Get ready. I got a feeling it's all going to read like that...so let me just apologize, right here at the outset.
Say...Remember this:
(Funny how smokers' voices were considered wise and powerful in the early '70s. And also: Why is that kid naked?)
So, then, remember, how, like, a while ago, I was saying how I was going to get rid of a stump in the back yard? A hundred whacks a day with an ax, and see how many it took to get rid of it? Remember? Well, imagine the axe is my tongue, and the stump is the Tootsie pop. Here's zero:
Janneke's former professor, Judith Kornblatt, and her husband Mark are staying with us for a couple of days. Judith is a Williams grad, and is out here for a friend's 60th birthday party. They were a huge hit with the kids last night - energetic, outgoing, caring people who charmed Q and T into submission in a matter of minutes. Q played piano for them, T showed Judith most of her toys...We all had a nice supper out on the deck, and then a pleasant evening of conversation and guitar. I played my latest acquisitions in the Spanish repertoire, and Mark showed us some songs he uses with his fifth graders. They seem happy with their downstairs accommodations - so much so that I feel confident, sitting here in the kitchen in my underwear, that they'll have no reason to come up and be scandalized. Although, hey, it might shake things up in an interesting way. They're heading out tomorrow.
(Here's 100:)
We're heading out on the 5th of July, driving down to Birmingham, Alabama (we've always heard it's best to go to the deep South at the height of summer) to visit Dominique, Octavio, and the kids. We'll stop halfway, in Virginia, and stay at a hotel for a couple of nights, taking a day to explore the national park nearby (is it Shenandoah...? I don't recall). On the way back, we're planning to stop in DC and spend a day with Uncle Jess, Auntie Stephanie, and Baby Jack, who's probably four feet tall by now. Should be fun.
(200:)
Today was kind of the first day of my summer. Yesterday too, I suppose, but yesterday I never got a real block of time in which to do whatever I liked. Today I did: Two hours, from 10:00 AM to noon. And you know what I did...? I played guitar. Two solid hours, working specific skills, getting particular licks and transitions down, questioning my posture, re-tuning, trying different tempos when a piece gave me trouble...Experimenting, learning. And I didn't stop because I got tired of it - I stopped because I had to be in Lenox at 1:00 for a second interview session with some candidates for a position at the school. (I'm consulting, I guess, on the hiring process. Feels nice to be asked.) I felt distinctly disappointed to be leaving the guitar behind when I left - I was just getting into something. With any luck I'll be able to dedicate a lot of time to that this summer.
(300:)
So a few weeks ago I was out here - walking Hobie, I think (heavy sigh), or preparing to - when I heard something rattling against the kitchen window. I looked out and saw this:
That's a frickin' luna moth! I don't think I had ever seen one before, honestly. Pictures, sure, and that story about a luna moth that everybody reads in third or fourth grade. But I was really thrilled - their enormity! Such otherworldly color...! And the poor, fragile little thing was just beating itself to death, trying to access the light that shone in our kitchen window. After I took a few pictures, I went back inside and shut off the lights, and wished it well. Hopefully it floated moonward and met up with its gender opposite. Although it seems just as likely that it bashed itself to death against a streetlight (which I would like to see removed from our street, personally), or was devoured by a bat. But I can dream.
(400:)
Q told us at supper yesterday that he'd made a vehicle with the Legos at his "camp" (glorified daycare at the Youth Center), and he'd left it there, and then he'd come back later to play with it, when a sixth grader came in and said "What are you doing with my Legos?", and had shoved him to the ground and taken it, and that he'd cried. He told us very matter-of-factly, without much emotion, and kind of out-of-the-blue; he didn't solicit sympathy, or answers, or anything. He told us, and then looked ahead, into a space ahead of him, and waited. I can't recall what interrupted us - a phone call, someone at the door, I don't know - but it was left hanging a bit. We got the kid's name, and asked how he'd reacted; he said he really hadn't done anything. And then with the hurly-burly of the bedtime cycle, somehow we never got back to the subject - you want to treat it properly, without hurry, and there was never a moment. Leaving me and janneke to discuss it after the kids had gone to bed.
(500:)
We decided we would give him the green light to react however he wanted. You don't want to say he "should" do any particular thing, setting him up to feel like a failure if his courage fails him and he doesn't do what you think he should. And you don't want to tell him to run and tell on the kid - if he can deal with it on his own, good for him. Although you don't want him not to, exactly, either - we were burning up with fury over the whole incident, and really wanted there to be some kind of fallout. So we decided we would tell him he could do whatever he liked. If he didn't want to react at all, that was OK - it was his life, after all. If he wanted to tell an adult, fine - that makes perfect sense. If he didn't want to, because it wasn't a big deal and he didn't want to be a tattle tale, we could understand that. If he wanted to call the kid names and fight back, hey, we weren't going to say no. Whatever he wanted.
(600:)
But, we told him (this was this morning, once we had our story straight), we were going to tell an adult in the building to keep an eye on the kid because he was bullying the younger kids. Not Q in particular, necessarily, but the kids in general. So that way Q wouldn't feel like we were concerned about him - just about this sort of behavior in general. You don't want him to feel too fragile, you don't want to fly into conniptions and sink to your knees and start searching him for bruises and crying out "MY BABY, MY BABY, THEY'VE BROKEN MY PRECIOUS BABY!" I mean, you want to. But you shouldn't.
(700:)
So that's what happened today - Q surreptitiously pointed the kid out (thank goodness for bilingualism) - a tall and lanky, obviously evil punk with a white baseball cap - and then I sidled up to the director of the joint and poked him in the chest and demanded action with liberal use of four-letter-words, then did the "I'm-watching-you", two-fingers-toward-my-eyes-then-toward-his gesture as I backed slowly away, breaking anything fragile within reach before exiting. Well, not so much that, really. I pulled him aside with my eyebrows and grumbled conspiratorially the kid's name, then said, "He's rumored to be throwing his weight around with the smaller kids. Might want to keep an eye out." The director, a nice guy named Mike, said thanks, and I went about my business.
(800:)
So Q got home and reported no further monkey business. In fact, he said, the kid seemed to be avoiding him, which was alright with Q. And alright with me. Although I have to say that in my mind's eye on the way to Lenox at noon today, I did a whole beating-up-the-kid's-father montage. The theme to "Rocky" was the soundtrack. I had a full head of hair and a handlebar mustache. It looked a lot like an episode of "Starsky and Hutch", actually.
(900:)
That's probably going to do it, kids - I'm finally feeling a little sleepy. Not sure why I can't get to sleep these days- I lay there and suddenly have all these itches everywhere. Although, actually, I was disturbed by something I read about in the book "Outliers", which one of my students gave me as a gift to thank me for three years of Spanish after she'd graduated. It's a neat book, but it raises all kinds of issues around where we wind up and why in life, and one of the middle chapters has some things to say about child-rearing that really had me second-guessing some of my own socio-economic cultural biases in the way I demand certain behaviors of my kids...got me thinking, I guess, and it's hard to sleep when you're thinking.
(1,000:)
Maybe it's the effect of these stump pictures - kind of like sawing logs. More soon, I promise: It's summer, after all. Once I'm done playing the guitar tomorrow, I'll crank out a few more whacks. See if we can't wear this baby down. Take care, brush your hair...
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