Signs that you might be a successful parent, or at least a subversive one

While driving in the car to therapy, Monkey Man and Gorilla Girl asked me to play Bruce Springsteen on the CD player, specifically “Shackled and Drawn.”

We also sang along to my favorite, “Death to My Hometown.”

I guess Springsteen may be too much of a pop star to qualify as subversive, and how subversive can you be if the President uses your most recent hit after his win on election night? But, still, in “Death to My Hometown,” Springsteen shouts for all to hear –

Send the robber barons straight to hell
The greedy thieves that came around
And ate the flesh of everything they’ve found
Whose crimes have gone unpunished now
Walk the streets as free men now

Pop or not, I’m glad that I can pass on some of my admiration for singing one’s truth out for all to hear to Monkey Man and Gorilla Girl.

Trying on jerky pants — or what it’s like to be a 7th grade teacher in February

No way are these guys jerks!

On my way to class the other day, I passed a few colleagues on hallway duty in the break between lunch and the start of classes.  One colleague was waving her arms like a traffic cop, desperately attempting to quell the exuberance of a normally sedate 7th grader who was alternating between running and high knees skipping down a very crowded corridor, amid lockers slamming and pre-class chatter. She did not succeed in her mission.

She wailed, “What is wrong with them?  Someone else, a kid I don’t even know, supposedly has a backpack full of snow and ice, and is throwing it randomly as he moves by kids at lockers, in some sort of stealth snow ball fighter game.”

Another hall monitor/traffic cop moaned, “Why is everyone acting so crazy?”

My answer: It’s February, and it’s endless.  Even more, it’s the time when 7th graders try on their jerky pants. Some only experiment long enough to gaze longingly in the mirror, while others wear them indefinitely, so much so that the pants become stiff with grime and that musty and distinctive 7th grade odor.

I don’t mean to suggest that 7th graders are jerks, because they are not.  However, they do find discomfort in this middle ground between childhood and becoming more mature, independent, and responsible. This last gasp of childhood almost requires some questionable behavior, even from the most serious and seemingly mature students, if only to make space for more adult norms. As they try to fit into the new expectations, a whole array of disguises seems at their disposal. Jerky pants seem, however, to be required wearing this month.

I suppose that is the rub — we adults have mostly (ah hem) at least stored away our jerky pants, or donated them to goodwill or something.

My 8th grade colleague suggests that even some of her 8th grade students, this time of year especially, reach into the back of their closets, drag out those jerky pants, and try them on for size.  Hopefully, they will soon realize that have outgrown them, and no one wants to be caught wearing skinny, floody, jerky pants!

Raiding the cookie jar in 2013

When we were kids, back in the stone age, we’d sneak cookies or whatever snacks we could find around the house.  I suppose all kids do this, and always will.  But there is a new twist to the desires of children for sweet treats. It’s called an ipad, and even the Pope has one.

Ed’s school gave each teacher an ipad in order to boost technology use (or maybe it was just because the Pope has a twitter feed).  Anyway, Ed downloaded some free apps, like the New Yorker, but he used my Apple ID to do so.  Not really thinking about it, he left the Apple ID logged on the ipad.  Monkey Man is quite the ipad geek, and for a six-year old, he is adept at maneuvering from app to app, and at finding exactly what he wants among what seems to me an indecipherable mess of apps, games, and junk that swim in no particular order on the screen.

After a long day of school, Monkey Man went to the ipad while I started dinner.   I glanced over and wondered what he was doing because  it looked like he was downloading more apps.  Ed confirmed my suspicion, but thought that they must be free, and we continued with dinner preparations.

Later that night, I got a receipt from Apple for $25.00 worth of apps — perfectly reasonable ones for a six-year old: Dora the Explorer app, a PBS Kids app, and a Cars 2 app.  Clearly , Monkey Man knew exactly what he was looking for, made his selections, and purchased with the power of a permanently logged on credit card.

The next day, I told Monkey Man that he couldn’t just buy apps since they cost money, and since generally speaking, buying extras like this requires a job. I was more amused than anything by Monkey Man’s resourcefulness, and his ability to find the apps that he thought he and Gorilla Girl would like, but I still felt the need to remind him of the age-old parents’ lament — money  and/or credit cards do not grow on trees.

Monkey Man’s response to my suggestion that if he wants to buy apps, he’ll have to wait until he has a job was the perfect precursor to the eye-rolling teenager. “Um, I was milk helper today at school.”

His teacher commented that she’ll need to do a lesson on paid vs. unpaid labor soon!

How craigslist connects us in the most unexpected ways

It has been almost a year since I caved into the allure of purchasing expensive in-home exercise equipment.  My aging ankles consigned me to elliptical machines at the gym, but my six-year olds seemed incompatible with an absentee mom, so working out at home seemed to be the answer.   Last winter, we bought an elliptical machine, and Ed assembled it in our bedroom. I used it once, then again, then somehow my determination waned, and the machine loomed there, taunting me with its gigantic fly-wheel, whale sized foot pedals, and highly mechanical workout data reader.  I could not coax or cajole myself into climbing aboard the thing.  Whenever I planned to exercise, I found myself doing something, anything, else. It was like being in some technologized version of a Poe story, haunted by the machine, envisioning walling it up, only to dream of its nightmarish whirring that would send me into madness.

My aversion  was odd, especially since I could easily do 60 minutes on an elliptical at the gym, and in my running days, could even hop on the machine after a longish run.  Even 20 or 30 minutes on the damned machine sitting in my house now seemed like it would require the effort of hiking to the top of Mt. Everest, but without the view or the oxygen deprivation.

I’ve been trying to sell the machine for about a month or so, with no luck.  I guess because it was barely used, I was asking close to what we had paid for it, and on Craigslist, folks are looking for big bargains.  Finally, this week, I had a nibble.  FL and I did some negotiating via email, and came to an agreement, one that I could live with if it meant the evil machine would haunt me no longer.  My purchaser planned to come this morning to pick up the disassembled machine and haul it away in her SUV.

When FL arrived with her brother to help with the heavy lifting, she was drawn to Monkey Man and Gorilla Girl right away.  As I suspected from her name on the email, FL is Asian.  We talked tentatively in the way that strangers chat when first meeting to do business, and then she asked, politely and with great sensitivity,  where GG and MM were from.  I explained that we adopted them from Vietnam, and immediately we were no longer strangers doing business.  We had become members of a community that included the other.

“We are from Vietnam, too.  Our parents left Vietnam in 1975 at the fall of Saigon — we don’t call it Ho Chi Minh City — and moved to Michigan City, initially.”

So began an hour-long discussion of adoption, family, going “home” to Vietnam, meeting other Vietnamese families, food, and coincidences.  Luckily, it took a bit of working together to load the elliptical into the car, so while we worked, we talked.

As I walked to yoga class after FL and KL left, I hoped that we would somehow maintain this connection. Though I am not a believer in fate or things “meant to be,” I am struck by the serendipity of our connection, and I am thankful that FL was brave enough to ask, and that the four of us were trusting enough to share some very personal stories with each other, strangers until this moment.   Monkey Man and Gorilla Girl provided us with the connection that made all four of us reveal pieces of our lives that we would never share with strangers, but this talk felt honest, open, and real.

The challenge now will be to maintain the connection. Does Craigslist have a listing for that?

A frigid winter’s night

What does believe mean?
Believe –
It means truth, without seeing,
Knowledge without touching.
What do you believe?
I believe in love.
Love?
Well, you can’t see love.
I can.
A small hand reaches out to touch my face.
It is right here.

Lift every voice

Earlier today, I visited Monkey Man and Gorilla Girl, and all of the kindergarten classes as they participated in the “King Sing,” led by their amazing music teacher. A former principal was visiting the class today to read from Martin’s Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  After the reading, we sang several songs together, songs that the children had been practicing for weeks.

I should back up.  Two weeks ago, Gorilla Girl launched into a discussion of bus boycotts, breaking “bad” laws, refusal to sit at the back of the bus, and going to jail, all in the name of fairness.  Gorilla Girl told us about Dr. Martin Luther King and his fight for the vote, for equality, and for a seat.  She also explained that King had been killed by a bad man, and that Dr. King’s birthday was coming up. Gorilla Girl was most interested, however, in the songs her class was learning in order to understand Martin’s fight.  Along with “This Little Light of Mine,” she sang what she could recall from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” by James Weldon Johnson. It turns out the Monkey Man was also learning about King, so we’ve had several discussions lately about why, in fact, we had a holiday from school yesterday.

As the room full of kindergartners began to sing “Life Every Voice and Sing,” I noticed that quite a few of the adults in the room were either fighting back tears, or allowing them to flow.  In this moment, I was filled with a sense that Monkey Man and Gorilla Girl were right where they should be, in a school that began the discussion of equity and justice with a grounding in the emotion and full-bodied engagement of singing.  As each child recalled the words and lifted their voices together, they began the journey to making meaning that will return to them in more nuanced discussions of social justice later in life. For the moment, this coming together, this story-telling through the joy of singing together, provided them with a memory of the power of their voices to shine a light.

Or, maybe it is that  children singing such powerful words brings adults back to remembering why we teach in the first place.

The Kindergarten “King Sing” — Lift Every Voice and Sing.

“Summer Solstice” by Stacie Cassarino

I wanted to see where beauty comes from

without you in the world, hauling my heart

across sixty acres of northeast meadow,

my pockets filling with flowers.

Then I remembered,

it’s you I miss in the brightness

and body of every living name:

rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.

You are the green wonder of June,

root and quasar, the thirst for salt.

When I finally understand that people fail

at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,

the paper wings of the dragonfly

aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?

If I get the story right, desire is continuous,

equatorial. There is still so much

I want to know: what you believe

can never be removed from us,

what you dreamed on Walnut Street

in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,

learning pleasure on your own.

Tell me our story: are we impetuous,

are we kind to each other, do we surrender

to what the mind cannot think past?

Where is the evidence I will learn

to be good at loving?

The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond

for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.

There are violet hills,

there is the covenant of duskbirds.

The moon comes over the mountain

like a big peach, and I want to tell you

what I couldn’t say the night we rushed

North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers

and the way you go into yourself,

calling my half-name like a secret.

I stand between taproot and treespire.

Here is the compass rose

to help me live through this.

Here are twelve ways of knowing

what blooms even in the blindness

of such longing. Yellow oxeye,

viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms

pleading do not forget me.

We hunger for eloquence.

We measure the isopleths.

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.

The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.

Fireflies turn on their electric wills:

an effulgence. Let me come back

whole, let me remember how to touch you

before it is too late.

Stacie Cassarino, “Summer Solstice” from Zero at the Bone. Copyright © 2009 by Stacie Cassarino. Reprinted by permission of New Issues Press.

Source: Zero at the Bone (New Issues Press, 2009)