A beautiful evening for baseball

Sunday was a beautiful evening for watching a baseball game.

Except that I wasn't really thinking about watching a baseball game, despite the fact that I had driven 25 minutes to reach the field, and toted along a fold-up chair, hats for my daughter Holly and me, salad and strawberries to contribute to a picnic, and a picnic blanket.

I was thinking about how I'd managed to vacuum only half the house. I was thinking about what time I'd need to get Holly to day camp the next morning and whether the schedule would enable me to reach my office on time. I was thinking about why the washing machine had mysteriously turned itself off in the middle of a rinse cycle, and when I could be home for a service visit if the washing machine didn't resuscitate itself in the morning. I was thinking about how many more games were left before Tim's summer league ended, and whether I'd submitted all the paperwork in order for him to start driver's ed next week. And I was thinking, as I always do during baseball games, about whether any of us in the stands or whether any of the players on the field were likely to get beaned by a fastball and sustain a brain-threatening injury.

And just as it looked like a win was within easy reach, the other team tied the game and it went into extra innings.

All of which almost made me overlook the fact that it was such a beautiful evening for a baseball game.

By 6:30, the edges of the field were bathed in shade. My parents had arrived earlier and claimed a wide swath of grass for our picnic. I'd taken time at home to hull the strawberries, and they were tender, sweet, and room temperature, just the way I like them best. Holly was excited about the start of camp. Tim was pitching with an air of assurance, whether merited or not.

It was the last weekend of June, and the whole summer still lay ahead....and yet as I watched the extra innings begin, in hopes of a prompt and easy tie-breaker, I realized the sense of limitless time was an illusion. The baseball season would indeed end, but more changes would follow. Holly would soon be old enough to make her own plans on a summer evening, plans which very likely would not include her brother's baseball games. By the time a new baseball season rolls around, Tim will be able to drive himself to the field. My parents won't be here to picnic with us forever either.

It's strange to have a sense of things ending just as the summer is beginning, but sitting there watching the game made me ever more aware of how much that game was like my life itself. So many details to keep track of -- details involving household maintenance, employment, health, finances -- but also so much to enjoy. And, too, so much to worry about: an errant pitch slamming into an eye or skull and changing everything; a bad decision about which side street to take on the way home.

Life is short, I reminded myself as the game entered yet another tied inning. Summer is short. The baseball season is short. Even the strawberry season is short. This abundance of blessings -- family, food, health, security -- all of this could, and in some ways inevitably will, pass.

There were still a couple of tied innings left for me to savor, and I stopped thinking about the malfunctioning washing machine and upcoming deadlines and paid attention to baseball. Tim's team lost, but that didn’t matter. We had a wonderful time. It turned out to be not only a beautiful evening but a perfect one.

Last day of school

I haven’t made presents for the kids’ teachers or picked up a gift card for the bus driver. Our month hasn’t included a single classroom visit for student poetry readings or choral presentations. No one has handed me a paper bag overflowing with art projects to somehow find room for around the house or in the basement.

So in some ways, it doesn’t quite feel like the last day of school. All those rituals of the earlier years seem to have tapered off. The kids have written their own end-of-year thankyou notes to their teachers without much prompting from me, and other parents have assured me that bus driver gifts are not typical in high school. Holly has described to me a couple of her final projects, and Tim is studying hard for exams, so I’ll just have to trust them that these are the end-of-year rituals that mark middle school and high school.

Despite the relative lack of fanfare, it’s good to see the school year drawing to a close, not because it wasn’t a fine year for all of us but because I can’t help feeling a twinge of victory at having pulled it off.

As this year began, I had so many apprehensions. High school was a whole new world to us, and I fretted over everything from how Tim would ever get to the bus stop for the pre-dawn, 6:40 a.m. pick-up to how I would learn to navigate the online parental communication system that offers parents information on grades, absences, and all other critical details of which we should be keeping track.

And even though middle school felt like a known quantity for us, I knew it would be different for Holly than for Tim, and wondered whether she would continue having secure friendships and keep up reliably with her homework.

But somehow it all worked out. Tim proved himself able to wake up at 5:30 a.m., shower, and make his own breakfast in order to be ready for a ride to the bus stop by 6:30. He interacted with new teachers whom I didn’t know and met kids different from those he’d gone to school with since kindergarten. He joined the freshman football team, made a few new friends, and earned High Academic Honors for the year. Holly wrote short stories, executed science projects, researched Afghanistan, helped to organize a fundraiser, and even joined the Ultimate Frisbee team.

I’m grateful that it was a safe and happy school year, given that school years have the potential to be neither safe nor happy. Yet I’m not sorry to see it ending, especially as the snow days last winter gave us plenty of extra time to enjoy the school year as it drew out through the end of June. Even though my own vacation from work doesn’t come until well into August, I’ll get plenty of enjoyment out of the kids’ time off from school. No bag lunches to prepare; no paperwork to fill out for their field trips and activities; and best of all, no more pre-5 a.m. wake-ups for me until September.

When I was my kids’ age, I loved the feeling of leaving school at the end of the year. I never imagined it could be nearly as fun for an adult to see the school year end. And maybe it’s not quite the same. But it’s pretty good. Even if I won’t have the long lazy summer days of reading or hanging out with friends that my kids can now choose to enjoy, I’ll still benefit from the change of pace. And from the contented recollections of a great school year gone by.

Blog-cation

On a blog vacation while attending the Aspen Summer Words writers' conference. Back next week!

30 years after graduation

It seems to me there are people who love attending high school reunions and people who wouldn’t dream of attending a high school reunion, and I know plenty of each.

I fall into the first group, although maybe not with quite so much fervent enthusiasm as some people do. I just always find high school reunions fun, and my 30^th, this past weekend, was no exception. Despite what you see in movies like “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” no one actually goes to a reunion to be mean or snarky or exclusive. That makes for good Hollywood, but it doesn’t really happen that way. People go to reunions specifically because they want to re-unite. Simply being together is the main thing that happens at reunions.

True, there is reminiscing, and joking, and in some cases maybe just a touch of reinventing reality. But more than anything else, there’s a shared spirit, a sense that we are together because….well, because we were together at another time in our lives, and it feels somehow like fulfilling a mission to close this particular circle again every few years.

As I see it, reunion moments take on two different forms. The first form is the nostalgia: “Remember when we…” and “How did that evening end when we…” and “What were we thinking when we decided to...” The second form is the connecting in the moment, the process of not just recalling who everyone once was but finding out who everyone turned into. While there were probably many moments of reminiscing in between the group dinners and other organized events of this past weekend’s reunion, it was more notable how much mingling was going on. People were going way beyond their teenage circle of friends, and presumably talking about the present, or the years that have led up to the present.

It makes sense to me, because while remembering old times is often fun, I find exploring current times to be a lot more interesting. Now well into our forties, we have so much to talk about, no matter how well we did or did not know each other thirty years ago. We talk about careers and career changes, children or childlessness, aging parents or deceased parents, good decisions, bad decisions, serious illness or brushes with the law.

As it happens, this was our first reunion that marked the death of a classmate – or actually two. Our class had been blessed with unusually good luck in that regard; while all the classes around ours had suffered their share of early tragedies, our class had stayed intact for 27 whole years after graduation, and then two losses came within one year.

It’s a sobering reminder that every time we gather in five-year increments from here forward, there may be fewer of us. But it’s also a reminder of how essential it is to gather. We talk, and we listen, and we learn. I’m making the reunion sound somber, and it certainly wasn’t that. The late-night revelry I didn’t stay up for was presumably far more rowdy than the cocktail parties and dinners I attended, but even those felt festive and celebratory. And they should. Reunions are about reuniting. It is good to be together again, for no better reason than to celebrate our shared existence.

Back to school - but not all that often, anymore

I had a mid-afternoon meeting at the kids’ school yesterday.

Except it’s not even the kids’ school anymore. I just say that from habit. It’s Holly’s school now; Tim has already been gone for nearly a year. His school is eight miles away, on a campus on which I still have to ask for directions to get anywhere except the main office or the auditorium.

But most of the time directions aren’t required because most of the time I’m not there, trying to find anything. Parents aren’t particularly needed on a high school campus; the administration and students together manage to pretty much run the show without us.

And it seems parents are needed a lot less at the lower school these days as well, although I know that’s not really true. From my friends with kids in the early elementary grades, I know that parents are still checking in and out of the office all day long to volunteer in the school library or run lines for the kindergarten play or chaperone a field trip to Boston.

But Holly is in middle school now, and even though it’s the same campus as the elementary school, my days as a weekly if not daily presence there are over.

So sitting in the brand-new conference room in the building that didn’t even exist when Holly was a grade schooler felt both familiar and strange to me yesterday afternoon. Watching the kindergarteners pass by outside the windows in a jagged line, some holding hands, some skipping, some distractedly shuffling, reminded me of every time I’d ever craned for a peek at my own kids’ classes passing by outside the window while I pretended to pay attention to a parent presentation or sorted book orders as a room parent. Except that if this were either of my kids’ kindergarten classes, I would have recognized every single kid. On this day, I recognized none of them at all. I didn’t even know why they were all wearing matching, neon green t-shirts.

Maybe they had a classroom performance, I thought, realizing only later when I drove past the baseball field and saw the bounce house that it was Field Day. That’s another event to which parents of younger kids flock, to deliver popsicles and take pictures and cheer on their little long-jumpers and three-legged-racers. Holly has middle school field day on Wednesday, but I wouldn’t have even known that if I hadn’t seen it in the school newsletter. At her age, it’s no longer a big event for parents.

All of this is making me sound more wistful than I really feel. Helping out at school was fun, most of the time, but it took up a lot of hours, and there were interpersonal politics involved, and sometimes a little guilt as far as who was doing too much and who wasn’t doing enough. Both kids are past the phase where parents are a big part of classroom life, and I welcome the new independence that comes with these new phases.

At the same time, in two years, Holly will be graduating from our local public school and I’ll have no call to be on that campus at all ever, except when the auditorium is being used for municipal purposes such as Town Meeting. Maybe then I’ll remember the days of classroom volunteering and feel more wistful than I do now. Right now, I still can’t imagine not being a school parent in our town; it’s been part of my identity for ten years.

To every thing there is a season. Now it’s nearly summer and school will soon be over, but Holly – and I – expect to be back on campus in the fall, to varying degrees. In another two years, Holly will cross town lines to the regional high school, and this campus will be mostly just a memory for me.

And that will be okay too. If I really need a fix of elementary school life, I can always take a seat in the back of the auditorium for one more mitten play or go watch the three-legged races at Field Day. But I probably shouldn’t. New parents will have taken my place. And that’s just as it should be.

A fall, and a helping hand

A few miles into a Memorial Day weekend bike ride on the Capital Crescent Trail, my 9-year-old nephew Andrew and I pulled over for a water break. Below us off the side of the trail was the Potomac River, with kayakers drifting by. In the distant background stood the iconic spire of the Washington Monument. Pretty cool view for a bike ride, I thought to myself as we took out our water bottles.

Then we heard a tumble and a shriek. Just a hundred feet behind us, a runner we'd passed a few minutes earlier was rolling across the pavement, entangled with a bicyclist. Another bicyclist had come to a stop just in front of them.

"You stay with our bikes; I'll go see if I can help," I said to Andrew.

The woman was clearly okay; she was sitting up on the trail by the time I reached her, whimpering just a little bit as she apologized to the bicyclists. "I know I darted into your way," she said. "I saw a snake by the side of the trail and it started me, so I jumped to the left. I knew you were passing me; I don't know why I did that. It was just that I was so startled by the snake."

The bicycling couple were shaken as well. Though no one seemed angry, I did not feel that they were being particularly comforting, perhaps because they too were distressed. I knew exactly how the runner felt. I had taken a bad fall while running last summer, and I still remember how jarring and disorienting it was even though, like her, I was just a little scraped up with no serious damage done.

But when I fell last summer, the one passer-by who stopped to help continued on his way as soon as I said, almost reflexively, that I was all right, and immediately afterwards I regretted my own self-sufficiency. I had been frightened and in pain. I wished I hadn't been so quick to tell him I was okay. I wished he'd stayed a little longer to be sure.

So when I reached the runner, I put my hand on her bare and sweaty arm and tried to offer comforting words. "It's okay," I said. "I know how you feel. Rattled." 

As I touched her, I thought briefly about how some people would not want a stranger laying hands on their bare skin, and I felt momentarily presumptuous, but I had to trust myself that what I remembered needing when I had been the fallen runner -- company, comfort, reassurance -- was what she would want also. I asked her if she'd like a drink of water, and she said yes, so I brought her my water bottle.

"I'm okay," she said. "Just a little scraped up."

"I know, but it's scary. Breathe slowly and deeply," I told her.

In just a minute or two, she was ready to resume her run. I felt as if something had come full circle, as if I'd finally had a chance to reclaim the comfort no one had offered me when I fell while running. It was as if the reverse of what really happened had taken place, as if I'd fallen again and this time been offered a helping hand, simply because I was able to offer one myself.

Later in the day, I saw a Facebook post from a friend who was widowed over a year ago describing a weekend party she had just attended at which she met a woman who had recently gone through the same kind of loss. This friend wrote about the satisfaction of being able to reach out with empathy and help, and about the perspective that the encounter gave her on her own long-term grieving process and all the healing that had taken place for her in recent months.

The two events are not comparable, but the sense of healing that an empathetic moment gave both of us seemed to have a tinge of similarity. It made me think about how trauma -- whether minor, like my tumble, or severe, like her loss -- may be the ultimate pass-it-forward model. We heal when we can help someone else through the same thing. And for that reason, I was so glad to have pulled over for a water break just when that runner fell.

The choices people make

Speaking articulately is not my strong suit under the best of circumstances – like a lot of writers, I do best with words when I have time to contemplate, draft, delete, reconsider, and revise before publishing – but in this case I was positively blithering.

But I had a reasonable excuse. My editor had assigned me a story about a particular historical figure and then mentioned that one of the leading experts on this particular historical figure was Mitchell Zuckoff, who is one of my favorite nonfiction writers.

He writes the kind of journalism to which I aspire: long stories that examine every possible facet of a situation. And often, the stories he chooses aren’t particularly complicated in terms of their political context or historical import. Some of his most interesting work is about how ordinary people act in unexpected situations. He wrote about a young couple faced with a diagnosis of Down syndrome in their firstborn child, tracing their early days as a couple deciding to start a family, the shock of the Down syndrome diagnosis, and how they went on to make meaningful lives for themselves as parents and as a family in the years that followed their daughter’s arrival.

He also wrote about two teenage boys from rural Vermont who almost overnight turned into cold-blooded murderers.

I interviewed him about the topic relevant to my assignment, and then before saying goodbye tried to communicate to him how much I admire his work. That was where the blithering part came in. “I love your books,” I said. “They are my favorite kind of writing: long stories about real people and how they make the choices they make."

And it was true, I realized as I thought later about my simplistic choice of words. In its own way, that was as good an explanation as any I could come up with for what makes people interesting to me. It’s what I often write about myself, though I’d never consciously framed it quite that way.

When asked what I write about, sometimes I say “Generally the arts or community life” if I want a short answer. If I have time or space for a slightly longer one, I might say “Mostly I write about ordinary people doing unusual things.” A friend of ours once said that my career was based on drawing water from a stone – an allegation I’ve repeated many times since. I think he meant that I take the very most ordinary circumstances of parents, children, seniors, communities, avocations, passions – and find something to say about them.

Another narrative nonfiction writer I once took a seminar with said “When you find someone’s obsession, you have a story.” The story becomes not the obsession itself but the how and why of the obsession, its etiology in that particular person.

All of these are true, but yesterday I found myself thinking more about those words that unexpectedly slipped out: “How people make the choices they make.” The young couple first chose each other, then chose to become parents, and later chose to raise a child with Down syndrome. The two Vermont teens chose to commit a murder, chose their victims, chose an ultimately unsuccessful escape plan. Where did each of these choices come from?

Outside of my work for a daily paper, I help people write their memoirs. In this role, I often ask “What formative experience made you the person you are today?” It’s a good question, but I think I’m going to try changing it up a little. “What are the most formative choices you’ve ever made?”, I’m going to try asking. It introduces agency into the equation. An experience is what happens to us. A choice is what we make happen. 

Based on this idea, I’m going to start thinking more now about the choices people make, rather than just who they are and what they do.