Today I was hanging out with my youngest. Who was home from school with strep throat. Because it’s critical that someone get sick right before a holiday, immediately before an airplane flight, and on the last possible shopping-without-children morning of the holiday season. Y’know. It’s a law.
And she tells me this story that she made up. There’s a contest. “Who can sit on a piece of fruit for 8 days but not rotten it?” That is the question.
The winner comes up with some incredibly clever papier mache ugly fruit idea. Hard to rotten.
I swear, by the end of it I was ready to throw in the towel.
This was better than half of the books on the shelves.
OK, maybe not half. But a good 37 percent. And definately better than most of my ideas.
Good idea: Ice-skating in Texas at Christmastime — it makes you feel appropriately seasonal.
Not a good idea: Ice-skating the day your daughter gets her stitches out. Even when the doc says “no restrictions”. Turns out he didn’t mean ice-skating and there’ll be blood to prove the errors of your ways.
Good idea: Raising indoor/outdoor animals — it helps them feel both loved and free.
Not a good idea: Accidentally shutting one of your cats in the minivan overnight in the winter — it makes him mad and the car smells.
Good idea: Building graham-cracker cookie houses with all the neighborhood kids — again with the appropriately seasonal.
Not a good idea: Eating gumdrops the whole time. Or leaving the finished products within reach of the dog. Yes, even if she’s an old dog.
Good idea: Hanging Christmas lights across the front porch and around the front door — it’s festive and nobody’ll call you tacky unless you wait ’til March to take them down.
Not a good idea: Hanging Christmas lights across the front porch and around the front door without checking to see if they work first.
Good idea: Getting together with old friends for a dram or two of holiday cheer — warming the cockles of your heart.
Not a good idea: Getting together with old friends for more than a dram or two of holiday cheer. Oi.
Good idea: Signing up for a half marathon — good fun and good for you.
Not a good idea: Signing up for a half marathon that requires most of its training over the holidays. On the mornings after you’ve had more than a dram or two of holiday cheer. Oi again.
Here are some of the books I’m giving as gifts this year. And I say some because I think there are others I’ve already wrapped and forgotten. But I assure you, they’re winners. And I also say some because you never know when, at the very last minute, I may need one… last… book…
(Which takes me back to yesterday’s post. Please tell me that books don’t count as stuff. Please. ‘Cause if they do, I’m sunk.)
If you haven’t yet watched the no-bull, low-tech, consciousness-raising video that is The Story of Stuff, you oughta.
Sustainability activist Annie Leonard put together this little primer on the materials economy, and in case you didn’t already think you had too much crap in the garage, she helps you see the light. There are a lot of powerful moments and pretty grim facts about everything from natural resource depletion to how quickly products become obsolete. There’s also a nasty treadmill-type scene that has the average Joe going from working to watching TV to shopping, to working to watching TV to shopping. Ad infinitum.
The Story of Stuff is a kid-friendly little flick, and a great way to start all kinds of discussions about advertising, pollution and workers’ rights, but you need to watch it with them. My girls got sad — Smaller actually cried a little — and it’s helpful to push the old pause button and infuse a little hope every so often. We did that by talking about what we’re already doing right, and what else we can do. We had a lot of good ideas, and I’m not sure why the current administration hasn’t brought us on as consultants, but in the meantime, we’re gonna try to ratchet the goodness up a notch — using both sides of every sheet of paper and turning down the heat a bit. That sort of thing, times a hundred.
It’s both hard and easy this time of year to think about stuff. Hard because we’re all doing our civic and cultural duty by making our lists and checking them twice and we don’t want to be guilted into doing otherwise. Easy because everything we do is fodder for change. Our girls both asked for new scooters for Christmas. They’ve literally ridden theirs into the ground and we’ve squeezed every penny’s worth out of ’em. BUT. Instead of new scooters, they’re each getting a new set of wheels and new handle grips — because the rest of the contraption is just fine!!!
That Santa. Always got an eye on the planet.
So check it out. In the 20 minutes it’ll take to watch, you would have only moved up a place or two in line at the post office anyway…
Wednesday night marked my last class of the semester and to celebrate, we turned our classroom into a coffeehouse for a final reading.
Each student brought his or her portfolio to the podium and read aloud to the rest of us while we noshed on cookies and cider. I even lit candles, which I think were made somewhat irrelevant by the flourescent lights, but it’s the thought that counts.
The students loved hearing their classmates’ final versions, having given input to earlier drafts, and I loved the concrete acknowledgement that this is what they accomplished these sixteen weeks — these lovely, evocative, well-crafted poems.
A number of these poets seemed to dread the act of reading aloud before reading, but there was a palpable pleasure in the air once things got rolling — emanating from the readers and the audience. Poetry aloud is just beyond compare.
So, in that vein, I want to share with you this site for the PBS series The United States of Poetry. You’ll find some mighty good listening there.
For example, check out this one — in spoken word and sign language.
I am grateful there are so many ways to speak. And to listen…
Years ago, just post-college, I was taking a road trip with a girlfriend (well, okay, we were going to see The Grateful Dead in Las Vegas, of all places) and we hit a deer in the Arizona mountains.
We pulled over and realized, right away, that the deer was dead.
The trucker who stopped to help us thought we were crying about our car, which was a bit battered, but we were really crying about the deer. And about the fact that as human beings moving across the earth in big, fast, steel contraptions, we are inherently destructive. It was a humbling thing to, well, run into.
These days my most humbling encounters are as a parent. There are just endless realizations and learning experiences and epiphanies and honestly, some days, I want to say, “OK. I’ve learned my lessons for the month. Let’s just coast through on autopilot ’til the 1st, shall we?” And then it’s the very next day that one of them has a falling out with a friend, or forgets her homework, or needs stitches in her knee. And I’m back on the “learn something new everyday” train, whether I want to be or not.
The lessons are plentiful and varied and specific and contradictory:
Six-year-olds and nine-year-olds need my help. Don’t do for my six- and nine-year-old what they can do for themselves. Best friends are true blue. We all should have more than one best friend. Kids need their sleep. Set the alarm a little earlier so the kids have time in the morning to get up, get dressed and get organized. Bodies are so strong and resilient. Bodies are fragile and precious and tender.
Oi. What’s a driver, I mean a mom, to do? But really, the bottom-line lesson is always the same and it is this: Once our babies are outside of us, moving around in the world, there is only so much we can do to keep them safe — emotionally or physically. Stuff happens. Our children get overwhelmed or left out or chastised or hurt, and there is often nothing we can do about it. Except offer love and support and comfort — after the fact.
Within the last week my daughter got stitched… A girlfriend’s son got scarlet fever… My sister’s son took a nasty tumble off the roof of a car…. And all of your kids out there? Someone bombed a math test, someone got lice, someone got his heart broken for the first time. Right?
We are driving through life and we’re all gonna hit stuff. There’s just no way around it. Cliff on one side, rock wall on the other. We’re driving fast. At night. And one of our headlights is out. We’re gonna hit stuff. And sometimes all we can do is get out of the car and cry a litle and hope a trucker pulls over to help.
Who’da thunk you could spend a number of months revising a couple of hundred words? Well, you can. It’s worth it to be sure, ’cause I like what’s there now better than I did before. But my focus is kinda shot.
I’ve got a picture book manuscript in progress, a middle grade novel in progress, 3 manuscripts making their way in the world and now I’m ditching it all to do something I can’t seem to stop.
I have to admit, I love it when that happens…
(PS — I forgot about my new pledge to end every post with a gratitude. Sigh. I’m terrible at resolutions. So, backtracking to last Friday’s poetry post — I’m grateful to folks like Rita Dove who can find in themselves better words than I. And to Monday’s post about intentions and expectations, I’m grateful for our sweet little Christmas tree sitting all lit up amidst the spinny life at our house. And today I’m grateful for the muse. Very grateful. Oh, and for The Writer’s Almanac, which is on RIGHT NOW. Gotta go…)
This weekend was meant to be the grand holiday kick-off at our house — from advent calendars and Christmas trees to a Hannukkah dinner and dreidl games with friends.
Only, the thing is, we kicked off the weekend in the E.R. getting my daughter a heroic set of stitches… it was 85 degrees at the Christmas tree farm… and mice had been in our ornament box.
Sometimes things don’t go quite the way we expect.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. There is a difference between living an intentional life, I think, and being totally beholden to your expectations. I mean, it’s good to have dreams and to put things into motion in the direction of those dreams. Otherwise there’s always the possibility that your motion will be, um, sort of repetitive and circular (or at least elliptical) and you might end up exactly where you started. Only older and grumpier. But it’s also good to be manage your expectations so as not to be continually bowled over by shock or disappointment or change. Right?
One of the little family tag-lines we’ve got around here is, “Flexibility is the cornerstone of mental health.” Actually, it’s “Flexibility is the cornerstone of mental health, Honey,” because it tends to be used as a pointed reminder from one spouse to the other at moments of high stress.
I wish I could say that I’m always the reminder rather than the remindee. But alas…
Anyway, I’m just kind of wondering how you’re supposed to strike the perfect balance between intention and expectation so that stuff gets done in your life but you’re not brought to your knees when you start your weekend in the E.R. with your daughter who’s got a hole the size of a kiwi fruit in her knee?
I stayed profoundly cool and was quite the labor coach, getting her to breathe through her novacaine shots. But. It sort of threw me off my game for the rest of the weekend and I think I may have reacted a little strongly when all the water from the Christmas tree stand spilled.
Still, last night we ate chocolate Hannukkah coins and listened to Amahl and the Night Visitors and — nevermind the laundry heaps that were as high as the tree — I started wrapping gifts. Many of which are books. And homemade treasures with the kids’ stamps of creative verve all over them. And it was a lovely, happy, cozy time.
So maybe the key is that when you’re busy intending your life, you should leave a little room for things that are unexpected. Some of which may be, well, miracles.
Lately all the news is about the upcoming primaries. And the most recent bombings in Iraq. Sometimes it is all I can do to say to myself, “These are not dark days, these are not dark days, these are not dark days.”
But today, on this drizzly, gray morning my children will be gifted with a concert in their cafeteria called The Circle of Light. More than a dozen luminous musicians will bring the traditions of Christmas and Hannukah and Kwanzaa and Ramadan and La Posada and Divali alive, through music, for our kids. Each year, it brings me to my knees. It is better than my humming mantra — “These are not dark days” — because it feels absolutely entirely true. And possible. And beautiful. And even, if you can believe it, easy. Easy to connect and comfort the whole world. Through words, music and school children. I mean, why not?
So I was reminded of this piece Rita Dove wrote for the dedication of the Clinton library a few years ago. It’s better than my humming mantra, too. Give it a read:
This Life
My grandmother told me there’d be good days to counter the dark ones, with blue skies in the heart as far as the soul could see. She said you could measure a life in as many ways as there were to bake a pound cake, but you still need real butter and eggs for a good one — pound cake, that is, but I knew what she meant.
Yesterday afternoon we’re driving home from violin lessons via the grocery store and the girls have got their riff running in the backseat. It’s almost like they’ve agreed on some sublime topic (“OK, let’s free associate about colors”), only they haven’t. It just unfolds.
Taller daughter: What does yellow have to do with orange and what does orange have to do with pink? (Apropos of nothing. The sky was gray and the car in front of us was a dirty blue.)
Smaller daughter, barely pausing and certainly not asking for clarification: They’re all in a sunset. (Notice there’s no question mark at the end. Her voice doesn’t rise like the voices of my college students always do, wondering if they are anywhere in the neighborhood of right. Nope. She’s certain it’s a good answer. And her sister confirms it.)
Taller daughter: Good answer! (Delighted with the sunset idea, which is, afterall, as good as any. Because it’s clear that there wasn’t one singular satisfying thing she needed to hear — the whole topic was open for interpretation.)
And I’m up front just trying to catch up. If I’d been in on this, I’m sure I would’ve asked for clarification, dullard that I am — especially at 5pm in traffic.
I’m thinking I oughta remember this when I’m parenting and teaching and writing for kids. There’s not always one good answer or even one good question. There’s not always context or linear thought. There’s not always a simple, straight-forward way of looking at things. These are the days before yellow and orange and pink have become all black and white.
(I may be a dullard, but I’m feeling grateful for color… )
