childhood – SIMCHA FISHER

I got yer spirit week right here

This time last year, I was trying and completely failing to make a breathable tortoise beak out of duct tape.

My daughter wanted to dress up as a tortoise for the 100th day of school, because . . . I don’t know, tortoises sometimes live to be 100 years old, and it made sense to her. I was just so thrilled the kids were actually back in school in person, I was willing go along with any stupid project.

My other child decided nothing would do but to wear a shirt to which someone (“someone”) had sewn 100 little bells, so I did that, too. (Yes, I packed an extra shirt on the off-chance that one of the long-suffering adults in her classroom somehow grows weary of the sound of 100 bells on a child who could not sit still if it meant the difference between life and death.)

If you’re thinking to yourself that the 100th day of school does not sound like a real holiday, you are so right. Some say it originated to encourage and celebrate teachers and students who have made it about halfway through the school year. Some say it’s just a great chance to sneak in some fun math lessons. Still others say that some school districts decided they would allot per-student funding based on how many kids were present on one particular day, and they chose day 100, so the school decided to plump up their budgets by luring in as many of the little scamps as possible with the promise of parties and fun; and that’s already sketchy enough, but then then Pinterest got wind of it, and now the day has taken on a horrible life of its own, completely unmoored from even its shaky origins.

It’s sort of like how Christmas has become entirely secularized and is now all about commercialism, except that 100 Day started out being about money, and now it’s just about making parents stay up until midnight sewing bells on a shirt, and whimpering, “Tell me this looks like a turtle shell.”

Either way, now that I’ve gotten the requisite snarking out of the way, I have a terrible confession to make: I love stuff like this. I love special days, and I love spirit week.

I live to twist fruit rolls into sticky little rosettes and jam them on top of dozens of mini cupcakes for Valentine’s Day parties. I adore hot glueing bits of cardboard to other bits of cardboard to make elaborate armor for a kid who has decided she must be a glow-in-the-dark ostrich pirate for Halloween. I’m totally in my element bashing hard candies with a hammer to make stained glass Christmas cookies for the bake sale. I don’t know if it’s because I can remember so clearly how thrilling it was to be a kid and to show up to school on A Day That Was Special, or if it’s just that my own adult life is just so dull that hot glue is enough to spice it up, but I truly enjoy making these dumb little crafts and projects and costumes.

I’m sorry. I know people like me are making life harder for people like you. I am what I am.

That being said, even crafty people like me have our down days. There are weeks when I open my calendar and my spirit groans to discover that it’s spirit week. There are plenty of mornings when crazy hair day isn’t something to plan with giggles and anticipation; it’s simply completely unavoidable, and I’m less concerned about sharing it to Pinterest and more concerned that someone will share it with child protective services. And I know I’m not alone.

So for the parents who have no natural creative impulse, or who are just too dang busy to consider dealing with yet another special thing in the morning, I’m presenting this list of alternative, more humane special activities that most parents can manage, and I hope their schools will consider them:

Favorite Shirt Day Child must show up wearing his favorite shirt. Bonus points if his mother has no idea where this shirt came from, and it features a trashy, ghastly, tasteless design that makes her wither up inside like a little bug on a very hot day, but she lets him wear it all the time because it is the delight of his heart, and she loves him even more than she loves her reputation. Bonus points if it has jelly on it because he also wore it yesterday, because . . . it’s his favorite shirt.

Twin Day Dress up exactly the same as someone else in the world, probably. I mean, there are a lot of people in the world. Chances are pretty high someone else is wearing that same outfit. See? Twins. Fun. For academic enrichment, look up the word “doppelgänger.” Spend the day staring out the window in case he happens to walk by.

Favorite Character Day Dress up as your favorite potential character, assuming somebody someday writes a book about a kid whose parents are TRYING, okay? Everybody has PANTS ON, okay? It’s not like we just dropped you off in a CORN FIELD or something.

Thing Day Child must show up with a thing. Just any thing, as long as it’s something the child made completely on his own, using materials found on the floor of the car or bus, or on the ground outside the school door. Must be so weird and wretched that it’s manifestly clear that it was made without help or intervention from an adult. Kid loses points if an adult even has to know about it. Or, if the kid forgets to make a thing, it can be an invisible thing. Or it can be a stick or something. It’s fine. It’s whatever. Call it “child-led” if that helps you sleep at night.

Name Day At some point during Spirit Week, when you pick your child up, you will be asked to state your child’s name. If you can’t immediately come up with it, you will be given a hint. If that doesn’t work, you will be given a cocktail and some warm socks and sent to bed.

And there it is. Hey, we’re all 100 days closer to the grave, anyway. Some of us will be there with bells on.

A cold day a long time ago

On the very coldest mornings, my mother used to wake us up by saying, “It’s cold out, girls! It’s ten below! It’s twenty below! It’s very, very cold!”

Why she did this, I cannot imagine. I was already, and still am, the most reluctant bed-leaver possible. Like so many things, getting out of bed made me cry, and I used to try to explain what a shame it was to ruin such a good thing, such a shame, as if they didn’t understand it was warm and soft and comfortable and safe under the covers, and cold and dark, harsh and demanding outside.

But my mother did make hot cereal most mornings. Incredibly, she often made several different kinds, so we could choose: Corn meal mush and Maypo and Wheatena, or oatmeal and Maltex and farina. These are things my children would reject with horror and alarm, but imagine coming down on stiff cold legs in holey socks into the chilly kitchen, and there in the double boiler, your mother has made something just for you, something warm and fragrant and faintly sweet, and you can pour a river of milk and sugar over it and bury your face in it. Maybe even get the nice wooden bowl that smells a little weird, and the spoon with the flying noodles carved in the handle. My kids think Pop Tarts are a treat in the morning. They have no idea.

There were hot water radiators in every room, and when we could afford to heat them up, I kept a lump of wax from my Halloween vampire fangs stuck handily to the warm side, to keep it supple and chewable. But we had some lean years when the radiators stayed stone cold through the winter, and the whole entire house, with its many large, high-ceilinged rooms, had to grab a little heat from the coal stove in the living room downstairs. My father, a Brooklyn boy, found himself knocking apart frozen lumps of coal with the blunt end of an awl so he could shove them into the black belly of the stove, where they would hiss and fry demonically and eventually send out green and blue and white waves of hot, hot flame, hot enough to burn your skin off if you ran or roller skated past the stove too fast and let your arm touch down. Which we always did, every winter. We could proudly point to the scraps and patches of grey skin that used to be ours, now part of the stove.

And we walked to school. I was in first grade and my sister was in third, and the school (I looked it up) was over a mile a way, but nobody thought twice about sending us out all winter to struggle through the snow to school together. Well, my mother did think twice, which is why she insisted we wear our humiliating one-piece belted snowsuits purchased at some godforsaken Army Navy surplus store. My classmates were all decked out in glossy, two-piece ski sets in quilted mint green or lavender, but I had some miserable olive green monstrosity, or is is possible they were bright orange? They were the color of humiliation, that no other child was ever forced to wear or even know about. For the first few days when it was cold, very cold, ten below, twenty below, tears of humiliation ran down my chin and froze onto the heavy duty zipper as I trudged to school.

But when we got to school, I forgot my shame. Because on that playground, there was something excellent.

Behind the school was a hill, a hill that was tremendously steep, so steep you had to scramble on your mittened hands to get up it. You would scramble as high as you could, until you met the line, and then you would wait with all the other kids, bouncing your butt against the chain link fence, knees trembling in the cold, sucking anxiously on the strings of your knit hat, waiting your turn.

This was a sliding hill. A sliding hill extraordinaire, a rocket hill. The sun beat down on this hill all day long, and it turned the steep slope into one long, solid, glittering tongue of ice. All you had to do was sit at the top and wait for gravity, or a little shove between the shoulders from the kid behind you. Down you would zip with a high singing sound on your bum, no sleds needed or allowed. The teachers only let you near the hill if you had on the proper snow pants, SUCH AS A BEAUTIFUL THICK ONE-PIECE OLIVE MONSTROSITY FROM MARSEN’S ARMY NAVY DEPARTMENT STORE.

And sometimes a kid would flip over and bloody their lips or bonk their skulls, but mainly it was a wild shot through the frigid air straight into the afternoon sun. Pure blind glory. It was over too soon, and you’d be left spinning and scrabbling at the bottom like an upended turtle, trying to get out of the way of the next kid hurtling down the chute.

Sometimes, when the teachers weren’t looking, that bully Lance would give you a “whitewash,” shoving your face into the snowbank and scrubbing it back and forth brutally until you cried, your face burning red with melted snow trickling down your neck. But nothing could make you give up your spot in line. Three or four times you could go down after lunch recess, if you didn’t waste time.

Anyway, they turned that school into condominiums a few years ago. It’s a nice building, so why not. High ceilings, hardwood floors, huge windows. I haven’t driven by to take a look. What if the hill isn’t as steep as I remember?

It really was colder then. We were further north than I live now. And the winters were really longer than they are now. And the sky was bluer, and the air was sharper, and the snow was deeper. The snow isn’t white; it’s blue, and it’s yellow, sometimes purple, or green. People think that, because New Hampshire is cold, it’s dark all winter, but it’s not. The sky is blue, high blue, and the sun shines in a particular, piercing way, that hurts and gladdens at the same time.

What cold days we had. How hard it was to get out of bed. How fast we went down that hill.

The Seed Who Was Afraid To Be Planted: A terrifying and potentially dangerous book for kids

A new children’s book, The Seed Who Was Afraid To Be Planted (Sophia Institute Press, 2019), is getting rave reviews from moms, Catholic media, and conservative celebrities.

On the surface, it’s a simple, inspiring story about courage and change; but for many kids — and for many adults who have suffered abuse — the pictures, text, and message will be terrifying and even dangerous. At best, this children’s book delegitimizes normal emotions. At worst, it could facilitate abuse.

The rhymed verses by Anthony DeStefano, lavishly illustrated by Erwin Madrid, tell the story of a little seed who’s plucked from his familiar drawer

and planted in the earth. He’s frightened and confused, but soon realizes that change means growth, and as he’s transformed into a beautiful, fruitful tree, he becomes thankful to the farmer who planted him, is grateful and happy, and forgets his fears forever.

While religion isn’t explicitly mentioned until after the page that says “the end,” the influence of scripture is obvious (the seed packets are labelled things like “mustard,” “sycamore,” “olive,” “grape,” and “fig,” and it makes references to “mansions” and “vineyards”). The seed is everyman (or everychild), and the farmer is God the Father, and/or authority figures like parents and teachers.

It sounds helpful and wholesome, but let’s take a closer look.

Margaret Realy, author, artist, and speaker (The Catholic Gardener) reviewed the book, anticipating a pleasant read, but was alarmed and disturbed. She wrote a review on Amazon that pinpoints the specifics. Realy said:

This story places childhood abuse and neglect in the center of its theme. A small defenseless being is repeatedly traumatized by seeing loved ones ‘disappeared’ “…and no one would see that seed anymore.” Then the following stanzas speak of anticipatory trauma that he too will be taken away.

The fearful day comes, he can’t escape, and the man’s hand clasped around him. No matter how the seed cried and yelled, he was taken from a secure and loving environment to one of “horror”, “pain”, and “agony.”

The man that took him away was silent and unresponsive to the pleading seed, buried him alive, and left him abandoned.

That’s a lot for a young child to process, and nearly impossible for one—of any age—that is abused.

The pictures are dramatic and gripping, and the dark subject matter contrasts weirdly with the cartoonish faces and font:

Here is the seed, weeping after being abruptly buried alive:

The seed does, of course, come out well in the end, and it becomes a home for birds and animals; children play around it, and it bears much (confusingly diverse) fruit while overlooking a prosperous paradisal landscape with “millions of mansions.”

But this happy ending doesn’t do the job it imagines it does. Realy points out that, while the story attempts to show that the seed’s fears were unfounded and it would be better if he had trusted the farmer, it doesn’t show any of that in progress. Realy said:

Unfortunately I find the story’s transitioning through fear of the unknown into transformation by Grace, weak. The ‘seed’ began to change without any indication of the Creator’s hand, and his terrified soul was not comforted or encouraged by human or Holy.

Instead, it simply shows him transforming “all at once, in the blink of an eye”

This might have been a good place to point out that a seed grows when it’s nourished by a farmer, and to illustrate what appropriate care and concern actually look like. The Old and New Testament are absolutely loaded with references to God’s tenderness, kindness, mercy, love, care, pity, and even affection; but this book includes none of that, and instead skips seamlessly from terror and abandonment to prosperous new life.

It explicitly portrays God (or his nearest representative in a child’s life) as huge, terrifying, silent, and insensible and unresponsive to terror and agony — and also inexplicably worthy of unquestioning trust.

Realy points out:

Research indicates that up to 25% of children in the United States are abused, and of that 80% of those children are five and under (Childhelp: Child Abuse Statistics Facts. Accessed December 2019). This is based on only reported cases.

That’s a lot of kids.

Imagine a child who has been taken from a place of comfort, happiness, and companionship and is thrust into darkness and isolation by a looming, all-powerful figure who silently ignores their terror and buries them alive.

Now imagine what this book tells that child to think about himself, and what it tells him to think about God. Imagine how useful this book would be to someone who wants to continue to abuse, and who wants his victim to believe that what is happening to him is normal and healthy and will bear fruit.

It is ghastly.

But what about kids who aren’t being abused? The statistics, while horrifying, do show that most children aren’t being abused. Can’t we have books designed for these typical children?

It is true that some kids are inappropriately afraid of change and growth, and need to be reminded that the unknown isn’t always bad. Imagery is useful for kids (and for adults), and I can imagine an anxious child who’s afraid of going to second grade being comforted with a reminder: Remember the little seed? He was scared, too, but the new things turned out to be good and fun!

But even for these children who aren’t experiencing massive trauma or abuse, and who truly are being cared for by people who want good for them, the narrative minimizes and delegitimizes normal childhood emotions. It’s clear that the seed is wrong to be afraid, even though his situation is objectively terrifying. Teaching kids to ignore and minimize their powerful emotions does not facilitate growth or maturity; it encourages emotional maladaptations that bear bad fruit in adult life. Ask me how I know.

The flaws in the book are especially egregious when they make the message explicitly spiritual. The final page says “From the Bible” and quotes four passages from scripture. Two are unobjectionable, but two are breathtakingly inappropriate for kids: One quotes John’s passage about a grain of wheat falling to the ground and dying; and one describes Jesus falling to the ground at Gethsemane and praying that the Father might take the cup away, but saying “Yet not as I will, but as you will.”

These are not verses for children! They are certainly not for children of an age to appreciate the colorful, cartoonish illustrations and simplistic rhyming stanzas in the book. These are verses for adults to grapple with, and goodness knows adults have a hard enough time accepting and living them.

Including them in a book for young kids reminds me chillingly of the approach the notorious Ezzos, who, in Preparation for Parenting, urges parents to ignore the cries of their infants, saying, “Praise God that the Father did not intervene when his Son cried out on the cross.” I also recall (but can’t find) reading how the Ezzos or a similar couple tell parents to stick a draconian feeding schedule for very young babies, comparing a baby’s hungry cries to Jesus on the cross saying, “I thirst.”

On a less urgent note, it’s also sloppy and careless with basic botany. Realy, an avid garner, points out its “backwards horticulture” which has the tree growing “nuts and fruits that hang down,” but then later “the tree sprouted flowers/and blossoms and blooms.” It also shows a single tree producing berries, fruits, nuts, and grapes, refers to how “woodpeckers pecked/at his bark full of sap.” Woodpeckers do not eat sap, and sap is not in the bark of a tree. Realy and I both also abhor the lazy half-rhymes that turn up, pairing “afraid” with “day” and “saw” and “shore.”

But worse than these errors is the final page, which shows a beaming, full-grown tree, along with a textbook minimization of trauma:

“The tree understood
that he had been freed.
He barely remembered
when he was a seed.

He barely remembered
his life in the drawer.
his fears disappeared
and returned . . . nevermore.”

Again, if we’re talking about a kid who was nervous about moving to a new classroom, then yes, the fears might turn out to be easily forgotten. But that’s not what the book describes. When the seed is being carried away from its familiar home, it says, “I’m in so much pain and such agony!” and “He felt so abandoned, forsaken, alone” as he’s buried alive by a giant, faceless man who offers no explanation, comfort, or even warning. In short, it describes true trauma, and trauma doesn’t just “disappear and return nevermore.” It’s cruel to teach kids or even adults to expect the effects of trauma to vanish without a trace.

As Realy said: “PTSD never goes away, even with God. We learn to carry the cross well.”

Let’s be clear: Children don’t need everything to be fluffy and cheery and bright. Some kids, even very young kids, relish dark and gruesome stories, and I’m not arguing for shielding children from anything that might possibly trouble or challenge their imaginations. We recently read Robert Nye’s Beowulf, for instance. We read mythology; we read scripture.

But when we set out to explicitly teach a lesson — especially a lesson that purports to speak on behalf of God! — it’s vital to get the context exactly right. This book is so very sloppy and careless with children’s tender hearts, that even if there isn’t some dark intention behind it, it’s very easy to imagine a predatory abuser using it as a tool.

A Catholic publisher like Sophia Institute Press ought to know better.

On meteors and managed expectations

Not long ago, our hemisphere passed through the Perseid meteor shower. When I was young, my family was heavily into astronomy. We owned more than one telescope, and we would sometimes all pile into the van after dark and drive out to the countryside, where there were no streetlights or house lights, but only the velvety darkness and the sound and smell of sleeping cows.

On this road, you could look up and see the Milky Way spread out across the top of the sky like a shining river. The planets gleamed like jewels, red and yellow and blue. More than once I actually heard a meteor sizzle past like a drop of water on hot soapstone.

Having had these almost mystical experiences throughout my childhood, I feel very strongly — perhaps too strongly — that astronomy ought to be part of every childhood. But in this, I have largely failed with my own kids. We’re just too busy. We’ve prioritized other things, and the thought of dragging ourselves outside in the dark for one last outing at the end of an exhausting day is unbearable.

So my kids know a few constellations. We’ve dabbled in homemade sundials, and they understand the seasons and eclipses and why astrology is nonsense. But a love of astronomy is not part of our family identity, the way it was for my family of origin.

I know this, and I know that knowing it sometimes cause me disproportionate distress. And this is why, when I prepared to take my kids out for the annual Perseid meter shower, I gave myself more than one stern lecture . . .

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly here.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

We don’t stop for nobody: Some memories of childhood

Our kids started school again this week. One of the teachers wants the kids to bring their morning snack in a container labelled “snack.” It’s annoying to have one more thing to remember, but I see the sense in it. A kid who turns up with a miscellaneous bag of food for the day is likely to snarf down the whole thing at snack time, and then have nothing left when it’s actually lunch time.

I was trying to remember how we handled snack time when I was seven. I don’t think we actually had one. Kids had the option to buy milk for ten cents, or chocolate milk for fifteen. This was delivered by a milk monitor, who was chosen by the teacher as an honor. Once she chose me, and I had no idea what to do, so I stood out in the dim hallway and cried. This was my go-to strategy throughout my school career and beyond.

Schools are gentler on children now, in some ways, and harder on them in others. In general, I don’t trust people who think everything new is bad, any more than I trust people who think anything old is bad. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to ponder anything heavy right now, anything about society or culture or civilization. But I have been thinking about how different some little things used to be. I was in first grade around 1980, for reference.

When I was little, snow days were reserved for real blizzards, when the roads were mayhem and the snow piled up past our waists. They definitely never cancelled school for just plain low temperatures, as they do now; and they never cancelled it until the morning. We woke up early after staying up late, staring out the window and hoping. My mother would tune the radio to a station on the foreign end of the dial: M106, the local rock and roll station. The DJ would reel of lists of school closures every six minutes or so, in between sets of songs. My poor mother, cursing and muttering as she suffered through “Like a Virgin.”

There were school buses, but only if you lived a significant distance away. My sister, in fourth grade, used to walk me, in first grade, to school over a mile away. There was a crossing guard who looked exactly like the Queen of Hearts, glaring at the cars to stop, then glaring at us kids to go.

If it was cold, my terrible mother would make us wear full-body snowsuits from Maresn’s Army Navy Department Store. We certainly never had indoor recess on account of cold weather, like my kids do now. I do remember students standing in a huddled circle on the playground, taking turns at being the one who got to stand inside in the relative warmth for a few minutes. It was all very Siberian.

We sledded down the big hill all winter, where the sun hit the slope and polished it to glaring ice. When it warmed up, of course we played tag and hide and seek, jump rope, hopscotch, four square, red rover, cat’s cradle, and some dimly-remembered stair-hopping game called “Witchy-Poo,” and my kids play many of these same games. I remember hanging upside down on the jungle gym languorously wailing, “We Are the World.”

Playgrounds really were paved, and every playground had a real see-saw that swung up and down freely with a musical groan. Sometimes some malicious girl on the low end would suddenly leap off her seat, leaving you to plummet to the ground, jarring your tailbone and clashing your jaws together. Now most playgrounds are padded, and the parts that move have a limited, baffled range of motion. Sometimes the railings are so high, you can’t even tell you’re off the ground even when you’ve climbed to the top; so kids are safe but they also don’t figure out what’s safe and what will get their heads bashed in.

I clearly remember the heady thrill of linking arms with a friend or two and roaming belligerently around the playground chanting, “WE-DON’T-STOP-FOR-NO-BOD-Y. WE-DON’T-STOP-FOR-NO-BOD-Y.” If anyone got in our way, we would, as advertised, not stop. There was also the chant that went, “We are drunk! We are drunk! A bottle of beer, a BOOT in the rear; we are drunk!” and at “BOOT!” you would kick your leg up, can-can style. It would be hard to overstate how much fun it was. Way more fun than actually being drunk, as I later found.

We had heard that in West Street School, the mysterious school on other side of town, the strange children there called their teachers by their first names. This was scandalous and unsettling. Teachers were always Mr. or Mrs. or Miss. In fifth grade, we had our first teacher who was a Ms., which inspired much eye-rolling. She had a perm, too, if you can imagine, and glasses with some kind of tricky scallop built into the frames. Probably from Massachusetts.

When kids were bad, they had to fold their arms on the desk and put their heads down. The really mean teachers would yell, “I wanna see noses touching the desk!” This was intensely mortifying. You didn’t know if everyone else was doing something cool or something boring or maybe just staring at your stupid, exposed, beet-red neck. It only happened to me once or twice, usually when the whole class was being punished en masse. But a few times a year, the real reprobates would be put “in castle,” and the custodian would be summoned to erect a cardboard box around the bad kid, to segregate and humiliate him; and that’s how he would stay all day. I suppose it was a refrigerator box, but it might as well have been an iron maiden. Brutal.

Their was one kid named Keith who got in trouble a lot. Like all the rest of the class, I was mean to him, all the time. When I made his valentine in third grade, I put a pig sticker on it. When the music teacher paired us up to folk dance, I grabbed my hand away as fast as I could and wiped it on my pants. I saw him many years later when I was taking some test, an SAT make-up or something. He softly offered me a Chiclet, and I said no, and acted like I didn’t know him. I have always felt bad about that — even worse than I feel for everything else I did. Man, I am sorry.

I don’t really know what typical discipline is like now. I guess it varies widely from school to school. They are allowed to use “fidgets” in school, to keep their hands busy while their minds are concentrating; and there is an assortment of futuristic chairs to suit every possible sitting style. In the hallway of my kids’ school, there is a list of activities they can do — crab walk, hop on one foot — to get the wiggles out if they can’t behave in class. Sometimes I discipline kids that way myself. Sometimes I am more old school.

We had a teacher with a mania for tidiness in fourth grade. He was a tall, broad-shouldered Irishman with thick glasses and a bristling red mustache. He would inspect our desks, striding up and down the rows of the room like General Patton, and if one desk were found to be especially sloppy, he would hoist it up in his mighty arms and dump it out onto the floor and then stride away, leaving the sniveling child to crawl around in the wreckage and put his belongings back together. Strangely, I remember him mostly as a kind man, in between his sudden furies. He never dumped my desk, I guess.

Anyway, that school had polished hardwood floors and enormously high and gracious windows, so now it is condominiums.

It is strange that, when my kids show up with some new evidence they’re being treated with care and concern, and being protected from something harsh in the world, I’m impatient and annoyed. I don’t actually want them to be cold and hungry. I don’t want them to break their elbows and be crushed in spirit. I want them to be understood.

Still, I don’t think I’ve ever seen kids have as much fun as we had when we chanted, ” WE-DON’T-STOP-FOR-NO-BOD-Y.”

***
Image: free images

Is it technically abuse? Does it really matter?

A child who is told he is stupid will always believe he is stupid. A child who is told she’s a failure will always believe she’s a failure. When these insults and hostility come from the very heart of the family, they take root.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

Image by George Hodan (Creative Commons)

Something to report of love

It’s the end of vacation, when all the things we meant to do over the summer cascade into guilt and regret. “Tree house” and “ocean” and “art museum” come off the list; “haircut” and “school shopping” go on. We should have done more! When I was little, I remember doing more.

On the radio, I heard the end of an essay by a man trying to connect with his elderly father, a father who had been harsh and distant for decades. I gathered that the one happy childhood memory the narrator had was of their annual, extravagant beach house vacation. The kids would run and play and whoop it up, while the dad would glower and retreat to the couch to watch TV. Still, he made it happen year after year.

Now, forty years later, the man finally asked his father if he had fun on those vacations — and if not, if he hated them as much as he seemed to, why did he make such a point of taking them every year?

It turns out that the old man, now almost eighty years old, was still smarting from the sting of his childhood, from the first day of school, when the teacher would assign that dreaded essay, “What I Did On My Summer Vacation.” The only true answer would have been: “We gathered peaches to pay the landlord” or “We shot rats in the turnip field so we wouldn’t starve come winter.”

So he and his brothers would make up something to write about, something that would prove that they had been having fun like the rest of the world. He resolved that his own kids wouldn’t have to resort to fantasy. They’d do something real on summer vacation, something wonderful. Something to report.

When my kids were all little, I used to accuse myself of not so much striving to make a happy childhood for them, as striving to create evidence that they had had a happy childhood. A baby book full of carefully edited anecdotes and cute dialogue; a photo album of high points and rare good days. Maybe, day to day, they had to cower away from me and my mood swings, and maybe they longed for me to just sit down, relax, and play with them, rather than frantically crafting towers of glorious expectations, and then collapsing in tears when it all caved in under the weight of real life. Maybe so. In the words of an old guide to confession: I am unable to judge the severity of my actions.

Either way, I had some hard evidence. I could point to the salt clay figurines, the stretchy loop potholders, the quirky animal sewing cards I had made just for them, using the back of a Crispix box and my own lifeblood, and I could say, “The proof is here. Only a loving mother would have done this. Remember how I let you make muffins with me, even though you drive me crazy? Let’s laminate this photo of you petting a goat at age 2, and let’s not laminate the memory of me crying over how much money we spent to get in. You liked that goat, you liked it very much. But you won’t remember, so I need to nail it down now, to present to the judge, I mean put in your baby book. And look, you were wearing a dress that I sewed myself.”

Behold, the gulf between love and intentions. Oh, the longing to love, the longing to be loved, the longing to have been loved. Oh, the clumsy swipes we take at that shining, shifting goal of happiness.

We are all, maybe, hoping to pacify the demands of the past, striving to bridge the gulf, to reach back over all those summers and tell our own selves as children, “Yes, you were happy. Here’s the proof.” We’re telling that long-dead teacher, now moldering in the grave, “You wanted an essay? You wanted to know what I did? Here’s my child, and he had fun on his summer vacation. Here’s the evidence you demanded; it’s all there.”

Here are the things I remember about my childhood, along with the vacations and the treats, the parades and the birthday parties — and also along with the mood swings and strife, the tensions and shouting, tipped-over tables slammed doors. Here are the things I remember, from summer and from winter, from the long, empty, formless days of vacation and the long, empty, formless days inside the lonely, needy heart of a child looking for some definitive proof of love:

I remember my mother putting down her book (more precious than rubies) and looking me straight in the eye when I called her name. My father pausing for a minute before he answered me, staying silent a little too long, muscling past his first impulse to criticize or refute. My big sisters praising me for so skillfully walking down the stairs with only one foot on each step, instead of two, like babies do. I remember being on rented skates and being swooped up from behind, a rescue just as the floor loomed up to pound in my face. I remember someone holding a pajama zipper away from my belly, protecting my skin as they zipped it up. I remember being protected.

There’s the evidence, and I’m writing it down now. It is the end of summer. We have something to report.

***
A version of this essay originally ran under a different title at Aleteia in 2016.
Image: David Prasad via Flickr (Licensed)

10 low-tech toys that flash, buzz, wiggle, and zoom!

Let’s . . . let’s just talk about toys.

A trip last weekend to my childhood home has made me nostalgic. It’s far too early to share a list of Christmas present ideas, so how about this list of toys I remember from my childhood? Many are still popular, in one form or another. Here’s ten of my favorites, most for under ten dollars:

1. Sparking wheels!

The ones from my yoot were made of tin, and were very sturdy. I liked to sit at the bottom of the stairs, at the darkest spot in the house, and just crank that wheel, watching a mesmerizing little red and blue galaxy flash in and out of existence in the palm of my hand. The scratch and catch of the mechanism was very satisfying for the hand and ear, too.

Shopping around for a sturdy version that didn’t cost a million dollars, I came across this sparking toy:

which also toddles around aimlessly when you wind it up. Looks like today’s version of the hand-cranked wheel I remember is plastic and more flimsy, but probably still four bucks’ worth of fun.

2. Magic rail roller!

If you haven’t seen one of these in action, it’s hard to explain what it does. The axles of the wheel have little magnets in them, and if you hold it by the handle end and flip it around the right way, the wheel goes whizzing around and around the frame, and, I dunno, it’s fun.

3. Siren whistles!

My migraine-plagued father had an inexplicable drive to buy us wonderful toys that drove him crazy. One perennial favorite was siren rings, which (like everything in my childhood, it seems) used to be made of metal. You could wear them like ordinary rings, and whenever the time seemed right, you would blow into the round window in the top and it would go “wwwweeeeeEEEEEEEEeeeooooooooooo,” and it never ever ever ever got old.

The closest I can find is siren whistles built into lips or mustache, or just in little tubes.

These get okay reviews, and you get, um, four dozen for $7.50, thereby ensuring that you will never ever ever ever run out of hearing “wwwweeeeeEEEEEEEeeeooooooooooo.”

Some inefficient part of me wants to buy myself this lovely, shiny little siren whistle, not a toy ($33) but designed for making sound effects.

It’s from the Acme company. THE ACME COMPANY. Wile E. Coyote c’est moi. The description also points out that it’s “a useful and unusual warning signal for small boats.”

4. Chinese drums!

Oh, my gosh, these are fun.

You roll the handle back and forth between the palms of your hands, which makes the balls swing on their strings, whacking the drum on both sides. Very satisfying! These are about $7, and they will send you a randomly-chosen design.

5. Clacker balls!

Did I ever get the hang of these? No, I did not. But they were enough fun that I tried for years and years; and I liked walking around the house looking at the world through the transparent balls with their tiny captive bubbles, too.

The trick is to loop the middle of the string around your finger and sort of jerk them in a rhythm so they smack together at the end of their strings until they start arcing up and down, clacking against each other high and low. (One of the reviews here shared a video, so you can get an idea of how it goes.)

Okay, so these are plastic (about $5 a pair). We had dark blue glass ones when I was little. Nostalgia aside, I can’t shake the idea that maybe it’s okay that today’s kids are pampered and coddled and aren’t generally encouraged to make glass balls crash against each other. Old ways are not always the best ways. Either way: not recommended for kids with short tempers.

6. Magnetic scotties

I’m not gonna lie to you: these are magnetic scotties. That is, they are two plastic dogs with magnets in them. See?

$6.55, and you get two dogs that have magnets in them! This mean you can make them kiss, or you can make them chase each other! It was a simpler time! It was fun, I tell you!

7. Mooing cans

They put farm animals on this item (about $8) to make you think it’s a toy for children, but it’s actually for anyone who just needs to hear a little moo from time to time. I believe it works with a weighted rubber membrane inside, and when you tip it over, it creates a suction that pulls air through the . . . you know, I don’t know how it works. But it’s hilarious. If you shake it really fast, it sounds like the cow is hysterical!

8. Color paddles

The one I had just had the three primary color, but kids these days are lazy, so get their purple, green, and orange handed to them on a platter.

This one gives you three sets of six colors for about $7. You can mix the colors together to make other colors, or you can just peer through them and think, “What if everything were purple all the time?”

9. Balancing bird

Balance it on your fingertip! Balance it on your chin! Balance it on your tongue! It’s such an obliging bird.

I think the product description says it all: “Extraordinary gift for someone.”

10. Jacob’s ladder

The perfect toy to feed into an introspective child’s Heraclitean confusion.

About six bucks. I understand how it works. Really, I do. The ribbons hold it in place, and the thing flips over, and I understand how it works. But damn! How does it do that?

***

I should note that all of the links are to Amazon products because I have an Amazon Associate’s account. If you buy any of these products, or if you buy anything at all on Amazon after getting to the site after clicking to one of my links, then I earn a small percentage of the sale. This is so helpful to my family, you wouldn’t believe it.

If you shop on Amazon, won’t you consider using my link? I’ll have a button on the sidebar here soon. In the meantime, here is Simcha’s Amazon Link. Be a peach and bookmark it for me! Thanks!

And now tell me about the toys of your childhood, especially the lovely, low-tech ones that keep on going through generations.

For the Child Crying

Help me, I beg the Father, to take up the task of Advent. The memories that awaken are silent Anna, raging Pat, chirping Mikey, his poor hand on the rail, begging his father, “No, Daddy, no!”

Read the rest at the Register.

Days with my father

When I was growing up, everybody else’s father would happily (or so I thought) camp overnight outside K-mart to make sure their kids got one of the few remaining Cabbage Patch Kids in town. They would give them the best presents: Game Boys, Simon Says games, and of course the Barbie Dream House, with elevator and real bubbling hot tub. We never got any of these things.

Instead, my father gave us experiences. It took me a while to realize this was a conscious decision; and it took me even longer to realize what a great one it was. He would spend days and weeks planning out trips, making reservations, calling ahead to make sure everything was what he thought it would be, and of course parking in a safe place and then heading out first by himself to “reconnoiter.”

We would set out on long, long excursions with nothing but a few metal canteens of water and several packets of sugar wafer cookies. But when we got there, it was always something amazing. And, unlike all those cruddy toys I wanted so much, they are something I still have, in my memory. In no particular order, here are a few of the gifts my father gave us:

PIC Alpine Slides
PIC St. Gaudens

PIC Polar Caves
PIC Fenway Park
PIC Queechee Gorge
PIC Peaks Island Ferry

PIC Hamlet
PIC Isabella Stewart Gardner
PIC Rollins Chapel concert
PIC The Cloisters

PIC Hood Museum
PIC Museum of Modern Art
PIC Mt. Ascutney

PIC Metropolitan Opera

PIC Fairbanks Museum
PIC Midsummer Night’s Dream

PIC Coney Island Nathan’s
PIC Covered bridge
PIC Big Apple Circus
PIC Hopkin’s Center Symphony
PIC Lake Sunappee seaplane

Happy father’s day, Abba! Thanks for all the days.

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1. Sparking wheels!

2. Magic rail roller!

3. Siren whistles!

4. Chinese drums!

5. Clacker balls!

6. Magnetic scotties

7. Mooing cans

8. Color paddles

9. Balancing bird

10. Jacob’s ladder

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