The Playgrind

I have Mondays off, so I spend a lot of them with B. at the playground. We have two regulars — the little playground by the school about four blocks away, and the big playground at the park by the Mississippi, which we have to drive to. Either one is fine by B. He just wants to play outside.

Last night I finally got him to sleep by promising that when he got up he could go to the playground, and he sure remembered — he was up at six and began peppering me with playground questions as soon as he was out of the crib. I made him wait until the sun peeked out of the clouds before we packed up the wagon and walked to little playground. He chose that one himself, because he has started to see some of the same kids and even more than the sand he can push around with his bulldozer and scoop up with his digger, even more than the swings and slides, Byron’s favorite part of the playground is other kids.

“We see friends?” he asks me. And when he’s there, “will that boy play with me?”

B. will pull any other kid into his little world. Even older kids want to play with him. He’s not a ringleader, just a magnet. It’s amazing to watch him. Today he had seven kids joining him in “playing trucks.” I don’t know how two introverts got such an outgoing kid.

To a certain adult who is young at heart and/or deeply disturbed, playgrounds are probably a wonderful display of young spirits mastering new skills both physical and social. But to me, they are boring places in which time passes like a snail across a field of paste. Oh, I enjoy watching Byron play and make friends, but every five minutes drags on like an hour. Even the occasional panic when the kid briefly disappears behind some playground equipment isn’t that thrilling. I expect it’s the same for other parents. We engage in small talk, which is always about the kids and never about ourselves (we trade THEIR names and ages like people at cocktail parties say their own names and what they do for a living).

At the end of today’s play, Byron must have been as exhausted by the mingling as I was, because it was a rare time when he left willingly. When we got home, he ate some peanut butter bread, asked me to play “Day O” (his favorite song) on the guitar, and then went eagerly and early to his nap. He’s snoozing in there now, probably dreaming of a second round of playground time when he wakes up.

The Ole Ax

I used to play guitar obsessively, at least an hour a day and often more, but although I did this for years and years I never got any better after the first year. I could never pick without getting over-excited and just sending my fingers fluttering all over the strings. I have a hard time playing in any rhythm other than some private one that courses through me and comes out in every song. I painstaking learned about three “hard” songs — “Over the Hills and Far Away” was one  – but rarely made it through one without messing up.

I never had any but the slightest dreams of being a pro, anyway, and I never lined up  even the paltriest  coffee shop type gigs. I suppose with lessons I might have gotten a tad better, but maybe it was never really about that. It was just something I did because I enjoyed the feeling of playing. I liked the ringing strings and the cathartic quality of belting out a song. (I would sing, too, but I’m terrible).

I have a friend who’s a painter who said once he loves the process of painting but hates everything he’s painted (even though he’s had some success at it). That’s how I am with guitar. The difference is that everybody else hates it to, or at best tolerates it because they like me personally and find something kind of sad and beautiful about my quixotic efforts to make music.

I don’t think I quit guitar all at once. It kind of petered out. I stopped playing every day. I would get a new guitar book and after stumbling through a couple of songs, set it aside and do something else where  before I would have done nothing but play all night, and maybe forget to eat dinner. And then, as I focused more and more on my writing, I put it away for good.

YEARS went by where I would not take the guitar out even once. I would think pretty often about getting the guitar out, but never do it.

One day I listened to The Avett Brothers “Kick Drum Heart,” and I thought about how much fun it would be to play that song, and how it couldn’t be that hard. I had heard it before, but this time I went home and went into the darkest corner of the basement and found the guitar and brought it upstairs and tuned it and sorted out the chords to “Kick Drum Heart” and strummed it for a good twenty minutes while Byron tried to strum the strings and then found a harmonica to “accompany” me.

And now every day I come home and play for like fifteen minutes, which is all I can do with the kid, etc., and it’s great. I’m getting back my modest leve of skill and my calluses. I’ve missed this part of me and I’m glad to have it back.

But I’m still not that good.

Rainy Day Dadding

I will be spending tomorrow with a rambunctious toddler who mostly wants to play in “the big blue room.” If you can spend the morning at the park, the day is a piece of cake — he has fun, daddy has fun, we go home and have lunch, and then he naps and daddy… probably naps too.

But if you’re INSIDE all day, the kid bounces off the walls, gets into things, makes noise, and basically brats around because he’s bored and cooped up and crazy.

Here is the forecast:

 

Maybe I’ll read him a book about a town plagued by ceaseless rain.

 

On Track

The winter in Minneapolis dragged on two months too long, and it was hard not to feel like everything was on ice. I lapsed from all my self-improvement schemes. I didn’t write anything and left my WIP as an unrevised (if complete) first draft. Books piled up unread in various corners of the house. I didn’t even binge on Netflix or computer games. I look back and can’t say, really, what I did. I was in a late winter blah. It’s still cool and wet here, and with summer around the bend it feels really like spring never happened.

The day after Memorial Day was a momentous one. I had a long conversation with my agent about my WIP and figured I better get back to work on it with renewed gusto. I started planning some late-spring cleaning. I returned to my day job with big ideas. And I went on Weight Watchers.

I am weirdly fond of tracking things. When I write, I keep logs of word counts. When I take up running or walking, I track the miles. When I read long books, I keep checking the page I’m on against the page count. (My e-reader tells me exactly how far I am an how much more time it’ll take to finish, which I admittedly love, even though it is completely unnecessary and probably appalls a certain kind of serious reader). I count and parse and track practically everything. I would rather live naturally, like a rabbit sprinting across the lawn, with no mind for progress, only for the goal — but I’ve found that to make progress, I need to obsess on progress. It’s the only way I’ve ever finished anything.

So when it comes to weight loss schemes, Weight Watchers pushes my tracking-addict task/reward buttons. And at first it is wondrous, reckoning every point in and point earned, distancing yourself from the Funyon-devouring monster you were just a few weeks ago. Suddenly you are accountable, and it’s weirdly fun (at least at first.)

I am not quite up to connecting my WW account to Facebook and boring my acquaintances with my weekly neck measurements or whatever, but I can even see the navel-gazing glory of making it all public. That makes you even more accountable, I guess. And there is some peer support, posting that you are 78% of your former self and collecting “likes.”

I associate process with progress, but I wonder at what point it becomes a cart-before-the-horse thing. Sometimes word counts don’t tell me how close I am to my real goal, which is a quality first-draft manuscript. And when I see myself hunched over the keyboard, musing aloud that avocados (unlike most vegetables) are not a point-less “power food,” I feel a little bit like a wary skeptic listening to a newborn zealot of pop-sci religion.

In any case, I plan to lose some weight this summer. And to get to a great second draft of that manuscript. And potty train a kid. And all of us get stickers and stars for every day we inch closer to our goal.

The Great Brain Series (Part 2)

I posted recently about my love for The Great Brain books as a kid and my disappointment on re-reading them years later. I went back yet again — another fifteen years have passed since that unhappy reunion — in the hopes that they weren’t as bad as I thought. I started with Book 3 because it was my favorite, and my review is in that earlier post.

Now for the first two (The Great Brain and More Adventures of the Great Brain). First of all, in case I haven’t made it clear, none of my concerns are really for the quality of the books. They are brilliantly written and illustrated. Fitzgerald can tell a story like nobody’s business, mixes historical detail so deftly you never feel like you’re being taught a lesson, and his characterizations could be used to teach a class. And of course he is a first rate humorist, and Tom one of the great comic characters in children’s literature (he is almost as good as the First Tom in that category). There are some great stories here. I laughed, I teared up. For people with fond memories of the series, you are not mistaken. They are good.

My disappointments came from those aspects of the book that felt, to an adult, to be heavy handed — every book has a few poignant moments — and aspects of the books that don’t stand well even with the understanding that they were historical to begin with. Those moments still make me wince. Tom shaming his little brother after the death of a family friend is particularly ugly, because it serves no purpose. A funeral for a dog is well-meaning but ventures into bathos. If it’s on purpose, it’s a patronizing kind of humor out of step with the spirit of the books; if sincere, it is another wincer. As for dated, the gender roles of the turn of the century seem more than depicted for historical accuracy, but savagely endorsed by the author. Boys have to fight. Girls are meant to be pretty. Those are not paraphrases; they are explicit morals of stories in books 1 and 2.

My reaction isn’t as severe as it was fifteen years ago. It wasn’t that I couldn’t read a book then with historical prejudice, it’s just that I went back to them with such an idealized memory that I was startled to find flaws at all. Also, the story that bothered me most still hasn’t appeared — it must be in one of the later books, which I’m sure get less inspired in every way.

For the good: some very well plotted, clever stories — one has Tom saving two boys for what turns out to be mercenary reasons; his heroism is ingenious and rousing, the comic twist at the end perfect. Though a story about reforming a tomboy is most loathsome for smug chauvinism, it also has one of the series’ best turns, as Tom finds just the right book to get her interested in reading. And a darkly comic story about a boy attempting and failing in suicide (try to publish THAT for middle grade readers now) turns into a great story where Tom’s famous great brain is shown working through a real-world problem and finding a believable solution. As a “process” story, it is one I’d recommend to kids everywhere.

One of the first American kid lit bestsellers was Horatio Alger, a writer of many limitations who nevertheless touched a nerve with over a hundred  books about kids hustling for money that sold like crazy for several decades. But at some point money became kind of a taboo topic among kids — we don’t much talk about incomes and costs of things, and few books deal matter-of-factly with money. There are a few books (I think The Lemonade Wars is one, but I haven’t read it), but no banner series in American kid lit about the fundamental American dream of turning a profit. For that reason, I think The Great Brain is still a stand-out series, as American as any there ever was, and any problems I find with it are distinctly American problems. Nothing has taken its place.

A Day At The Beach

Our family spent a week at a water park at Wisconsin Dells, a mecca of family fun in the upper midwest. There are a bazillion things to do at the Dells, but we mostly stayed in the lodge and used the waterpark. Byron loved it and didn’t need to do much else.

His favorite feature in the waterpark was a fake beach with zero depth entry.  He approached the shore cautiously each day… daring not enter right away, but just watching the other people splash around. Eventually he would wade in and wait for the wolf howl sound that meant waves were coming. By the last day he was in the deep end, secured in a tube, riding the waves with mommy.

He also liked spinning Daddy in circles while he was in a tube. That was fun for Daddy too.

We are a strange people that extoll the virtues of freedom and spend our days on fake beaches, but this is also a world where a nature walk is through carpeted hotel hallways with a guide pointing out taxidermy animals, and where story time features a giant clock with animated animals and people singing about living in the rhythm of nature, encouraging children to help the planet by using microbottles of Suave body wash (no wasteful waiting to lather!) and two-in-one shampoo/conditioner while a billion gallons of chlorinated water churn nearby. We learn to live with the irony. The kid had the time of his life.

A Recollection

When I was about five years old we had a dachshund named Ginger who wasn’t fixed and was always making puppies. For one of those batches of pups we went door to door searching for a new home for them. I guess the fact that a five year old could wander  the streets in 1973 says a lot about what a different era it was, but we also lived in a friendly and quiet area where we knew most of the neighbors.

I ended up at one house about two blocks away, was directed by a sign to the back door, and there found two women having a late breakfast and chatting and excited to have a little boy and a puppy to brighten up their day. I got the feeling by the way they talked about adopting a new dog that they both lived there and shared their lives.

Can two women get married? I wondered. The idea did not seem to my child mind to be unlikely. In fact, it seemed likely — knowing how many men and women there were in the world, what were the chances that every man found a woman, every woman a man? It seemed like such long odds, like expecting every one of Ginger’s puppies to be a brown like her instead of black or white or spotted or whatever. (I didn’t know exactly how puppies were made; it was just part of puppy magic that they were all different.)

I figured on the walk home that there must be occasional wife-wife marriages and husband-husband marriages. As soon as I got home I asked my mother if sometimes married couples were two husbands or two wives. She said no. I said there was a couple nearby like that and she said I was mistaken. I argued with her a bit, knowing what I’d seen. She  sent me to my room for a nap.

Four decades later same-sex marriage has become a reality, and now it’s about to be the law in my adopted home state of Minnesota. Among the arguments against it were the case that somehow children would be confused, upset, bewildered and even threatened by wife-wife and husband-husband marriages. And I remember being a little kid and feeling the opposite. I was more upset by the sheer irrationality of every body being expected to be the same, my mother’s brute insistence that the two women who’d taken our puppy couldn’t possibly be a family.

I’m proud that Minnesota is one of the first dozen states to champion marriage equality. And for the record, if my mother was still alive, she would be proud of us, too. She was only 27 years old when I was five, and she hadn’t made up her mind about everything.