Mercy and memory

My senior in high school recently got a concussion in a football game.  In order to get clearance to play again, we had to go back to the doctor for a checkup.  The concussion was not serious - he never threw up, had a headache or felt dizzy after the initial impact. But to the doctor we went. One of the checks the doctor gave was to list three items at the beginning of the appointment and then to ask my son to rename them at the end of the appointment - apple, pencil, sky.  Oh no! I would not have been cleared to play! I forgot the second item. The last one, sky, stood out to me, so I began daydreaming about skies and then watching the assessment and then narrating the doctor's actions to the toddler who came along for the adventure.

Do I have a concussion? The beginnings of Alzheimer's or dementia? Short term memory loss? (The boy remembered all three, by the way.)

Maybe yes to the last three. But maybe I am just easily distracted and wasn't paying attention in the first place. This was a little lesson in reminding me to have mercy on my children as they forget oh so many things I just said to them.

While trying to parent both a toddler and teenagers, I have become very aware of parenting lately and the need for mercy, both on myself, as I lie awake at night replaying the many ways I failed the kids during the day, and on the kids as I lose patience with their forgetfulness or their failure to live the way I keep telling them to live for their own good!  Read more! Play outside! Finish your homework! Ride your bike around and admire the ocean or the sky or the gardens!  Study harder for your exams!  Finish those darn essays! Clean your room! Wash the dishes! Apply for scholarships! Get a job! Join a club!  So many, many things I tell them it's no wonder they forget.  Sometimes I sit down with them to review for a quiz or to proofread an essay, but often I am finishing dinner or folding laundry while I bark out commands.

No wonder they forget.   I am not teaching; I am telling.  Perhaps if the doctor had said "I gave the teacher an apple, she gave me a pencil, and I drew the sky," I would've remember the three items.

I think of the way I parented my older children when they are young compared to the life Baby leads now. Life has changed in many ways since the days when I had many small children and no big ones, and I counted hours of the day.  If I could just get through the day until my husband came home, I would make it to the next day. Sometimes he was gone for days and weeks; then I had to get us all out of the house so we could while away some hours in a diversion. I bought zoo memberships, botanical garden memberships, natural history museum memberships, and spent hours at the library and the beach and the YMCA.  We did Meals on Wheels and looked forward to the home school co-op one day a week. We walked slowly to and from playgrounds. We read books on the couch. We spent a lot of time in each other's company.

And a lot of those days I can't remember what we did. But I remember the feeling of long hours and the stories I have told about the fifth kid getting lost but really being locked in the basement, about almost driving off and leaving the second kid by the side of the road, about the fourth kid vomiting through a Halloween, the oldest claiming a puppy, the death of a rat and a dog, the sixth kid's broken arm, the third kid's early shyness.

Then the kids began getting more independent. They began having more homework. I had more leisure, which I filled with work and socializing. Parenting has become a mental rather than a physical activity, although it still requires a lot of energy to shuttle kids places and to deal with the mental meltdowns.  The big kids don't say cute things or get themselves into silly scrapes that get retold and elaborated. I find myself craving more hours in a day instead of fewer.

Another blessing: I can share some the physical responsibility for the toddler with the teenagers.  This is a welcome development. And the nine year old still is young enough to play with Baby, now that Baby is developing a sense of imagination.  This morning, my husband and I probably committed a parenting fail by laughing at the baby as she threw herself down on the floor to protest the confiscation of candy for breakfast. Then she got up and found the 9 year old and led her by the hand to the cabinet with the babyproof latch where the candy is hiding.  She knew who would access it for her.  She melted again when we gave her the uh-unh. The nine year old was willing to be an accomplice in candy snatching, but this time she was foiled.

My husband and I shouldn't have laughed at the wilted and tear streaked face that wailed out one long last wail when she turned to see us watching her. Will she learn from this episode that we are not going to let her eat candy for breakfast, or that she needs to be sneaky about getting someone to open the cupboard for her? Was this a genuine teaching moment, or was it just the first of many repeated reminders not to eat too much candy?

I hope she learns to make healthy choices.  Maybe she will remember this episode because it was different. It might become a story, a part of family lore, about how the baby tried to get her siblings to sneak her candy.  Sometimes I have mercy on her and let her have a lollipop for breakfast, or at least a lollipop on the way to school so she will sit in her stroller.   Sometimes I have mercy on myself for saying yes to what I used to say no to and for the failure to say yes or to find time for the good things we used to do in the days of long hours. Many times I am grateful for the mercy that has been shown to me by my parents, my siblings, my husband, my children, my friends, my God,  over and over so many times that I am finally beginning to learn to appreciate the gift as one of the most precious I can receive.

Talk of the town

A peek at what's been going on around here.  Looks like I haven't posted photos since before Halloween.  We've been busy around here. 

Window painting at a downtown business

A scary group

Pumpkins

A study in orange

Old Town Day of the Dead decor

Socal surfer girl. November body boarding...

Study in blue.

A small harvest

Homecoming parade watching   

Homecoming game watching.

Homecoming dance crowd watching. Let me say that my daughters will
never dress like 75% of these girls. . .  or their mothers.

Iconic roof

A Veterans' Day hike. Torrey Pines reserve.  Just us and 1000 of our closest hiking buddies.
Everyone had the same idea

It was a pretty place. You can see why people would want to go there on their day off.
And just minutes from the highway!

Even the en plein aire painting group was out.

A Torrey Pine

Cliff jumping

Beach combing

R. I. P. Dr. Louise Cowan

A great soul has left the world.

Dr. Louise Cowan passed away on Monday.  I was blessed to count myself as one of her students at the University of Dallas where I attended graduate school. (Her obituary in the Dallas Morning News.  Simcha Fisher also posted a tribute.) I took her Southern literature class. To listen to her lecture was to sit hypnotized, enthralled in the literal sense by her voice and her profundity, completely unaware of the passing of time. As Jo Brans wrote in D Magazine in 1979, "Whenever I hear Louise Cowan talk, I want to be Louise Cowan." She captured such deep ideas with such clarity and apparent simplicity.  Of course, that love affair in Their Eyes Were Watching God is symbolic of the cosmic union of earth and sky, soul and body, God and Man, divine and human, eternal and temporal! She had a way of explicating a text that made you see patterns you never saw before and realize that all images, all the arts, lead the mind to ruminate on transcendent things.  She even gave a lecture once on Pulp Fiction that made it seem like the film makers had created another Divine Comedy.

Not only was she an incredible teacher who made her students feel that the truth and beauty of good literature could lead them toward salvation, she also was a lady of manners, grace, and fortitude.  She was in her eighties and still teaching when I was in grad school. And she still had style and great legs. I think she didn't finish her Ph.D. until she was forty, so her career began late. She seemed ageless. And she made her students believe that they, too, could do what she did - find joy and connection in sharing the beauty of poetry and literature.

Not long ago, Dr. Cowan contributed an essay to a collection entitled What is a Teacher. She wrote:  “Teachers are consecrated persons who have made the choice to lead others into learning. If they are to lead others into learning, they must continue themselves to be learners.”

She certainly embodied this herself. May she continue to inspire future teachers. She may become a patron saint of those who love literature.

Photo from http://porterbriggs.com/teaching-good-poetry/

On Sports and School

Last night I had the privilege of attending a brainstorming session on creating an ideal school.  The high school here is going to compete to become an XQ Superschool, a program sponsored by Steve Jobs' wife, Laurene Powell.  It was invigorating to meet with other parents, faculty, members of the school board and the community to talk about ideas in education.  And the focus was not on reinventing the wheel or incorporating more technology - it was more about identifying the challenges to learning that kids face and how to create a school that addresses and tries to eliminate these challenges.  There was a lot of consensus on the idea that kids need smaller classes and engaged and engaging teachers. They also need the ability to access classes that stir their curiosity as well as meet their interests, so there was a lot of discussion about changing the length of the school day, week, and year to allow internships or special interest classes.

One idea I really liked was the concept of having kids take one large lecture for a class in high demand like AP US History, and then meet in breakout sessions with smaller groups for discussion and review. So you could have the most dynamic teacher lecture and then let students learn critical thinking by leading discussion groups.  Another idea was changing the traditional language classes to become less about vocabulary and more culture classes where students learn about other cultures and then dialogue with students from that country via Skype or Facetime.

My suggestions were to make learning more expeditionary - go to the ocean front, go to the desert, go to the battlefield. These would require a "flex term" sessions - three or four weeks devoted to special interests classes or projects, which I've seen done at other schools.  Additionally, I'd like to see more fluidity between the community and the school. Invite experts in to teach or lecture.  Have career days or clubs. Get businesses to offer apprenticeships or internships in the community. We live in a place ideal for that because students could walk to a business. They would see how certain skills are necessary in the real world. [A real world skills class was also mentioned: Home ec for the modern day.]  Since this is a public school, involving religion or spirituality wasn't discussed, but several people brought up the idea of educating the whole person.  And the buzzwords resilience and mindset came up also. Grit wasn't mentioned but that's the other buzzword getting tossed around lately - how to teach kids grit.

One way is through sports, I would argue. Sports came up at the very end of the evening. The principal asked about actually doing away with sports. I drafted this note this morning. Kind of presumptuous of me, but in my defense I have had a couple conversations with her at various events that made me feel more comfortable with being long-winded:

Thanks for including parents in the brainstorming meeting for the xqsuperschools project last night. I really enjoyed listening to ideas and getting a chance to add some of my own ideas that have been percolating for years.  As we move around and see bits and pieces of what works and what doesn't at different schools, I always wish we could put together the ideal school where all of these things come together.  And hearing about other people's experiences about what works/what doesn't is also invaluable. Of course, the two biggest indicators of "learning potential" are great teachers and smaller classes where kids get mentored rather than managed, and both of these are hard to realize.  But finding creative solutions like reorganizing classes with "breakout sessions" or inviting "experts" in to inspire students, even if they don't have teaching credentials, were two of the ideas I really liked last night. 

I also wanted to revisit the topic of sports while I am thinking about it. I know I was quick to jump to the defensive when you mentioned doing away with sports last night, but after giving it some thought, I had a couple observations - no solutions, but some ideas to come back to.  First, I do agree that sports can be disruptive of learning and require an immense amount of money and time to manage.  Our last school was a football school, and there was some definite resentment on the part of a some faculty, students, and parents about the time and attention given to football, and for good reason.  On the other hand, the football team actually paid for itself and made the school money through tickets, concessions, and donations.   

I may be biased because  I come from a family of athletes.  I said last night that boys need the competitive outlet, but I was every bit as competitive in spirit as my brother, and my middle daughter isn't afraid to take on her brother's friends on the soccer field, so girls benefit from athletics just as much as, if not more than, boys, as studies have shown.  

I'm sure other studies exist that show how sports can help improve grades and lifelong learning and living habits just as much as the arts can.  As a huge fan of the arts in schools, I was excited about the idea of the school hosting an arts conservatory when we were researching schools. But I am sorry that some of the classes/programs are not more available to students outside of the program.  [Both of my boys would love to be able to take some music classes, but the one band class available didn't fit their schedules and they were told that the band was very competitive.  May be a rumor, but they were discouraged.]

What I think would be ideal is if both sports and the arts were more accessible to average students - students who want the enrichment of learning to play an instrument or golf but aren't going to make a career out of either.  Both sports and the arts teach students habits of mind AND body that are essential for healthy adult lives:  discipline, the value of effort in producing results, the value of creative thinking and problem solving, the value of using different kinds of thinking and moving to reach a goal, the values of teamwork and collaboration, the value of taking care of your health, and sports especially I think provide a social connection that promotes other-focused thinking - in an ideal program.  For instance, as much as I cringe at the violence in football, I think there is something valuable in learning to defend a teammate.  Some people might think it a stretch if I argued that sports teach compassion, but I'm willing to make that claim!  I also appreciate the importance of sports as a type of ambassador outreach to the local and other communities.  In my own experience and in that of my kids, I've seen that sports, perhaps more for individual sports like cross country, swimming, and track, provide an opportunity to interact with kids from other schools and other parts of the state (and other countries when we were in Guam and they participated in Far East competitions.)  Our kids have also experienced this doing things like Knowledge Bowl, Model UN, and Geography Bowl -  elevating the acceptability and the fun aspect of academic competitions is also important.  

So I defend sports as a part of a school program because they are essential to educating the whole person.  I do think that high school sports, especially here in California, have become much too competitive and time consuming. I know CIF has some rules about practice times and travel distances, but in some cases coaches find a way around these rules. Ideally, you'd find brilliant, charismatic coaches who valued balance for students.  The other key is accessibility (allowing kids time to do sports and drama, for instance, or offering more options, like another fall sport for boys besides football and cross country.) This requires both the drama instructors, or whoever, and the coaches agreeing to creative flexibility. 

My fear is that turning sports over to clubs would make them inaccessible because of cost, travel time, and selectivity, at least clubs in the sense of what they are right now.  As you know, sports are becoming elitist at the middle school level because of these highly competitive and expensive clubs, which is a challenge for kids who develop at different rates and may like to try something new.  But if by clubs, you mean something more on the level of an Ultimate Frisbee Club, for instance, that meets at the park on Friday afternoons, or a running or biking or paddleboard club that gets together on weekends, then I am more onboard.  Allowing students to organize and manage some club sports would provide even more opportunities.  The challenge would be finding other communities to play with or against, but without incurring great costs or travels.

In closing, I think returning to this topic could provide even more creative ideas. How to eliminate the time out of class requires the cooperation of coaches and athletic directors willing to postpone competition times or limit them to weekends. How to widen accessibility but also provide an opportunity for students who have the ability to excel are additional challenges. And finally, finding those great coaches who inspire athletes to give their all, without demanding that they make sports their reason for being, is probably the biggest challenge of all. 

A bit too much, probably, but it was cathartic to write - one of those "I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say" moments Flannery O'Connor noted. 

I think the idea of trying to create an ideal school is a fascinating thought project, and as a former home schooler, one I tried to articulate and simplify. I never wrote it down, though.  I really don't think home schooling is the ideal situation - I'd rather send my kids to a small school with a Catholic identity, unlimited funds, and charismatic experts as teachers. Technology use would be limited to being a learning and access tool, rather than an entertainment factor. Learning would require the use of all the senses - field trips, experiments, projects.  There would be plenty of literature, art, music, and sports and community service. All the good things, and none of the peer pressure, college pressure, or competition that gave more emphasis to the athlete rather than the glory of God. We would have 32 hours in the day and 57 weeks in the year.  And parents could go to school, too. 

MORE book reviews - L'Heureux, Denby, Alvarez, Kelly

I've been on a reading jag lately that is partly motivated by the easy access to good books at our library and at the "Little Free Library" at the beach (which is mostly stocked by someone who gets advance reader copies) and partly motivated by escapism from the daily grind.  We've been hosting an array of company lately, so in between madly cleaning before company arrives, I go through periods of laziness in which I let the dishes and laundry stack up until the next round of guests are due to appear. Perfect time to hide in the bathroom with a book.

I've discovered another new-to-me author that I'm enjoying: John L'Heureux. He was recommended by a priest I talked to at the conference back in February, but I just now remembered to check the library shelves for his books.  First I read one of his more recent books, The Miracle, and then a collection of short stories called Family Affairs last week. Both brief, but thought provoking. The Miracle  is about a priest struggling with his vocation who witnesses what could be a miracle that happens to an undeserving girl.  As he struggles to understand the miracle, he also is struggling with his faith and what it means to love. I found myself both frustrated by and sympathetic to the main character, but the really attractive figure is an old priest who is dying of ALS.  He seems to have figured out what it means to love, and all the while minor miracles are happening through him.

Family Affairs is a collection of short stories, most of which also are about priests and potential priests and lay people struggling with their vocations, written in the late 70s.   I wasn't surprised then, that the author bio on the back cover asserts that L'Heureux was a Jesuit priest for 17 years.  So many of these stories seem to be somewhat auto-biographical, and perhaps therapeutic attempts to explore vocation from the perspective of someone grasping to understand what it means to live a vocation.  And since I sometimes find myself cogitating about the same puzzle, I read the book hungrily.

It's interesting that L'Heureux doesn't often show up on lists of Catholic writers that I come across on the more conservative sites that I sometimes visit.  He, along with Lodge, must have been enthused by some of the potential changes to come with Vatican II, and then perhaps disappointed that more didn't change.  Both the Lodge books (Souls and Bodies and Paradise News) and the 2 L'Heureux books I've read both seem to center around Catholics engaged in the struggle to love God and love other people, so they are very religious in subject matter.  Have they been deemed too liberal by some listmakers because they seem to assert that love needs physical expression, which makes a celibate priesthood an extremely difficult vocation to support?  (A gothic short story of L'Heureux's is here.)

*****

Yet another Catholic author exploring the conflicts between flesh and spirit is Julia Alvarez.  I just finished How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Told in reverse chronological order, it left me with a feeling of loss, without much consolation.  A Dominican Republic family comes to America and loses it's connection with the big extended familia. The four girls in the family have broken relationships and struggle to find themselves.  Discontentment abounds. It's hard to reconcile the family dynamic at the end with the family in the beginning. I think of my own family: I removed myself and my children from the extended family compound. As my grandparents have passed away and my kids have grown older, and I've grown away, we come home less and less often.  I often feel at loose ends trying to decide how to live because of the lack of connections to a past and priorities.  But Alvarez's book remains at a surface level; we never really get to see a real spiritual struggle within the girls - they only seem to struggle with how to define themselves in relation to each other, which maybe is saying something about identity and loss.  Perhaps the consolation is that the family does still cling to each other, the sisters still respect and honor their father, and they continue to come together in spite of opposition from outside and within their circle.

*****

Stepping away from the Catholic authors for a bit, I picked up David Denby's Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World while passing through the shelves.  I ended up skimming the second half.  It was written in 1996, when the dialogue about core programs (as opposed to Common Core) at colleges was getting some attention.  Denby attended Columbia and goes back to class to attend Columbia's Contemporary Civilizations and Literature Humanities classes, the two courses required for graduation. At the time, many larger universities were doing away with graduation requirements - now Notre Dame is reevaluating its philosophy/theology requirements to allow more courses to be considered for fulfillment of the credits.  Denby goes back to school in part to defend the core, but also to redefine himself in middle age (identifying a bit with Dante). He observes students wrestling with big topics and compares his past and present self in encounters with great authors, all the while crafting an argument in defense of the Core Curriculum without defending it against charges of exclusivity.  All in all, I thought it was a very fair defense of maintaining an acquaintance with the thoughts of dead white males - along with some women and minorities.  You can read his new preface in 2005 which is more politically charged than the original, but still maintains the importance of engaging with the great minds of the past in order to understand what makes us human.

Denby references and quotes parts of two poems that resonated with me as I read them.  I wasn't familiar with  "Original Sequence" by Philip Booth, but now am intrigued to read more of this book on Google books.  "Time was the apple Adam ate" it begins and ends with "[God] reached, and wound the clock" - a painful connection between original sin and time.

Denby closes with an excerpt from Whitman "Leaves of Grass":

5
  Dead poets, philosophs, priests,
  Martyrs, artists, inventors, governments long since,
  Language-shapers on other shores,
  Nations once powerful, now reduced, withdrawn, or desolate,
  I dare not proceed till I respectfully credit what you have left
      wafted hither,
  I have perused it, own it is admirable, (moving awhile among it,)
  Think nothing can ever be greater, nothing can ever deserve more
      than it deserves,
  Regarding it all intently a long while, then dismissing it,
  I stand in my place with my own day here.

  Here lands female and male,
  Here the heir-ship and heiress-ship of the world, here the flame of
      materials,
  Here spirituality the translatress, the openly-avow'd,
  The ever-tending, the finale of visible forms,
  The satisfier, after due long-waiting now advancing,
  Yes here comes my mistress the soul.

from Book II https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1322/1322-h/1322-h.htm#link2H_4_0023

*****

Finally, the last book worth a mention was The Curious World of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly. This was an advanced copy I picked up from the Little Free Library. It was readable, but not as good as the first book The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. Calpurnia is a pre-teen living in Texas at the turn of the century. Her grandfather is an amateur scientist who introduces her to Darwin and his systematic observations and scientific method. The first book had charm and a unique subject matter. This second book is still appealing, but has less charm and more to take issue with. Maybe I was feeling more critical this time around, but I found the book too episodic without a real unifying theme - was the focus the relationship between Callie and her brother Travis, or her grandfather, or her cousin Aggie, a refugee after a hurricane in Galveston, or her developing sense of oppression because she is a girl?  Two things bothered me above the others - first, she seems to have a real hatred for her brother Lamar. He is never shown to have any redeeming features, and they never reconcile. In fact, in the end Callie finds a way to get revenge on him and she isn't caught. While most middle grade readers might identify with the sibling strife, I didn't like that the author seems to glory in the act of revenge. I kept wondering if she had a really difficult brother and her personal revenge was writing this despicable character. And the second thing I didn't like is that Callie is encouraged to be secretive to her parents by older characters.  The vet tells her not to tell her parents that she is helping him and Aggie asks her not to tell that she is running away.  And Callie herself encourages Travis to keep his pets secret from their parents.  So I have some moral issues with the book.  I also didn't like that the grandfather takes a smaller role in this book - their relationship was what made the first book so appealing to me. Callie's father also is kept at arms' length once Callie discovers he doesn't think girls should go to college and he gives her less valuable gifts than he gives her brothers. So I can't really recommend this one very strongly, although I like the idea of a curious girl during that time of incredible technological progress.

Silence and slow time

Most days I have a long to do list. I have to do now lists and to do soon lists and to do someday lists.  I usually have someplace to be or something to get ready for that precludes leisure time.

But having a toddler precludes checking off to do lists.  While time spent rearing a toddler is not exactly leisure, neither is it all work.

The baby lately has learned how to get out of her restraining devices: the car seat, the stroller buckle, the straps on the bike trailer, the high chair belt.  We constantly are in a battle to get her to sit down.  And I am losing.

The other day I had nothing on the "to do right now" list, so I quit my exercise run and let her out of the jogging stroller to walk.  She walked almost a mile. It took over an hour.  We stopped to feed ducks. We stopped to wade in the bay.  We stopped to throw gum balls - the spiky seed pods from the gum tree a couple blocks from our house. We stopped to chatter about Halloween decorations and to touch  - gently! - someone's eclectic witch decor.  She patted fake grass, which keeps sprouting up here in drought land.  I fear it is loaded with bacteria. (Aren't you supposed to spray artificial turf with a bleach rinse or was that just in Guam, the MRSA haven?)

Baby was awfully cute. I enjoyed watching her.  I thought about taking pictures, but I'm trying not to let her see me with my phone too much.  And already there exist exponentially more photos of her than there ever were of her older siblings, who were babies when you had to buy film.  Film was cheap, and I took plenty of photos, but I only sent the doubles to the grandparents and sometimes godparents. No one on the internet saw photos of my cute babies, and I still wonder if any one really wants to, even on Facebook. I like to see pictures of people's cute babies, but I don't like to spend hours looking at other people's lives, and sometimes I catch myself wasting time doing just that.

Oh such mixed feelings about media!  I like to tell my little story here, and I know my mom likes to read it.  I like to illustrate it with photos, and I know she likes to see them.  But how stealthily the internet steals time!  Time that could be spent admiring a phase that is altogether too fleeting.  Captured by a cheap camera and perserved in cyberspace does it collect meaning - like art, like Keats' Urn? (The phrase "silence and slow time" echoed in my memory as we walked along the Bay, but I had to google to aid my memory of its source. Sad. And good.)  It is Fall here at last, and while it's not the golden autumn of the Midwest, the shorter days and cooler evenings are reminders of change and aging and loss and death.

Perhaps I am spoiling Baby by letting her out of her restraints. I'm not teaching her to mind me or to respect limits. But she won't want to explore like this forever. Time won't always be slow.