Yesterday, my mother and I took a 30-minute walk in the late afternoon. On Sunday after lunch, a friend and I took our daughters for a walk in the woods. On Saturday morning, I walked with my dog to the post office.
I absolutely love walking. Even though I ride my stationary bike for 45 minutes every morning and run at least two miles every day, I’ll take any chance I can get for a good stroll. Not for the exercise – unlike biking or running, when I’m walking I don’t worry about target heart rate. I don’t even particularly worry about continuity: I’m fine with stopping along the way to talk with a neighbor, inspect an unusual leaf that falls in my path or watch a deer cross a meadow, all of which are frequent occurrences while I’m out walking. If I’m alone, my mind wanders; if I’m walking with someone else, which is equally enjoyable, so does the conversation. It’s different for me from running. When I’m running, although the scenery and climate nearly always register, my primary focus is on the physical aspects of what I’m doing: my own footfalls and heartbeat.
When our town constructed footpaths a couple of years ago alongside the major roads, some residents were skeptical, claiming it wasn’t the lack of safe access that prevented more people from strolling around town; it was that people were busy doing other things. Those who want to walk, these skeptics claimed, take advantage of the miles of conservation trails that run through our town’s fields and forests.
I’m not sure if they’ve noticed what I have, but it seems to me that having footpaths in our town has not only changed people’s recreational practices but has in some ways changed the social fabric of the town. I run into neighbors, acquaintances and strangers all the time now when I’m out walking. The footpaths aren’t all that long; my suspicion is that people who wouldn’t bother with what they see as a real hike on one of the conservation trails still enjoy parking their car at the library and strolling a mile down Bedford Road and back. The footpaths cover some beautiful scenery in just a short distance, winding amidst stone walls, past ancient trees, near centuries-old houses and farms, through the quaint Town Center.
When I lived in the city I walked a lot too, although then it was out of necessity as well as preference; I didn’t have a car. I wasn’t surprised to see on the news this morning that Boston was just ranked second-highest for safe pedestrian access in a survey of 52 metropolitan areas nationwide done by the Transportation for America lobby group. Boston has sidewalks everywhere, usually fairly well-maintained, and a fabulous biking/walking path alongside the Charles River.
Derrick Z. Jackson writes in his Boston Globe column today about being in suburban Tampa and having to drive somewhere just to be able to take a walk safely. Even though the walking trail, when he finally reached it, was inviting, he disliked having to drive to it, and I understand that. Non-pedestrian-friendly regions go beyond feeling physically unsafe for walkers; they seem to convey a certain hostility, or at least coldness, as if walking, and its attendant meditative and/or social aspects, simply aren’t a priority there. (Or, as Jackson illustriously writes, “It is as if planners [in Tampa] viewed walking as a communicable disease and jogging as cancer.”)
During the two years that I was working in another suburb about a half-hour from here, I would go out at lunchtime and walk in a neighborhood not far from the office park where my company was located. It wasn’t a very attractive neighborhood – split-level homes on small lots – and it didn’t have sidewalks, but it also didn’t have much traffic. I found it uninspiring, but I was relieved just to get out of the office and walk.
Even though losing that job was nothing to celebrate, I can’t help feeling that my current situation – being self-employed and working from home – is in many ways far more congruent with my values, one of which is being able to take advantage of my natural surroundings. I feel so lucky that I can go running midmorning, walking with my mom in the afternoon, off for a short hike with the kids when they get home from school. (Holly was so enthusiastic about Sunday’s hike to Castle Rock that she insists she wants to do it soon again, although by yesterday the urge seemed to have already faded.)
On Twitter this morning I saw this quote from Lao Tzu: “If you want to stop being confused, join your body, mind, and spirit in all you do.” When I walk, that’s how I feel: that my body, mind and spirit have intertwined, at least for the duration of the walk. Making that happen in “all I do” might be a bit more of a challenge, but that’s a start.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Monday, November 9, 2009
My son had a sleepover - and I got a good night's sleep
I’m starting the work week well-rested and cheerful. The house is neat, the bathrooms are clean, the refrigerator is stocked, my patience is untried.
This is notable only because my 11-year-old son invited three friends to a sleepover this weekend. It was an event I approached somewhat grudgingly, knowing that two months after his birthday we owed him some kind of celebration but still not genuinely enthusiastic about the plan to fill up his room with fifth grade boys for the night.
I worried that they’d be loud and messy and rude – not because any of these particular boys has ever shown any of these qualities to me, but because I had an innate wariness about combining that many male tweens and being responsible for them for eighteen hours.
But I needn’t have worried. Beyond not being any trouble, it was a delight to spend time with the four of them together. They played football in the driveway. My husband took them bowling and out for pizza. They played pool in our attic, raved about the ice cream pie I served after dinner, were kind (or at least exhibited an absence of unkindness) to Holly, played Wii into the wee hours, went to bed at the agreed-upon time (11, so not a huge sacrifice, but still), slept until 7, woke cheerful, raved about the pancakes and bacon I made for breakfast, trooped out to the barnyard to help me feed the cows and let out the sheep, worked on making a poster together, and packed their stuff up when it was time to leave.
They are great boys, and my son is so lucky to have such kind friends. Holly has wonderful friends too, and I feel fortunate on both of their behalves. So much rides upon the question of who your child makes friends with – and there’s so little a parent can do about it. Worst-case scenarios can have unthinkably awful consequences, but even middling scenarios can keep a parent awake at night, stressing out over a child’s dangerous liaisons. My children have both been lucky enough to find peers who are thoughtful, self-disciplined and generous.
That’s not to say we won’t face any friendship problems going forward. Tim already seems to be quite effective at deciding whom he wants to hang out with and whom he wants to stay away from, but Holly is immersed in more of a typical girlhood, and no doubt there will be drama along the way. In fact, I fully admit it’s likely she’ll be the one causing the drama sometimes. I try to teach her to be a good friend, but as Rosalind Wiseman writes about in Queen Bees and Wannabes, girls find their way into a quagmire of social issues despite our best intentions.
Be that as it may, right now I’m still ensconced in a cheerful glow from our wonderful weekend with Tim’s friends. They played outside; they left the bathroom neat; they didn’t keep anyone else awake at night. They complimented my cooking. (Ice cream pie and pancakes: you could argue that those are two can’t-misses, but still. They could have eaten and kept silent rather than complimenting.) Almost every day I feel grateful for my own kids. Today I feel additionally grateful for the terrific kids with whom my children surround themselves.
This is notable only because my 11-year-old son invited three friends to a sleepover this weekend. It was an event I approached somewhat grudgingly, knowing that two months after his birthday we owed him some kind of celebration but still not genuinely enthusiastic about the plan to fill up his room with fifth grade boys for the night.
I worried that they’d be loud and messy and rude – not because any of these particular boys has ever shown any of these qualities to me, but because I had an innate wariness about combining that many male tweens and being responsible for them for eighteen hours.
But I needn’t have worried. Beyond not being any trouble, it was a delight to spend time with the four of them together. They played football in the driveway. My husband took them bowling and out for pizza. They played pool in our attic, raved about the ice cream pie I served after dinner, were kind (or at least exhibited an absence of unkindness) to Holly, played Wii into the wee hours, went to bed at the agreed-upon time (11, so not a huge sacrifice, but still), slept until 7, woke cheerful, raved about the pancakes and bacon I made for breakfast, trooped out to the barnyard to help me feed the cows and let out the sheep, worked on making a poster together, and packed their stuff up when it was time to leave.
They are great boys, and my son is so lucky to have such kind friends. Holly has wonderful friends too, and I feel fortunate on both of their behalves. So much rides upon the question of who your child makes friends with – and there’s so little a parent can do about it. Worst-case scenarios can have unthinkably awful consequences, but even middling scenarios can keep a parent awake at night, stressing out over a child’s dangerous liaisons. My children have both been lucky enough to find peers who are thoughtful, self-disciplined and generous.
That’s not to say we won’t face any friendship problems going forward. Tim already seems to be quite effective at deciding whom he wants to hang out with and whom he wants to stay away from, but Holly is immersed in more of a typical girlhood, and no doubt there will be drama along the way. In fact, I fully admit it’s likely she’ll be the one causing the drama sometimes. I try to teach her to be a good friend, but as Rosalind Wiseman writes about in Queen Bees and Wannabes, girls find their way into a quagmire of social issues despite our best intentions.
Be that as it may, right now I’m still ensconced in a cheerful glow from our wonderful weekend with Tim’s friends. They played outside; they left the bathroom neat; they didn’t keep anyone else awake at night. They complimented my cooking. (Ice cream pie and pancakes: you could argue that those are two can’t-misses, but still. They could have eaten and kept silent rather than complimenting.) Almost every day I feel grateful for my own kids. Today I feel additionally grateful for the terrific kids with whom my children surround themselves.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Tim telecommunicates
You know those times when a name pops up in the “from” column of your e-mail directory that makes you do a double-take? That happened to me yesterday. It wasn’t the name of a high school nemesis or a long-forgotten co-worker. It was my son Tim.
An e-mail from Tim? I thought to myself. It didn’t quite compute. I was at my desk beginning the last hour of my workday, and Tim was at school. Sure, I knew he had the capability of sending me e-mail; I was the one who had set up his account, just last weekend. I wasn’t really thinking at the time about how he would use it: mostly to send notes to his close friend who goes to a different school, I figured.
It didn’t occur to me that he might write to me. But when I opened the e-mail, I realized he had just gotten out of school for the day and was writing to me from the public library, his usual afterschool destination, to confirm with me what time I would pick him up there. How convenient, I thought. In the past, we’ve always had to finalize a pickup plan before he leaves for the bus at 7:30 in the morning. Now I was free to alter the plan just thirty minutes out, because Tim happened to be on e-mail and happened to have written to me.
We’re behind most families we know in terms of telecommunications and children. Most of Tim’s classmates have not only e-mail accounts but also cell phones, text-messaging capability and Facebook status. Last week when there were no computers available at the library for afterschool research, he and a friend pulled up Wikipedia on his friend’s iTouch. They’re all light years ahead of us. I’m still accustomed to making plans with Tim the old-fashioned way: deciding first thing in the morning when and where I’ll pick him up, and making it clear that he’d better be there.
But now he has e-mail, and in the very near future he’s likely to get his first cell phone, only because my husband needs an upgrade so probably each one of us will move one step up (I’ll get Rick’s outgrown one, which has advantages over mine in that it’s a flip phone and takes pictures, and Tim will get mine). This won’t exactly open up a world of technology to him: I have what I call the old-fashioned kind of cell phone, meaning all it does is make calls, and even those we pay 25 cents a minute for. Texting, not to mention the newer variations thereupon, won’t be an issue with my clunky old circa 2002 Nokia.
Objectively, it makes sense to me for Tim to have his own phone at this point. Like a lot of kids in our town, he likes to go to the library after school dismissal: he does his homework (that’s the rule if he’s not going to come straight home), then plays computer games for a little while and, as of yesterday, apparently checks his e-mail. I generally swing by to pick him up at the library an hour or so after school dismissal. It’s a casual plan that has worked well for the first two months of school.
Still, it will be a little easier once we can reach each other by phone to change or confirm pickup times. But I worry a little bit, with the phone and even the e-mail, that once I have the capability to track him down electronically, it will just become a problem for me when I can’t. If I rely on him to check his e-mail after school for changes in the pick-up plan, what if one day he doesn’t happen to want to check e-mail? As for the phone, I’ve reminded him several times that ringing cell phones are forbidden at both the library and at school, which means he’ll never embarrass himself by having it go off when it’s not supposed to, but it also means he’ll end up using it only when he wishes to turn it on. I can leave him a voicemail…but will he remember, or care, to check voicemail?
There’s no question that enhanced means of communication with Tim will be both an advantage and a disadvantage. During mild weather, he rides his bike to school and home. That’s definitely a situation in which I’ll feel a little better if he has a phone. But I can’t help thinking that providing ourselves with more agents of communication means simultaneously opening up the possibility of less communication, or at least proportionately less given the possibilities that will exist. What if I e-mail him, call him, and voicemail him – and he doesn’t respond? Won’t that leave me a lot more worried than if I didn’t have any way to get in touch in the first place?
We’ll get used to it, I’m sure. We’ll figure it out. Every other family does. But it’s still new to us, and I have no doubt it will take us some time to work out the details.
An e-mail from Tim? I thought to myself. It didn’t quite compute. I was at my desk beginning the last hour of my workday, and Tim was at school. Sure, I knew he had the capability of sending me e-mail; I was the one who had set up his account, just last weekend. I wasn’t really thinking at the time about how he would use it: mostly to send notes to his close friend who goes to a different school, I figured.
It didn’t occur to me that he might write to me. But when I opened the e-mail, I realized he had just gotten out of school for the day and was writing to me from the public library, his usual afterschool destination, to confirm with me what time I would pick him up there. How convenient, I thought. In the past, we’ve always had to finalize a pickup plan before he leaves for the bus at 7:30 in the morning. Now I was free to alter the plan just thirty minutes out, because Tim happened to be on e-mail and happened to have written to me.
We’re behind most families we know in terms of telecommunications and children. Most of Tim’s classmates have not only e-mail accounts but also cell phones, text-messaging capability and Facebook status. Last week when there were no computers available at the library for afterschool research, he and a friend pulled up Wikipedia on his friend’s iTouch. They’re all light years ahead of us. I’m still accustomed to making plans with Tim the old-fashioned way: deciding first thing in the morning when and where I’ll pick him up, and making it clear that he’d better be there.
But now he has e-mail, and in the very near future he’s likely to get his first cell phone, only because my husband needs an upgrade so probably each one of us will move one step up (I’ll get Rick’s outgrown one, which has advantages over mine in that it’s a flip phone and takes pictures, and Tim will get mine). This won’t exactly open up a world of technology to him: I have what I call the old-fashioned kind of cell phone, meaning all it does is make calls, and even those we pay 25 cents a minute for. Texting, not to mention the newer variations thereupon, won’t be an issue with my clunky old circa 2002 Nokia.
Objectively, it makes sense to me for Tim to have his own phone at this point. Like a lot of kids in our town, he likes to go to the library after school dismissal: he does his homework (that’s the rule if he’s not going to come straight home), then plays computer games for a little while and, as of yesterday, apparently checks his e-mail. I generally swing by to pick him up at the library an hour or so after school dismissal. It’s a casual plan that has worked well for the first two months of school.
Still, it will be a little easier once we can reach each other by phone to change or confirm pickup times. But I worry a little bit, with the phone and even the e-mail, that once I have the capability to track him down electronically, it will just become a problem for me when I can’t. If I rely on him to check his e-mail after school for changes in the pick-up plan, what if one day he doesn’t happen to want to check e-mail? As for the phone, I’ve reminded him several times that ringing cell phones are forbidden at both the library and at school, which means he’ll never embarrass himself by having it go off when it’s not supposed to, but it also means he’ll end up using it only when he wishes to turn it on. I can leave him a voicemail…but will he remember, or care, to check voicemail?
There’s no question that enhanced means of communication with Tim will be both an advantage and a disadvantage. During mild weather, he rides his bike to school and home. That’s definitely a situation in which I’ll feel a little better if he has a phone. But I can’t help thinking that providing ourselves with more agents of communication means simultaneously opening up the possibility of less communication, or at least proportionately less given the possibilities that will exist. What if I e-mail him, call him, and voicemail him – and he doesn’t respond? Won’t that leave me a lot more worried than if I didn’t have any way to get in touch in the first place?
We’ll get used to it, I’m sure. We’ll figure it out. Every other family does. But it’s still new to us, and I have no doubt it will take us some time to work out the details.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Tim and me - Live on NPR!
Admitting this may irredeemably brand me as a nerd, but I have to confess it nonetheless: being interviewed by an NPR personality was a truly thrilling experience for me. The broadcast aired today, and I’m pleased to say I’ve listened to it from start to finish only once. It’s not the sound of my own voice that brings me such delight; it was the interview process itself. Today I get to have my fifteen minutes of micro-fame – after all, this is NPR, not Oprah – but it was the taping two weeks ago that really caused my heart to sing.
This is for two reasons. The first is the same reason that probably most NPR interview subjects are happy to be on the air, especially those in feature stories like this one. It’s just really gratifying to have someone take an interest in something we’ve done. Tim and I embarked on a daily running challenge in August 2007; for the next two years, we both ran a mile or more every single day, usually together though sometimes separately. When Tim gave up the streak after exactly two years, we had logged a total of 732 consecutive days of daily miles. During that time, we struggled through snow, ice, heat waves, thunderstorms, arguments, and chest colds, but I never imagined that someday an NPR personality whom I listened to daily during the four years he was broadcasting from Boston would be asking me about it.
And Tim, though he’s not the NPR fanatic I am, knew this was something special too. After all, he got to leave school two hours early for our taping session at the WGBH studios in Boston last month, and when I gave the reason as “media appearance,” his teachers asked him about it. He doesn’t have the same reverence for NPR figures that I do, but he still felt honored – as anyone would -- that someone was asking him about himself.
But for me, the second reason this was such a thrill is more specific to my situation. I’m a journalist myself, and the bulk of my portfolio comprises stories like these: human interest stories about interesting people doing unusual things. But I’m always, always, the one asking the questions. Until now. I make a living taking an interest in asking other people questions about their lives, and I genuinely enjoy it. I wouldn’t be in the field otherwise.
At the same time, there’s always a tiny part of me that feels like no one ever asks about me. I like to imagine an apocryphal New Yorker cartoon featuring my professional role model, Terry Gross, attending a cocktail party at which someone innocently says to her “I want to tell you about this great project I’m involved in” and Terry snaps, “Oh no, tonight it’s all about ME!”
I’ve heard that Terry Gross actually doesn’t like to be interviewed at all, and submits to interviews reluctantly only when she’s promoting one of her own books. I’d like to think I’m equally modest, far more interested in hearing about other people than talking about myself. But in this case, first when we were interviewed two weeks ago and then hearing the broadcast today (okay, and admittedly, then sending out the podcast link to the 200 people at the top of my personal contacts e-mail list), it’s only fair to confess that I really loved the switcheroo, the chance to be the one graciously thanking the interviewer as I attempted to answer questions with clever sound bites and evocative descriptions.
Tomorrow it’s back to being the one asking the questions. I have four interview stories to conduct over the next week. One is with a shop owner, one a champion in the sport of orienteering, one an opera librettist and I’ve already forgotten what the fourth is. Oh, right, a woman who started a public service organization in Rwanda. Which is way cooler and more important than going running every day for a year. But today I got to sit on the other side of the counter for a change, and let me just admit it outright one last time: What a thrill.
This is for two reasons. The first is the same reason that probably most NPR interview subjects are happy to be on the air, especially those in feature stories like this one. It’s just really gratifying to have someone take an interest in something we’ve done. Tim and I embarked on a daily running challenge in August 2007; for the next two years, we both ran a mile or more every single day, usually together though sometimes separately. When Tim gave up the streak after exactly two years, we had logged a total of 732 consecutive days of daily miles. During that time, we struggled through snow, ice, heat waves, thunderstorms, arguments, and chest colds, but I never imagined that someday an NPR personality whom I listened to daily during the four years he was broadcasting from Boston would be asking me about it.
And Tim, though he’s not the NPR fanatic I am, knew this was something special too. After all, he got to leave school two hours early for our taping session at the WGBH studios in Boston last month, and when I gave the reason as “media appearance,” his teachers asked him about it. He doesn’t have the same reverence for NPR figures that I do, but he still felt honored – as anyone would -- that someone was asking him about himself.
But for me, the second reason this was such a thrill is more specific to my situation. I’m a journalist myself, and the bulk of my portfolio comprises stories like these: human interest stories about interesting people doing unusual things. But I’m always, always, the one asking the questions. Until now. I make a living taking an interest in asking other people questions about their lives, and I genuinely enjoy it. I wouldn’t be in the field otherwise.
At the same time, there’s always a tiny part of me that feels like no one ever asks about me. I like to imagine an apocryphal New Yorker cartoon featuring my professional role model, Terry Gross, attending a cocktail party at which someone innocently says to her “I want to tell you about this great project I’m involved in” and Terry snaps, “Oh no, tonight it’s all about ME!”
I’ve heard that Terry Gross actually doesn’t like to be interviewed at all, and submits to interviews reluctantly only when she’s promoting one of her own books. I’d like to think I’m equally modest, far more interested in hearing about other people than talking about myself. But in this case, first when we were interviewed two weeks ago and then hearing the broadcast today (okay, and admittedly, then sending out the podcast link to the 200 people at the top of my personal contacts e-mail list), it’s only fair to confess that I really loved the switcheroo, the chance to be the one graciously thanking the interviewer as I attempted to answer questions with clever sound bites and evocative descriptions.
Tomorrow it’s back to being the one asking the questions. I have four interview stories to conduct over the next week. One is with a shop owner, one a champion in the sport of orienteering, one an opera librettist and I’ve already forgotten what the fourth is. Oh, right, a woman who started a public service organization in Rwanda. Which is way cooler and more important than going running every day for a year. But today I got to sit on the other side of the counter for a change, and let me just admit it outright one last time: What a thrill.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Reading aloud
The Frugal Mama blog devotes today’s post to a useful reminder about the importance of reading to children. As Amy writes, it’s free, it’s fun, and it’s really the best investment of recreational time you can possibly make with your kids.
Amy’s post outlines a recent talk she attended by a childhood literacy expert who not only talked about reading but also offered numerous variations on the theme: that is, literacy-related activities, such as making up rhymes or writing letters, that go beyond the traditional reading-a-story-together scenario.
My children, at ages 7 and 11, are both able to read to themselves, so it’s interesting to see how reading aloud fits into their development at this point. Like plenty of kids his age, Tim, in fifth grade, has essentially the habits of an adult reader: he chooses his own books at the library or bookstore and reads them to himself. But when I’m reading to Holly, I’m often amused to see him sidling into the room to listen. When we were reading the Little House on the Prairie series last year, he seemed to show up frequently during reading time, and sometimes he’d ask me questions about the books. It’s not a series he would have chosen to read on his own – too girlie and too young for me, he would have said – but the allure of hearing me read the stories proved irresistible much of the time.
For Holly, being read to is still an nonnegotiable part of her evening routine. Now that she chooses chapter books, sometimes she’ll continue on her own after I tell her it’s time to go to bed – she’s generally allowed to keep the light on to read for another 15 minutes or so – and then she takes great pains the next night to update me on any plot development that I missed, but she also usually then decides to backtrack and have me read aloud the same chapters she read. It’s important to remember that kids love to hear their parents read even after they can read on their own, and it’s not uncommon for children to resist learning to read – or at least to resist admitting that they’ve learned – because they fear it will mean subsequently losing the ritual of having their parents read to them.
Recently Holly’s love of reading has transitioned rapidly into a fascination with writing. Now, beyond the school writing assignments she’s had ever since kindergarten, she’s been spending a lot of time at home writing stories. For a while she was writing on small squares of paper and stapling them together into little books; then I came up with the idea of starting her own blog on which she could post her stories. This gave her the thrill of seeing her work in what looked like published form, and also made it easy for her to brag about – I mean share – her stories with her grandparents, teachers, aunts and other interested in parties. (Re. security, I set the blog settings to private and non-searchable, so it’s very unlikely that a stranger will happen across her work.)
Then last month she undertook a more complicated task. She decided to write a chapter book. More specifically, she decided to dictate to me a chapter book. Where once we would spend 30 minutes or so reading together before bed, the new ritual is that she lies on the floor under my desk, gazing up at me and spinning the adventures of Louise the Writer out of her imagination. It’s not bad stuff, though I don’t think she’s any Mozart of the written word. Though derivative in parts – some aspects of Louise’s life, including the protagonist’s name, correlate undeniably to the fact that we recently started reading Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh – there are some very clever and original aspects as well. In the chapter Holly wrote last night, Louise’s father gets fired from his job as a kennel manager and confesses to the family that what he really wants is to try his hand at being a plumber.
I was a little concerned when it came time for Holly to fill out her weekly reading log for school last night. I hadn’t realized that our work on “Louise the Writer” had detracted significantly from the time we normally spend reading. When Holly saw the gaps in her reading log, she filled in the name of her own book, listing herself as author, so that it wouldn’t look to her teacher like she’d been sitting idle.
I’m hoping we manage soon to re-integrate nightly reading into our schedule, since I don’t think writing her own book should be a substitute for Holly’s reading habits. Good writers do both: write a lot but also read a lot. Otherwise we writers would be boring. As Amy points out in her blog post, reading aloud is the best way to start a lifelong appreciation for books, words, reading, speaking, and writing. And it’s good for all of us to find more time to do it.
Amy’s post outlines a recent talk she attended by a childhood literacy expert who not only talked about reading but also offered numerous variations on the theme: that is, literacy-related activities, such as making up rhymes or writing letters, that go beyond the traditional reading-a-story-together scenario.
My children, at ages 7 and 11, are both able to read to themselves, so it’s interesting to see how reading aloud fits into their development at this point. Like plenty of kids his age, Tim, in fifth grade, has essentially the habits of an adult reader: he chooses his own books at the library or bookstore and reads them to himself. But when I’m reading to Holly, I’m often amused to see him sidling into the room to listen. When we were reading the Little House on the Prairie series last year, he seemed to show up frequently during reading time, and sometimes he’d ask me questions about the books. It’s not a series he would have chosen to read on his own – too girlie and too young for me, he would have said – but the allure of hearing me read the stories proved irresistible much of the time.
For Holly, being read to is still an nonnegotiable part of her evening routine. Now that she chooses chapter books, sometimes she’ll continue on her own after I tell her it’s time to go to bed – she’s generally allowed to keep the light on to read for another 15 minutes or so – and then she takes great pains the next night to update me on any plot development that I missed, but she also usually then decides to backtrack and have me read aloud the same chapters she read. It’s important to remember that kids love to hear their parents read even after they can read on their own, and it’s not uncommon for children to resist learning to read – or at least to resist admitting that they’ve learned – because they fear it will mean subsequently losing the ritual of having their parents read to them.
Recently Holly’s love of reading has transitioned rapidly into a fascination with writing. Now, beyond the school writing assignments she’s had ever since kindergarten, she’s been spending a lot of time at home writing stories. For a while she was writing on small squares of paper and stapling them together into little books; then I came up with the idea of starting her own blog on which she could post her stories. This gave her the thrill of seeing her work in what looked like published form, and also made it easy for her to brag about – I mean share – her stories with her grandparents, teachers, aunts and other interested in parties. (Re. security, I set the blog settings to private and non-searchable, so it’s very unlikely that a stranger will happen across her work.)
Then last month she undertook a more complicated task. She decided to write a chapter book. More specifically, she decided to dictate to me a chapter book. Where once we would spend 30 minutes or so reading together before bed, the new ritual is that she lies on the floor under my desk, gazing up at me and spinning the adventures of Louise the Writer out of her imagination. It’s not bad stuff, though I don’t think she’s any Mozart of the written word. Though derivative in parts – some aspects of Louise’s life, including the protagonist’s name, correlate undeniably to the fact that we recently started reading Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh – there are some very clever and original aspects as well. In the chapter Holly wrote last night, Louise’s father gets fired from his job as a kennel manager and confesses to the family that what he really wants is to try his hand at being a plumber.
I was a little concerned when it came time for Holly to fill out her weekly reading log for school last night. I hadn’t realized that our work on “Louise the Writer” had detracted significantly from the time we normally spend reading. When Holly saw the gaps in her reading log, she filled in the name of her own book, listing herself as author, so that it wouldn’t look to her teacher like she’d been sitting idle.
I’m hoping we manage soon to re-integrate nightly reading into our schedule, since I don’t think writing her own book should be a substitute for Holly’s reading habits. Good writers do both: write a lot but also read a lot. Otherwise we writers would be boring. As Amy points out in her blog post, reading aloud is the best way to start a lifelong appreciation for books, words, reading, speaking, and writing. And it’s good for all of us to find more time to do it.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
End of daylight saving time
The end of daylight saving time receives a mixed welcome in our household.
My husband Rick considers the day in April when we turn the clocks ahead to be the best day of the year. He loves the extra daylight after dinner. For him, it means the start of warm sunlit evenings at the baseball field, even though we often have chilly weather and plenty of rain right into early May and beyond. So he scowls every year when I remind him about turning the clocks back. He sees no advantage to early nightfall.
Tim doesn’t like the end of daylight saving time either, although he won’t (or can’t) articulate it the way Rick does. For years, Rick and I have suspected that Tim suffers from a mild form of Seasonal Affective Disorder. His reaction to the diminishing daylight is that strong. Every year, as the dusky late afternoons arrive, he seems to melt into the arm of the playroom couch as if becoming invisible, pale as the couch’s grayish-white upholstery. The onset of winter incites crankiness and a morose bearing in Tim. One reason I coaxed him to try running daily with me three years ago was to see if we could offset the response he had annually to the dwindling sunlight. It didn’t help much in that regard, though. It’s still early this year to judge his response to turning the clocks back, but so far I don’t notice as much of a setback as usual. Maybe he’s starting to outgrow his sunlight-dependent mood swings.
I fall toward, though not all the way at, the other end of the spectrum from Rick and Tim when it comes to the end of daylight saving time. True, the late-autumn and early-winter nights can seem very dark around here. But I also find something helpful in the early darkness: it seems to cue us into early-evening mode a little earlier and a little more naturally. When the daylight lasts well into the evening, it’s always harder to ramp down at the end of the day: hard to make fast rules about bedtime or quiet time when the sun is still high in the sky at eight o’clock.
In the fall, we have the opposite effect. Seeing the daylight start to fade at 4:30
reminds me that it’s time for homework and dinner preparation. Yesterday, though Tim complained briefly about the early sunset, it worked out well for us; from about 4:30until dinner, Holly played school and Tim did his homework while I thought about what to make for dinner. At other times of year, although Holly would probably still be playing school at that hour (other kids come home from second grade and tell their parents about their day; Holly reenacts the whole thing in a fictional version, and in real time), Tim would likely be at a baseball practice and I’d be having trouble focusing on end-of-day responsibilities as well.
The extra daylight in the early morning helps me, too, though I know it won’t last long. For weeks, I’d been getting up in total darkness at 5:45 AM, turning on the outside lights to let the dog out, turning on Tim’s bedside lamp at 7 to wake him up for school. Now it’s already starting to brighten outside when I get up before 6, and the kids don’t need extra cues to know it’s time to get up when I go to wake them; they can see the broad daylight.
Of course, the best part of the end of daylight saving time is the extra hour. I treasure that, and this year more than ever before because it was found-time in its purest form this time around. All day Saturday, with the excitement of Halloween, I forgot about turning the clocks back. Not until I crawled under the covers at 11 PM on Saturday night did I remember about resetting the clocks. And by then it was too late to get out of bed. If I’d remembered a half-hour earlier, at 10:30, I would have said “Oh good, it’s only nine-thirty” and squandered the extra hour on Twitter or folding laundry, not using it for extra sleep at all, which was what I most needed this weekend. Because I forgot about it until I was in bed, sleep was the only way to use it.
So I started the post-daylight saving season this year with an extra hour of much-needed sleep. Rick is dealing with it, and Tim hasn’t gone into too much of a seasonal slump yet. Holly doesn’t notice daylight saving time either way; she carries her sunshine internally and doesn’t seem to have much of a relationship with the natural world. So come five o’clock, we’ll turn on the lights, start making dinner and hunker down together like hibernating bears, ready for cold weather and the approaching winter with its long, dark nights, and us cozy and warm in our well-lit home.
My husband Rick considers the day in April when we turn the clocks ahead to be the best day of the year. He loves the extra daylight after dinner. For him, it means the start of warm sunlit evenings at the baseball field, even though we often have chilly weather and plenty of rain right into early May and beyond. So he scowls every year when I remind him about turning the clocks back. He sees no advantage to early nightfall.
Tim doesn’t like the end of daylight saving time either, although he won’t (or can’t) articulate it the way Rick does. For years, Rick and I have suspected that Tim suffers from a mild form of Seasonal Affective Disorder. His reaction to the diminishing daylight is that strong. Every year, as the dusky late afternoons arrive, he seems to melt into the arm of the playroom couch as if becoming invisible, pale as the couch’s grayish-white upholstery. The onset of winter incites crankiness and a morose bearing in Tim. One reason I coaxed him to try running daily with me three years ago was to see if we could offset the response he had annually to the dwindling sunlight. It didn’t help much in that regard, though. It’s still early this year to judge his response to turning the clocks back, but so far I don’t notice as much of a setback as usual. Maybe he’s starting to outgrow his sunlight-dependent mood swings.
I fall toward, though not all the way at, the other end of the spectrum from Rick and Tim when it comes to the end of daylight saving time. True, the late-autumn and early-winter nights can seem very dark around here. But I also find something helpful in the early darkness: it seems to cue us into early-evening mode a little earlier and a little more naturally. When the daylight lasts well into the evening, it’s always harder to ramp down at the end of the day: hard to make fast rules about bedtime or quiet time when the sun is still high in the sky at eight o’clock.
In the fall, we have the opposite effect. Seeing the daylight start to fade at 4:30
reminds me that it’s time for homework and dinner preparation. Yesterday, though Tim complained briefly about the early sunset, it worked out well for us; from about 4:30until dinner, Holly played school and Tim did his homework while I thought about what to make for dinner. At other times of year, although Holly would probably still be playing school at that hour (other kids come home from second grade and tell their parents about their day; Holly reenacts the whole thing in a fictional version, and in real time), Tim would likely be at a baseball practice and I’d be having trouble focusing on end-of-day responsibilities as well.
The extra daylight in the early morning helps me, too, though I know it won’t last long. For weeks, I’d been getting up in total darkness at 5:45 AM, turning on the outside lights to let the dog out, turning on Tim’s bedside lamp at 7 to wake him up for school. Now it’s already starting to brighten outside when I get up before 6, and the kids don’t need extra cues to know it’s time to get up when I go to wake them; they can see the broad daylight.
Of course, the best part of the end of daylight saving time is the extra hour. I treasure that, and this year more than ever before because it was found-time in its purest form this time around. All day Saturday, with the excitement of Halloween, I forgot about turning the clocks back. Not until I crawled under the covers at 11 PM on Saturday night did I remember about resetting the clocks. And by then it was too late to get out of bed. If I’d remembered a half-hour earlier, at 10:30, I would have said “Oh good, it’s only nine-thirty” and squandered the extra hour on Twitter or folding laundry, not using it for extra sleep at all, which was what I most needed this weekend. Because I forgot about it until I was in bed, sleep was the only way to use it.
So I started the post-daylight saving season this year with an extra hour of much-needed sleep. Rick is dealing with it, and Tim hasn’t gone into too much of a seasonal slump yet. Holly doesn’t notice daylight saving time either way; she carries her sunshine internally and doesn’t seem to have much of a relationship with the natural world. So come five o’clock, we’ll turn on the lights, start making dinner and hunker down together like hibernating bears, ready for cold weather and the approaching winter with its long, dark nights, and us cozy and warm in our well-lit home.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Keeping the Sabbath
Recently our minister gave a sermon on the topic of keeping the Sabbath, a tradition that dates back to the opening pages of the Old Testament. Our minister rather humorously described the evolution over the past four generations from “the Holy Sabbath” to “the Sabbath” to “Sunday” to “the second half of the weekend.”
I think often about how best to organize my time. For me right now, the challenge is not getting necessary tasks done but fitting in downtime, specifically downtime for reading. I have mentioned often that for me, the symbol of luxury where time management is concerned is reading the Sunday New York Times. If I get through the Times before the next Sunday’s edition arrives, I feel that I’ve been generous with myself, and fit a little decadence into my week. Most weeks, this doesn’t happen. I fit in everything else – housekeeping, cooking, time for my children and my husband, writing and other forms of work, exercise, community involvement, visits with friends – but the one item I never seem to get to is whatever I would do if I didn’t have to be doing anything else.
So over the past several years, I’ve given some thought to how I can create a Sabbath for myself. I’m not looking for a full day of rest; I’m trying to figure out the best way to ritualize a small pocket of time every week when I’m not writing, exercising, housekeeping or focusing on anyone else’s agenda. That’s not to say I need to be alone; I love the idea of a family reading hour, or – as happens frequently during the summer – finding my time while watching the kids swim or play on the playground. The point is just to find time that’s free of all my usual daily list items.
In the past, Sunday afternoons have seemed like a good time to try to do this, and so have Sunday evenings. But the more I think about it, the more I feel like I need to be fluid in my definition of Sabbath. Maybe it isn’t even Sunday. But beyond than that, maybe it’s not a singular event. Maybe Sabbath – time of rest – can be best defined not by what I'm doing but what I’m taking time off from doing.
For example, I always try to be done with housework by dinnertime on Sunday; it just seems too much like drudgery to be scrubbing countertops and vacuuming in the final hours of the weekend. But that’s often when I sit down to the deskwork I didn’t do the previous work week.
Moreover, I’ve often acknowledged to myself that I could have more downtime on weekends if I did some of the housework during the week – but I feel strongly about preserving my weekdays, when the kids are off at school for seven hours at a stretch, for writing and other tasks related to my professional life. If I am to consider myself a nearly full-time freelancer, as I do, I have to use weekdays for work, not for housecleaning.
As far as errands, in general I fit those in after the kids get home from school, because then I don’t feel like the driving-around part of the day is eating into my writing time. My daughter usually opts to come with me, so it’s a chance for us to be together for us as well. I used to be opposed to highly opposed to shopping on Sundays: again, to me that was an important part of the traditional Sabbath model. But recently, to my surprise, I’ve found myself in something of a shopping mood on Sunday afternoons. It’s not like we’re hitting the mall or the big box stores (though I don’t know why I say that judgmentally, as if my kind of shopping somehow has more integrity that that); it’s that Sunday afternoons recently have found me happy to take a leisurely stroll through Whole Foods or an unhurried trip to the drugstore. Yesterday, my daughter and I had fun together perusing the post-Halloween shelf for items to send in a care package to my niece, who unfortunately was sick and couldn’t go out on Halloween this year. CVS on a Sunday – by choice and not necessity? By a traditional Sabbath model, or even by my previous standards, that would sound heretical. Yet I liked the mellow pace of it, knowing we were in the middle of a free afternoon and could take our time as we examined the witch candles and plush black cats.
So now I’m starting to think Sabbath might, at least for now, mean more a state of mind for me than an hour of the week. It’s reading the newspaper during Sunday afternoon football; it’s focusing on writing while ignoring the laundry on a Tuesday morning; it’s shutting down my computer on a Saturday morning so that I can throw myself into housework without the temptation of checking my e-mail. Keeping the Sabbath is a good idea, and I do suspect for me it will continue to be an evolving model. Someday I might devote entire Sundays to reading or spending recreational time with my children and be somewhat appalled to think I ever used to buy socks on Sunday afternoons. But for now, this works.
I think often about how best to organize my time. For me right now, the challenge is not getting necessary tasks done but fitting in downtime, specifically downtime for reading. I have mentioned often that for me, the symbol of luxury where time management is concerned is reading the Sunday New York Times. If I get through the Times before the next Sunday’s edition arrives, I feel that I’ve been generous with myself, and fit a little decadence into my week. Most weeks, this doesn’t happen. I fit in everything else – housekeeping, cooking, time for my children and my husband, writing and other forms of work, exercise, community involvement, visits with friends – but the one item I never seem to get to is whatever I would do if I didn’t have to be doing anything else.
So over the past several years, I’ve given some thought to how I can create a Sabbath for myself. I’m not looking for a full day of rest; I’m trying to figure out the best way to ritualize a small pocket of time every week when I’m not writing, exercising, housekeeping or focusing on anyone else’s agenda. That’s not to say I need to be alone; I love the idea of a family reading hour, or – as happens frequently during the summer – finding my time while watching the kids swim or play on the playground. The point is just to find time that’s free of all my usual daily list items.
In the past, Sunday afternoons have seemed like a good time to try to do this, and so have Sunday evenings. But the more I think about it, the more I feel like I need to be fluid in my definition of Sabbath. Maybe it isn’t even Sunday. But beyond than that, maybe it’s not a singular event. Maybe Sabbath – time of rest – can be best defined not by what I'm doing but what I’m taking time off from doing.
For example, I always try to be done with housework by dinnertime on Sunday; it just seems too much like drudgery to be scrubbing countertops and vacuuming in the final hours of the weekend. But that’s often when I sit down to the deskwork I didn’t do the previous work week.
Moreover, I’ve often acknowledged to myself that I could have more downtime on weekends if I did some of the housework during the week – but I feel strongly about preserving my weekdays, when the kids are off at school for seven hours at a stretch, for writing and other tasks related to my professional life. If I am to consider myself a nearly full-time freelancer, as I do, I have to use weekdays for work, not for housecleaning.
As far as errands, in general I fit those in after the kids get home from school, because then I don’t feel like the driving-around part of the day is eating into my writing time. My daughter usually opts to come with me, so it’s a chance for us to be together for us as well. I used to be opposed to highly opposed to shopping on Sundays: again, to me that was an important part of the traditional Sabbath model. But recently, to my surprise, I’ve found myself in something of a shopping mood on Sunday afternoons. It’s not like we’re hitting the mall or the big box stores (though I don’t know why I say that judgmentally, as if my kind of shopping somehow has more integrity that that); it’s that Sunday afternoons recently have found me happy to take a leisurely stroll through Whole Foods or an unhurried trip to the drugstore. Yesterday, my daughter and I had fun together perusing the post-Halloween shelf for items to send in a care package to my niece, who unfortunately was sick and couldn’t go out on Halloween this year. CVS on a Sunday – by choice and not necessity? By a traditional Sabbath model, or even by my previous standards, that would sound heretical. Yet I liked the mellow pace of it, knowing we were in the middle of a free afternoon and could take our time as we examined the witch candles and plush black cats.
So now I’m starting to think Sabbath might, at least for now, mean more a state of mind for me than an hour of the week. It’s reading the newspaper during Sunday afternoon football; it’s focusing on writing while ignoring the laundry on a Tuesday morning; it’s shutting down my computer on a Saturday morning so that I can throw myself into housework without the temptation of checking my e-mail. Keeping the Sabbath is a good idea, and I do suspect for me it will continue to be an evolving model. Someday I might devote entire Sundays to reading or spending recreational time with my children and be somewhat appalled to think I ever used to buy socks on Sunday afternoons. But for now, this works.
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