Light and Momentary

Summer Reading

Hey, friends, remember last summer when I said, "Let's read Bleak House!" and bunches of you said, "What a great idea!" (Well, there were at least three of you who gave it a shot.) Let's read more Dickens this summer!

I was already planning to read Our Mutual Friend this summer, because it's about rubbish. (Did you guess, from that impressively persuasive opening, that I used to work in the marketing department of a small publishing house? Wonder why they never let me write any of the catalog copy...) Just recently I read Adam Gopnik's New Yorker essay on Trollope, in which he opines that Our Mutual Friend is the Dickens book that people who don't like Dickens actually like. (Did you follow that? If you've always thought you don't like Dickens, you should totally read Our Mutual Friend with me. You'll definitely like it. Adam Gopnik says so.)

This classification perplexes me, however, because Our Mutual Friend seems to me to fit right in with the rest of the oeuvre. Gaffer Hexam on the Thames, the Veneerings at dinner, the dustman in his kingdom of rubbish -- nobody else could have written those characters, if you ask me. Tell me what you think, please! I'd love to hear it. 

(I'd also, parenthetically, love to hear your thoughts on Gopnik's essay. I was taken aback by his read on the Barsetshire Chronicles -- I thought Mr. Harding was being scrupulous, in an endearing and well-intentioned way, but Gopnik doesn't see it like that. But back to Dickens--)

This summer I'm also going to try reading Tale of Two Cities to some combination of my children. My 15yo says he's too old to be read to and too anti-Dickens to tolerate ToTC, but I am wondering if I can lure him in. I expect the 13yo and the 10yo will be game. Stella interrupted tonight's chapter twice tonight to say, "Mama, this is *not* very interesting to me," but I think as the story unfolds she may be drawn in despite herself.

My husband always used to say that he didn't like Dickens except for Tale of Two Cities, which (in his view) wasn't very much like other Dickens novels. I disagree completely, though. The ideas that drive ToTC are all over his other books: the value of freedom, the scars that prison inflicts on the imprisoned, the redemptive nature of work, the importance of self-sacrifice, the capacity of the human soul for transformation. I haven't read it since 1997, so I'm interested to revisit it. 

Anyway, that's my plan: to read two Dickens novels that aren't very Dickens-y, at least in some estimations. Join me! You know you want to witter via Twitter about Madame D's cryptographic methods. I remain skeptical that Dickens knew much about knitting, but boy, the man could plot.

Twenty years later

Twenty years ago today, a little life flickered into being. Although I would miscarry that baby, our first, in the twelfth week of my pregnancy, I am still grateful for the joy and the hope she brought with her. She was also accompanied by uncertainty and then by heartbreak, and at the time I thought perhaps I shouldn't be experiencing those things. Perhaps if I were better at trusting God and accepting his will, I thought, I would just have the joy and the hope.

The days after her death felt like the end of everything good. I couldn't have guessed what our lives would look like twenty years later.

Today my oldest son moved out. The tears keep taking me by surprise. It's not as if I wanted him to stay. This is a good move. This is the right time. He landed a well-compensated summer internship, in which he will spend twelve weeks doing interesting work for a well-established employer before he goes to college in the fall.

But I will miss him ferociously.

[insert damp pause]

Today I cantored 4:00 Mass, and while I was waiting outside the sacristy to check in with the celebrant I saw two of my friends. They asked me how I was doing. I thought I was fine until I tried to say that I was fine, when I promptly started to cry. They told me about dropping their oldest children off at college and crying all the way home.This made me feel better, at least for the next ten minutes. "Watch out for those tears," one of them said. "They'll sneak up on you." 

Today's gospel is the Great Commission, and I listened to it with a mother's ear. My husband and I went forth as instructed, and we have done our best to make disciples -- to baptize them and to teach them to obey everything Our Lord commanded. Our children are teaching us to persevere, to take the long view, to be faithful in prayer. I hope we are teaching them that a faithful life brings hope and joy.

But I will no longer worry that the uncertainty and the heartbreak are the fruits of my own shortcomings. It's because I love my children so much that uncertainty about their future is hard for me to bear. It's because I love my children so much that their troubles can cause me heartbreak. Love and suffering are bound up together; I cannot separate them.

We sang the Magnificat at the offertory, and I thought about Mary singing those words. I thought about her courage in saying yes, and her courage in letting go. And I prayed for the son I am letting go of today, that God would hold him close and shield him from evil, and teach him more and more about goodness and mercy.

Win some, lose some

Good news: socks returned to normal in the dryer. Recipient seems very pleased with them.

Bad news: as soon as a nameless boy read my post about the whiteboard, he slipped away with a dry erase marker. Can you guess what he needs? "More individualized attention." Of course.

Maintenance

This spring I had two time-consuming commitments: I had signed up for a 10K, for which I was planning to use Matt Fitzgerald's high-volume/low-intensity training plan, and I had agreed to be part of a retreat team. I was so relieved when those things were over, but I was glad I had put in the time. (I didn't actually put in all of the time that Matt Fitzgerald told me to, but that's a topic for another post.) I thought, "I want to maintain enough running fitness that 6 miles feels like a manageable weekend workout and not like A Commitment." I thought, "I want to play my guitar enough to keep my fingertips callused, because playing is more fun when it doesn't smart after a few minutes."

You could not hear the heavy sigh that I just sighed, but it's the impetus behind this post: the maintenance is the hard part.

The weeds in my yard are not terrible at this moment, but it's going to take discipline to keep it that way. I have 8 messages in my Gmail inbox, but I also have some work to do in there. And if I don't do it, they'll have 40 friends keeping them company before I have time to blink.

It used to seem so unfair that I had just washed all the dishes (finally) and then before I could turn around there were YET MORE dishes. I used to think about stripping the kids naked so I could Wash All The Things, because I found laundry demoralizing.

These days I stay on top of the dishes and the laundry is almost always clean (though I must confess that I have some work to do with the kids, whose folding is only rarely timely or tidy, and who have a mysterious habit of putting my nice dress slacks into someone else's pile of clean clothes). I never confront the piles of paper that used to leave me weak in the knees. This is progress, I know.

It would be foolish for me to keep attempting 6-mile runs when my IT band has begun whining after the first mile. I don't need to berate myself as I look at the fingertips that are slowly shedding the calluses I built up earlier this spring. Even so, I'm feeling a little gloomy about my good intentions.

Notes from the lava pit

One night I was picking up a kid from a friend's house, a tidy ranch inhabited by the friend, his parents, and his one sibling. Two of my other boys had also had plans that evening, so there were just four of us around our dinner table. It was very different: lots of empty space in the conversation. I've never been a person who minds having space in the conversation, but dinners for seven aren't like that. We laugh. We pun. We riff. We think aloud. We say, "Excuse me, I am changing the subject right now," and feign indignation when someone says, "Well, I am changing it back." Everybody talks, but there's an approximation of turn-taking. It's a heady blend of order and chaos.

I love it. (Well, 90% of the time I love it.) So when I picked up my son at his friend's house and I mentioned how different things had been that night at dinner, the end of the sentence in my mind was "...because things were so quiet and slow-moving and BOY do I love it when my big noisy family is all together." The friend's mom finished the sentence for me, though; she said, "...because the kids got some individualized attention?"

Probably my mouth clapped shut, as I deliberately did not say, "My kids DO get individualized attention TYVM." I don't remember exactly what neutral thing I ended up saying in a neutral voice, but it was something along the lines of "Oh, we have a lot of fun when everybody's together." Since then, though, my attitude about this mom has not been neutral. My son will say, "We're playing games at E's house on Friday, Mom," and I'll instantly think, "Oh, the house where they think you're INVISIBLE because your family is TOO BIG??" I have been pushing back against this attitude, but it keeps oozing its way to the surface, like a noxious bubble of hydrogen sulfide bubbling up from a lava pit and bursting in a mephitic cloud of resentment and defensiveness. They're a nice family; she's a nice woman. I'm sure she didn't mean to hurt my feelings.

Recently she came up in conversation; my son mentioned that she grew up as one of 12 children. And inside the overheated lava pit of my psyche a little voice said "...oh." Maybe that exchange wasn't about me. (I know! Such a crazy idea!) Maybe she's got her own large-family baggage that has nothing to do with us. Maybe I don't need to feel defensive every time I see her -- perhaps I could relax it to every other time. (I know! Another crazy idea!)

It is hard to keep the balls in the air when there are 5 kids and two full-time jobs in the picture. This spring I discovered that my quietest kid, the boy least likely to complain, had been wearing outdated glasses for a year. The lab had made a significant grinding error, resulting in a useless pair of lenses. But when he told me that the new glasses seemed off and gave him headaches, I said, "Sometimes that happens with new glasses. Give it a week and let me know if they're still bothering you." In the throes of adjusting to bifocals, I thought I knew whereof I spoke. Quietly, he went back to wearing his old glasses. The new ones sat in his room until his next eye appointment, a year later. [brief pause for a moment of self-flagellation] 

This spurred me to re-do the dining room whiteboard. At the top it says, "What do you need?" and there is space for each kid to leave me notes. So far this system is working really well. The entries have mostly been things like "socks" and "trumpet lessons." No one is writing "more individualized attention," or at least not yet.

Summertime, and the living is purposeful

I've been thinking about writing this post since I submitted spring semester grades, but here is my dilemma: I get a little ambitious about seasonal planning. That is euphemistic, actually: it would be more accurate to say that I am a NUT about seasonal planning. This is beneficial, in that doing half of a preposterous list of tasks means that a lot of tasks get finished. This is bad for me, in that I spend too much time feeling vaguely stressed that only some of my self-assigned tasks are getting done. It also causes some stress to my more sensitive children, who pick up on that subcurrent of Must! Do! All! The! Things!

So I have been a little reluctant to write this post, even though I mostly want to write this post. Perhaps we should move on from my somewhat troubling inner landscape to the actual planning part of the post.

The biggest thing is that I don't want the summer to slip away in a haze of checked-out clicking on random Facebook links. I've been thinking about giving up FB altogether -- it can be such a useless time suck. I think I'm going to require everyone at home this summer, including me, to be deliberate about checking out -- to keep screens in one spot with a clipboard, and require users to aver that they have done the stuff that needs doing at that point in the day and to state their purpose for the next x minutes of screen use. (Is this a wacky idea that my children will need to discuss with their therapists in their 20s? It could be a wacky idea that will cause more harm than good. I'm just so weary of computer drift.)

The other thing I'm thinking about comes from reading the new edition of Getting Things Done: I want to channel my inner Dave Allen this summer. This means being diligent about capturing stuff that needs doing, defining what needs to happen next with it, and then actually doing it.

But...okay...I am still me and I am still going to use Holly Pierlot's framework to spell out goals for myself for the next 12 weeks.

Prayer: Get to a weekday Mass each week. Respond to 6yo's request to resume evening prayer -- work on tying it to dinnertime.

Person: GET ENOUGH SLEEP. Use up CSA vegetables. Exercise at least 4 days per week. Nibble away at Kindle backlog, knitting backlog, and annual reading goals, while also remembering that it is silly to stress out about leisure activities. Blog a bunch-- let's aim for 5x per week.

Partner: Have fun with my husband. See Shakespeare. Run a 5K together.

Parent: There's some habit formation stuff that needs to happen here, but I need to think about it a bit more before school lets out. That's my task for this week-- think about habit formation for kids.

Provider: Finish poster. Submit grant-funded paper, which will require a fair amount of getting over myself in addition to the usual paper-writing tasks. Prepare syllabi for fall and rough out syllabi for spring. (I am deliberately streamlining this list, pushing away thoughts of all the stuff I could do...) Okay, I feel really shy about including this here but I am doing it anyway. I have a novel idea I have been thinking about since 2003. I have an outline; I have some scenes drafted; I have some backstory roughed out. And I have a HUGE mental hurdle about writing a novel. This summer I want to squelch my inner critic (a kind, gentle sort of squelching, you understand), and just do some writing. Like Trollope, cranking it out day by day without any hand-wringing. Gulp.

You Have Clown Feet in Clown Shoes

My oldest son's girlfriend is a real sweetheart. She is also 

1. a knitter
2. who is intrigued and intimidated by sock knitting
3. and who would like to start running

So I decided to knit her a pair of socks as a graduation gift, and give them to her with a gift certificate for participation in that summer women's running group I have enjoyed so much. I decided for a card I'd scan a page from The Places You'll Go, which talks repeatedly about having brains in your head and feet in your shoes. I am wishing you cozy warm fleet feet in your shoes, I was going to say, and I have been praying for you as you start to cover more ground on your own.

This is, I know, a weird gift, but I thought that it was weird in kind of a sweet way and really if I needed a 3-word epitaph for myself WEIRD BUT SWEET would be an apt one. I did feel uncomfortable giving her a weird gift at her graduation party where the weirdness would be public, and so I told her it was coming soon.

ALAS.

These are the socks as of yesterday afternoon. Don't they look nice? It's Regia sock yarn, soft but hard-wearing wool, rendered even softer by angora. The angora means you're not supposed to put them in the dryer, but I thought that would probably be okay. 

Then I gave them a good soaking to dewonkify any uneven bits. I pulled them out of the water with a sinking heart: they had grown. A lot. Now Andre the Giant could wear these socks, if his coffin happened to be a little too drafty. I...can't even think of any living people with feet that large.

(I exaggerate slightly. They actually fit my teenaged boys beautifully. Both of them offered to take the socks. Under ordinary circumstances I would be happy for them to be excited about something I'd fashioned with my own hands, but they are supposed to fit the graduation girl's feet. They can only fit her feet if she wants to stash something in her sock toe. Like a pet guinea pig. Or a pet capybara. Or a pet hippopotamus.)

(I seem to have a knack for crafting hippopotamus-friendly handknits. Perhaps if the academic gig doesn't work out that can be my new calling.)

Look at this sock, you guys, and note the arrow that marks the position of my little toe:

I really need to know: who puts SOCK YARN on the market that can't be washed without growing and can't be dried without ruination? Why are there no one-star Ravelry reviews shouting "ONLY BUY THIS YARN IF YOU HAVE A PET HIPPOPOTAMUS WHO LIKES TO RIDE IN YOUR SOCK TOE"?

The sensible thing to do is to knit a little swatch with the leftover yarn, give it a good soaking, and toss it in the dryer. If catastrophe ensues, I'll give the socks to one of my boys. If it just shrinks back down to its proper size with a little added fuzziness (as that hat did back in 2010), I'll pitch the socks in the dryer.

But I'd rather go write all-caps reviews on Ravelry, I tell you what.

Dialect Fail in the NYT

Today's NYT includes a genuinely dismal article on faking a British accent. First off, there are approximately a zillion British accents; the article is about a particular flavor of English accent, known as Received Pronunciation or RP. Except it's NOT about RP. Americans do not need to exercise their tongue tips, folks. Your tongue tip is not lazy. I suspect that the dialect coach they're quoting is the lazy one, because she was not paying attention in whatever phonetics classes she took before she hung out her shingle.

It's true that an American who says "butter" in England will immediately identify herself as American. This has nothing to do with a lazy tongue tip, however. In the US and Canada we turn /t/ and /d/ into a related but distinct sound, called an alveolar flap, in predictable contexts. We don't interrupt the flow of air for as long a time, and we keep the vocal folds vibrating. This is why "writing" and "riding" are practically homonymous in American English, except for a tiny difference in the duration of the vowel.

This is a quirky thing to do. To speakers of other English dialects, it's as weird as pronouncing nickel and niggle in the same way. If you want to sound like an RP speaker, you must eradicate all of your alveolar flaps. But you are never going to learn to do that by practicing the sentences in the NYT article, where you're drilling /t/ in initial position. I am willing to wager that your initial /t/ is 100% fine -- indistinguishable, in fact, from the Queen's own initial /t/. Instead you need to practice intervocalic /t/: hotter, bitter, batted.

That's only half of the reason why an American's "butter" is conspicuous to English ears; the "er" is equally important. In RP, that "er" turns into "uh" -- unless the next word starts with a vowel. If I say "What should I do with your toast?" and you say "butter it," you'll want to say "butter" and not "buttuh." Sometimes this pattern means that you insert an "er" where American English speakers wouldn't dream of doing so. In US English we say "grandma and grandpa"; many British English speakers say "grammar and grandpa."

After you fix your alveolar flaps and your "er," you could spend a long time investigating vowel differences between the two dialects. (Note to my fellow Midwesterners: your short a is a dead giveaway, especially when you nasalize it in a word like "man." Move your tongue back and lift your soft palate up.) For my money, though, the most bang for your buck (or punch for your pound) would come from another consonant change. In the US we do something called yod-dropping, in which we drop the "y" sound from words that have it in British English: stoopid instead of styoopid for stupid; toona instead of tyuna for tuna. We only do this after alveolar (tongue tip) consonants -- as in newspaper, duty, etc. It would be extremely conspicuous if you heard someone say "moosic" instead of "music," yes? Or "coot" instead of "cute"? It's a little weird that we hardly notice the absence of that same sound after an alveolar consonant.

My 15yo asked if he could read the draft version of this post, and he sighed afterward. "Well, this post is going to be wildly popular," he intoned drily. This is the same kid who told me this morning, when I attempted to explain the phonetic similarities between his name and his sister's name (adjacent checked vowels! followed by alveolar sonorants!), that I should refrain from phonetics talk until after breakfast. But if the NYT fact-checkers find this post, perhaps they'll shoot me an email. Next time, guys, you can interview me instead. :-)