Not All Who Wander Are Lost

On Hiatus Here; Coverfolk There

2008-06-13T00:12:00.003-04:00

Regular readers have surely already noticed, but it bears repeating: this blog is on indefinite hiatus.

Thanks to the support of some amazing folk artists, label representatives, and promoters, I am now blogging about cover songs of and from the folk community at Cover Lay Down. Feel free to stop by anytime.

Testing...

2008-02-29T22:21:00.003-05:00

Hope no one minds this space being used as a testing ground for Cover Lay Down; I'm blogging over there thrice weekly, these days, in case you're in the mood for some stellar coverfolk.

Anyway, assuming this works, enjoy some sweet Neil Young covers -- details available at the above link.

Grr. Huge and wonky. try two:

On the cusp of the season

2007-12-22T16:56:00.001-05:00

Two years now on the last day of the school year I give my middle school classes a break from the brainbending work of figuring out non-linear writing and trying to make sense of their increasingly virtual world and instead show them how to make virtual snowflakes. The flash-based software is pretty cool, to be fair, allowing more precise cuts and more perfect folds than real paper, where folds turn thinness into mass so quickly by doubling rules.

What I like about this activity is that it reaches an unexpected set of kids. Normally, my teaching style hooks a specific type of kid, not necessarily the best and brightest by traditional standards, but those who can visualize and reimagine the world flexibly. Over a term, they build a relationship between real world and virtual which explands their views of rhetoric, of space and time as applied to communication and perception -- a tall task for the average fourteen year old.

Here, however, the kids who get stuff quickly are lost and too-quickly bored. Instead, it is those who need seasonal magic -- a few cuts turning into something delicate and lithe, hexagonally-speaking -- who brighten up. The sad kids who just needed a plaything, the different-brained kids who turn to games out of a lack of understanding of basic writing parameters; the kids who loved the hands-on work of elementary school and have lost their way in the new paperwork of middleschool -- here is the moment, the magic, the time to find them more than just a new medium for expression of the same old cumulative concepts.

It is no-stakes, in one sense, but it means everything for them. The room fills up my time with kids eager to share what their virtual scissors have wrought. For a change, the "lost boys" want me to see their work, instead of hiding its skimpiness from view as I pass by. I get to smile and praise students who have not been praised or smiled at for weeks. And I get to see their secret selves emerge, if they let me, if they try, if they let their newly jaded middleschool selves get hooked.

If I'm careful, the lesson can continue from there. I've got scissors and paper ready; I do not push, only mention that what can be true in cyberspace can be made real here, as always. Against the back wall counter, I show those who seem interested how to turn the online lesson into a tempate for real paper, real folding, a lesson hiding topology and imagination-to-real lessons which will hide in their brains until they need to use the virtual world to make the real world work to their advantage. By the end of class, while their peers play space invaders illicitly on the internet, those few and happy kids lag behind, finishing one last papercut before slogging off to math and the endless spate of sugarparties that inevitably characterize that last pre-holiday schoolday, lost to too much energy, curriculumless and chaotic.

But I am left with their temporarily recovered childhood of paper dolls and cheer, proudly pasted to windows and walls. It makes the heart sing as I close down the computers for the long break, to know that their last day was full of pride and youthful glee. Over break, the custodians will scour the paperscraps from the floor, hiding the activity; on the first day back, the sowflakes pinned there will come down and be filed away, or more likely fill the recycle bins. But one or two will stay, high in a corner where no one will notice much. It's enough, I think. Maybe, just maybe, they'll remember when they return.

Now Blogging...Folk Music Covers!

2007-11-30T09:38:00.000-05:00

Those who stop in from time to time may have noticed I'm not really here these days.

I'm fine. Happy, even. Just living life instead of blogging about it, mostly.

I'm also musicblogging. If you're interested in folk music covers -- both covers OF folk music, and folk music covers of popular songs from Cat Stevens to Britney Spears, head on over to Cover Lay Down!

My Sporadic Life

2007-09-21T13:10:00.000-04:00

A letter today from an old, old friend on the other coast just about to pop with firstborn child, and I'm thinking about California, especially after last night's chat with Dad. He always says how sane I seemed, there on the road and the highclass hotels, despite homelessness and joblessness. I guess I've come to love uncertainty, now that I've learned to trust the way my best self emerges in chaos, the more the merrier.

And then, I guess, too, I've learned that as long as everyone is safe we are whole together, there's nothing to fear. And here we are, the kids and wife and I growing every day: the spouse in the background making jam from wild concord grapes she harvested down the street, homemmade streetfair pretzels from downloaded recipes; the elderchild tapdancing out of rhythm and gleeful, learning to be okay with male authority as she learns to love kindergarten gym class; the wee one growing ever-less wee despite lingering linguistic quirkiness, doubling her plurals, refusing to use the letter s in combination, asking for more chippez while she sucks at an applesauce moon. Meanwhile, the larger family dissolves into diaspora; we walk on eggshells, recast our relationships, put each in its new place, safely.

Me? I've got that asthmatic bronchitis again, and the doctor says it's not quite pneumonia yet; the meds ream my system sickly, but I know I can take pain, and it's worth it. No cigarettes since I first awoke, just gum instead; it's hard to figure if the delirium is from the lack of nicotene or the illness or the meds, probably everything and anything. Middle school teaching's going great and smooth after two years of figuring it out, but no matter how honest the workdays, there's nothing like a day off work to stomach-clutch and swim in the trippy haze of meds and gut mayhem.

On Coffee

2007-09-03T13:10:00.000-04:00

I never know how to count coffee consumption. It takes two mugs and a thermos to drop the liquid level from six to one; I know, because for most of my teaching life, it's been two mugs to get me into the car, and a tall metal sippy cup to get from there to the end of first period. Is this five cups, or three? And more importantly, is it enough?

I have a hard history with caffeine. Jolt -- "all the sugar and twice the caffeine of regular cola" -- got me through high school AP exams; those No-Doz were a lifesaver in college, at least the first time around. And coffee? I chewed espresso beans to get through my graduate program; drank a twenty ounce every Monday for a seven year stint at my latenight radio show, deep in the bowels of the now-dark classroom buildings, and on a school night, yet.

Once, then, I would have jumped at a testrun of Stok, these new coffee shots in creamer tubs, recently boingboinged via their new gadgetblog. That they come in both black and sweet would create a conundrum of delivery like nothing since the day I discovered there were other dark roasts besides French. The idea of adding an extra minishot to every cup would be worth serious consideration, at least.

Not this year, however. Because this year, in an attempt to find a cure to the as-yet-undiagnosed syndrome of yesteryear, and also because I finally noticed the uncanny coincidence of summer mellowmode and the halved ration of coffee that gets me to and through it, I've been drinking a cup less in the morning.

I still have energy in school -- still sing "Won't You Be My Neighbor" at the top of my lungs as the kids stream down the hallway from the bus, waving my coffee mug like a mug of grog. I still get there, ready to go; in fact, I've been getting there earlier. But I'm a little more focused, a little less anxious, and a lot more happy. I'm also falling asleep early, which is a mixed blessing.

As an added bonus, it takes less nicotene gum to get me through the day.

Maybe I'm on to something, here.

Coming To

2007-08-10T13:29:00.000-04:00

There must be a word, I think today.

(But a word about what? At the time, there was some thought of a new perspective, an illumination that should not go unnoticed -- one as yet unworded, unnamed. By the time I got here, it was gone. All was vague of purpose. But here I ended up regardless:)

And unbidden, I think of this space, and the language begins to scan itself. Three paragraphs swim into blurry unfocus, the smooth flow of the light serif blocks out in the brain. The public mind awakens as if no time had passed.

Once I spent a summerweek writing my blogging life. Four chapters, an hour at a time by the banks of the Smith College waterway, by battery in the rough-hewn wood of a Japanese Teagarden, my back to the woods and dormitories beyond.

In the end, I took the unfinished half'script home, archived it -- and never opened it again.

Today, a thought: perhaps it was only a beginning. Or a part of the larger writing, the life-logging constant, in review.

Regardless. If there is to be a language flow -- if I dare let the hidden itch rise to the surface, to grow back into the constant nag of the brain that this, too, must be written.

Maybe the book is there. Maybe not. Maybe this is a hiccup, a faint one-fer, a retired novelist's daydream, a once-poet's bubble amidst another life.

But there must be some sort of word, I think.

And so goes this unblogging. And so comes the return, like shingles: reluctant, blossoming, and oh, the relief of the fingernail scratch on the keyboard like skin. Perhaps an outbreak. Perhaps a fluke. But for one moment, awakened, here I am again.

Unwritten Postcards from the Periphery

2007-03-22T18:03:00.000-04:00

In the evenings I empty my pockets of blogs that might have been, postcards from a life on the road. In and out of days, weeks, a month and more, they pile up in my computerside cubbyholes: a growing catalogue of the unread and unedited, living out a darkened existence on the back of envelopes and old maps in a shaky hand.

They cry out to me, sometimes, when I cannot sleep, these almost illegible scrawls, written up against the steering wheel on the back roads and highways.

Some excerpts from a life unblogged:

...Every once in a while on a different way home I pass the house not taken and wonder what that life would have been. Back on our familiar streets closer to home, the neighbors have removed the inflatible leprecaun from the lawn, though the tinsel shamrocks still swing from the trees. How much polyurethane, how much air and light, how much sheer commercial kitsch will it take to ring in the subsequent season? What will Easter bring? We'll soon know...

...I'm in therapy now, paying ten bucks a week for the privledge of talking about myself for an hour uninterrupted. The health plan picks up the rest; I wonder what they think I'm getting out of it, whether they'd tell me if I asked, if the answer would help me understand why I go back every week...

...The urge to write still comes, sometimes, but my heart stops me. Without a grand entrance prepared, the prodigal return seems unsurmountable. Does it take humility to come back home? Am I so stubborn still? ...

...I care too much, and cry at the radio, play and replay the same sad songs and stories from This American Life: children challenged for who they are, their parents cursed for who they would never be. I try to care more about people, less about things; more about nature, less about human nature. But still I dwell in my mind's eye, seeing my children in these voices, these rooms, these roads, years from now, in an imperfect world I could not fix for them....

...I've lost my voice, and cannot sing. My sinuses stifle, my ears clog. I cannot hear myself. The poignant pieces of our trivial lives -- this one's first haircut, the paper plate rainbow that one makes for me in school -- overwhelm my senses. I used to want to feel less, to protect my heart. Now the feedback I once depended upon for understanding goes missing, and I know not how to recover it...

This evening after supper I bring in the last of this year's wood. Clearing the line brings light into the yard where no light has been for months; the neighbors house and the woods beyond emerge after a long winter.

Afterwards, in the waning light, I raise my eyes to the sky, give of myself back to the world, give over to the urge. And like an answer, out of grey nowhere, drops begin to fall from the sky.

Snow melts away into Spring below my feet. The smell of ozone fills the air.

I feel the rain on my face.

The rest is still unwritten.

Wandering Off

2007-02-09T21:36:00.000-05:00

It's been two weeks, and though I have nothing to say, I suppose I owe it to me/you/us to create some closure. Quickly, then, and fragmented as it comes, before the moment passes:

In the myriad possibilities of wandering, there must always be an acceptance of that which passes. After all, we cannot carry our entire histories on our shoulders as we go. Sometimes, if we are to go forward, entire worlds must be left behind.

Maybe I'll come back one day. Maybe I'll need this place that never existed, yet can always be found, right here where I left it.

Until then, I suppose. May the road rise up to meet you.

And may our paths cross, once in a while. You'll know me: I'll be the boy smiling at the evernew world in his hands.

Midweek Muse

2007-01-31T21:10:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about poetry again, wanting to capture the way the mothers huddle together at the end of their driveways, glancing half-anxious over the hill's horizon as they wait for the bright yellow buses each afternoon as I drive past.

I think there's something there, maybe an image to pair with the way my old students, now hulking high schoolers, stand huddled in their own coats, watching their breath and the cars pass each morning, watching for another town's bus, way on the other side of the same mountain.

Of course, I'll never write it now.

In the halflight before the sun came up this morning the world was covered in a thin layer of snow, and everything -- the sky, the ground, the trees, the air -- everything was the same color, the same shade of grey, the color of bleached night.

It's like poetry, this world. Sometimes, I guess, it's enough to leave it at that.

Reading as Death, Writing as LifeOn Teaching Your Own Child to Read

2007-01-28T14:47:00.000-05:00

So many stories about death in this year's Best American Essays: spouses, dogs, your own impending. Winter is like death, too, or so the everpresent "they" have always said. I read outside in the frigid cold, five minutes at a time, and watch last month's too-soon bulbs wither and die.

In our house life reigns. We're teaching the elderchild to read and write, the two of us in turns over the weekend. It's a difficult task compounded by her vast brains and creativity, a well-intentioned reassurance that she need not bother yet carried over from school, an ADHD instinct to look away from the page and into space when trying as if the words were everywhere at once, a tendency to already know what the words should be.

The living room gets taken over by her magnetic drawing board, a focused selection of books. We take on the task for the bare maximum of her attention, and I wonder how much we can truly get done in ten minutes at a stretch, and marvel at how much progress we've made in one short weekend.

Yesterday after I got frustrated, she copied the word "moss" perfectly from the page where we had been working. I didn't know until I unearthed the word, centered on an otherwise blank page, there on the floor where we had been working. Today she knows the word, and it's hard to tell if she recognizes it wholecloth or if she really reads it to me.

I want to keep this, her first privately written word, in my wallet, hold it close to my body forever, a talisman against the independence and solitude that reading represents. Instead, I leave it in the pile, hoping it will do her some more good.

Words are life, I explain to her when I tuck her in that night. With words, you will be that much closer to your own self, and to the world. In my head, I finish the sentence, knowing that, in the way they open up the world to her, the words will change her, take her away from me, add one more little death of us to the pile that is her daily growth.

I kiss her, and tell her how proud I am that she is learning to read. She smiles that proud, almost smug grin to herself, and I tuck her in quickly, and turn out the lights, and close the door almost all the way, hurrying to leave before I can cry in her presence.

On Reeling, Writhing

2007-01-20T10:55:00.000-05:00

Books left on the glass-topped table outside crack at the spines when you open them -- something about the way the glue gets brittle in the cold, I suppose.

When I was a kid I used to love the way the paperback spine would stretch and give as I found my place again. Some of my oldest young adult selections still sport the scoring of my fingernails, pressed absently into the soft, forgiving pasteflesh during a lifetime of latenight reading.

I've been reading a lot, and blogging little. There's both comfort and avoidance in this, especially given the end-of-term grading that looms before me: a hard drive's worth of projects, two boxes full of notebooks in the backseat of the car. A strong practitioner of structured procrastination, I use the time to post a discussion of disk-death and the home-to-school work dynamic in the workblog, anticipating a long-overdue but politically sensitive switchover to web-based storage for our students and teachers. You can't read fiction at work, no matter how much you plan to timeshift; it looks bad.

Back home the books I read are random, pulled from the giftpiles accumulated over my birthday week: more Terry Pratchett, a Jewish humor collection, the NPR's This I Believe collection. I read them outside, five minutes at a stretch, in the cold and suddenly white-coated world; I read them on the couch by the pellet stove fire, late at night when the kids and wife are asleep, and I really should get to bed myself.

Sporadica

2007-01-17T22:16:00.000-05:00

The blank space, white like the snow that never falls, a world that hardly beckons. How to begin again? And where is the urge?

The house is clean, intermittently. We eat out more often than we should. The wee one speaks in sentences we cannot always understand, sits in her highchair at supper and picks at her pale white foods: crackers, cheese, plain pasta, the occasional pea.

Out the window the world is deceptively autumnal, the backyard ground still unswept of brownleaves and twiglets. Only when we step out the door do we feel the sudden freeze in our lungs, sharp and dangerous. On the morning drive to work the world is still, save for the constancy of smokestack grey rising ever upwards. Even the students waiting for buses by the roadside do not move, their shivers lost inside their huddled, heavy coats.

At work the term winds down in the usual fog of grading and last-minute adolescent angst over grades long past the point of revisiting. My computer classes give up their mice, learn to love Tab and Shift and the function keys, come finally to trust that no amount of key banging and guesswork will irrevocably enflame the hardware. I sit at my desk and chat in hearts and symbols to the howdyspouse, at home with the kids on her lap, while the students struggle.

One night the elderchild's musicbox stutters and is still; I play soft strings, dulcimer in the dark by her bedside, until she falls asleep, and the next night she is finally weaned of our attention, her solo slumbers come so easily it is as if we never coslept at all, never worried how we would ever get our bed back.

I spend my time reading birthday books: the full round of this year's Best American collections, mostly. Deep in my mind, the world is still and quiet, unfamiliar, and yet somehow like the winterworlds I remember, white snow dampening everything, out and in, macro and micro.

Are you there, blog? It's me, boyhowdy.

2007-01-12T22:04:00.000-05:00

Two weeks with nothing but a haiku food review to show for it, at least in the virtual world. Starting over again, it’s hard to know where to start.

But embracing life has been a noble experiment, worth every minute.

An increasingly verbal wee one has turned into quite the Daddy’s girl. She looks for me in the dark house before I leave for work, makes me read to her with my coat still on when I return. Mama brought her in to work twice this week; both times, the look on her face as she ran towards me was priceless.

Meanwhile, elderchild goes solo at bedtime for the first time. She looked so proud and sleepy when I stopped in to check on her.

It’s my birthday tomorrow, and we’re having a party: barbecue and beer, a mixed bag of coworkers old and new, a few friends from church, their kids. It’s the first party we’ve thrown, I think, other than family events, and the first time our guest list runs multigenerational in both directions. It feels very adult.

In other news, mama’s replaced the computer chair with a huge yellow yoga ball. It squeaks beneath me as I write. There’s been a flurry of books, arriving each day like rain; used paperback Discworld novels, the year’s Best American Non-Required Reading. The quantity of it pleases me. I read a book a day, all week, and do not blog.

Haiku Product Review: Fabulous Flats Tandoori Naan

2007-01-06T14:01:00.000-05:00

Fabulous Flats Tandoori Nan*

Sprinkle with water,
Heat. Buttery. Delicious.
Gets stuck in toaster.

*Winner, "Best New Innovative American Product of 2006", Prepared Foods magazine.

Resolution

2006-12-30T22:00:00.000-05:00

Nothing to say tonight, really. I just missed the old regularity of the blogged life. It's been a good week, anyway. A little restless tonight, perhaps a little bittersweet. Two days worth of nostalgia are coming, and I'm looking ahead with my heart.

First, tomorrow night we've accepted a quiet invitation to old friends from the prep school teaching days. After seven years on campus, it's going to be more than a little odd to feel the pull of these now-deserted buildings that once held our lives captive.

The next morning we're expected at what will surely be the last of a long tradition of Hangover Special breakfast feasts farther north, at the house in Newfane, where we crashed for one glorious summer, and a decade of New Years Eves; where our family grew bigger as Darcie's brother Josh found his own second family.

The world is about to change again. The siblings continue to disperse: Josh and Clay to Oregon next week; Ginny back to Hawaii the next. The endless uncertainty and stress of the workweek whirlwind looms in the forecast, longterm and practically eternal.

I've been thinking more about the idea of New Years resolutions than about any particular self-improvement or renewed conviction. Giving my wife the gift of time for the holidays has left us both more relaxed, and with more energy left after kid bedtime for each other. I'm fresh off a workmeeting about my professional goals, with clean markers of progress to report; my Instructional Technology certification finally arrived last week, an early holiday gift from the great state of Massachusetts.

Which is to say: I'm doing okay, I think. My family is amazing; my environment is safe and stable, if still bereft of snow. Life is crazy, as it always is. But this year, I'm resolving to let the world be what it is.

Pimpin' The B & J

2006-12-29T21:39:00.000-05:00

Do you like beer? Do you like ice cream? Well, has Ben & Jerry's got a taste for you...

I consider myself somewhat of an ice cream snob, ever since I spent a summer scooping ice cream at a local Steve's franchise, my first real job (from which I was ultimately and rightfully sacked, a story for some other evening). At Steve's, we made all our own ice cream, and it was beautiful to watch; we folded our own toppings in by hand on a long, creamywhite countertop long before a generation of Cold Stone employees discovered tendonitis, and it was a glorious, sticky summer all around.

One especially hot and adolescent evening we decided to try making beer ice cream. It tasted like vile swill -- mostly because the beer already tasted like that before we put it in. But otherwise, our experiments were generally a success. I can still taste the fresh peach ice cream like it was here in front of me. With mixed-in mini-sized chocolate chips. Mmm.

And after being so close to the process, I'm always game to blow those gourmet bucks on the best quality. No cheap, rectangular ice cream cartons for me; it's Ben & Jerry's if I'm doing the shopping. For a long time, I stocked up on Pecan Pie (with real chuncks of pie!) or old standby Chubby Hubby when I got the chance.

This week, after eyeing it on the shelf since it's release date in March, I finally tried something really new. Black & Tan, Ben & Jerry's new pintflavor, ain't the work of a couple of stoned teenagers. Here, the bitter bite has been tempered to a faint and fond hint of a quite distinctive cream stout.

I don't usually "do" product reviews these days, but this is amazing: deep, rich, extra-dark chocolate ice cream blended with cream stout ice cream, with a cream stout head. It doesn't taste like beer so much as it tastes like the world's best beer ice cream. It's like frozen Guinness, if Guinness didn't leave that bitter bite on the back of your tongue. And it looks like this:

Yeah, I know it's freezing out. But there's still no snow. Settle for ice cream.

I'm just sayin'

2006-12-28T21:19:00.000-05:00

Tonight's moon is a boat:
hollow, bright against seablack night,
rippled by cloud. Here the sea
moves against the silver hull.
The trees are coral. Later,
they will drown the moon.

Well, it was going to be a poem when it started

Tidbit Thursday

2006-12-28T13:22:00.000-05:00

A lazy day amidst the holiday season -- errands late this morning, a leftover lunch of christmas ham sandwich and heavy squash soup, a bout of to-the-basement woodstacking in the clear, still-snowless side yard.

In other news, elderkid got a gigantic Colorforms set for the holidays; I've more than doubled the piececount by cutting out lines and boxes from the sheet from which the original shapes had been punched. Check out how well they photograph against the soon-to-be-terraformed yard.

Darcie suggested we use the shiny plastic to map out the lines for this spring's yard project. It works out: red and white for path and stone walls, yellow for deck and railing, green and blue for field and fountain. I'll probably have at the windowglass this afternoon, after furnace fire, perhaps a nap.

Toddler Mine

2006-12-26T23:20:00.000-05:00

Pikaboo, Daddy!

I am rolling elderchild around atop the giant yoga ball before supper; shrieks of glee echo throughout the house. The wee one, ever Daddy's little girl, sees this as an imposition, a usurping of her usual role, and runs over.

No! My ball! NO! I'm....ME!

My wee one. Lighter than air, deceptively small for her age. Says please and nak noo, fusses over the slightest mess, spends hours wedging herself into the tiny space under the kiddie kitchen sink. This is a kid who names her emotions, who, when the world begins to whirl in front of her, yells Fun, yes? Fun, Daddy! like a spriggan.

Surely, she intended to say No! I'm mad! Just as surely, something more primal, the sheer identification of the feeling ego, was all that could emerge. Only with language so new could emotions so potently overwhelm the very vocabulary.

Post

2006-12-26T13:18:00.000-05:00

Home from the heavywet snows of Vermont to a garden pushing up green bulbshoots through the heavywet leafbed. The house is cold, as if the fog had infiltrated everything in our absence. The cat is happy to see us, happier still to be let outside again.

It was a frantic Christmas, like every year -- a dizzying flurry of wrapping paper and elderchild deliveries from undertree to aunt, uncle, grandparent, parent. We were late arriving, and my wife's siblings had to run their separate ways soon after, but the long afternoon with the inlaws was quiet and centered, and the kids were happy to play with new braintoys, the hanging bells, their great, great grandfathers' music boxes.

Now we fill the fridge with scavenged Christmas ham, line the kitchen counters with gifted bakedgoods, begin the long process of cleaning up for tomorrow' mass playdate, my father's afternoon visit, a week of snowless vacation. In the corner, the dog chews on her Christmas bone, tired out from long outdoor hours with my in-law's mixedbreed giant. The wee one slumbers in the car outside, pooped out from a long overnight. 364 days to Christmas, and it's good to be home once again.

Not With A Bang, Nor A Winter

2006-12-23T11:47:00.000-05:00

Family, finally.

Emotively speaking, the middle school holiday break begins midweek, somewhere between the multifaith and snowman-heavy decor and the calendar's end.

By Friday morning, the kids are a mess, and so are we. Learning has gone out the window, to be replaced by so much sugar it's not even funny. In my case, this meant cookies, gummi bears, and enough chocolate covered goodies to overload the nervous system. At 7:40 in the morning. After the usual six cups of coffee.

Of course, you just have to have one of everything, lest some kid feel left out. Not even the gift of a half dozen buttery, smooth pierogi, boldly requested in compensatory jest from the kid who took Thursday off from school to make 'em with his family, could take the edge off the sugar high.

By midmorning I'm practically hallucinating. I've given my morning lab classes the option of free play on the computer; the best and brightest choose to make holiday cards, or fiddle with the snowflake-maker courtesy of my mother in law, but most play mini golf while they munch on their cookies. The rest flail around the classroom, hurling gift wrap at each other, laughing uproariously while I make snide comments that keep them -- barely -- on this side of appropriate behavior.

I save the last few minutes of each class for a comprehensive crumb-cleaning and lab shutdown, finish my own classes by ten thirty, spend the afternoon wandering the halls, wideeyed and jittery. The kids are in their teams, watching holiday films; most won't finish, but the point is to be eye-glued to the screen, given the potential for havoc. Their teachers look frazzled after their own morning of containment. Their classrooms are clean, and ready for a holiday break floorwash in their absence.

By 2:15, I'm on the road, surprisingly relaxed, ready for a long winter's break. No snow in the forecast this year, but the rain begins as I crest the mountain. It hardly makes a dent in my serentity.

Back home, the kids are charging around the house like angels, pantless and gleeful. Elderchild and I present mama with her gift: some rose-scented bath lotion, the plaque above, and a commitment to moving the bedtime ritual into our mutual corner, that mama might have more time this year. The wee one throws cotton snow from window display to couch; everyone smiles, and no one asks her to stop.

We light candles, trade a last night of Channukah gifts, eat fresh challah warm from the oven. Darcie calls some old friends, making plans for a New Year's in our old prep school haunting grounds. The air is full of holiday shufflesounds. By nine, I'm asleep beside the elderchild, wiped out from a whole year's worth of bustle.

Holiday, here we come.

In Short

2006-12-20T22:26:00.000-05:00

Pre-holiday Wednesday is a bit like the bitter, poisonous taste of biting into an orange rind -- you can take it, even as your lips grow numb and itchy, because there, unfolding before you, is the Fruit, leaking onto your hand.

I was going to write more, but now it seems unnecessary.

Unca Jesse!

2006-12-17T22:59:00.000-05:00

My little brother and his nieces frolicking over the holiday weekend. They grow up so fast, don't they?

Back To Appalachia

2006-12-17T19:05:00.000-05:00

Oh, one of those: an appalachian dulcimer

Hanukkah was a rush this year, as always but moreso, a perennial crunch of eight days into concentrate made both necessary by our family's inevitable diaspora. In eight hours or less, a whirlwind of eventhood: lunch with my brother, our spouses, or father, my children; a rush back and forth in various combinations to get the right people in the right places to prep for the party, and to pick up my brother's car in the shop.

By six, we were singing songs around a dozen menorahs with my parent's oldest friends, now joined at the kitchen island by their own grown children holding children of our own. By seven, the family left behind was deep in a gift exchange, the kids burning off the evening's sugar rush rapidly among a blizzard of bright orange toys and wrapping paper snow.

By the time we arrived home, it was past ten. The kids had fallen asleep miles back to the story of the Maccabees, the lullabye rush of the holiday traffic on the turnpike; Darcie put them in their beds, and stayed up to clean and read a bit.

And instead of heading right for the computer, I used the sudden, rare silence to take out this year's present from mom: a dulcimer, in cherrywood.

The perfect instrument for the mellow and melancholy. Sure enough, I spent an hour in the firelight, faking my way through the Sufjan Stevens Christmas songbook.

Since then, I've managed to sneak in a few moments here and there, away from grubby fingers and eager minds unused to fragility. And, after wanting one for years, I'm pretty happy.

The dulcimer sounds a little like a banjo, and a little like one of those autoharp things that were popular when your mother was a hippie. You've probably heard it on a bunch of old Joni Mitchell songs without realizing it -- though it's much easier to play.

Want proof? Less than two hours total, and I can play the full set of blues chords, but more than that, after years of flute, I can find the intervals in the music, play melody and twang-harmony alike. I've mastered a dozen songs, and can play them at speed, and all without having to run through the usual gradated boringness that is the learner's workbook.

And thank goodness. Because it did come with a book, like instruments do. And, typically, the book is called You Can Teach Yourself Dulcimer. Which is the dumbest name for anything, really, because either it's true, in which case what do I need a book for? Or it's not, in which case maybe this isn't going to be the best book to start with, seeing as how they don't think you need one.

Also, the picture on the cover isn't promising. It depicts a guy wearing a dorky vest and a tall, blackbrimmed, turn-of-the-century hat. He seems to be working at some sort of faux-authentic outdoor museum; all around, perfectly normal children pull at their equally normal parent’s hands, point and laugh and this poor goofy-smiled guy who...well, darned if he doesn’t look just like me, beard and all.

I've decided I don't need the book. I can be me better at home than I can in a crowd of overcharged gawkers. No, it's enough to play along with the radio, and with the songs in my head, and finally and so rapidly be an agent of the full, chorded sound that fills my universe. And to be given such peace, such autonomous peace, out of the midst of such chaos. Thanks, Mom. It's what I've always wanted.

Home Sick

2006-12-15T11:53:00.000-05:00

Sinuses strained and fever at 101. An earache, a swollen backache, and -- since the coffee pot seems to have blown a fuse -- a headache growing behind my eyes. Last night I passed out on the couch in my winter coat, slept for three hours, and staggered upstairs to toss and turn until 4.

Not much of a way to end the week, what with the elderkid performing tonight in her preschool holiday show, tomorrow's hanukkah party at Mom's. But what goes around, comes around, and this one's been going around.

O Come, All Ye Faithful

2006-12-09T21:39:00.000-05:00

It's coming on Christmas, and up on the ridge the family farms sell cut-your-owns to send their kids to college. Ours consumes the living room, though we took it off four feet up to clear the ceiling; five hundred tiny lights and a wife's lifetime of ornaments spread sparse against the tapered balsam.

Tonight was meant to be a full-fledged traditional Christmas with the intimates, all four parents, their only grandkids, our longsettled selves. Darcie made a duck and all the trimmings: beets, stuffed game hens, a cheese and a balsam reduction, three sorts of sauce, and for an hour or three the house was just full enough, almost comfortable.

The intention was to follow this with a true turn-of-the-century Christmas, complete with roasted chestnuts and a host of recreated otherthings for the reenactment fan at Sturbridge Village. But tiny Cassia's cold made her too cranky to drag into the stilldry winter, so Dad and I stayed home to drink endless tiny cups of imaginary tea in front of the unattended television. By the time her bedtime had come and gone, so had Dad; all that was left was to bathe the fogheaded child, and wait for mama.

Tomorrow the elderchild will play Mary in our Church pageant. Smalltown Unitarian being what it is, there's been no rehearsal; Joseph will be played by the minster's child; between them they make up half the kids in the congregation. She was encouraged to dress up as anything she likes, "from fairy to lobster"; Darcie being what she is, there's sure to be a costume hanging in a closet somewhere already.

For most of my life Christmas was a cultural thing, everywhere but here; of the public sphere, and faintly imagined in other people's houses. Our Jewish lot brought presents, and the lights were bright, too.

Somewhere in those years I fell in love with someone who loves Christmas, and ceremony, and peace on earth. Christmas came into my house, and nestled in me.

I was thinking about Christmas songs the other day, and I finally realized something: what I love so much about Christmas has always been the way the music is something we all share in common; how with universal song we can belt our joy out together, and do; how it brings the world a little closer every year, if only for these darker days.

There's little else so powerful, and so sustained, in this world.

Jewish or Christian, Muslim or Pagan, let us celebrate together anything at all, so long as it can bring smiles of familiarity and memories of gingerbread to even strangers. Merry Christmas, everyone. God bless us, every one.

Top Songs of 2006

2006-12-05T22:30:00.000-05:00

After a handwringing elimination process, this year's top ten songlist runs the gamut from brazilian hiphop to americana, from emocore to indiecool.

It also contains eleven songs, because I just couldn't winnow the list down any further without going into full-blown OCD mode. And five covers, for which I make no apologies.

Eligibility requires a 2006 release date. All songs are downloadable.* Enjoy.

*to download a song, merely click the songtitle as you would any link, and you'll be directed to the Yousendit page for downloading.

10. (tie)
When Doves Cry
The Be Good Tanyas (site)

Mountains O' Things
The Duhks (site)

Two Canadian bands with female vocalists from opposite ends of the trad-alt-folk spectrum cover black American songwriter hits from the mid eighties. Exceptionally well. With banjo.

Ironically, though their playing styles are disparate, the originals were conversely so. The rough backporch plucking of Doves reframes the beatperfection of Prince's original; the crisp, bright acadian-rock turn of Mountains brings the distance of a greek chorus to folkie Chapman's raw, plaintive lament. And so on.

9.
Upside Down
Jack Johnson (site)

Okay, it's from a kids movie, and I can't help visualizing an animated Curious George painting handprints on an elephant's butt at the end, but I'd like to think that even if this weren't my daughter's favorite song, I'd still appeciate the sheer childlike joy of this and the better half of this year's soundtrack. More full than some of this ex-surfer's previous efforts, and less storytold, but for me this finally pulls together all the elements in one from Johnson. Who knew the jungle drums and the bounce of the animated flick were just what that distinctive strumstyle needed?

8.
Summersong
The Decemberists (site)

Recent release The Crane Wife is still growing on me, but this song stands out, and not just for a production value that finally showcases that quirky, nasal lead as powerfully distinctive, rather than just plain awesomely weird. I still have no idea what this song is really about -- there seems to be some eastasian fairytale backstory -- but the catchy universality of getting swallowed by a whale quietly sticks like gravy in the mind. And oh, those crashing accordian choruses like waves.

7.
Handle With Care
Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins w/ Ben Gibbard, M. Ward, and Conor Oberst (site)

Finally, a song that pretends to be nothing more than a fun wheeze almost accidentally transforms a chestnut into one of the catchiest songs this side of January. The original supergrouping from which sprung this poppy hit featured distinctive voices from Orbison to Petty, and Lewis plays the song true to form, bringing in the next generation of Traveling Wilburys with great success, proving once again that the best covers bring new light and life to even the cheesiest of originals.

6.
Heart of Life
John Mayer (site)

Me and a billion twentysomething housewives, I know. But I'm not in it for the top forty hits. There's something about John's simplest songs, the way they capture inner adolescence so perfectly, the sheer joy of hope, the claptonesque guitar, the boy genius. Heart of Life rivals Daughters on my sentimental playlist, and that's saying something, since my first daughter was born when that one first came out. And, hey, Dave Chapelle thinks he's cool.

5.
Mas Que Nada, Sergio Mendes featuring Will.i.am and the Black Eyed Peas (site)

Everybody's collaboratin' across the genre line these days. Sometimes it even works (see number 3 below, for example). This hiphop samba, featuring the always askew Black Eyed Peas over tradlatin beatmaster Sergio Mendes, is so crisp it teeters on the good side of overproduced, but that's half its charm. The other half is the universally stellar, almost disparate performances. The mix is clean, the players rock, and the whole is better than the parts -- what more could you want? Who knew the samba was so deep?

4.
Tonight We'll Be Fine
Teddy Thompson (site)

Another cover, this one by an avowed addict with a voice and style that transcend his pedigree (say what you will about Richard Thompson's songwriting; his voice really isn't my cup of tea, and nor is Bob Dylan's voice). Originally performed live in 2004 for this year's tribute flick to Leonard Cohen, this plaintive reworking rivals the best of Teddy's album work -- a nice turn from the oft-cheesy coversongs so often cluttering up the soundtrack racks. Thanks to Dad for turning me on to Teddy.

3.
Crazy
Gnarls Barkley (site)

It was tempting to pick the throttled rage of Ray lamontagne's cover, or perhaps Nelly Furtado's scared little-girl lisp. But the success of the covers only demonstrates just how universal the sentiment, how plastic the motif of insanity. In the end the original reigns supreme: from the phat beats and funky bass jumpstart to the raspy vocals of out-of-nowhere Cee-lo, this one had earworm all over it, and I'm always grinning-glad to see it rise from the shufflechaff.

Incidentally, major props to me for introducing dozens of middle schoolers to this song long before it hit the summer beach boombox crowd. Thanks, blogosphere, for setting me in the groove.

2.
Paperweight
Joshua Radin and Schuyler Fisk (site)

Joshua Radin was kind of a dark horse for me this year; it was September, I had never heard of him, and then, within a week,
this song popped out of nowhere
someone passed me a live cover of Yaz's Only You
his originals turned out to be universally quiet and catchy
I fell in love.

A quiet gem off The Last Kiss soundtrack, Paperweight's poetry was supposedly written the night before it was recorded, and I believe it; musically and lyrically, it is one of those perfect, raw, sparse songs that come out whole cloth on those rarest of inspirational nights long past bedtime. We hear Zach Braff's second film is no Garden State, but this song makes it all worthwhile. No idea who Schuyler Fisk is, incidentally, but it's her lyrics that rock.

1.
World Spins Madly On
The Weepies (site)

A nightsong about waking, a mystical spinner about motionlessness and impotent loss: sweetness and light from a harmonic pair of solo-folkies-gone-indieband that took the blogging world by storm this year. Talk about earworms; according to iTunes, I've listened to this song over 120 times since downloading it in April. My daughter knows all the words; she's fallen asleep to it, once or twice, in my arms on the couch, when Mama was out.

I cry to this song sometimes, in the dark.

Towards A Top Ten

2006-12-04T22:27:00.000-05:00

Finally managed to pare down to a clean top ten songs of 2006 list, though it hurt to make those last few cuts. Thanks to those who sent along suggestions. Honorable mention, in no particular order:

Roll On, Little Willies
Manifest Destiny, Guster
Cell Phone's Dead, Beck
Little Sadie, Crooked Still
Chasing Cars, Snow Patrol
The Needle has Landed, Neko Case
Thirteen, Ben Kweller
The Heart of Saturday Night, Madeleine Peyroux
Yeah Yeah Yeah Song, Flaming Lips
Springtime Can Kill You, Jolie Holland
Blue as You, Shawn Mullins
My Strange Nation, Susan Werner
Heist, Ben Folds
Waiting, Glen Philips

Thanks to the wonders of Yousendit, the final top ten songs will be available in mp3 form. Give me a day or two to upload everything, and I'll have an early holiday present for you and yours up before you know it.

Tracking Tuneage: Towards a 2006 Top Ten

2006-12-02T18:25:00.000-05:00

Been trying to make a top ten songlist for the year, but the pickins are slim. Plenty of albums by great musicians this year just never stuck a track in my ear. Ray Lamontagne's new album? Eh. Madeline Peyroux? Neko Case? Good, but nothing quite so catchy as their last few. Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler, Bruce Springstein and a house full of banjo players? Worth having for posterity's sake, but not worth featuring.

More frustrating, I find to my chagrin that much of the music I discovered since January was actually released in 2005. Feist's Mushaboom, Jose Gonzales' Heartbeats, an amazing half an album by Teddy Thompson, even the newest Death Cab For Cutie singles first showed up a year ago or more. So much of my overplayed 2006 favorites have been out for ages, there's little competition for the top spots.

Makes you wonder what's out there already, just waiting to be loved.

I'll post full mp3s once I've finished the list. In the meantime, since it would embarrasing to end up with a top ten list with only nine items on it, feel free to drop me a comment with any must-have suggestions I might have missed. And don't be afraid to point out the obvious. I don't get out much.

Marlboro Lights, Part 2What were the students like during your time there?

2006-12-01T21:50:00.000-05:00

Bring the second in a series of interview questions for old collegiate co-conspirator and amateur historian Shaw.

What were the students like? Not one was like the next; each was a busted stereotype in and of himself. Find commonnality between the ruralmaine carpenter down the hall, his classically trained homosexual roommate, my quiet ex-Deadhead athelete of a roommate and the RA huddled next door studying the TV Dinner culture of the american fifties? Typifying them is night impossible, Shaw; even on the smallest scale, your second question is a null set.

True, the small group I drifted towards were primarily older students, back at school again after a few semesters and a few more soulsearching. If we were all anything, it was that we were more defined than eighteen year olds, and perhaps that was why, in the end, I find them a pack of remembered individuals, rather than a group to explain.

As underclassmen, however, we were framed together by our similar status. We lived as classmates and co-explorers more than anything else -- strange bedfellows, all, sharing co-ed bathrooms and party basements thick with smoke and life. The upperclassmen were half invisible, barely present. Even those who did not live off campus were wraithlike in the social world, focused on plan and higher order questions.

By the time we became those upperclassmen, of course, what had once felt defined was now just overfocused. The reason upper classmen were invisible was that they spent much of their time in solo pursuit of The Plan, a solitary and anticommunity activity of the mind.

When we met in those last years it was more to talk crosspurposes at each other, using each other as objects and soundboards for our own necessarily one-track minds, trains passing in the night, and I appreciated how bright, how different we were then, because is validated our own unique pursuits while simultaneously offering of and in each other the one totally new perspective, however off track, that we would have in a month of single-question thought. If we started as individuals in type, we ended up individuals in mind.

Tidbit Thursday: Yet Another Damn Sonnet

2006-11-30T20:49:00.000-05:00

Tonight the moon looks like an ear
Silver and pocked behind strands of cloud.

It's been warm, but it was cold before.
The chrysalis that never hatched
Turned black, transparent, glittery, dull,

A shriveled fruit among the strawberry plants,
The unmistakable orange marks of a monarch
Just visible through its dark walls.

It's snowing tonight where my sister lives.
But it's warm here, and damp in the air.

We'll hide the chrysalis from the children
passively, leave it there, dead
among the browning leaves and dark.

Quiet. The moon is listening.

Marlboro LightsQuestion 1: Why did you choose Marlboro?

2006-11-28T23:02:00.000-05:00

As part of his ongoing obsession with all things Marlboro, old college chum Shaw is interviewing me via email. I'll be posting my responses here as I can get to them. Got no time for othermusing anyway.

We were living together off and on for a couple of years by then, most recently in a shared Somerville, MA apartment under the world largest willow tree. My fellowship at the Museum of Science was coming to an end, and the time felt right to go back to college.

But I also knew that most educational models didn't work for me. You've seen me in the classroom, Shaw -- I'm a bright guy, but I really need to be engaged with the material in order to get much out of it. And I got lost in those long, inevitable hours of background and knowledge that spun out time eternally between every subjectively resonant image, every mind-altering epiphany, in a classroom. It wasn't just a need for small class size, I also needed an environment where everything I was asked to do was, ultimately, something I asked myself to do.

Thank God Marlboro was that place.

I mean, sure, I was in a different place, too. When Darcie and I had dropped out of Bard together halfway through our Sophomore year, it was partially because the only thing we were really getting out the place was each other. Since then, my time as a public programs and school programs fellow at the Museum of Science had taught me that I had some mad skills, but more than that, it gave me a real curiosity about the relationship between the content of our presentations and the mass media models which lurked behind us, audience and presenter alike, and the way this shared awareness of narrative modes framed the ways we developed our demonstrations.

'course, I couldn't have said it like that at the time. That's what Marlboro was for.

Why did I choose Marlboro? Because it was ten miles up the hill from Darcie's parent's house. And Darcie had decided to move back home. And I needed one myself. And Marlboro was perfect.

Busy, Busy, Busy

2006-11-28T22:37:00.000-05:00

No time to chat today; I'm busy creating a presentation on the state of technology at my middleschool workplace for tomorrow's PTO Tech Committee meeting.

I'll pop back in sometime soon, and you can hear all about how I backed into my mother's car pulling out of the garage. I promise.

Draftpoetry: November Sonnet

2006-11-27T16:25:00.000-05:00

Here's a little draftsonnet fluff from an hour's respite, typed directly into Blogger while the kids watch A Muppet Christmas Carol.

November

Some mornings the fog rests over
the city like snow in a hollow.

A barely sealevel something
must trap the air, the humidity,
something about heat convection

and I wonder whether it evaporates or rises
or if the city just sucks it up somehow
in the collective gasp of awakening.

The rest of the world is tilted green.
There's just that downhill strip of road
Cutting through the farmland

And Springfield in the distance
Poking through her fogblanket
Like Spring rising from the earth.

Elseblog

2006-11-24T21:05:00.001-05:00

Posted a few tunes of thanksgiving over at music sharing community Audiography yesterday. Head over for Deb Talan, Chris Smither, and the song least likely to ever again be sung in public lest a horde of angry liberals lynch the singer for promoting molestation. Stay for the rest of the music. This week's theme: late night tuneage.

Coming soon: a workblog entry about Wikipedia pro and con, featuring the classroom potential of Wikipedia Simple English. An entry so obvious in its outline and high points it practically writes itself -- so why haven't I started it yet?

More fully elseblog, the Xmas music continues to pour in, and daddyblogger Phil begins a discussion about the toys kids keeps coming back to.

'Tis The Season

2006-11-24T10:41:00.000-05:00

Kill! Kill! Buy! Buy!

At the mall on Wednesday, past red-suited Salvation Army bellringers, the stores were full of tinsel and snowmen, shimmer and tree, and not much more in the way of crowds than an average Summer sunday. We didn't buy much -- some shoes, a pink peasant skirt for the elderchild, a sit-down lunch at Friendly's -- but we weren't holiday shopping, either.

On our way back home, the year's first Christmas song turned up on the car radio. This morning the astutely audiocool jefito posted his 2006 Holiday mixtape. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and it comes earlier every year.

But shopping on Black Friday? A great way to lose your sanity and your kids. We're not celebrating Buy Nothing Day per se, we just hate the crowds. Happily, a teacher and his family can always start shopping at 3:00 midweek to beat the rush. What do you want for the holidays this year?

Thanks, By The Numbers

2006-11-22T22:09:00.000-05:00

There was a seed, grey and small
In the ground of the earth between our hearts.
We'll never know what mystery made it grow
It will just be our history, now...
-- from Thanksgiving, by Deb Talan (click to download)

One week seeding the house with the colors of autumn, filling the glasstopped table with dried leaves and twiglets, hanging boughs from the post and beam. An afternoon constructing the world's largest cornucopia in the bay window. Two days cleaning, with special attention to the shelfdust and windowsmears for once.

Four leaves on the cherrywood table, and we still need to add the camping table to seat the prospective 18 arriving tomorrow, side dishes in hand.

It's our second year hosting Thanksgiving at home, and it's already looking like another successful family afternoon.

I can't really take credit for much of it.

This year's theme is a celebration of the local. We've bought local milk and cider. Today we picked up the bird: farmbought by Darcie's parents, driven halfway here, and handed off from trunk to trunk in the parking lot of the Ingleside Mall. Tomorrow we make stuffing with the challah she made last Friday.

The family -- my parents and hers, sisters and cousins and aunts -- will converge with their own local goodies, making it a true New England feast, unless my sister manages to bring something on the plane from Ohio.

On the way home from the mall, the suddenly unsullen elderchild insists on singing every verse of Twinkle Twinkle to her sister in the backseat darkness; the everpolite wee one brings Mommy, please help me as her first proper sentence. Our children grow in leaps and bounds, become themselves in firework moments. Tomorrow, they'll be the center of the universe, get drunk on attention.

I am thankful, among many, many things, to have a family like this, a home like this, a place like this. Having come from homeless and uncertainty to this bigenough house full of love makes it easy to give thanks, and then some.

But if I have so much to be thankful for, it is no coincidence my wife runs through this evening's entry like an angel. She is a wonder, and at her best when creating the perfect event environment. She is a mother with everything she's got, and she makes it look easy. She is a partner, a friend, a lifemanager. She who plans the party, schedules the turkey, sets the table, cleans the bulk of the house while I am at work, holds us in, holds us together. Giving thanks, like life itself, would be empty without her.

A Blogger Turns Four

2006-11-20T22:15:00.000-05:00

Happy blogday to me, though the language doesn't spill from me like it used to.

Happy blogday, though the world is quieter now, more full of white noise, less bloggable.

Happy blogday, though we've come a hundred miles or more, lost a generation and a job, had a second child, been homeless and come home again.

Some things haven't changed, I suppose. The beard grew back, though the hair doesn't hang like it once did. My back still hurts; the cigarettes still run my life despite a three month hiatus. My wife still loves me, and I love her.

But the evidence is in the archives. That tiny fistwaver has passed through tyrant into something bright and too-often self-aware. The students I once knew as friends are now just kids, no matter how smart, how coiled, how epiphanic.

The memory of weekly radio broadcast fades into mundania. Memes disappear; the last unhashed past congeals and grows cold on the kitchen counter like the picked-over bones of leftover chicken.

The mind I threw freely into the void smothers under the weight of family secrets, workplace preservation, all the myriad symptoms of a life lived in public as the rest of the world has come online.

I lived at work once; now I clear my head twenty minutes at a time, back and forth ten times a week between two disparate selves.

My voice, my world, my family, my home: some days is seems like nothing is the same.

Four years ago tonight, in the wee hours where I no longer dwell, I started a blog. You were there, too.

It seems like a lifetime. In many ways, I suppose, it has been.

It is still impossible to say just what I mean.

But maybe it's enough to have tried.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

2006-11-19T09:46:00.000-05:00

Finally got around to signing up for an account over at last.fm, a web-based service-slash-tool that -- among many other social sharing functions -- logs your last-played songs and makes the resulting up-to-date playlist available, like so:

A neat way to give your adoring public some ear-access. Assuming I can find a skin that's narrow enough, look for a permanently placed playlist in the sidebar sometime soon.

What are you listening to?

Meanwhile...

2006-11-17T20:36:00.000-05:00

Not much blogging this week, but spending the week porting 41 gigs of mp3 files over to "Max", our new 200G external hard drive, was well worth the time otherwasted. The newfound space cranks up the downloading habit a bit, especially after a year valiantly struggling to keep room for pix and docs on the 60 gig laptop; at this rate, the 60 gig iPod will be full by New Years.

Mad props from the district superintendent last week for my workblog post on workhabits and instructional strategies to minimize the possibility of losing digital work. Of course, the kudos raise the stakes so high for the next entry, I end up with blogger's block.

Back in the classroom I've got my seventh graders comparing internet news sites with their TV, radio, and deadtree counterparts. Today's assignment: write a letter to a pre-literate infant, recommending one of the big four over the others as a lifelong primary source. Interestingly, no single medium came out a clear favorite; even more interestingly, at thirteen, most members of the post-digital generation can already intuit the basic benefits of each, from portability to personalization of content and context.

In other techhead news, and to come fullcircle back from blogging to musictech, seeing a ska cover of the Batman theme song from my brother's old band pop up on Fongsongs (one of my regular short-to-medium-list of mp3blogs) was kind of like bumping into your local coffee barista in the Dhaka airport lounge. On the other hand, it makes an entire Batman vs. Taxman post so much more than just a front to recapture that old Lenlow mashup.

Na No No No

2006-11-13T19:13:00.000-05:00

A few years ago I seriously considered joining the fray for NaNoWriMo -- aka National Novel Writing Month for those of us who, unlike the New Zealand Testing Board that just decided that high school students will be allowed to use "text-speak" in exams, actually still prefer english over cyberspeech.

Happily, by midday on November 2nd of that year, I soon realized I was a plotless idiot who had no business trying to produce junk, whether it be for meme or for later novelfodder. I mean, imagine what most NaNoWriMo participants are cranking out on November 27th at 3 a.m. and you grok the basic problem here. Heck, imagine the dreck that most folks tend to start with, given the lack of general outlining and planning participants speak almost proudly of.

Look, maybe you're Kerouac -- maybe you, too, can produce a short stream of consciousness thingie of quality and innate truth in just a few short weeks on the road of your daily grind. But most of us don't live the whirlwind existence. Most of us have no great unwritten novel fully outlined in our heads. And most of us have much better things to do with three hours of every day than to write as fast as we can about absolutely anything, so long as the keys keep clicking along.

And anyway, my life is my novel. Why force it? Four years and over a third of a million blogwords later (that's six novels, if you're counting), I remain convinced that'd rather pour my energy into family, friends, blog and brain on a daily basis.

To be fair, way back in that fateful November, I bookmarked Novel In Less Than One Year, just in case I ever want to go back. But when I publish my blog excerpts, I'll have the last laugh for sure. When I do write my novel, it will be marked by a lifetime of history and careful craft, not an arbitrary ruler or a clock on the wall.

God bless anyone who manages to actually complete a novel worth reading in the midst of this experiment in mass production -- and there are sure to be just enough exceptions to prove the rule. And God bless you, too, if you have no better way to do what you've always wanted to do.

But, truly, doing it because it's that time of year? Because everyone's doing it? Novels aren't a destination. It's not about speed OR endurance. It's a piss poor way to fulfil your destiny.

Kerouac's powerful, high-school-accessible On The Road is a great story, and it's great poetry, but a novel it ain't -- and Kerouac knew it. Anyone who thinks they can write a novel against deadline would best remember Truman Capote, who said of On The Road: That's not writing, that's typing.

Memento

2006-11-12T20:37:00.000-05:00

Two indian summerdays in Brooklyn, where art is everywhere, especially in the tinroof apartment my brother and his wife share with their studio spaces. Kid-friendly, pescetarian fun in Central Park and subways, but cities make us nervous, New York City moreso.

We were on the road when I realized I was dizzy. The world looked yellow. My hands felt cold. I pulled over in the rain so Darcie could drive.

Home, the front room is infested with fragile bugs. Their cornhusk wings show on the sliding door like fingerprints. I spend an hour lurking by the chairlegs, waiting for wings visible against the glass, the room spinning.

The garage is an airlock. It's still raining outside the cold house. All night the New York sky glows like a ballfield.

Stakes in the GrassInside and Out: A Juxtaposition

2006-11-05T14:20:00.000-05:00

We're closing fast on the end of our fourth year here at Not All Who Wander Are Lost, and other than a little sitetweaking the biggest issue here seems to be the sporadic posting. I've blogged before on this, suggesting at the time that maybe this was a good sign, that the life unbloggable was a life less in need of being blogged.

But the coverage area of possible reasons is endless, remains murky. Perhaps, I wonder, the subconscious is trying to keep a tight reign on the flow of language, lest something slip out. Am I so afraid to see what I am thinking?

On the homestead we spend the morning behind the house, staking and roping where the sliding glass falls off into nothingness. The project will involve a complex deck opening into, varously, a full-scale patio, a suite of halfwooded playspaces and terraces, and a shape-enchoing staircase similarly opening into same from the french doors at the house's other end.

After months of treecutting, becoming comfortable with the space and its possibilities, what was once wooded and closed starts to seem infinite. Funny how, once you've steeped in it a while, the world steps out organically into the senses like that, to become somehow both defined and present.

Tinythoughts

2006-11-03T18:42:00.000-05:00

I like a warm house. That we've not yet figured out how to dampen the wood furnace properly pleases me.

The laptop -- our sole computer -- holds 60 gigs. So does the iPod. What with photos, software, and room for the occasional word document, that leaves the 'Pod glass perennially 2/3 full. Or is it 1/3 empty?

Two short-attention-span kids + an endless number of short clips from classic Sesame Street episodes on YouTube = three nights running of postprandial snuggletime.

If the natural trend of the universe is entropic, why do we clean the house again?

You know how, on late eighties sitcoms, they've got that hilariously wry handyman who never seems to finish that endless series of odd jobs? We're looking for one of those. I think his name is Mike.

"Mr F., you know what movie you need to see?" "No, Courtney, but it wouldn't matter unless it's rated G." We haven't had a proper date since the elderchild was born. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Used to be, the very mention of a bath would set the dog barking madly. Now it sets of the dog and both kids. Bubbles, Dada? Indeed.

Blogger's cut their users off from their FTP accounts as of the 31st. Note to self: after three years, it's probably a bit late to update the old about boyhowdy pages anyway. Want to know more? Read it anyway, and extrapolate from there.

Reason #4,572 why my wife rocks: the local consumer bureau is paying us thirty bucks to use two packs of diapers we'd have bought anyway, and all we have to do is answer a few easy questions online and call for our check. I'd give details, but we're not supposed to tell anyone. Shhhh...

Reason #4,573: The wee one's caterpillar costume won a prize at the town hall after the Halloween parade.

In a universal nod to fairness, the elderchild's butterfly fairy photo showed up full color in the local paper two days later. I'd post the pic, but they're a bit too local for that.

In other news, there's nothing like an almostfull moon in a clear sky the first night it freezes over. Stay here awhile, baby: it's cold outside.

Best. Chart. Ever.

2006-11-02T21:48:00.000-05:00

Recursiveness at its best, wonderfully wry, and ever-useful for helping middle school students understand how charts represent ideas. Via BoingBoing, of course.

Thinking Out Loud

2006-10-30T19:05:00.000-05:00

Me. Mine. Self. Help.

A holy host of new words from the wee one this week speak to the growing awareness of selfhood and separation. We adapt to her needs, offer her opportunity where just last month we did it for her, wait for her first try to fail, hold ourselves back until we are asked for help.

Then, tonight, as we dance in the lights-off living room, wrists aglow with summer's leftover lightsticks, a new word comes: own, as in "I'm going off on my own for a while."

Mama comes back from the bathroom alone to tell me about it. And off goes the wee one, stalking herself in the dark.

On some basic level, language is freedom. Speaking up and speaking out make the difference between slave and freedman, between own life and owned life. Witness the language of the baby, who cannot speak for herself; witness, too, the self-censored silences of untenured wage slaves, the yes men nodding in the silent boardroom as the doomed ship goes ever onward towards the reefs. In ancient societies, cutting out the tongue was an act of disempowerment in many ways more severe than excommunication.

As an expression of inner voice, words are more than mere evidence of mind. It is a truism in teaching that the ability to verbalize is paramount for those who would develop clarity of thought. The inner grok, the empathic awareness, the epiphanic brainburst have value, to be sure. But if you can't put it into words, we say, you can't truly be said to comprehend.

Thus, we celebrate Cassia's new words, and the development we infer from it. How wonderful to have a child that wants to try. How blessed we are to have a kid that sees herself as self. How beloved we feel, to know that she trusts us to be here, if she needs us, and when she returns.

But you can't have selfhood without personal loss when you're a parent. How ironic, I think, that the goal of a parent is to teach that which we have put aside in order that we might have children in the first place. How wonderful and strange to realize that giving up my independence was but the first, vital step towards her own first steps away from us, and towards herself.

Someday, God willing, she will walk towards us again on adult legs, head held high, clear of thought and tongue, moving of her own volition. In the meanwhile, God give me the strength to step aside, and gladly, that she might come into her own.

The Autumn Leaves

2006-10-28T14:34:00.000-04:00

Never so happy being buried alive...

It's raining now -- all high winds and falling limbs, in fact -- but yesterday before the storm took the rest of this season's leaves down from our towering oaks, the elderkid and I had some fun with the leafblower. Full flickrset here; samples below.

Musical ElseblogDeath Cab Does Death Right

2006-10-24T22:35:00.000-04:00

Spent my blogging energy tonight over at music-sharing community Audiography, where the theme this week is Death.

If you haven't fallen in love with Death Cab For Cutie's brave, sweet, everhopeful lovesong I Will Follow You Into The Dark, you haven't lived.

Hard not to end up a bit depressed after thinking about death so much, I suppose. The dark, cold nights don't help. But I can't help thinking: if work weren't a thing to endure these days, I'd have weathered it better.

Back From The GardenAn Interlude, With Music

2006-10-23T21:18:00.000-04:00

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe its the time of man
I dont know who l am
But you know life is for learning
-- Joni Mitchell, Woodstock

Ahem.

My name is boyhowdy, and I'm a blogger.

Once I wrote in this space several times a day. Four years ago when things were new; three years ago, when the life of the mind was rich and renewed; a year and a half ago, when the world was falling apart; a year ago, when it all fell back together again.

In the past month, I've averaged one post a week.

It's not just that nothing's new, though I suppose in some way the mundania of it all is starting to shine through, like tin under the gold plate of an insincere marriage. It's not just that I've mined my past until the cavernous shafts are all that remains, though it's hard, sometimes, to remember which tiny remnants might still be there, buried under the discard pile.

On Friday, I was alive and light of heart for the first time in months. For the first time in years, I got to be a part of one of those perfect oldfriends parties, where intimacy is the name of the game, and you stay up late eating comfort food and talking about everything there is to talk about. Those rare nights, where you never seem to be without a drink, but you never get really drunk, and you never lose that happy, babbling glow.

On Saturday, after a slow hilarous morning, pancakes and bacon and coffee by the koi pond, comfortable in everyone's nightclothes, we caravaned it over to the annual meeting of the minds -- thirty crew chiefs, the heart and soul of the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, our home away from home. Where I was more appreciated, more genuinely celebrated for both who I am and what I have done with the world, than I've felt at work in a good, long time, not since the novelty wore off.

Once, I would have rushed home to blog it all: the friendly faces, the thousand thank yous, the nods of approval, the ideas, the love, the shared sense of purpose. The chicken pecking at my feet as the roundrobin crew chief reports slowly wound their way around a circle of folding chairs still cold from their barn storage space. The glasses we smuggled from the pizza place, ice and all in our coat pockets out the door midmeal, so we might remember this night forever.

In the car on the way home the language would begin taking on the rhythm of the road, my heart, the wind through the crackedopen window. By the time I hit the turnpike, I'd be scribbling fragments to myself in the dark, desperately trying to hold on to the overwhelming, perfect structure of the ten 'graf entry forming unbidden in my head.

Less than a month to go until my four year bloggiversary, and I'm fighting to tear this one out before it disappates.

Brain be damned; rut be cursed. I need this blog, need you, need the regular rush of language. I hate what I'm turning into. I hate that I only feel this alive one weekend in ten. I hate that the language is leaving my life.

We are stardust. We are golden. And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden...

Click over to Yousendit for Eva Cassidy's cover of Woodstock.

Sorry About That

2006-10-22T00:04:00.000-04:00

Excuses here.

Seriously -- it was one of those weeks. Yesterday and today have been much, much better, though. More on that tomorrow.

Oh, and Darcie, if you're reading this...I miss you and the kids terribly.

Confessions of an Addict

2006-10-16T22:28:00.000-04:00

Every day it's the same. Alarm at 5:20, down in the dark for the bathrobe by the bathroom door, flip the coffee switch on my way outside for the first cigarette, shiver in the dark, reading by the porch light. Finish, head right for the now-glistening java on my way back inside, pour the milk by the refrigerator light. Settle in by the computer in the otherwise-dark with that first golden cup: check the email, play a few rounds of weboggle.

When the clock says six, I pack up the computer, leave it by the door by my shoes, belt, wallet and keys, head out for a second cig, refill on the way out.

Coming in, the cup is stil half-full, or half-empty, I suppose. The shower beckons.

I hang my clothes in the bathroom the night before. I fill the coffee pot with water, filter, grounds, rinse the travel mug. When I disrobe for my shower, I hang the bathrobe where it will need to be for tomorrow's darkened awakening.

The coffee goes on the first surface inside, so my hands are free to put the toothpaste on my finger; in the shower, I'll transfer it to the brush, and do my teeth with my whole head immersed. The watch goes just so on the sinkside, next to that second cup; I'll finish the now-cold coffee between pants and socks, there in the still-warm damp before opening the door into the new day.

From here, it's all downhill: the hair cream in the unfogged mirror, the flip of the fan to clear the last moisture out of the air, the trip upstairs for forehead kisses all around, the final pocket assembly by the counter, lights out behind me.

I realized this morning as I bumbled through my daily ablution that I no longer think about the day ahead as I prepare for it. A minimum of movement, a grace in grogginess, everything on its way to the next thing, a well-oiled machine am I.

The ritual takes the place of the preparation. It's as if the walkthough was all there is. Meditation, or man's measure? Survival, or careful planning? Either way, the start of another day.

Awoke

2006-10-14T06:17:00.000-04:00

Sleepless in almostwinter, the sky still dark, I am awoken at six in the morning by the wee one waving a waning-light flashlight in my face, asking for batrees. Clok?, she asks, pointing above my head. And in my half-awake stupor, it takes a moment to realize she's asking me to switch out the unseen power from one object to another. Pretty subtle, for a little kid.

It's her half birthday today. At eighteen months her vocabulary has grown to almost a hundred words, though not all are clear. And she still won't use more than one at a time, unless you count the sequence of sounds that comprise Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star in babblese.

But she's forever on the cusp of full language, prepped with nouns and adjectives and verbs, a few sounds. She can finish every line of her favorite songs with the right word; knows the names of a dozen family members, twice as many foods. Some words, like in every kid's development, seem to have come from nowhere (what do you say when you burp, we say? Beep!).

So far this morning, we've talked of snak -- appies, nuts, mik -- and settled on fissies (What do you say, Cassia? nak nu!). She's gone to the door to look for the moon, watched Daddy make cafi, and asked for batteries until the mind moved on.

Watching her come fully awake is like watching a seed grow. At first, the wee one and I glaze over to Boohbah, an old tape made by my mother when we first tried the telly with the elderchild oh, so long ago. We watch it twice together, talking our way through, like an ex-media teacher should when watching television with a kid far too young. She sways along with the fuzzy wide-eyed blobs, first in my arms, then, more independent, on the carpet in front of the television, solo with the screen, grinning like a madman, laughing with glee in the otherwise silence, learning to jump with fierce concentration.

By now, she's running in circles behind me, humming along, rolling and tumbling and spinning in almost-control of her body. In a half an hour, she's moved from identifying with the Boobahs themselves to trying out the movements of the live-action, look-what-I-can-do kids portrayed between the scenes. She's fast with the fast music, slow with the slow, almost on the beat, almost okay on her own, except that she wants to be sure I'm here, enough to come over every few minutes to touch my hand, look at my face, laugh, go back to her play.

Maybe she isn't too young, after all. In the context of the usual daytime I experience, she looks so small against her sister; though their constant struggle for place and self has become a bit more manageable in the past few weeks, it's still rare to know them for themselves, outside of the sibling struggle.

But kids aren't statistics; each one needs what she needs, and those of us with more than one of them must constantly struggle to give them their individual attention in a constantly shared environment. And this one is, to my surprise, more awake, more human here in the early morning than she is in the late post-work afternoons that, usually, are my only lot with her.

God bless the one that can take us by the hand, lead us downstairs in the morning long before her sister arises, and, in doing so, give us the time to finally see them in their own growing light.

Postscript: First sentence: Daddy, Dance! Ten minutes of frantic, hilarious carpetwiggling later, she fell asleep in my arms watching Elmo. She may be growing up, but she'll always be my sweet little girl.

Mundania De Lo Habitual

2006-10-12T21:10:00.000-04:00

So many days of full steam ahead, though it started a bit oddly when I got pulled from the classroom after the first fifteen minutes of class Tuesday to go off and grade 7th grade standardized essay tests, which I secretly enjoy, because it's so often hilarious. Didn't miss much back at school -- it was to have been my slow day this week. Ah, well -- my students seemed to do okay researching their "moment in computer history" without me there to constantly derail them with tangential trivia.

Yesterday at work we did a dry run of our emergency lockdown procedures. The cops brought the dogs in to check lockers while we huddled on our classroom floors in groups of twentyfive, behind closed curtains, locked doors, silent, in darkness. Twenty minutes never passed so slowly. But it's better to be sure, I guess.

Back to normality today, or what passes for ritual in the specialist's everchanging world. The lab's still busy, what with both 8th and 7th grade science projects in the last throes of completion, and my own students are mid-research, but while they cut and paste their pix from google I've got enough time for overdue paperwork. In the end, I fill up an hour's worth of tweenminutes with a hundred emails, a rewrite of the old and out-of-date citation standards for the school, a draft list of school technology project needs for the principal.

All the stuff once pending, now finally out of the way.

Back home the leaves have turned our lawn a bright yellow orange. The driveway is wet from the rain, slick with rotting, fallen foliage, and it takes two tries to get the old couchmobile up the turn. The kids have been home all day with mama, uncleaning in her wake, and it's good to bring some energy home.

Some, anyway. I still fall asleep on the couch before supper.

It's darker now when I rise, as if that were possible; dark when, dressed and showered but as yet unbrushed, I tread lightly upstairs to kiss the girls goodbye; dark, still, when I check my pockets, gather up the laptop, the third cup of coffee, the keys, head out the door. The garage door rises at the push of a sunvisor button to reveal the faint deepsea blue of a wakening morning, and I am off to another day.

The weatherman predicts a cold night, but it's still damp and warm outside, the humid air holding back the first true frost. Who knows how close we are to the edge? Let us celebrate the autumn while we may, for snow is coming.

Stacking The Deck

2006-10-09T22:22:00.000-04:00

Talk about structured procrastination -- I just spent an hour writing a workblog entry on the ecology of learning spaces just to avoid writing here.

Sometimes, the best thing about having a blog is everything else.

Pity the main reason I'm avoiding this space is that my life has become temporarily consumed by the unbloggable bits. Well, that, and the sad fact that surely no one wants to hear about how much I hate shaving.

A Horse Of A Different Color

2006-10-07T20:49:00.000-04:00

Rocking horse (Oak, Provincal stain) from Kloter Farms

Even beyond the car dealership inventory sales, in our nexk of the woods, at least, the universe of commerce and community comes out for Columbus Day in droves. The fall foliage is at its peak, so the buying season is on its cusp before New England hunkers down for winter. Greenhouses hold last-gasp hayride festivals; orchards feature this year's last apples and the first, best picks of the pumpkin patch.

So, with little to do on the first of a three day weekend and a holy host of deck and playstructure ideas to test out in full, we headed across the Connecticut border to Kloter Farms for their annual kid-friendly fall festival.

Imagine, if you will, a dozen or more playstructures, ready to sell, all filled with children; a clown making balloon animals; a pumpkin painting station; free barbecue and cookies and cider for all. Imagine just the right amount of kids to keep things feeling festive, but not enough to cause lines or conflict at the swings or facepainting stations. Imagine a two-car steam train running through it all, steam whistling and bell clanging just often enough to avoid a wait, a sneaky, snaky way to pull parents across the totality of backlot inventory while their wee ones hoot and holler.

Imagine, too, a family prepared for the full brunt of their children's antisocial behavior -- this is, after all, a kid who threw a full-bore tantrum at the local playground just yesterday because we were trying to teach her to pump the swings instead of just pushing her forever -- only to discover that something about the crisp fall weather and the part atmosphere had coincided to create the perfect behavior for the perfect day.

When we asked her to move on to another activity, she did so willingly. It was like having someone else's kid, or the kid we always wished for, or maybe just the kid we thought we had, once, before the long struggle began.

Maybe it's an anomaly. Maybe it's a turning point. Either way, it was worthy of reward, and we gave willingly.

Willow was in such rare form -- manageable, happy, and willing to take direction -- we bought her the showroom rocking horse we'd been eyeing for ages. Sure, someday soon the rockers will come down on her sister's foot. But the more kids you have, the more precious and rare those perfect days, where everyone is in the right spirits, will come along. And for a long while, now, we've been starting to think we might be plumb out of days.

After a quick trip back to the warehouse to switch it out for the golden oak finish instead of the provincal featured above, it just fit in our trunk. Looks great in our living room, too, in that hole between the barstools and the oversized chair. Winter will come to the window behind it; surely some stress will mark the majority of our days. But today will ride forever, into the sunset of our memories. Finally, after years of waiting for the right moment, kid and horse fill the perfect spot in our hearts, our house, our home.

Where I've Been

2006-10-06T18:38:00.000-04:00

Driving over the mountain, startling crows from the yellow lines as I whiz through on my way to work, pink sky in the rear view mirror, the bright reds and oranges of autumn all around me.

Teaching far too much without a planning period in sight, since every teacher wants their classes to start their first project off with a trip to the lab for instruction in everything from Publisher to better research to creating their first formal wordprocessed papers.

Leadership training today for the district-wide professional day -- a great systems thinking workshop chock full of fun moments and nifty new management tools, plus it was just an honor to be asked to attend.

At the playground with the kids, at least until Willow flipped out. If anyone has ideas about how to get a kid to learn how to swing, I'm all ears -- she just won't listen to instruction well enough to understand how to pump against the swing, instead of with its motion.

Searching the byways of our little rural town for milkweed, so our little be-jarred monarch caterpillar can stuff himself, and -- if all goes well -- we can have a butterfly to release come springtime.

At the sliding door, watching the setting sun dapple the newly cleared yard, and the trees that we've just contracted to cut down next week -- which will leave an even greater area, mulch piled at the edge, ready for seeding, leveling, landscaping, and spring. And for swings, God help us. Though I'm determined to include, as well, a fully enclosed treehouse, so when the kids fly away some day, they don't go too far.

At-one-ment

2006-10-02T12:29:00.000-04:00

As last year and the year before, I've taken Yom Kippur off from work -- not to go to temple, but to spend some time in the wilderness of myself, and come to terms with the year's past.

I head off midmorning, towards the waterfall and the dam, through a neighborhood silent in the workday sun. Across the street the cows graze behind the fence; over my head, this year's wild grapevines hang low with fruit, ripe purple globes entwined among maple branches red-gold with the season.

I ford the stream to pick my place, find a flatter spot under the trees just that side of the spillthrough, where the rushing water and the mottled light on the newly carpeted forest floor provide a place for peace and reflection. I set up my chair, and reread last year's meditation, my own private Vidui, for strength and context:

We are guilty, O Lord
of pride in a job well done,
even when it comes at the expense of others.

We are guilty of playing to our strengths...

I take the pen and paper in my hand, try to clear my mind as blank as the pages before me. A chipmunk scurries across the rocks by my feet; the wind stirs a jay from his nest nearby. Clouds move past the sun. The river flows ever forward.

And then, nothing.

A year ago yesterday we spent our first night here, in a house not yet a home, but already a promise of newness and survival after months on the road, the four of us evicted wanderers, jobless and worried, our lives and safety at the mercy of friends and family. The convenience of the time frame encapsulates the year nicely, like a well-wrapped present.

But atonement was easier when everything was new, and the world was suddenly no longer all wrong. It's easier to make amends when the future looks so bright and the past is so rootless. Examining the heart in the midst of a new beginning is to natural as to go without saying.

This year's underpinnings are more subtle, more private: a still-unexplained illness, a growing discomfort with the way our nested lives have grown static under our feet and all around us.

I have so much to atone for this year. But I fear I was easier to forgive -- both for others, and for myself -- when we were coming off that year of homelessness and hope.

Too, here -- at the base of the dam's far side, where high rocks hide the floodwaters -- it is hard to feel authentic about anything, really. The things I should atone for are so much more subtle, so tangled in a life of place and purpose, that they seem impossible to isolate, let alone explore, like fat, dark grapes hidden behind the bright turning leaves.

If I could wish for a better context, some light to illuminate my faults -- some Godblown wind to clear the trees of my heart of these obscuring leaves -- I would.

But atonement postponed is atonement unrealized, and I am blessed to be part of a religion that mandates such reflection. The time is ripe, though I may not see the fruit; it is better to offer these grapes, however hidden from my view, than to miss the moment, and pass through the liminal still unwritten in the book of life.

So, as last year, and the years before:

For all those offended, regardless of intent or personal gain, I offer my sincere apology. You deserve better; I love you more than I may have said, and I apologize.

Even if you never noticed my lapses, or I never noticed, or we shared the experience without the name; even if I made you happy, and it was not as much as I could have: I could do better by you.

In this time of self-exploration, or recommitment, of sorrow and yearning for betterment, I commit myself to you, and your betterment, and ask that you hold me to it.

May we be blessed enough to be inscribed in the book of life for another year together, side by side. And may we be honored, one day in the long distant future, to see those inscriptions, and smile, and remember each other fondly, and have more fondness to remember than we could ever have pain.

Come Back To The Five And Dime...

2006-09-30T22:18:00.000-04:00

Yes, chocolate chip pancake covered sausages. On a stick. Kinda says what it needs to already, doesn't it?

On Not Writing

2006-09-30T20:54:00.000-04:00

I want to write, and I don't. This, for example.

And this.

Sure, I write monthly reports for work. I key-and-send emails quick through the ether. I write on the whiteboard, with stick-figure accompaniment like fugues.

But that's not writing. It's typing.

I want to write gunfire and testosterone, like Hemmingway. I want to write quicksilver language colloquial, parenthetical, onamotapoeic like cummings. I want to write turned phrases or scanned worldliness, in perfect iambs
like Shakespeare. But my hard drive is full to the brim with unfinished odes and vilanelles, fragments all.

I want to write my daughter to sleep each night, and I do. Every bedtime is another princess, and new pangaea, a second story lost to the night. Sometmes she doesn't even hear the endings. But this writing on darkness is lost to the light.

I want to write. But there are so many other things I want to do, need to do, for the same reasons -- to keep myself whole, to create the world, to preserve it like a message in a bottle. Each day I write less, without saying less, and slowly, the volume of words moves from archivable to non, the potential histories of myself growing thinner as I grow older.

Some days, I suppose, it's enough to just say it out loud. And maybe, just maybe, there's something healthy about letting language live esoteric, as fragile and shortlived as soap bubbles. But I want to write. And I don't. And I wish I did, again.

Fill-In-The-Blog

2006-09-28T21:56:00.000-04:00

It's been a long blogless week, so to liven up the usual tedium of cath-up and excuses, Not All Who Wander Are Lost is proud to present our first installment of what we hope to be a very, very irregular feature: Overly Specific Blog Absence Mad Libs.

___________ (exclamation), what a __________ (period of time)! Tuesday me and ___________ (person) took the ___________ (mode of transportation) to ____________ (special event), which was ____________ (adjective) -- not a lot of (something there's not a lot of), but we saw ____________ (famous person) ______________ (gerund) a ______________ (flightless bird), so the evening wasn't a total loss. Yesterday I went to the ___________ (place you can buy things) and picked up a new _____________ (something you really only need one of), since the old one was starting to get ______________ (sign of age) and we finally had enough ______________ (something of value) to trade in.

Back at ____________ (place where you spend lots of time), things are going ___________ (how things are going). My ___________ (a relative) turned __________ (either a number or, say, the word "over" or something, I don't know, I'm really tired), so we threw a ______________ (party theme) party, complete with _____________ (party object) and even a whole bunch of ____________ (political party, plural), which was a ______________ (animal sound). Tomorrow we're all going to _______________ (place you can drive to), maybe find a good ______________ (type of restaurant) and ____________ (verb that describes eating) some ____________ (type of exotic food), since I've been having these ___________ (adjective) cravings ever since we saw ______________ (that movie, you know, with that guy from that other movie). Or maybe it was just the ___________ (something you eat, but not usually at a movie).

___________ (artificial, one-word segue). Check out these ____________ (yet another adjective) links I found: ________________ (link to a dumb flash cartoon), ______________ (broken link), ________________ (link to a pornsite), and _______________ (link to the least funny cartoon evar!). They made me ___________(verb) my ____________(noun) off! But watch out for the ________________ (something horrible, or just annoying)! Until ______________(something unlikely), ______________ (regional mannerism which expresses goodbye)!

Wasn't that fun? Feel free to play along in the comments -- simply cut and paste the above, and fill in your own inane content!

Ford, Finished

2006-09-25T22:59:00.000-04:00

Writer and game designer John M. Ford passed today after a lifetime of illness. This poem -- which he originally "published" in the comments of one of my favorite megablogs -- serves as a fitting epitaph, and a raison du'blog, all at once.

Against Entropy

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days—
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

— John M. Ford, 1957 - 2006

Autumn Dreams

2006-09-25T20:18:00.000-04:00

A fallen Willow, like our own tends to be.

Last week it was unseasonably warm, though too foggy for true indian summer; fast forward three days and it's fullblown fall. Nights drop down to the forties; leaves turn, scatter, cover the dying lawn in golds and reds.

At night, I suffer antibiotic dreams. Three times since last week I've woken to the fastfading horror of my children lost, or drowning, or missing, always unsaveable and my fault eternally, my old adolescent fears of high-stakes impotence rising through my subconscious unawares while they slumber beside me.

I arrived home today to find the living room furniture where the playroom had been, a surprise, but a fitting rearrangement, and not just because this Thursday will mark our one year anniversary in this home, and since homelessness. The children sat unexpectedly calm at their old craft table where a chair once filled the corner, wearing butterfly wings and pumpkin hats, sharing a project peaceably, after months of unsettled, half-dangerous competition.

Funny how a simple change of scene can bring about such difference of emotion. Funny how the seasonal despair sneaks up on me through my subconscious, every year a new discovery, as if I had not felt a lifetime of watching from outside myself in horror as I holed my own boats. Funny, too, how things always start so fine, and how I've never noticed that, after 33 years as first student, then teacher, beginnings always mean Septembers.

But the apples this year are especially crisp: Empires and Cortlands, we picked them ourselves. The children are blond and beautiful, charmers who stop in the school office to bring Daddy's lunch and leave an impression that will not wear off all day. My wife moved a couch today; cleaned house; kept the children happy; found joy for and in us all as everyday, and still managed to make the perfect omelet for supper. The air is clean here, and smells of woodsmoke.

Tomorrow I will wake in darkness, walk unseen stairs to push the coffee button, sneak out into the chill of morning, sit on the porch in the still dark, listen to the blood rush in my ears. Dreams fade, and nightmares, too; as everyday, so will it be tomorrow. What's one dream, one change of scene, when the world is as true and clear as the evening light through the newly cleared woods? We're here, and sometimes, this is everything, and all that matters.

Quickblog

2006-09-23T11:17:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's blog went to my teaching with technology blogspace, a quick primer on camerause and photosharing for my coworkers in honor of the two cameras I commandeered from the office for curricular use -- and the newly XP-ed machinery now safely ensconced on teacherdesks after years of increasingly halfbroken Windows 98 workstations.

Now we're off to Boston for Rosh Hashanah, the jewish new year, a day late for temple services but just in time for tonight's family dinner. Would have left last night, but Willow had a stomach virus, and wasn't going to be able to sit in the car for long enough to make it.

Thunderstorms on the horizon for tomorrow, but unless it's absolutely pouring we'll probably hit up the barbecue and bluegrass over at the Charlton Orchards Harvest Festival-slash-fourth-anniversary party on the way home. Look for us under the big tent, huddled among the masses, eating the last of this year's apple crop, grinning widely.

Until then, stay out of the rain, or if you prefer, walk into it with your head held high, reveling in the natural order of things -- something I try hard to do in my own life, plus the looks you get are priceless.

Joining The Dance

2006-09-20T21:08:00.000-04:00

Willow’s dance class in town was cancelled due to low enrollment, but we like the non-competitive philosophy, so while we try to recruit other mommies -- from the parent network and preschool parents, mostly -- we're temporarily attending the beginner’s class in East Longmeadow, where the much more suburban crowd sustains a two-studio program with little difficulty.

It’s a half hour drive, but after grandma spent so much time and energy on outfits, and after so much psyche-up, from studio visits to a lifetime learning to love movement and direction, it would feel too much like witholding a promise to not find some other solution. Today, we’re trying the Wednesday class, since it’s a tougher trek on Saturday mornings, and, like her Daddy, Willow’s not much of a morning person. My teaching schedule allows it, so the four of us come together.

Dance for kids ages 3 to 5 (technically, 2.9 to 5, but who’s counting) seems to be primarily about placement and direction. The teacher leads the kids through several line-walking activities, first along the tape, then along the same tape but with a blue construction paper puddle to hop over, then finally through a series of small yellow hoops laid end to end. Marching order counts, and the teacher is proactive enough to give each kid her turn to model the activity. They begin and end in a circle on the floor, feet in the center, bodies radiating out like a multiracial starfish.

The mothers sit in the doorway, in institutional chairs borrowed from the room's periphery, and talk about parent things: developmental milestones, where to get the most darling little jeans. Occasionally, they spot their kids peering at them mid-hop, and call out "pay attention to the teacher!"

In the meantime, the advanced ballet class begins in the other studio. Cassia and I watch from the doorway as the once-famous dancer, back braced against his age, takes a crowd of healthy-looking adolescents through their sped-up paces. After a while, I can feel her squirming in my arms, and I look down to discover her face screwed up in concentration as she tries to point and squat, count and hum all at once. "One", she says, an echo of the instructor, and her bare foot rises towards her knee, pushed out just so, as if she, too, were paying for the privilege.

As a proud feminist daddy of two blond, adorable girls, I have my qualms about all the pink and lavender, the fetish of toe shoes, the unavoidable clique of the dancer. Somewhere in my media literate mind I worry that I will have failed if my kids cannot push trucks like the boys, as if tomboy were the only way a girlchild could grow up truly healthy. And sure enough, from the doorway I can see the way Willow keeps creeping back to the head of the line, pushy and masculine, and though I am happy to see her take correction as the teacher cheerfully puts her back in her place, there is a secret part of me that cannot help but be thrilled at her competitive nature.

But I'm a big supporter of dance. In high school, I took dance for a few terms to fulfill my gym credit -- partially because the very idea of competitive sports brings back hard memories of being the uncoordinated dork in the outfield, but also because, like my younger brother “Spilly”, I seem to suffer from a tendency towards accidental self-destruction, a lifetime of smashed watch faces and overbruised shins caused by what other people would call sheer clumsiness, and I prefer to refer to as “low limbic awareness.”

I was never a great dancer -- yearbook pictures show me hopping like the floor's on fire, amidst a sea of graceful female leapers in leotards. But I liked being away from the testosterone peer group; liked the precision and rhythm, the mind/body work, the comfortable clothes, the self as instrument. After so long pushing the brain as an academic, I miss the athleticism of this, the only sport-realm I ever felt I might actually make my own.

And this particular studio, for all its famous graduates and work ethic, is ultimately one which values the individual over the program. You can see it in the way the girls arrive: serious, but thoughtful, comfortable and without the haughtiness of Hollywood dancehype. The dowdiness of the studio floors and the way the director sits behind her desk in the middle of everything, selling sweatshirts and toeshoes and answering student phone messages throughout the hour, speak to a sense of intimacy over impressiveness which belies the suburban Longmeadow stereotype so prevalent in our own rural smalltown. The pictures that line the walls feature the school’s founders and directors, back in their professional heyday, but their black and white stillness is subtle, and their uniform 5x7 size says what it needs to.

When Willow emerges, with a happiness that will last until about seven steps into the parking area, I consider asking about an adult beginner’s class. But today is about Willow, not me. Some other time, perhaps. After all, just three more months and Cassia will be old enough for the parent-and-toddler class, and I get out of the classroom early enough to join the crowd one day or another, if I wish. Though her mama is, surely, eager to return to the bar herself, there's nothing wrong with being the only Daddy in the room.

Arrrrrrr!

2006-09-18T21:37:00.000-04:00

It's Talk Like A Pirate Day tomorrow, and my lovely and ever-creative wife loves a challenge, so here we are, watching the last moments of Pirates of the Carribean, gleaning a few last ideas for the best costume this side of Jack Sparrow. Can't wait to wear the boots and sash.

Pirate webquest-slash-treasure-hunt with the kids in class in the morning, too. High-fallutin' phrased questions on everything from scurvy to eyepatches, and what's with all those parrots? It'll teach the sprogs not to mistake full queries for search terms, at any rate.

Bonus question asks how much it costs to send two blueberry pies to Hawaii, with extra credit for anyone who can tell me what that has to do with the webquest topic. Hint: it's a pretty bad pun.

Already prepped an iTunes playlist covering everything from sea shanties to the Spongebob Squarepants theme to a punk cover of that infamous Veggie Tales tune The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything.

Looks like I've finally adapted to the middle school mentality in full. Avast, me lads...thar's learnin' ahead of ye!

Growing Real

2006-09-16T22:32:00.000-04:00

Hi. It's me.

Yeah, I know. I haven't been around much lately.

I could go for the usual excuses. Tuesday I discovered I probably have Lyme Disease, which would go a long way to explaining everything from those damn tremors to the exhaustion and crankiness to the lightheadedness I start to feel about halfway through every class. Wednesday I was out late with Dad. Thursday was parent's night at school, and by the time I drove off I was so tired, I don't even remember driving home. Friday I fell asleep on the couch at 4, and never really hit consciousness again.

But something else is happening here. Over the past few months I've gone quite naturally from blogging daily to blogging perhaps three times a week, and even then, it feels like I'm doing it just to keep the record straight.

It struck me today that perhaps I don't need a blog so much anymore. Back when we started this ride, I was living in a dorm, my private life only available behind closed doors. Maybe I needed a separate life then, in ways I no longer do.

I'll keep coming back for a while, I think. But as we close in on five years, I'm beginning to wonder if perhaps my newfound abilities out there -- in the yard, in my family, in taking control of my body after all this time -- have taken me to a place where I can get from the real self what I once needed a virtual self to accomplish.

It took me a while to get used to it, I guess. But now that I can change the world, I don't seem to need to constantly create and recreate my own virtual world anymore.

It's a little bit sad. And I'll miss the screen. But there's something wonderful about realizing that I still had more growing up to do, but only retroactively, now that I seem to have grown it.

There's something wholly empowering about finally finding myself ready to take on my real world existence as both graspable and entirely my own.

Maybe, sometime soon, it's going to be time to move on into myself fully. And if that means the blogging urge is through -- that the virtual self has served its purpose after all -- well, it's been a hell of a ride.

One Nation, Invisible

2006-09-12T21:06:00.000-04:00

In yesterday's entry, I suggested that my new crop of students have not yet felt national pain. But thinking about it afterwards, I realized that many of them don't even feel national anything.

I mean, every morning, first thing, we stand and turn, our hands over our hearts, and mumble our way through the pledge of allegiance. The principal says "please remain standing for a moment of silence," which lasts, like, seven seconds, since they are, after all middle school students. The kids fidget. I take a deep breath and try not to say "shhh".

And then they sit, and Mr. Hale goes on to read the mundane nuts and bolts of a morning's announcements, and the moment is shattered without ever really coming together in the first place.

So this morning, I wrote the pledge on the board before they came in.

And then, for the fifteen minutes we have between announcements and the rest of their school day, we parsed it.

And talked about symbols, and nations, and what it really means to pledge your allegiance to both.

And talked about a republic, and what it is, and how it cannot work without each of us taking the mantle of it upon ourselves.

And talked about how indivisible is in some ways the opposite of invisible -- that it requires a pledge, and a daily reminder.

And talked about liberty, and justice, and the values we commit ourselves to defending each day.

And mentioned silence, and how we might need that moment, some days, to square ourselves with the daily reality of socialpush and gradegrub.

And for once they were quiet, and asked questions, and wished they could stay longer at the bell.

Not bad for fifteen minutes.

Sure, maybe we'll learn to live with the way we are unified and then dropped again so quickly every day, the way the disembodied speaker voice moves us from the sacred to the profane in ten seconds flat. Maybe they'll forget, and fidget, more often than not. And maybe that's okay, for a bunch of twelve year olds.

But maybe, just maybe, tomorrow and this week and every once in a while from now on, they'll move through the day from there with a little more purpose.

And maybe, just maybe, they'll feel connected to the world of school and social structure just one tiny bit more deeply when they walk out of my classroom door, on their way to math or social studies. And, heck, maybe it'll even make them better humans, and more civic-minded.

It's nothing political, our nation's pledge. It doesn't say you have to stand by your president, or his policies. It doesn't say you have to vote one way or another, or that you can't protest.

But it is a serious thing, I think -- a real commitment, to take on the responsibility of citizenship in whatever way you see fit. And further, it is a great and awesome thing, to commit to seeing everyone else who stands under that banner and takes that pledge as inseparable from you, regardless of how they might feel about the government, or the people, or the land...and regardless of whether you agree with them.

It is what makes us us -- one classroom, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. And I love that, and so, though surely it is insane to confess it, I love the whole crazy idea of pledging to it every day.

(And if teaching isn't about love, then what the hell am I doing in a stuffy classroom all day, anyway?)

(Still) Mourning In America

2006-09-11T19:50:00.000-04:00

Five years ago today I ran the media center at a private boarding school. When the kids started streaming in, I turned the theater projector to CNN, and we watched together as the world crumbled around us. It took an hour before I could bring myself to turn off the cycle, speak softly about the difference between news and spectacle, and send them back to their counselors and dorm parents, and I still wish I had thought of it sooner.

Five years ago today my friend and co-worker Chris Carstanjen took a flight to California to visit a mutual friend. It wasn't until three days later that I learned I had spent the morning watching his plane smash into the World Trade Center, over and over and over again.

Five years ago I had no children of my own. Somewhere in the months that followed, we conceived our first child, and though we had been trying for years by then, I'll never know if creating life then and there was, at least in some tiny way, part of our healing process.

Today at school the intercom crackled at 8:46, and I stood before a group of kids and bowed my head in a moment of silence. I wanted to think about Chris, and I did. I wanted to think about my own children, safe in the car with their Mama on the way to Willow's first day of preKindergarten, and give thanks for thier innocence and grace, and I did.

But mostly, I thought about how my students were seven year old suburbanites on 9/11, and how little they really understand pain.

Five years ago today I lived in another world, like the rest of us. Then the world changed, and we're still picking up the pieces.

Thank God for a new generation. May they never know the horror firsthand.

Teaching The Cut-And-Paste Generation

2006-09-09T22:37:00.000-04:00

No blog yesterday, as I was all blogged out from writing up an entry over at the workblog, newly resurrected for the new school year.

This week's topic, straight on the tail of a week of teacher complaints of kids parroting (or even printing) instead of just writing the sentence or two required for homework: strategies for addressing (and preempting) plagiarism, a much bigger deal in the cut-and-paste generation, and much harder for the wee ones to understand given an early lifetime of increasingly fuzzy intellectual property habits brought on by the wonderful world of technology.

Irony, of course, is that as long as we want Generation Net to learn that understanding must necessarily come before pastiche, the best strategies involve disallowing high-tech over-reliance, and requiring handwriting-to-type as a general rule when going from first draft to last. Too, as long as we're going to be making them handwrite their standardized tests, it doesn't hurt to make 'em practice, lest their hands cramp up when they're trying to beat the system. More here.

No Entry, Really

2006-09-07T21:22:00.000-04:00

Not sure why I started this entry, really -- I've got the once-familiar buzz, but the skills are rusty, and the content just isn't there.

It's not that life is uneventful, far from it. Work is full, rich, fulfilling, my kind of whirlwind. The kids grow in leaps and bounds, each doubling her talents by the day. Their mama and I make halfplans for next summer's deck, perhaps a sunporch, traced narrow up to the very legal variance line for building. We spent the afternoon behind the house, eyeballing a new clearing for a playhouse and swingset where currently stand wood, a decade or more of dead leaves soft and giving like brown bog under our feet.

What happenms is reportable, I suppose. But there is no structure in it, and little joy to merely retell. Where once this need came complete with phrase and meter, in three-paragraph form unbidden, as if a gift from some internal gods, today the need comes unaccompanied by topic or tone.

I sit here and write the urge to blog, as if the mere act of writing would make meaning out of words. Once, it would. But today nothing comes, only the dark, the restlessness, the empty sounds of a house asleep faint behind the quiet music.

Wednesday Wandering, In Doggerel

2006-09-06T20:21:00.000-04:00

Two weeks into the schoolyear and it's already a ride.
I rise in darkness every day to help minds open wide.
When day is done, and I come home, my children pout and hide.

Mornings in the mirror I can see the fading tan
still stark against my pale white skin from living in the land.
Today at work I gave the eight grade teachers our tech plan.

Once we were two, and wandered much, with hardly any care.
We'd hit the back roads on a whim, wind whipping through our hair
It seems a million million miles since we were living there.

And so the days grow longer as September passes by.
The wood is stacked along the trees where we can watch it dry.
At night I sit upon the porch and look up at the sky.

Harvest Wanders

2006-09-04T11:22:00.000-04:00

Used to be we could take off on a dime, and we did -- I have fond memories of college weekend drives in upstate New York, my future wife at my side, odometer-watching to determine which way to go at each intersection. True wandering is tougher with the kids, but how else to share with them the wandering spirit that to take off and go?

Which is to say, yesterday, we took off and went. The rain came slow but steady all weekend, but my allergies took a turn for the worse in the mold-and-pollen, so we decided to take a page from our wedding vows and head out without a map, looking for the spirit of adventure.

20 miles due east just above the Connecticut border a happy accident of meandering and sign-following found us at Charlton Orchards and Winery, where an amish-looking farmer ran his very own farmstand in the steady drizzle, and his wife hosted wine-tasting in the farmhouse next door.

I cannot recommend a better farm-going experience, especially with the kids. We got crisp cortlands, sniffed fresh pies, tasted an octet of delicious award-winning fruit wines; the kids loved the bunnies and ducks, and fed them grain from their hands in the quickening rain.

We've chosen woods over fields, I suppose, landing a long cry from the school-based farmstead we once called home. Always nice, though, to find those out of the way spaces that remind us to stay close to land, and how sweet it is to do so.

We'll be back at Charlton Orchards September 24th for their harvest celebration: bluegrass, barbecue, and this year's cider to celebrate what is sure to be yet another big win at the Big E Eastern States Exposition. Pick your own pears, apples, and blueberries, if they're still in season. Hope to see you there.

I Need A Hurricane

2006-09-01T19:35:00.000-04:00

Chat with the wife and kids from work this afternoon during my free period. Willow reports she'll be taking Yoga as of next Thursday, and my first thought is jealousy -- not that I want to take Yoga, really, just the thought that she'll suddenly be doing something I can neither share nor talk about.

Sure, she's not me, and her knowledge is her own. She's collected trivia out of my presence, knows books from library story hours I never saw, taught me songs from school. Interesting, nonetheless, to think that this will be the first fullly unique skill that she'll be picking up. Makes her seem more real, somehow, and more separate.

At supper we brainstormed things Daddy could do that Mama cannot, and other than a few primarily violent summercamp skills (archery and riflery among them), we came up pretty empty. Good thing she loves me, I guess. It would take days to list the things my wife can do, and does, lest they go totally undone, though not through lack of trying.

In other news, the weather says:

...NASTY WEATHER WILL AFFECT MUCH OF SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND FOR A PORTION OF THIS LABOR DAY WEEKEND...

I sped home today, skipping what promises to be the first of many afterwork "taco" sessions to stack the last of the wood, cover it with blue tarp and bungee in preparation for the gale-force wind and rain. Looking forward to a few days home with the family, watching the rain, sharing our days again after a long week mostly absent.

Bonus points, as always, to anyone who can identify the seriously obscure musical source of today's blogtitle.

New Beginnings, Ragged Ends

2006-08-30T20:19:00.000-04:00

Another year, another crop of kids. The seventh graders are overwhelmed by homeroom's end; the eight graders turned surly and distracted, all-over adolescent overnight. At the close of the hour-long, rules-laden assembly at start of day, some kid wants to know if hugging is okay. I think he's serious. Happily, it seems to be acceptable, as long as the feeling is mutual.

Work is exhausting, but my new schedule leaves me clean half-days "free" to work with teachers and other classes in the lab, a big improvement over last year's sporadic and hard-to-schedule on-off hodgepodge. The new principal is sincere, eager, easy to work with. I begin to expect big things.

Back home the elderkid pulls a Delilah on herself, chopping a jagged hairline from brow to ear with her project scissors when her mother's back is turned. I try to be disapproving, but, honestly, she's worse the the eight graders.

A Tale of Two Children

2006-08-28T22:52:00.000-04:00

Cassia couldn't sleep, so I took her outside in the damp night to listen to the bugs buzz, the peepers peep. Her year-and-a-half eyes glowed wide with wonder as walked down the driveway, the pitch black before us, the garagelight fading behind us. Afterwards, she gave me a snuggle and said my daddy clear as a bell before asking for Mama, and bed.

Meanwhile, Willow had a hissy fit out at the stream this afternoon, so we cut the fishing short and fumed back through the woods together, though if she were old enough to make her own way back, she would have. She pulls at her sister, and natters loudly if we try to talk to anyone else in her presence. Tonight, on the phone with my mother, of all the wondeful things we did this weekend, she chose to share did you know that we were pulled over by a policeman in the car?

Once, the wee one was practically prehuman, cute but essentially object. Once, the elderkid was sweet, generous, gracious and gentle by default. I suppose they'll forever see-saw, too, on their own wobbly curves, sometimes in sync at high or low, sometimes like today, just a study in opposites.

Ah, who am I kidding. I love 'em, God bless 'em. Even if their reaction to my daytime absence were to remain forever diverse and unpredictable, I miss them terribly when I'm working. So long, summer vacation. Hello again, teacher's life.

Glad, Glad, Glad

2006-08-27T21:59:00.000-04:00

Malcolm Gladwell has the ability to make me interested in anything. This week, it’s the dependency ratio, a vital economic conceit in which the ratio of non-workers to workers in any pension system turns out to be amazingly powerful predictive factor for long-term systemic potential -- including impending corporate doom -- to a factor of about 40 years out.

I know, it’s the kind of article you skip over first time around, and read later because there’s nothing else around to read. But it was, honestly, fascinating, and I wish you'd stop reading this blog and go read it right now. Gladwell's blog-based follow-up helps us chew the gristle a bit, too.

I’m glad there’s a Gladwell. It gives us someone to aspire to, without the threat of jealousy.

Tiny Voices

2006-08-26T12:20:00.000-04:00

The wee one's language develops exponentially these days. She's not yet threading words together, but the world is full of nouns and desires, from new potty to her favorite internet video, inflected appropriately as request or demand in her babyhigh soprano.

Meanwhile, elderkid's voice is all over the place. In the background, sometimes, I hear her singing to herself, playing with the sound of words until they lose their meaning, and usually to the tune of something Disney.

It's time to notice these things, I think; all too soon I will be gone more than here again. Monday's professional development day, Tuesday's classroom set-up and faculty meeting are the flesh hitting the water. The kids arrive Wednesday, bright from the August sun. Under the surface, a faculty still reticent to change lurks like a swordfish.

Inside my head, the buzz of workyear begins. Tasks whirl around each other in my brain, naming themselves out loud, making a whirlwind of my once-summerquiet head. Distant at first, by Wednesday it will be a full-blown constancy, nagging and loud and eternal, blurring my vision and keeping me from fullness with the ones I love, at least until another summer.

Blogging For The Sake Of Blogging

2006-08-24T20:32:00.000-04:00

Went into school today, to check in and meet with the new principal for a bit. Bumped into a few familiar faces, but mostly the place is empty and seemingly untouched since the Spring. Didn't seem like work has started as just one of the things I had to do today.

Other things I had to do today: buy milk, watch the baby develop OCD (Messy! Wipe?), stack a good row of freshly delivered cordwood. How good to do an honest day's labor, use a little muscle, a little brain. Thanks to the Internet for some informative info re: proper stacking technique, which you'd think would be pretty obvious, but I suppose it doesn't hurt to be sure.

There are baby cows at the local farm-slash-creamery up the hill, and the sunsets are beautiful over the fields. Willow and I went fishing for an hour before supper yesterday with nary a nibble, except for the mosquitoes, which are pretty bad the time of year. Summer winds down, and not with a bang, either. But the days are good, if generally uneventful.

Airborne

2006-08-22T14:14:00.000-04:00

I've spent 24 hours turning up mold in every corner of the basement: under rugs, behind the fridge, hanging from the strings which once held preschool paste projects. From a room where our predecessors had their pool table, I personally removed over hundred stacked, half-brokendown boxes swarmed with the stuff.

The sour stuff even seeped into the once-clean clothes stacked neatly on the futon at the base of the stairs. I saved what little I could, and have now turned to running prefolded stacks through the wash.

Not sure how I'll manage to save the futon mattress, though. Or the hardwood sideboard and matching chairs, fuzzy with green hair. Or the boxes of stuffed animals and playroom toys, all organized by type and developmental stage, each waiting for the little one to grow a few months more. Or my sinuses, damnit.

Am starting to suspect, in fact, that the entire basement is just plain unsalvageable. Certainly, I can't go down there any more. Not now, with the worst of it exposed to the stirred-up air.

But it's here I'm more worried about. The door to downstairs sports a few green spots by the base. Floorvents leak poison as I struggle to clean the rest of the place before the kids come home tomorrow with their mother. The very air is toxic. I've just sneezed all over the keyboard, in fact.

I'm out of here for a haircut, with windows open to the sun. Here's hoping the world looks a little brighter when I return. Or at least less humid, and a whole lot less sour smelling.

Cleaning House

2006-08-21T11:22:00.000-04:00

If you haven't heard from me for a few days, it's because I've been cleaning the dumping spaces. Yesterday it was the garage, where the walls have crept in on our carfootage until we could not pass with doors open. This morning I start on the basement, where a green mold patina blossoms on every leather surface, and a hundred empty boxes remind us that we never really finished moving in.

If all goes well, I might have time to clear the brushpiles from along the driveway tomorrow afternoon between a much-needed haircut and supper with Dad. Such possibility grows distant, however, as time goes on, and the mold begins to affect my sinuses.

Everyone understands the idea of Spring cleaning; airing out the nooks and crannies after a winter cooped up in the house is intuitive. But we're messy people, Darcie and I, and the kids seem to have inherited our trait. We've spent a year tidying, mostly for company, mostly in a rush, and it's these semi-private dumping grounds -- the basement, the garage, even the wood's edges -- which have sufered from our eternal struggle to keep the place cosmetic.

Too, what with the school year starting up again next Monday, time is running out for such projects. Soon my days will be filled with children, and my evenings full of family. Soon, full days will be too precious, and the air too cold, to do other than hunker down, and be close to my kids after long weeks of work and early rising, and fill the house with winter's nest.

Thus, Fall cleaning. Unrealistic as it is, I remain ever hopeful that the spaces I sweep and unclutter today will remain so. More probably, we've made enough room for another year's accumulation. Until the Fall comes twice, then: may these places become rooms, that we might fill them with our love.

Ten Years...So Far

2006-08-19T16:38:00.000-04:00

She wore her wedding whites, put her hair up like she used to. So beautiful, and glowing with the magic of that simple dress, the bright blue scarf above it. I wore a tie, in case anyone cares.

We left the kids with her parents, drove downtown, parked in the lot in the center of Brattleboro. There were naked people in the parking lot, just standing around. Everyone looked, but nobody said anything.

I took her out to Peter Havens, the fanciest place downtown, one of those reservation-only joints where the menu in the window doesn't list the prices. From our seats by the wall we could see a slice of Haystack mountain over the old brick facades and across the Connecticut River. We were easily the youngest people in the place, strangers in a community we once knew and loved, eating pheasant pate and escargot, venison and cherry-roasted duck in a sea of surrealist paintings. It was, to tell the truth, kind of romantic.

On the way home it was twilight. We stopped by the church where we were married, walked the garden, in the darkening light turned suddenly adolescent. She tugged my ring, I took her hand; bats fluttered in my stomach, in the trees, everywhere. And somewhere in the awkward dark we declared ourselves another ten years, and kissed, and held each other over an endless bridge of time; and went back home to our family, ready for the infinite future.

And I’d do it again in a heartbeat. All of it. Thanks, Darcie, for a wonderful ten years. Here's to a hundred more, one day at a time.

Yardwork

2006-08-17T23:58:00.000-04:00

Been stretching the end of summer a bit by tending to the yard -- mostly mowing and treeclearing, with a designer's eye towards an eventual deck. Started in on the garage this afternoon. Hey, I know it's not exciting, but it's what's going on.

Plan is to head up north to Brattleboro tomorrow, have a nice tenth anniversary supper at a quaint Vermont inn, and then leave the spouse and kids with her parents while I jet back home for a few days to finish what I've started.

I guess the theory here is that a clean house makes for a clean head. There's something deeply satisfying about making order of your own environment, and with your hands.

How odd to think that ten years ago tonight we were nightswimming, a country mikvah up at the lake. It was pitchblack, and cold, I remember. We would have gone all the way, too, if it weren't for that huge splash down the shore. Well, it could have been a bear.

Last call on those Random Rules mp3s, by the way. I've already posted the bluegrass instrumental Phish cover as requested; if you want one of the others, just ask and ye shall receive.

Internal Monologue

2006-08-16T21:08:00.000-04:00

Oh, look, Pottery Barn has halloween costumes. In August. They look comfortable, but I bet they're expensive...yup. Like I'm going to spend $99 for a ladybug outfit elderkid will wear for two hours. Oh, wait, that fairy outfit looks really cute...

And that's how I used to end up spending money we don't have on cute things for the kids. Hoorah for the Internet, where I know I don't have to act now, because, really, it'll still be there when I come to my senses and realize that Darcie always makes our costumes, and loves doing it.

Not sure how I ended up on the Pottery Barn mailing list, but I get email from them a couple of times a week, usually sandwiched between Planned Parenthood updates and those damn spam stocktips. This was the first one I actually read, mind you.

Random RulesThe Home EditionNow with mp3 goodness!

2006-08-16T14:11:00.000-04:00

Just 'cause we're not indiefamous like the usual schmucks over at the AV Club doesn't mean we can't speak inanely to our own random pod-play. Twelve oughta do it -- as an added incentive, I'll post up to ~~five~~ four more of the below as mp3s upon request (thanks for making the first request, hypercycloid!).

U2, Negativland

Oh, this is hilarious – some guy sent some outtakes of Casey Kasem swearing to the Negativland guys, and they mashed 'em up with that U2 song Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. My brother had this on vinyl when we were kids; it was really rare, because U2 sued them and they had to pull the album from stores.

I Fell In Love, Susan Tedeschi

I saw Susan Tedeschi in concert a couple of years ago, tenth row with my parents at the Calvin in Northampton. Amazing. Best blues guitarist since Bonnie Raitt. One of the best electric blues guitarists in the business, in fact. This song’s a bit standard honky tonk for me, but the riffs are great.

Left click to go download Fast Enough For You, Gone Phishin’

This is a bunch of unnamed bluegrass musicians covering Phish; I got a whole album of this stuff on here, some more bluegrass covers, a couple dozen string quartet covers. I love covers – like, half the songs on my iPod are covers of something. With the guitar instrumental in place of the lyrics this one’s really mellow, a perfect summer afternoon of a song.

Mama, You’ve Been On My Mind, Peter Mulvey

Mulvey’s one half of Redbird, so I’ve seen him a couple of times, but only with Jeffrey Foucault and Kris Delmhosrt. The raspy basso needs to grow on you for a while, but it’s worth it. He recorded this album (Ten Thousand Mornings) in a T stop on the Red Line in Boston; some songs, you can hear the trains come in.

Virginia Wolfe, Indigo Girls

I was so into the Indigo Girls when their first few albums came out. This song is kind of catchy, an anthem, not their best but a good sample, I guess. Biggest lesson here is, if you want to flesh out your vocal sound to something quirky, almost angelic, use the Roches for your backup singers – they don’t come in until 3 minutes in, but it’s worth the wait.

Wolfman’s Brother, Phish

Ah, there’s the stuff. One of their best jams, hornful and radio-ready at 4 minutes, all the silliness and funk intact. Off Hoist, their last truly great album, though I suppose for sheer comprehensive conceit you’d have to go with Rift. Mike Gordon is a bass god second only to Victor Wooton.

Let’s Make A Family, Mark Erelli

A silly little ditty about family that goes on for far too long. I liked Erelli plenty when he was a singer-songwriter -- the country music swing is a bit much for him. You can practically hear him grinning throughout.

And They All Look Broken Hearted, Four Tet

This is okay for background – mellow, harpish strings, jazz cymbal brush. I liked the Four Tet cover of Iron Man; I guess I must have downloaded some other stuff of theirs afterwards.

Stem, Hayden

See, I don’t even know what this is. Maudlin hair rock ballad thing, though the vocals are kind of Evan Dando harmony, in a good way. That’s what I get for being so indiscriminant with my mp3 downloading.

Five Days In May, Salamander Crossing

More folk bluegrass. Do all iPods get into these genre ruts? Anyway, this one’s nice and pleasant. Salamander Crossing rocked.

Steal My Kisses, Ben Harper

Beautiful beatbox. Catchy chorus. Fun to sing along to. (sings) “Always have to steal my kisses from yoooo…”

Act, White Rabbit

For a while, some mp3 blogs were trying to be the first to collect and post every cover of a song. A few gems in those lists, but I ended up filling my hard drive with really awful music. Like this one. Classic tune, cheesy 80s synthpop cover.

Um, sorry. What? Twelve already? Okay, let me know if you want to hear any of this for yourself. Not sure the RIAA would care -- it's not like I'm AV Club Famous or anything.

Back To Mundania

2006-08-15T22:59:00.000-04:00

Check-ups and dentist appointments. Solo shopping while the kids nap. A bit of cleaructting in the yard: the big pines raised to make room for firewood stacks, the forsythia cut back from the bulhead. Far too much time on the Better Homes and Gardens arrange-a-deck software, dreaming of next summer.

In the evening, feeling fed up and cooped up, with no planned direction we follow a rumor, discover Fenders, a drive-in burger and ice cream joint by the shores of Holland Lake. Willow asks the ride the mechanical horse. Cassia holds out her hand, begs for quarters. Waterskiers fly by across the busy vacation road, their laughter drowned by the buzz of their towboats.

On the way home I stop suddenly at the dam runoff, remembering fishing gear still in our trunk. Cassia and Darcie walk home; Willow and I drag the bottom for hours, until it gets too dark to see our own lines. The weather is fine, the company sweet and grateful for the attention. Willow learns to cast, hits fifteen feet out on the nose. We catch nothing, and care not.

The curious suspension between summer and school year is much as it ever was. The back of the brain tickles with the rowing awareness that, soon, the world will expect things of you again. Each moment becomes overwrought with portent; soon, faint deperation will begin to flavor the minutes.

It's probably true of all teachers: in Fall we lose the ability to become one with the universe, lean into the system instead, like stepping onto a moving sidewalk, teeter for a moment, get our bearings, ride ever onwards.

It's a different life, this coming electrical storm, one no less fulfilling and full for what it is. The worklife is so western, so absent of Zen: I love it when I'm there, and in the groove...but I don't always love the me that lives there, if you know what I mean.

The Wanderer, At HomeA return, in improptu doggerel

2006-08-14T12:28:00.000-04:00

The sand is gone from tween his toes.
His tan begins to flake.
About the sterile house he goes
shedding sunlight in his wake.

His garden bloomed while he was gone.
It sports a hundred blooms unknown.
Each, like the lawn, is overgrown,
too tall to hold weight of its own.

And so he lies, like these bright flowers,
on shaded concrete steps, and waits
for hours, for the coming Fall,
And dirties the house with his plates.

Last Thoughts, Cape Cod 2006

2006-08-12T22:01:00.000-04:00

I'm swearing off seafood for a while. I've had enough oysters, lobsters, scallops, and cod to fill a fisherman's freezer. Last night's lamb chop was a relevation.

I swear that guy playing guitar down the street last night was Evan Dando. I mean, his rendition of It's a Shame About Ray was impeccable.

If I didn't smoke, I'd never see the Perseids. Just can't beat shooting stars over the darkened sand.

After experiencing both, though the secluded vacation spot has merit when you've got time/space to just sit/be, for family affairs, living close to both town and pier is worth fronting the main drag into it.

Elderkid's an exhausted mess: off her sleep schedule, on a constant ice cream high. Me, I've taken to drinking a beer or two every day -- a dangerous habit.

But like a diamond forged from fire, baby-no-longer is transformed. Who grows an entire first-tier vocabulary in just two weeks? Plus, the way she offers her hand, then physically drags us around to do her bidding is just...beautiful.

The drive tomorrow is going to suck -- Cape Cod bridge traffic is notorious. (Random aside: When I was a kid I went down to the cape with a friend; I remember pacing the car, seeing guys having beer out the side of their van while it sat in traffic, a turtle-pace party along the line.)

But I'd walk the 200 miles if I thought there was no better way.

Cape Cod has had its moments. The sulfuric smell of the sea rocks my universe. But, man, I can't wait to go home.

Cape Cod Catch-up: By The Bay

2006-08-10T15:14:00.000-04:00

Finally figured out that I had changed my DNS settings; switching 'em around again reinstates my network access, so here we are ready to recap.

Tuesday the wee one got the earache that had been going around, so we spent the afternoon at the clinic, and then in Provincetown for a bit of pharmaceutical shopping. P-town was a mess as always, hot and crowded with tourists and shirtless dogwalkers strutting their homosexual chests, but we bumped into new in-laws Jesse and Jaimee, also childless, and shared a bar beer, which was a nice mid-day respite.

Tuesday night we left the siblings and new cousin-in-laws at the beach, headed out with Mom and Dad and the kids to the Cape Cod Melody Tent for this year's Acoustic Planet tour: Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Del McCoury Band, and fiddle virtuoso Natalie McMaster, first separately and then, finally, together in an absolutely incredible jam session. Third row seats, the stage in-the-round on a rotating stage, so we got to see the fingerplay up close. Amazing experience, all 'round.

Cassia managed to sleep through the encore, but Willow was a trouper; for her efforts, Victor Wooton (yes, THE Victor Wooton) threw an authentic Flecktones trademark -- pink stuffed hippo in a beret -- to Willow as the show came to a close, and then waited while the guys in front of us got the message and passed it back, which was the nicest thing ever. I totally covet the hippo, and have asked Willow to put it "up high" when we get home, so we can always remember this day.

Wednesday was a transitional day, with the newlyweds and her sister's family off for various worldly parts; mostly, we packed and cleaned, and said goodbye throughout. That night -- last night -- Darcie's parents arrived to take their place; we walked down to the pier for fried fish, and headed down to the bay shoreline, where the tide was so far out you could see the trapped bluefish jump to catch the bennies. Willow and I watched a shark feed, all fin and sudden flip like a mini-Jaws; some guy caught one with his squidbait, so now she can tell the world she's petted a shark and lived to tell the tale.

Today has been pretty quiet, all told. Darcie and her parents, the kids and I walked over the nearby bikebridge, hiked a conservated island, and sat awhile in the shade by the marshbasin, watching the fiddler crabs scuttle up the beach. Plan for later was originally an ocean-side beach, but then, the plan was to leave at 2:30, and with deadline come and gone I'm no longer sure I know what we're doing here, now or next.

Willow seems more subdued without Felix around, though she's clearly exhausted, almost beached out. Cassia nurses and nurses and otherwise behaves as if she could really use a stable environment for a while. Jonathan Katz in concert tonight with my parents, which should be okay if we can manage to stay silent. Darcie's birthday was yesterday, and we've promised each other a date Friday night, but I wish we had had just a few minutes to ourselves, just man and wife, in the last two weeks.

Patty and Neil are talking about leaving pre-sunrise tomorrow to beat the traffic off the cape, and I kind of wish we were going, too.

This kind of vacation is neither vacant nor that elusive vacating of the usual stresses and strife of the homeworld. Some of that is just what happens when you have kids; some is what happens when you try to summer with your parents, and with a rotating cast of over 20 others, coming and going like fish darting in the rushes under Uncle Tim's bridge. But some of it is truly that our home is new enough, our life on the road no longer a necessity, our summer almost gone, and our lives intended to be smaller, our wanders shorter than this.

It's been nice to be in the sun, I guess. But all told, I'd rather be home, even if it makes the workworld approacheth sooner. We're counting days, wishing we had the freedom to leave on our own, and Sunday cannot come too soon.

Chaos, Continued

2006-08-08T15:15:00.000-04:00

Night swimming and outdoor showers. Endless seafood suppers: the freshest fried cod, clam chowder by the sea, Wellfleet oysters, lobster rolls galore. Beach days and long afternoons watching the kids totter around the patios, getting into mischief of one kind or another, while we coparent and chat with our new in-laws in turn.

Oh, and the wedding, of course. Which was beautiful, and uniquely theirs.

We've been three days in the second week house. The chaotic life of too much family and not enough time, too many hosts and not enough consensus wears like footprints on the dunes, eroding my psyche down to the bone. Felix and Willow -- once friends, now cousins -- begin to grate on each other, best friends but too young to know when it's time to take time for theimselves.

But town is close, and the pier is too; we walk down in pairs or families thrice a day or more, just to mix things up a little. I stay up until three, exhausted and sleepy, watch Adult Swim just to unwind. It is almost enough.

Darcie's parents arrive tomorrow, just in time for her birthday. Two weeks more, and my worklife starts up again as the school year, just visible on the emotional horizon, begins in earnest. I can't get the laptop to work with the broadband router in this new, second-tier capehouse, so this will be my last missive until Sunday, when we will be home, finally, and happy to be there, alone fulltime with my family and no one else, if only for the tiniest time before the workyear begins, and my soul is split, subsumed, fragmented for another year.

Cape Heat

2006-08-03T16:16:00.000-04:00

Too hot to blog about an early start, the sweltering big top this morning, the kids in and out of the shower all afternoon.

Too hot to dwell overlong on the delightful breeze of the Vineyard ferry, or the fridge-to-oven transition, in infinite progression, of chasing the kids back in from the bouncy-horse in the yard at our old friend and late-stage MS sufferer Dan, who keeps his home at a frosty 61 degrees year-round.

Too hot to even consider a wedding tomorrow, unless the heat wave breaks, and fast.

Cape Cod as travel destination is seriously misleading. Every time you want to go anywhere it's a good hour and a half from here to there, but because it's still "the Cape", it seems perfectly sensible at the time. Back home, of course, we'd never head to Boston (a scant hour away) for the day, and certainly not five times in a week, back and forth like a wheeled metronome.

If the befevered and raspy-coughed wee one didn't sleep in the car, and if the car weren't the only air conditioned space we own, we'd stay, sit, melt into the deck chairs. As it is, we're 26 hours from the advent of wedding ritual, and if I have to take one more run to the grocery store, I might just keep on driving unti I end up home. It's only three hours, after all. Practically local, by Cape terms.

Cape Cod Continued: Cassia & Co.

2006-07-31T23:37:00.000-04:00

Long day with the kids as the rest of the family went off on various and sundries: my sister to the second day of her veterinarian's conference, Mama and Mom off running pre-wedding errands, Dad down to Florida to pick up his own father. By tomorrow night we'll have four generations in the house, and the newlyweds-to-be arrive in the wee hours tonight.

It's been a good while since I had such a long stint solo with my own children. Took 'em to the beach, but their hearts weren't in it; though the hermit crabs and other kids bright shiny beach toys attracted their attention for a while, it practically broke mine to see the wee one toddle around the sand calling for Mama. She fell asleep in the car on the way home, so we left her there in the shaded driveway while the elderkid and I watched PBS, a rare treat.

Which left us only two more hours to kill, post-nap.

Hint to Daddies who find themselves in my situation: The outdoor shower, balanced as it is with warm nakedness, is a good two-hour timekiller. The incidental cleanliness will win you mega-brownie points with the wife, too.

Drive-in tonight, for the second installment of the piratical Depp-vehicle. Plan was to leave both kids home with Mom and have a proper date, but the wee one wasn't having any of it; we dragged her along, she fell asleep in the car but awoke for the climax to stare owlish and awed at the screen. I think being in the car threw her a bit; she spent much of the time trying to guide my hands to the wheel, as if we could complete this whole movie experience by just driving into it.

House is starting to feel like where we live, at least for now. Nice to be able to blog under the stars, anyhow. Later, the meteor shower continues, I bet.

Cape Cod Is All Around Us

2006-07-30T19:07:00.000-04:00

After four long hours on the road (how much longer now, Daddy?) I'm writing today from a patio deck chair, overlooking the bright, meadowed backyard of a rented home in Wellfleet, MA. The birds swoop low in the late afternoon sun.

There's wireless here. Also seven bedrooms, four and a half baths, two full kitchens, both my parents, and a holy host of family on their way over the next three days. The house is just big enough for the kids to feel left behind as we drag our things up our respective, almost Amsterdam-steep staircases. We've decided to leave the master bedroom for the happy couple, due to arrive Tuesday.

Supper soon, and a quick trip to the ocean. Because we're here, and because we can. Later, a long walk in the darkness, and perhaps an early start to the neverending quest for a local bar in every port. Or not; the wonderful thing about vacation is that, sometimes, you can wander with impunity.

En Passant

2006-07-29T22:05:00.000-04:00

No net last night apres thunderstorm; Verizon's tech support was entirely unhelpful, and now I can't remember what my DNS server settings are supposed to be. Also, the red wash got a crayon in it, and it spotted everything pretty bad. Went to bed early, pissed and bored and grumpy, wondering what we did with our time before we were wired.

Spent a much better morning picnicing down the Connecticut coast with Darcie's extended family, celebrating past and impending birthdays and youngest sister Virginia's imminent departure for Hawaii, where she'll harvest, grow, and roast organic coffee on a tiny farm until she achieves full vertical integration in the coffee industry, or just gets sick and tired of working her butt off and comes home. Ginny, we'll miss you.

Back home, cleaning and packing, now that the muddy laundry we accumulated during our annual pilgrimage to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival is finally finished. Amazing how much mess a family of four can make in their own home in such a short time.

Five days home from the fields and tomorrow we're off again for the wilds of tip-of-the-cape Cape Cod, my extended family packed like sardines into a succession of houses. Offline mostly, but I hope to blog from the Wellfleet public library when I can, assuming there is such a thing.

From festival to family, from field to sand, with but the tiniest of hiatus: It's all so just like last summer, really. Except with a home to come home to, this time around. And that makes all the difference.

Brown From The Sun

2006-07-27T20:26:00.000-04:00

Neck, arms, face and fingers: two weeks of outdoor living and my skin is as crisp and healthy looking as it's ever been. As long as I stick to long pants and keep my shirt on, I could pass for a sunbather, and I like it. Just in time for my brother's oceanside wedding next weekend, too.

I don't have the darkest skin, though my plight is nothing like that of my wife and children, who are doomed to walk the face of the earth along the treelines, perhaps under parasols, lest their flesh sear and glow. I burn, but it doesn't bother me much any more, and the red fades to a nice brown for a couple of days before my arms turn into leprous scaly things from a zombie movie.

Right now, though, I'm in that golden moment, and the face that peers out of the mirror seems more relaxed, more at one with nature, more aglow with life and weather than the usual haggard workself.

I've been thinking I should document this tan somehow, but the camera flash bleaches out what in direct sunlight was a lovely golden brown from t-shirtline to fingertips, broken and set off by a starkly contrasted strip of pastiness where my watch has been. You'll just have to take my word for it: I'm no George Hamilton, but as long as I keep the pale parts covered, I sure do look beachworthy.

And The World Spins Madly On

2006-07-26T22:12:00.000-04:00

Waking with the kids by my side, and clutching them to sleep at night with songs and tummyrubs. A free matinee and a clean bill of follow-up health. Plans to come: a weekend picnic in Connecticut with the inlaws; two weeks on the Cape among my own for my brother's marriage; a side trip to the Vineyard in the middle of it all.

How good to watch the girls run through the sprinkler on a freshly mowed lawn, naked and shrieking with glee in the late afternoon sun.

How good to be home, though the place is a mess, and the spectre of work looms faint but ominous on the horizon.

How good to have another month, another chance, another path to follow.

How sweet it is, really.

Sounds Like Everyone Else Had A Good Time, Too

2006-07-25T22:19:00.000-04:00

Then at about 4:00 in the morning we had to evacuate the tent because a van with fireworks and a propane tank was burning up. We went to Dillon's car and spent the rest of the night there, and I watched the van explode in his rear view mirror...

A search for "Falcon Ridge" over at blogtracker Technorati offers a fascinating look at the diversity of experience had by festivalgoers this year.

My own fire story, incidentally, involves being woken up at 4:00 so I could spend the next three hours rounding up diapers for camp refugee families. Thanks to Brink for the quote above!

For the rest of my own somewhat community-centric impression of Falcon Ridge Folk Festival 2006, just keep reading...

It's Been One Week Since You Looked At Me...

2006-07-25T15:04:00.000-04:00

...but over a week without blogging (or, indeed, any communications technology more wideranging than a walkie talkie) has left me a bit befuddled over where and how to begin.

Also, I've changed, I think.

In the absence of the literate urge, and perhaps to better capture the true chaotic mess that is memory after eight days of tentcommunity and fieldlife, Not All Who Wander Are Lost WAS going to be proud to present a sort of quotes-and-moments compendium from this year's Falcon Ridge Folk Festival.

And sure, somewhere in my head will always live a list and litany of days: of swimming holes and trips into civilization for forgotten suplies; of Dave and his constant stream of young and sadly heterosexual visitors, Eileen and her Long Island brothers, of nights under the shade tent while the festival built around us.

But in my mind, the true story of this year's Falcon Ridge Festival will be that this was the year I stopped being a mere visitor-participant, and became truly subsumed, at one with the community, an organ of the festival (a small organ -- a pancreas, perhaps -- but a vital components of the organism nonetheless).

You see, when I woke up on Thursday, groggy in the morning sun, watched children while Darcie painted signs, and finally, after lunch, wobbled over to my shift checking in volunteers and press and performers, I was just another volunteer, one of a thousand working his shift with cheer and as much compentence as possible.

But then I was pulled behind a car for a conference with the Volunteer Coordinator, and the weekend turned into a series of starburst moments, a whirlwind of timing and grace:

Being asked to step up as new Crew Chief for Teen Crew -- on Thursday afternoon, just twenty hours before the crew meeting.

Transforming Teen Crew on-the-spot from a loose posse of teens who spent 90% of their time hanging out at maingate into a truly well-regarded team of curious and hardworking adolescents who spend their time making a real difference while, simultaneously, making the kinds of connections and gathering all the experience needed to become the next generation of volunteer movers and shakers.

Enjoying the new privledges accorded Crew Chiefs, such as backstage access, and a total lack of time to take advantage of it.

Realizing that, as Crew Chief, I don't just get to have my finger on the pulse of the festival at all times, but that I now get to be a part of the committee which meets throughout the year to confer, strategize, improve -- and party.

Realizing, too, that this Crew Chief management group is made up of a group of friends and dedicated like-minded folks, people that I respect more than almost anyone else. And that they treat me like an equal, and are generally glad to have me among their ranks.

And driving home in a fog after a luxurious night of play and chat and song and stars, and a day of mellow sun and take-down with old friends and campmates, and suddenly realizing that joining in Crew Chief management means I no longer have to wait until next summer to be a part of Falcon Ridge. That from now on, Falcon Ridge will always be there, a part of my real world, too.

Being charged with such responsibility and knowing that you're the best man for the job -- because you proved it this weekend, didn't you, and under fire -- oh, it's indescribable.

It is an amazing, powerful, awesome thing, this sudden epiphany that you can do this, and well, and in public, and grin happily all the while, and mean it.

But being given Falcon Ridge forever, all year long?

That, perhaps, is the happiest thing of all.

Oh, yeah. There was also some music. It rocked. For those who care, the total count as of Sunday night's closing song:

Grey Fox:
Infamous Stringdusters
Uncle Earl
Danny Barnes
Hot Buttered Rum
Tim & Mollie O'Brien
Austin Lounge Lizards

Falcon Ridge Folk Festival:
Liz Carlisle
Russel Wolfe
Wild Asparagus
David Buskin
John Gorka
Cheryl Wheeler
Christine Lavin
Susan Werner
Winterpills
Shawn Colvin
Crooked Still
David Massengill
Tracy Grammer
Rowan & Rice Quartet
Eliza Gilkyson
Eddie From Ohio
Dan Bern
Greg Greenway
The Rowan Brothers
Lowen & Navarro
Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams

In From The Fields (But Not For Long)

2006-07-16T22:41:00.000-04:00

Being a quick entry in the midst of a two-week volunteer gig which will otherwise keep me from blogging, as there ain't no net access in a New York cowfield.

Back under our own real roof for the afternoon and into tomorrow morning, but then we're off again for the wonder that is Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in all its thronging glory, and I can't wait to get back home.

Wednesday night we arrived in a rainstorm as the sun was going down, no one on site yet, but it had been a hell of a trip, what with picking up the picket fence, the total lack of RV batteries at any of three Wal-Marts, and a lost windshield wiper around Springfield.

The fields were muddy and bare, but the farmers were cool, and we bedded down along the road just inside the irrigation ditch to wait out the storm.

By morning there would be a few familiar faces, mostly those at the very core of executive function, there in their jeans and grubby tee shirts, building bridges down by the vendor rows, along nothing but open fields beside.

By the next day, there were twenty crewmen, staking out spots along the meager shade of the lowest treeline. Tents arose from the ground like mushrooms, white hats along the lowest field a skelleton of the festival to come: two on Thursday turning to the full dozen or more stages and stations by end of day Friday.

By Saturday, the tents were wired, and the staff kitchen opened for business. We staked a spot up on the hill along the outer edge of mainstage seating, where we may not have the best view, but we'll always have the closest safe haven from sun and crowd. At Parking John's demand we moved the volunteer camping line out fifty feet under our own toes, putting us smack dab in the edge of handicapped camping (we've promised to limp, if needed).

That night -- last night -- the staff tent was alive and boistrous in the dark, hard drinking and laughter around an ongoing fiddle-and-bass jam and singalong, until long after midnight.

In amidst all this I made it down the road apiece to Grey Fox a couple of times, where we chairhopped around the first few mainstage rows while all around us drunkards roared in the dark, and I fell in love with yet another couple of young, energetic bluegrass boybands; had dinner with my parents; found our camping buddy Dave and spent a hundred hours just sitting around smoking under the stars with the good old crowd.

Oh, and Willow made a dozen new friends, found older kids to watch and wonder at, had a birthday party in the field, with all the site crew kids whacking away at the pinata.

We've been living in the field, watching the community build slowly around us for four nights, and I miss it. The girls love living in the open; they're easier to watch outdoors; they cried when we left, and I'm glad to be able to give them back the land they love tomorrow.

Thanks God for Falcon Ridge, and the organic homegrown community that we rebuild every year, for it is my oasis, my mecca, my summer's peak. Thanks, God, for a family that loves the land and the people and the spirit as much as I do. And thank God we're going back in less than twelve hours.

And We're Off!

2006-07-12T13:00:00.000-04:00

Hello, you've reached Not All Who Wander Are Lost. We can't come to the blog right now...because there's no internet in this big open field.

We're folking out at Falcon Ridge Folk Festival (with an early sidetrip here).

Plans include much music, serious relaxation, beer and grub, and the usual chaos that comes of living in an open field with two kids, old friends, and thousands of folkies. See below entries for details.

Other than a quick stopover at home on the 16th, I'll be on a blog hiatus until July 24. Falcon Ridge, here we come!