Sunday Haiku: Comb Sherpa

The comb in my back
pocket isn't for me.  I
have two sons with hair.

(Soon-to-be) Missing Person?

Our family made royal with Christmas cracker crowns

Our older son is twelve right now.  Those who know him would describe him as sweet and smart and funny and knowledgeable and really, really engaged with whatever he's doing.  From following sports teams to playing sports and games to school and church groups, he places himself right in the middle of everything.  With peers, he's game for adventure and doing what interests others.  With younger kids, he's like a junior counselor.  In adult conversation, he's like that precocious youngster calling in to a talk radio show.  He, of course, has called in to sports talk radio, voicing opinions about the Pirates and Steelers. 

Two of his cousins are roughly a year older.  We benefit greatly as parents by having them preview coming stages; we're grateful to our siblings for that.  Our niece and nephew are fun and interesting kids, but still, when I get to observe them right now, I get scared.  They're not rebellious or disrespectful. (Perhaps their parents will disagree in the comments).  On recent visits, though, they've made themselves so absent from the family.  That's what scares me.  

At a family reunion last fall, I would wonder where Riley was when the adults and younger cousins clustered together.  Nearly always, she was in a corner of the basement with headphones in.  My parents report that she was napping through much of their Christmas visit, awakening only to play Ticket to Ride.  She so dominates every game of Ticket to Ride, actually, that one time they let her sleep through a game so someone else could win.  

On our beach vacation last summer, Trevor slept in very impressively.  He committed to a long morning in a way that required poking him with a stick around 11:30 just, you know, to make sure....   I saw the same thing happen for several years with our only child neighbor boy across the street.  We have summer happy hours, and when they first started, he would come with his parents.  Bit by bit, he would come with them and leave early, or he would "be coming over in a minute" when they arrived.  Eventually, he just didn't come.

I don't fault these young people, and I'll try not to fault Charlie when and if he follows in their footsteps.  I remember it.  In growing up, we can feel awfully different from how we felt just a short time before.  We can feel awfully different from those around us; no longer quite so keen to hang out with smaller kids but also nowhere near at home among adults either.  We need space to figure ourselves out on our own.  While I'll try not to fault Charlie, that can't change the fact that I'll grieve his absence.  In addition to loving the boy, I really like him, and I like his contributions to groups and events.  I'm going to miss him.

In the end, the adolescent's eventual launch likely explains the hermit hours.  In order to flee the nest, he must create a little space within it that he gets to occupy by himself.  Although I might wish for myself that Charlie will go on relating to us the exact same way, I have no right to wish that for his sake. 

I always tell parents of younger children that each phase of parenting has become my favorite phase.  The teenage years likely break that pattern, and they're bearing down on us like a freight train.  I'm actively savoring Charlie's continued sweetness, relative innocence, affection and involvement.  It feels tenuous and precarious, poised to vanish at any moment.  I take some solace in believing that it won't vanish all at once but rather ebb away in fits and starts.  But still, I expect and fear that we'll look up one day and register that these qualities have vanished altogether.

When envisioning that dark moment, I think again of the neighbor boy.  Now absent for real, off at his freshman year of college on the west coast.  It's true that he's gone, but I saw something wonderful happen before he left.  He came back.  In his final summer at home after high school, he brought his polite and interesting high school girlfriend to happy hour on the street.  They engaged in conversation with people years and decades older than themselves on a different footing than before he'd disappeared from our community life as a young teen.  Young adults in the true sense of the phrase.  I wish Charlie the child didn't have to start disappearing - literally - from the scene, but that may be the only honest path.  That will allow him to come back and then, both sadly and happily, to truly leave.

On Rob Lowe on Sending his Son to College

It happens this way:  A friend links to something on the web.  Then another friend and another.  Depending on how busy I am, by the third or fifth friend, I'll often click on the link.  After all, my friends are using their social media capital to tell me about this item, I might as well read it.

Last week, the item was Rob Lowe's essay about sending his son off to college.  Timed with the release of his book Love Life, the essay has been published by Slate.  It's not a super-long read, and I invite you to go read it before I share my take on it.

 

This is not a book review of Love Life, even though I used that label on this post.  I've only read the college essay they're pushing out in the publicity for the book.

•  Facts highlighted by the essay or surfaced in subsequent Rob Lowe research - some striking, some not
• Rob Lowe is ridiculously attractive and shared his genes with his son
• Rob Lowe is still married to the mother of his two children as the older one goes off to college.  Impressive for a celebrity, especially given the above fact.
• Love Life is Rob Lowe's third book! Look out, JK Rowling.
• Gut reactions to the essay
•  After being winningly honest about growing up as a child of divorce, Lowe demonstrates a need to be friends with his sons that feels not quite appropriate to the father-son relationship.  It feels a little dependent and clingy.  Maybe we all work to make up for what we saw as most glaringly missing or painful in our childhoods.  Having shuttled between his parents as a kid, it's apparently really important to Rob Lowe the Father to be very close and just one of the gang with his kids.  This is apparently backed up by an interview with Jimmy Kimmel in which he confesses to being an "inappropriate frat dad".
• A fact relevant to the above: Lowe didn't go to college.  At the age at which he would have, he left home not for a campus full of his peers but for a 3-month movie shoot with grown-up actors and crew in Tulsa.  This does put an interesting spin on his life event of sending his own son off to college.
• Being a celebrity does not inure one from being a proud papa.  He gushes so much about the incredibly competitive school his son went off to that I finally had to google what amazing institution this is.  Turns out it's Duke.  That means the president he quotes is my own beloved former professor Richard Brodhead; that was a cool upshot of my web stalking of Matthew Lowe.
• It's a touching essay and definitely better than if he were unmoved by his beloved eldest's departure for college. 

 
Watch this space for my own version of this essay in six years, three months and six days.

An Everyday

An Everyday

a prose poem
November 2013

Almost as soon as I get into the 
night-lit bathroom on Saturday,
I hear the smallest knock one hears
in our house.

After my "Come in." (compliant
like his mother was as a child), he
enters, his hair a true sculptural 
artifact of sleep.  He never sleeps in long.

Running the hot water for my 
shave, I watch him paste up his toothbrush.
Rather than "Good morning", he says
"I need cold."

Sighing, I switch from
hot to cold for him.

Just like I do, he sticks the pad
of his pinkie into the stream to
see if it's cooled to his liking.

Then it's back to hot for my shave.
And we're standing side by side
Y shaving, 1/2Y brushing.

When I thought about being a
father, I thought about feeding
and clothing, looking out for health,
teaching children right from wrong
and how the world works.

I didn't think much about
shaving cream and toothpaste
squeezed out simultaneously.
I didn't contemplate
competing demands for hot and cold water.

I didn't reckon with
a roommate thirty years my junior
sharing the sink.

While I help them learn how to live,
I also live with them.

And the lack of these 
moments will make me miss
them when they have new roommates
in East Lansing or Lewisburg.

Quiet dinners and clean, orderly rooms
will make me miss them.
Already, when they're gone for just
a day, their mother and I mock-remind
each other of chores to do.
They are not there to remind.
How will we handle it when they're
not coming back to share our
space
anymore?

11 reasons I love and like my 7-year-old

I file this post under the good-gravy-the-start-of-the-school-year-is-busy-and-hard-to-

bedtime birthday cupcakes

adjust-to exception to the timely birthday post rules.  Also, for the math majors, I'm offering 11 reasons I love my 7-year-old because I offered that many when his brother turned 11, and my younger-sister wife felt that posting only 7 for Teddy would be unjust.

1. He hangs on me.  I confess that I only came to see this as a positive only after complaining about it.  Having a 50 pound human drape his weight on me while seated or standing doesn't always feel like an asset.  When I complained to Paige about it, however, after snapping at Teddy to get off me while typing, she said "but he's so bonded to you".  We had a lot of one-on-one time from late 2008 until he went to Kindergarten more than two years later, and it still shows.

2. He's a helper.  From an early age, Teddy's relished opportunities to help - mixing up ingredients, shopping, fetching stuff, carrying things.

3. He has an eagle eye.  It's probably most accurate to say that I admire this quality.  Teddy sees things other people just don't - mostly of the insect variety, but also coins on the ground and punchbuggies.

4. He has a strong, accurate arm.  From the time he could stand up (way before he could catch a ball), Teddy's been able to throw a ball a surprisingly long distance right to a spot.  It's wicked fun. 

5. He feels things so strongly.  Poor kid, he got this one from his dad.  Our main priority as his parents is helping him work with strong feelings - good and bad - and behave decently no matter what they are.  Happy Teddy, though, is incredible company.

6. He draws detailed pictures.  When Teddy undertakes to doodle, he draws complicated scenes with tons of things going on.  When asked, he can narrate the whole deal - e.g. "This guy dropped from the helicopter on his skateboard and went down the ramp and then did a flip off of here and grabbed the club and hit the dragon on the head."

7. Possibly related to his eagle eye, Teddy is very observant.  He's a professional noticer of things, people and patterns and he makes connections between the things that he observes.

8. He is so cute.  He's shed his baby fat, but he still has those big moony eyes and kissable cheeks.

9. He has a younger brother's bulldog spirit.  One of our big challenges as parents of two physical boys is keeping them from fighting, but when I'm not worried about safety or hurt feelings, I admire Teddy's tenacity in taking on his younger brother at every possible competition.  I first saw it when he was about 4 and tackling his 8-year-old brother with surprising ferocity.

10. His tastes are very predictable.  The palate has expanded since this chart, but Teddy's still very easy to menu-plan for: pretzels, provolone, bananas and apple juice satisfy most of his appetites.  It will be satisfying when he gets more adventurous in his tastes, but it's logistically easy to stock a Teddy-friendly pantry.

11.  He believes deeply.  Teddy prays with a sincerity and familiarity with which we should all approach God.

11 Reasons I Love and Like my 11-year-old

A happy boy and his birthday tacos.

1. He still thinks I'm funny.  Not all the time, but sometimes, he can't help but laugh at my jokes.
2. He works hard.  He does his homework and practices his trumpet and takes baseball coaching by actually changing his stance/swing/throwing.  He can start a task and stick with it until it's done.
3. He's so sweet with smaller kids.  He showers most of that sweetness on his brother, but he loves all babies, and he loves leading younger kids in games and adventures.
4. He has few secrets (I think).  I'll just choose to believe this one for as long as I can.
5. He's affectionate with everyone in his family.  He may be more shy than he used to about showing affection to his parents in public, but he loves our nuclear family and his extended family, and he's quick with a hug, a back scratch, a pat or a tug.
6. You know where you stand with him.  He's a straight shooter.  I think his honesty comes from how confident and sure of himself he is - more qualities that will stand him in good stead.
7. He's so game and enthusiastic.  He jumps in with two feet and likes going new places and learning new things.
8. He's a big sports fan.  I'd love him regardless, but it makes it easier that we share that.  One particular thing about his sports fandom is how quickly he forms a loyalty to a team he's rooting for.  We went to one baseball game in Korea, and he's a huge Doosan Bears fan.  He's always loved Robert Morris basketball, and he likes the major league teams for which his little league teams are named.  He never watches a game without choosing a team to root for by some criteria and then sticking to that.  He loves wins and takes losses hard and knows his stuff.  We found out at the end of fifth grade that he'd been giving Monday morning Pirates updates at his school's morning assembly for two months.
9. His new friend receptors are always open.  He only has friends and friends he hasn't met yet.  We worried not at all about leaving him at a summer camp where he knew zero campers and zero counselors.  He jumped right in, and we figured he'd be mayor by the end of the week.  (Turns out, that camp doesn't have a mayor.  But if it did...)
10. He takes serious things seriously: schoolwork, injustice, his faith.
11. He's so cute.  Awkward phase shmawkward phase.  Unless it's still coming, which it probably is.  But even then, this kid will still be cute.

With love for my Charlie Barley.

Dad's Summer Reading Program

We have one avid reader (the 10-year-old) and one who reads in discouragingly short bursts (the 6-year-old).  Immediately following a trip to the library, he reads with a high degree of absorption.  His usual habit is then to declare himself finished with at least one of the books he just got before it seems possible that he could have finished it.  He also gets really excited about a series of books (e.g. Magic Treehouse) for about 2 1/2 books.  I tend to find out that he "doesn't like those anymore" upon bringing home a stack of four of whatever series it was from the library.

All this is to say that I did not think that our library's summer reading program would be enough

to get him interested in reading this summer.  I have decided, therefore, to supplement it with Dad's Summer Reading Program.  The boys found at their places this morning four coupons, two of which are picture at the right.  They can choose whatever order in which they redeem these coupons for rewards valued at under five dollars.  They just have to show me their reading logs when they've reached a milestone (10 books per reward for the younger and 15 books per reward for He Who Would Read No Matter What).

We'll see how it works.  The younger complained that 10 books was too many at the same time that he planned the order in which he would redeem all four of his coupons.  The older chose one that he would redeem first then said "Maybe I'll read 75 books [15 more than the sum of all his incentive milestones] and get a five-pack of cars."  While I appreciate both his ambition and his confidence that he could negotiate terms completely different from those offered in writing, I think I'll stick to my original plan.

Watch this space for updates.

Picture Post: Amazing Dinner Stat

Sunday Haiku: Now that's good looking

My son's good-looking,
but he's not good at looking.
Dude!  Your hat's right here!

Apparently not Mysterious Enough

OK, so my mystery post lacked the potency of a real mystery.  After less than twelve hours, two smart guys had solved it in the comments.  These diagrams do indeed represent the timeline of our family's dining room table.

Pre-kids, quiet, candlelit gourmet dinners, string music tinkling in the background (or something like that; it's hard to remember).  This diagram represents tables in three apartments and for a while in our first house.

With our first boy at the head of the table in his high chair.

The boy drops his tray and pulls up to the table between mommy and daddy.

Only when boy number 2 comes along does boy number 1 move to the side of the table.  Soon after, he begins being able to operate a knife, which makes this configuration much more viable.  Gosh, these dinners stank.  Some small human constantly needed attention or help with the process of getting food into his mouth.  This stage also included lots of hopping up to get a food, vessel or implement that didn't make it to the table during table-setting.  Rare restaurant meals without children are savored like never before or after.

Goodbye high chair; hello youth chair; hello fork.  Mommy and Daddy still need to cut your food up and stuff.

Just weeks ago, the younger heir started wielding his own knife.  We considered it high time (after nearly 10 years) that we rejiggered our table into a configuration that does not include a boy at the head.

The Comics

My boys read the comics at breakfast every morning.  I read them before going to sleep at night.  I'm happy that my boys interact with a physical newspaper for now.  They'll be able to tell my great grandchildren about the medium.

I should have suspected that our favorite comics differ from each other, but until I asked Charlie his top 5, I had no idea.  We have no overlaps at all.  I know that young children like Garfield, and I'm glad that current young children still connect with the characters Charles Schultz created for so long.  But Drabble?  Seriously?

Charlie's Top 5 (in no particular order)

Beetle Bailey

Big Nate

Drabble

Classic Peanuts

Garfield

My Top 5 (again, no particular order)

Non Sequitur

Bizarro

Dilbert

Doonesbury

Tundra

Sunday Haiku: Nerf shedding

MacArthur genius

grant for inventing Nerf balls

that don't shed.  Vacuum!

Nine-year-old self identity

My wife had seen a big ad for the book The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth in The Atlantic.  I haven't read it yet, but I'm interested.  It's (apparently) all about how high school outcasts go on to succeed in later life.  She borrowed it from the library.

My nine-year-old saw it in the house and asked "Is this book for me?"  We often get him books out of the library because he reads so quickly and we want to keep him in new books so he doesn't go back and read a Harry Potter book over again.  Mean, I know.


It made me laugh out loud to have him think that this book was chosen for him.  If it's any good, he could probably glean something valuable out of it...in 12 years.  It showed me, though, that he identifies that way: as a geek.  He was doomed by genetics to this fate, of course.  The first child of nerdy parents stands almost no chance of being cool.  At nine, though, he doesn't feel miserable about being a geek.  He's confident and creative and knowledgeable.  He has a circle of friends, some of them just as nerdy, others further along the cool spectrum.  I envy him that.  Moving around as a kid, I lost the protective bubble of at least having the kids I'd started kindergarten with knowing me and having my back later on in school.  Nerdy and new proved a socially inhibiting combination.  He may grow, sadly, into the carload of insecurities that marked my high school days, but as a fourth-grader, he doesn't worry what other people think.  Life remains fun and full of possibility.

Future earth-inheritor with his solar system
model (and Diary of a Wimpy Kid tee shirt)

The culture at large seems to have advanced to a better place vis a vis nerds and geeks.  (Dorks are still up the creek without a paddle.)  The software-nerd-to-millionaire path generates a certain respect for brains.  If my generation had Revenge of the Nerds, this generation has Bill Gates, Steve Jobs (R.I.P.) and a nerdy president.  [Sidebar: this decade is shaping up as the era of the black nerd, thanks to Obama, which is fun and intriguing in its own right.]  Revenge of the Nerds was, unfortunately, rotten at the core.  The narrative centered on the nerds getting what the popular kids wanted.  Success for those nerds arrived when they achieved what the popular kids have.  This new narrative offers the possibility that nerds don't necessarily want the same thing the captain of the football team wants.  Just ask Taylor Swift.  Oh wait.  Don't.  Ask Zooey Deschanel.

Even though Charlie's way closer in time to the pressures of middle school and high school than I am, I remember difficult days in those seven years.  So I worry for him.  His spirit -  so robust now - undoubtedly will face assaults by a smart-ain't-cool philosophy, cultural advances or not.  I fear that my analysis and advice will ring hollow when the time comes.  I can see him balking at "Stay true to yourself.  It'll all get better as you get older."  Sad to say, I know that he won't even face the harder pressures of being a smart, ambitious girl.

Raising a grade school geek really is fun.  He surprises us and makes us laugh.  He even challenges me to keep up with his knowledge at times.  I just hope I have what it takes to help him through the valley of the shadow of seventh grade.