set and the woods behind it were their primary domain.
They played alone. They played with friends. They found rusting old stoves and cars being buried by the forest. They create forts and founded kingdoms.
They don’t have ATVs or cell phones. Their clothes are always dirty, and they couldn’t tell you what brand of sneakers they wear. But when they get back from an afternoon rambling through their world, the flushed smiles reassure us that even they know that they do have all that matters.
Saturday our writing group met at my house. We had all been looking forward to this for weeks and even months, and there was no way I was going to miss seeing these people. But when an invitation to a friend’s Origami Days celebration appeared on my Facebook page, I felt more than a tiny bit of conflict.
Leyla Torres, a gifted illustrator had recently revealed on her long-time interest in Origami on her Facebook page, and she joined the community of Origami users in their global, on- and off-line celebration of the art last weekend. But writing group is now sacred to me, and I contented myself with the hope that I would see the results on Facebook on Sunday. Fate and my family had other plans, however.
The Big Guy took command of the kids for the afternoon so that grownup talk could happen at our house. I expected them to return about the time the group ended, but it was getting dark by the time they bounded in the door. The Big Guy usually finds something fun for them to do – hardware stores, Lego exhibitions, and welding shops – and today was no exception.
This man who has avoided Facebook like crazy had discovered Origami Days as he was driving by our friend’s studio in Arlington, VT. He took a chance and dragged the kids into the tiny gallery, and they emerged an hour later brimming with a different kind of energy. Their excitement still showed by the time they glided in the door, pockets full of Origami swans and toys. In two minutes, Thing 2 apprised me of their day, of the entire history of origami, and of the generosity of their hostess. The Big Guy then told me that she was holding the gallery open just a little longer, so I grabbed my keys and out the door I went.
The gallery was in an old carriage house behind the big stone Church in Arlington. Petite with a sometimes soft-spoken demeanor but a feisty spirit, Leyla shares gallery and studio space with her husband, John Sutton, a multi-talented artist and gifted photographer. Heated by an old wood stove, the simple rustic gallery was decorated with John’s black-and-white photos (in frames he built himself). But it was the riot of color on the table at the center of the small space that grabbed my attention and held it.
Strewn across the table were dragons and roses and butterflies and intricate boxes made of folded, interwoven pieces of paper. Some of them seemed (deceptively, I’m sure) simple; others clearly had taken hours and years of practice to learn how to construct. Leyla cheerfully shared the history of her interest in this craft and in a community of paper artists dedicated to sharing peace through art. But it was the colors that caught my heart as they reminded me of a gift/prize I had received from another artist earlier in the day.
Maria Wulf, a fiber artist and the wife of our group leader has been joining our sessions, and she serves as a gentle sounding board and resident joyful spirit. That spirit is evident everywhere in her art. She designs quilts that are colorful and somehow contemporary and traditional. She had created a giveaway contest on her website, and I was the lucky winner of two colorful potholders.
My prizes were, like Leyla’s origami, a marvelous combination of connecting shapes and colors. But they were each reflections of their creators, spreading happiness and peace. I knew the two of them should meet at some point, and I told Leyla about our group and about my potholders. I asked if I could link to her site (I’ve linked to Maria’s site since I’ve had this blog), and I could see her excitement rising. We talked about art and writing and encouragement, and, suddenly, she stood up and went to the basket full of origami art at the end of the table. She started rummaging and pulled out seven or eight flat pieces that could be easily carried home and said, “Here take this to your writing group as a gift from me.”
I thought about the other gifts she’d already given my kids this afternoon. They were bits of paper, and they were art, but they were also trophies of a world made just a little wider in the space of an afternoon. And when our group next meets to widen it’s world, I’ll bring these trophies, and, with them, (I hope) the encouragement that feeds not just the artists but the communities they nurture.
I’m redesigning the header on my blog. I’m a creature of change, and I knew I’d get tired of the current one at some point. It’s funny, and it’s me, but I’m in a drawing phase right now. Maybe it’s because they help nurture the illusion of having control over some part of my world.
I’ve settled on an illustrated collage of the family, and Thing2 is my first subject. He was an easy first choice.
A force of nature, he is inspiration. He’s Spiderman and Superman and every superhero you’ve never heard of. He’s a whirling dervish of activity, a butterfly. He jumping from couch to chair and room to room, embracing a new personas with each turn about the house. And he is joy.
Real life is casting shadows on him now, and they grow longer every day as he becomes more aware of the world. Still, he stays just out of reach of them. It is this sprite with his dancing gate and flights of imagination who keeps my pen moving.
The drawings aren’t as accurate as I want them to be. There will be more drafts. But joy can only be followed with a quick pen, and only unrestrained gestures can capture this boundless energy. I know enough to savor them while the shadows are short and before he slows enough to follow with a careful, studied sketch.
No matter how many promises we make on Monday morning to get started on Friday or even Saturday, every Sunday afternoon is a last minute push up Homework Hill.
This weekend I upped the ante – restricted computer activity until it’s all done and parent-approved (when you’re kid is a budding computer guru, this is more severe than withholding food or even oxygen) – and miraculously there are suddenly hundreds of things to do that don’t require a computer.
Thing1 is acting as a dog whisperer for my sister-in-law’s shy dog who’s visiting. He’s playing happily with Thing2. He’s unloaded the dishwasher -unasked. And Heaven help him, he’s even made his bed this morning.
I figure he’s got about 96 more ways to avoid homework before he surrenders. I know this because once upon a time I was the one who tried every trick to get out of studying. And, as I prepare to sound the next salvo in the homework war, somewhere my parents are getting a warm feeling on the back of their necks.
Picking My Battles 