Light and Momentary

Silver Linings

Silver lining #1: One of the pleasures of post-election life is having conversations with #nevertrump folks whose political positions differ from mine. Back in the day we might have argued about policy, but these days we have a republic to preserve.

Silver lining #2: Tonight I worked late and then went straight to a visitation. Afterward I was starving, so I swung into Panera to eat a quick bowl of soup. A man was standing right behind my chair, talking into his phone. He was 2000 miles from home, he said, when his radiator died a spectacular death. He was stranded in Gladlyville until it was fixed. But he'd paid for the expensive repair with his debit card, and now his bank account was overdrawn by $11. He was trying to find some food for himself and his kid. The story twisted and wound -- I won't tell you about all of his frustrations -- but the bottom line was that this guy was having a rough time and reaching out for help from someone at home. He sat down at a table near mine, still talking. "Well, if you can't help me, what do you think I should do?" he asked. "I don't know what to do."

The voice in my head was loud and clear: Welcome the stranger. I fished in my pockets for cash and walked over to his table. "I didn't mean to eavesdrop," I said, "but you sound like you're in a fix." He looked astonished. "A lady in Panera Bread just gave me some money," he said into the phone. "I'm going to Kroger to get some groceries." Still looking surprised, he waved and thanked me. "God bless you," I said, and waved back.

I wish it hadn't been so surprising to him that a stranger would help him. I wish we lived in a world where the kindness of strangers was more of a given. Be the change you wish to see in the world, I guess.

Here's the silver lining part, which is also the embarrassing part: I'm not sure I would have done that six months ago. I was trying to put my finger on the reason why this guy seemed so much like a stranger to me: he had a conspicuous Southern accent and he sounded like a working class guy. Now that I think about it, I'm afraid...he sounded like my stereotype of a Trump voter. But I have had occasion recently to reflect on the fact that "welcome the stranger" is a mandate, not a serving suggestion: even when it's inconvenient, even when it feels a little risky.

Maybe it would have been nicer to reflect on that fact in happier circumstances, but I'll take my silver linings where I can find them these days.

(PS I know it's obnoxious to classify people based on their accent and apparent education. I'm working on it, I promise.)

Pledge

Tonight was the Boy Scout Court of Honor. We started, as always, with the flag ceremony. I've been saying the pledge of allegiance since I was a wee small girl, and most of the time I rattle it off without thinking. Tonight I was paying attention.

I thought about how the pledge is a promise -- a solemn promise to commit myself to something that's bigger than I am.

I thought about the people who have laid down their lives to advance the American flag: the men at Iwo Jima, the men lying dead at Arlington National Cemetery. I saw Arlington National Cemetery as a high school student and I was shocked by it, the neat rows of white tombstones stretching into the far distance. At the time it made me angry -- why did all these people have to die? -- but these days the answer to that question is clearer to me: they died because peace and freedom are dearly bought.

I thought about the republic for which that flag stands, and the gift of a free democratic society in which we can elect our own representatives -- and boot them out of office when they fail to do their jobs. I am thinking now about our slow and patient efforts to extend the franchise: the 15th Amendment, the 19th Amendment, the 26th Amendment.

I thought about what it means to be indivisible in this season of Calexit jokes and nationwide uproar. I thought about liberty, the privilege of choosing what you'll think and what you'll say and where you'll go and where (or whether) you'll worship. I thought about justice, the glorious promise that might (or riches) cannot make right, that the right of a matter is something true and abiding and worth fighting for. And I am thinking now with tears in my eyes about that incendiary last phrase: 

for all.

Seen from a trotting horse

LA LA LA I am taking a little break from thinking about the wider world. Shall we talk about knitting, just for a few minutes?

Today I finished two lingering projects, a shawl and a pair of fingerless mitts, while reading to Stella. I thought it would take me a zillion years to weave in the ends on my robot insect shawl, but it did not. Look:

It is enormous. Huge. Vast. I was blocking it on my bed (it is slightly too long to fit diagonally across a king-sized bed) and Stella said, "It's like a country. Like our country. No, bigger. It's like Africa." Indeed.

I am packing it up and sending it off to Lilian, who admired it when I was musing about what I might do with a fun-to-knit-but-too-weird-for-me continent-sized wrap. I was going to do one more thing before I sent if off, though.

That block at left is an example of two-color brioche stitch. It's fun and pretty but also a little tricksy, and I made one of my increases in the wrong direction while I was knitting that section. I was going to fix it with duplicate stitch before I popped it in the mail. Unfortunately, the last few yards of apple green yarn have gone walkabout -- wayward yarn has been a recurring exasperation with this particular project. (That's kind of weird. I don't lose yarn, but I kept losing this particular yarn.)

I think instead of waiting for our ductwork bunyip to barf it back up, I'm going to pop it in the mail with its mistake unrepaired. Some knitters dismiss mistakes by saying, "It'll never been seen from a trotting horse." I myself tend to let my perfectionist flag fly when it comes to knitting mistakes, but not this particular mistake. It can say "Look, I was learning something fun and new" and "The architecture of brioche stitch is confusing" and also "Hey, on a day when the country was convulsing over an unjust and horrifying situation, I finished something pretty. Also odd, but let's focus on the pretty."

Strange convergences

It's a strange thing, the synchrony of the March for Life and Holocaust Remembrance Day and the executive order halting refugee resettlement and banning Syrian refugees altogether.  Maybe on a different day I would have had some snarky comments about how the folks in charge of vetting cabinet nominees have lots of time on their hands these days with those incomplete dossiers, so hey! --maybe they could be in charge of the amped-up refugee vetting demanded today.

Today is not that day.

Olga returns

When I was pregnant with Stella she bounced all around. She didn't really want to put her head down and keep it there: she thought sideways was good, or occasionally breech, or sometimes she twisted around diagonally just to keep things interesting. Oh, gosh, I am having a sensory memory of the discomfort of a 39-week baby stretching herself out sideways. Phew, I'm glad that's over! Here's a picture of my sweetie Petey and me, reading books in the breech tilt position. (Whoooo, having another sensory memory. Those steps were so uncomfortable!)

I took to calling her Olga near the end, in honor of Olga Korbut. Tonight as I was tucking her in she wanted to know what other names I had called her before I settled on her actual name -- she'd never heard about her in utero gymnastics. She thought Olga was an awesome name. She has decided to abandon her actual name and instruct everyone to call her Olga.

I'll let you know how that works out.

Thanks, hon

So you guys, the headlines are getting me down. I fully expected that principled Republican senators would block Rex Tillerson's nomination. I have been fuming since I read a news story about Marco Rubio buckling under pressure from donors. "Tell me not to be discouraged," I said to my husband this morning. "Don't be discouraged," he said, and kissed me.

But then he frowned. "Actually," he said, "maybe you should be a little bit discouraged."

In a world where Rex Tillerson is probably going to become secretary of state, at least I have a husband who makes me laugh.

For whose benefit?

Rolling back EPA regulations does not reflect the will of the people and it does not serve the common good. It chiefly benefits a narrow sliver of the United States: the very wealthy.

Failure to clean up fracking messes causes direct harm to those living in the affected watershed.

Failure to pursue alternatives to coal-fired power plants brings short-term good news to coal country, but it's delaying the inevitable at a substantial cost.

Failure to acknowledge the link between environmental contaminants and neurodevelopmental disabilities causes suffering for millions of US families (many of whom, let us not forget, are likely to have diminished insurance coverage).

Read Bill McKibben's New Yorker article on the impact of the Trump administration's environmental actions. Read it and weep.

Or what's a heaven for?

My oldest turned 20 a few weeks ago, which means I am now in my THIRD DECADE of trying to teach children how to function in the real world. Over the years I have developed some shorthand. I no longer say, "Sweetie, if you turn away from the table while you're eating you'll get food in the carpet and we'll get bugs and stains and entropic squalor." Instead I say, "Knees!" -- because if your knees are under the table, your mouth will most likely be over it, thereby cutting down on the entropic squalor.

If someone picks up a hunk of meat and gnaws at it while it is impaled on the fork (instead of cutting it into bite-sized pieces), I always say, "We are not barbarians." Stella is my most carnivorous child, and my youngest child, and so she is the most likely to be reminded that we are in fact civilized people in this house even if an outsider might occasionally pick up a different vibe.

Yesterday only four of us were here: Alex is back at school and the Scouts were camping. We went out for brunch at a place that had -- oh rapture and delight -- a chocolate fountain. After her brunch was eaten Stella got a plate with some chocolate-dipped treats on it, and when they were eaten she had a moment of forgetting that we don't lick our fingers in restaurants. "We are not barbarians," her older brother told her firmly.

"When I grow up," she said longingly, "I want to be a barbarian."

It's good to have goals.

Clear your schedules, folks

Today I was thinking about which fat Dickens novel I'd like to re-read next, after the spring semester ends. "Martin Chuzzlewit!" I said to myself. It's the only novel that's partially set in the US, and its biting observations about American culture still resonate. I read it for the first time in 2001, not long after our return from two years in the UK, and I am curious to see how my memories hold up. Plus it's an interesting time in which to reflect on outsiders' perceptions of the wacky ways we do things here in the US.

"Oh!" said my brain to itself, "let's spread the word right away! How many people will want to join in? We could make a hashtag: #FAMDRAL, for Fourth Annual May Dickens Read-Along!" And then I thought realistically about the number of people who will probably want to re-read a 900-page novel that I myself have classed in the bottom tier of Dickens novels, and I had to laugh at my enthusiasm.

But hey-- if you are pining away to learn more about the Dickensian perspective on US quirks and redemption through illness and Victorian midwifery, you have 3.5 months to deal with your current reading backlog. I know you won't want to miss a minute of the #FAMDRAL party.

At the top of my own pile is a brand-new book called Class. The Times reviewed it this week and I bought it impulsively. The main character is increasingly unlikable and yet I do not want to see the trainwreck I fear awaits her. It is crisply written, packed with on-target zingers about mommy-wars nonsense and subtle flavors of racism, but it is also pretty depressing. This character won't stop telling lies, though, and I almost can't deal with it. (My reaction reminds me of the way I felt about Eligible. People on the internet had all kinds of complaints about that book; I liked it except for the lies. I hate it when characters I'm supposed to like keep telling lies.)

I am bracing myself to find out what happens. Something I appreciate about Dickens: you're never expected to root for a person who lies habitually. There, I bet that filled you with firm resolve to join me in May. (I bet Tracy, who may not have forgiven me for persuading her to tackle Bleak House three years ago, is pretty sure what she's not reading in May.)

Good Enough Prof

Remember my new year's resolution about being a good enough professor? Perfectionism doesn't work very well for me at work. No matter how strenuously I try, I will never get a 100% approval rating from my students. No matter how feverishly I edit, I will never get a set of reviews back that say, "This manuscript is exactly right! Don't change a word!" But I can torch a lot of energy and willpower trying to achieve those impossible goals.

l keep thinking about the conversation with my chair in which she said, "More than 90% of your students [in the class I was fretting about over break] said you were either effective or highly effective in your role." And something clicked for me: I can live with a 92% approval rating. I can be okay with that particular A-. I hated the very idea of A-minuses when I was a student myself, but I am going to make my peace with them as a prof.

Have I told you about my load this semester? The first four weeks of the semester are going to be crazy intense from a teaching perspective, because I'm prepping 5 hours of content each week for a new grad class. [takes a deep breath; declines to hyperventilate; repeats "good enough prof good enough prof"]. The following four weeks are going to be crazy intense from a service perspective, because I've been assigned to the department's most time-consuming committee. (There's some overlap between those two commitments, but I'm not going to think about that right now.)

I'm teaching two undergrad classes, one right after the other. They run from 11 until 1, and at about 12:10 today I was feeling hungry and wired. I tripped over a sentence and thought to myself, "Oh, dear, that came out wrong." In my mind's eye I could see myself standing at a fork in the road: I could go down the path of self-flagellation and worry that it was going to get worse as I got hungrier, or I could say "good enough prof! no biggie!" I chose option B. 

Here is the weird part: my undergrads are always more reserved than my grad students. They're slower to ask questions, they're slower to answer questions, and they never laugh as loudly at my jokes. But today, after I chose option B, it was as if they relaxed with me. We had much more fun than I would have expected to have on the second day of class -- it usually takes longer for them to warm up.

This is strange to me, because I would never have guessed that my students could perceive my worried perfectionism. But maybe they can.

A distraction

I was looking for videos for my students on Youtube when Youtube thought I might need a distraction. "Look, Jamie," said Youtube. "Wouldn't you like to watch this tiger mom in action?"

This was an actual tiger mom, not the Amy Chua variety, and she was having her first baby. Do you need four minutes of not thinking about whatever you might be thinking about? (I myself am trying not to let myself even think about what it is that I'm not thinking about. I need a little extra buffer so I can keep on plugging.)

This is going to sound a little nuts, but I was watching her move with a contraction and thinking that some things resonate across species. (Okay, that sounds more than a little nuts, but I'm just going to leave it there.) And then...she broke her own water. With her teeth. Some things emphatically do not resonate across species.

If you happen to need a distraction yourself, I give you two fluffy squeaky tiger cubs and a wee bit of drama. Plus Australian accents.

Oh, little twig, I am sorry about the bending

Stella has a loose tooth. She was frowning and wiggling it last night, asking me all kinds of questions about losing teeth. "But Mom," she said, "when I move it I can taste a little bit of blood." 

"That's normal," I told her. "It used to be rooted in your jaw and now it's making its way out. It's not..." --and here I paused, looking for the best word to soothe my worried girl. 

She filled it in for me: "...cancer?"

No, darling. No, a loose tooth ≠ cancer.

Anap-festival

You guys, I got taken in two days in a row. It took me a few hours yesterday to realize that the story about Donald Trump and handwashing couldn't be true (you can find it via Snopes if you didn't see it and are curious), and then today I believed that the widely shared "inaugural poem" was written for the inauguration. It's strange living in a world where you can't always tell the difference between the actual newspaper and The Onion.

Whatever a person might think about the content of the inaugural poem*, it is a veritable festival of anapests. An anap-festival, one might say. It sparked a dinner table discussion about metric feet. I do love dinner table conversations about metric feet. When one of my kids says, in response to a pounded-out illustration of dactylic hexameter, "Wait, you said those were dactyls but wasn't the last one a spondee?" -- it doesn't just warm the cockles of my heart. It practically flambés them. And this was, unexpectedly, a different kid from the one talking about spondees in April. Here's a snippet from that post: 

Last night my basement was host to a pack of teenaged boys, one of whom belonged to me. Elwood told me he overheard a snippet of conversation, in which the boy in question said: "Well, my mom can recite the Iliad in Greek." (Insert another pause, for me to crack up at the memory. My dad can beat your dad at arm-wrestling; my mom can recite more ancient epic poetry than your mom.) This is the same kid who was recently learning about scansion in his English class, and he came home grumbling about the teacher's definition of a metric foot. "She said it was a collection of syllables including at least one stressed and one unstressed syllable, and of course you know what I wanted to know," he announced at dinner. I raised an eyebrow. "WHAT ABOUT THE SPONDEE?" he burst out, a picture of indignation. 

The next day he told the teacher about our conversation. She said, "First, it wasn't my definition; it was the textbook's definition. And second, who talks about that at dinner? Don't you have anything better to talk about?"

But my answer is no: I can't really think of anything I'd rather talk about with my family. It makes me fiercely happy to hear my son thinking about how words can fit together to make something beautiful and memorable, something transcendent.

So here I am, eating humble pie. I mentioned the handwashing incident in confession today, because it speaks of a willingness to believe the worst of DJT that I need to eradicate. And I was wrong to say Trump has accomplished nothing good since the election: I am confident that we wouldn't have had this particular conversation about anapests without him. So thanks, DJT. I'd prefer it if you could find a Secretary of Education who was actually committed to free and appropriate public education for all, but failing that I'll appreciate the anapests.

*The lassies' champion. I can't even.

The Yowl and the Pussyhat

I made a hat for a friend. It wasn't just any hat; it was a statement hat for her to wear to a protest march on inauguration day.

This felt a little strange for me. On a surface level, the vulgarity bothered me. A year ago I could not have predicted that we would be preparing to inaugurate a man who thrust his casually inappropriate talk about genitals into the headlines on more than one occasion. There's still a voice in my head that says, "Nice Catholic ladies don't say 'pussy.'"

But nice is not my highest goal right now, and the surface-level issue isn't what really matters. On a deeper level, my outrage is still burning hot. I have inhabited a woman's body for 46 years now. I have offered up this body in the service of my vocation to marriage. I have learned some of the mysteries of a life laid down as I have gestated, birthed, and nursed five children. I have used this voice, unmistakably a woman's voice, to shine a light for my students into the murky corners of my discipline. I have used these hands, unmistakably a woman's hands, to type up truth to the best of my ability and send it out into the world. I have offered this body, all the parts of it, as a living sacrifice in obedience to Romans 12.

And I am aghast that a man with so little respect for women's bodies is taking over the Oval Office. I'm not over it. I'm never going to be over it.

When I first started thinking about this post I was going to call it "Strange Bedfellows," because many of the women wearing pussyhats on inauguration day will be passionate supporters of abortion rights. You know I am pro-life. Here's what I wrote in my initial draft: I believe, though, that this is no time for separatism. I believe it is a time for women of good will to say "Here we are, inhabiting our women's bodies, and we will not take this affront lying down."

Today the organizers of the Women's March posted this tweet in response to an article in The Atlantic: 

Our statement regarding press today: pic.twitter.com/z1y9cfFFvY

— Women's March (@womensmarch) January 16, 2017

I still believe this is no time for separatism. We have too much work to do. I'd like to say once more that we have important common ground: let's work on bringing down barriers between pregnant women and access to prenatal care. Let's work on paid maternity leave and on affordable childcare. Let's build a culture in which no woman, ever, for any reason at any time, is coerced or manipulated into terminating a pregnancy she wishes to sustain. Let's build a world in which industry does not spew teratogens and neurotoxicants into the air and soil and water with reckless disregard for their impact on gestating babies.

Let's elect a president who doesn't think he deserves access to our bodies because he's "a star."

I am categorically, irrevocably, unabashedly opposed to Donald Trump's presidency, and the making of this hat was a weeklong yowl of outrage. I believe in the unique and unrepeatable nature of each unborn life. I am willing to work side by side with women who disagree with me. This is no time for needless divisions among American women.

Simplified Organization

Have you encountered Mystie Winckler yet? She's a homeschooling mom who runs a few different sites, one of which is focused on better homemaking via better attitude. That could be dreadful, I know, but it is the very opposite of dreadful. I find her so helpful. Lissa Wiley turned me on to one of her e-books a few years ago; it was full of useful tips and pointers.

She's running a program called New Year, New Attitude here in the first seven weeks of 2017, and her emails together with that mid-Whole 30 energy burst are getting the wheels turning in my brain. I've been thinking.

When we moved into this house in 2005, we set things up for toddlers and small children. We haven't had any toddlers for a while. Our youngest child is now the age that our oldest child was when we arrived in Gladlyville. It's time to adjust accordingly.

In 2005 we put an open bin of plastic containers on the kitchen floor for babies and toddlers to rearrange. It's been years since anyone wanted to chew on a lid for fun, though, so I'm thinking about alternatives. My big Kitchen-Aid mixer doesn't get used very often because all of its accessories live in its mixing bowl and I have to haul the whole thing up and find a place to put them in my teeny kitchen with minimal counter space. The seldomer I use the mixer, the less inclined I am to use the mixer, because then I have to wash everything before I can start when really I just wanted to knock together a quick batch of something. Here's my idea: I think we can still use the existing bin if I turn it the other way. And then, if I can find a similarly sized one with a lid, it can be my baking bin. It can house the mixer accessories and the hand mixer that lives in the high cabinet over the stove and measuring tools that are currently mixed in with other kitchen items in an annoying way. See?

There is also the Not-Exactly-Horrible-But-Not-Far-From-It Office. There's just something about a room where the kids spend more time than the grownups: it attracts mess. The office has a desktop computer that doesn't get used for much except Stella's favorite YouTube videos, because now the boys all have to have laptops for school. There's a table that gets used a lot for drawing, which is also housing the printer that makes me swear like Yosemite Sam and my interrupted scrapbooking efforts and some vexing homeless bits and pieces that I need to rehome or perhaps douse with turpentine and set ablaze. Oh, and a file cabinet that can only open partway, and two guinea pigs who seem to have poop-throwing contests when we're not around, and all of the existing photo albums, and the desk that I do actually use, and about 2000 books because OH MY WORD the books in this house just keep multiplying. Here, let me show you the view from the northwest corner.

Oh, I forgot: an entire closet (in a 1923 house where closet space is at a premium) filled with games. Filled.

My husband loves it when things fit tidily into their spaces, so he was very pleased when the guinea pig cage fit under the drawing table and the Printer of Perdition. The thing is, you can't leave the chairs in front of the table that way. They get moved every day for guinea pig feeding and patting, and they rarely get moved back. So there are always these big chairs sitting randomly in the middle of a small room. Just the thought is making me frustrated. So here's my new idea: if we ditch the (ancient, limping) desktop computer (Stella will have to watch her 80s TV shows elsewhere), and take that desk down to the basement, then the guinea pig cage can move to the wall that's shown on the right-hand side of the picture. We can hang a couple of additional shelves for photo albums on the standards you can just see there. (Not shown: trade paperbacks on shelves that go up to the ceiling. If I want to read a book from the A section I have to stand on the desk. Hm, I'll need a ladder if we move the desk. Or I'll need to resolve to read only trade paperback books written by people whose names start with C or later letters.) That way the albums will still be accessible -- the kids love to look through them -- but they'll be neater than they are at the moment, lined up on the floor along the north wall of this room.

Last, the living room. In 2005 we set up our living room so kids could run around a little bit without too many furniture collisions. 

(Whoops, the throw and stray pillowcase left in the floor were invisible to me until I prepared to post them on the internet. As was the pile of knitting left on the couch.) Here in 2017, we don't have small boys chasing each other in circles around our downstairs any more. I'd like to have a conversation circle: a little loveseat at right angles to the couch, with a coffee table in the middle. And while I'm thrifting for a loveseat, I'd like to replace that armchair in the corner -- preferably with one that doesn't rock. I am tired of the THUNK of that armchair slamming into the wall behind it. And you know, I have often felt that we don't have much wall space for pictures because we have books on all the walls, but look at those bare walls calling out for some decoration. 

My husband is not a fan of this conversation circle plan, because he is used to our sparsely furnished living room. But I think it contributes to separateness within the family: often in the evenings I sit here on the couch while my 17yo sits on the music room loveseat and my 14yo sits at the dining room table. Elwood sits at the dining room desk. Wouldn't it be nicer if we could sit together? Around a coffee table?

For years our living room was a no-coffee zone, because we had small boys caroming through it. It seemed like every cup of coffee my MIL brought in here wound up getting spilled over books, until finally we banned beverages from the living room. But hey -- perhaps we could have a coffee table with actual cups of coffee upon it!

I don't know if that's what most people mean when they talk about the joys of parenting older children.

Laser Eyes of the Heart

Yesterday I was trying to get a jump on my spring semester lecture prep. I am teaching a class that overlaps substantially but not entirely with the grad class I taught in the spring, and so I went through all of my spring slides in sequence to pull out the ones I can use this time around. 

This was the class, you might remember, into which I poured uncountable hours only to learn in June that a majority of the students had hated it. They were so nasty in their assessments of the class that I had started to think it must have been a really terrible class after all. But yesterday I sat in my office and looked at file after file of carefully prepared information-- information about theory and practice and language and behavior that took me years to learn, served up with all the clarity and creativity and wit that I could muster. I told my husband this morning, "It's like I blenderized a chunk of my heart for them, and dispersed it across the semester."

Sometimes you do the very best you can for people, and they are jerks about it. I know that's a true statement. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

There's a beautiful prayer in St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians: he prays "that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you." It's an idea I keep coming back to, that my inner vision is more important than what I see with my actual eyes. That I can hold on to hope in all circumstances. On bad days my inner vision is nothing so lofty. On bad days it's more like laser eyes of the heart in there: zappity-zap, mean student with distinctive handwriting who said patently false things about me under cover of anonymity! Zappity-zap, rude drivers and judgy acquaintances and also that person ambling through the crosswalk while attempting to send a text! Dear Jamie: You are the only person who gets zapped by those laser eyes.

This week I will try again to teach this material that I love so much to a different cohort of grad students. It will probably be fine; the fall class was fine. One of my new year's resolutions is to aim to be a Good Enough Prof: to lay down perfectionism and anxiety, to keep my eyes on the bigger picture. I suppose I should also try to keep my inner laser in check.

Snapshot

I can't remember now if Stella was 4 or 5 when we checked out the Pony Scouts books from our local library. Two of the ponies were named Inky and Smoky. When we read the books she decided that we would no longer have cars. Instead they would be "wheel ponies," both girls. Our silver van was Smoky, and the dark green Focus was Inky. Any time someone new rode in our cars she would explain: they look like cars, but they're actually wheel ponies. Girl wheel ponies. The names caught on. We stopped saying "Did you leave your backpack in the Focus?" and said "Inky or Smoky?" instead.

Smoky died in September, and then Inky went to the Big Ranch in the Sky in December. (Probably it is not a very big ranch in the sky if it is inhabited by wheel ponies. I haven't observed many wheel ponies in the wild.) We bought a gray van in October and christened her Cloudy. We bought a gray Fusion in December-- Stormy.

I am thinking about the ways Stella has grown up since she was entranced by the Pony Scouts. She's still enough of a little girl to give pony names to cars, but she doesn't need to explain to all comers that they're not actually cars. Maybe the most endearing part of the car-naming for me is the way that all the boys were on board with it. Of course we'll give pony names to the new vehicles, they seemed to think. Doesn't every vehicle need a pony name? I hope these vehicles will last at least another five years, at which point she'll be a teenager, and probably too grown up for pony names.

So I am just recording a 2017 snapshot here, thinking about the girl who once was 4 or 5, and then was 8, and who will be 13 before I know it. And I am thinking about her cooperative brothers, who are all willing to be a little silly for their sister's sake.

Faster and faster

An old post showed up in my referral stats tonight, and I clicked through to it because I couldn't remember why I would write a post titled with a phrase describing a grisly death in Sholokhov. (Reason: I was talking about preschool snacks. Obviously.) A few posts later I was writing about kids and distractions. Remember in 2011 when people thought you should stay off your screens in restaurants? SO QUAINT!) 

My brother left me a comment on that post that I don't think I appreciated at the time. I usually read comments via email*, but my email notifications strip out HTML. So I didn't see his link until tonight, I don't believe. The post he linked to was written in 2010; the author is saying he doesn't have an iPhone because he doesn't want to take the internet with him. I'm curious about whether he still feels the same. Smartphone saturation means it's become a little unusual in my work and social circles for someone to be unable to pick up email anywhere, anytime. I bought a smartphone myself this year. It is a clunky Flintstones-era phone, but even so I would be unenthusiastic about going back to life with a dumbphone. I kind of hate to type that out loud.

*I am waaaaay behind on responding to comments -- apologies to those of you who have taken the time to comment. I always appreciate it.

My husband still has no cell phone at all. People are astonished by this, as if he were an Old Order Amish man eschewing buttons. This is very odd to me, that a device that no one owned in my childhood is now regarded as a necessity.

I'm not a fan. I still don't want my kids on screens in restaurants. (In candor, I also don't want my adult dinner companions on screens in restaurants. But I am not the boss of them.) I think, whether it's kids or adults, I'm probably losing that battle.

Miscellany

Thank you for praying for my friend Jennifer and her husband. She is asking especially for prayers to get through the baby's funeral, which I believe will be this weekend. Please do keep lifting her up.

***

Yesterday I took the kids who weren't in school (#1, #4, and #5) to Chicago for the day. We caught the early train and went to the Field Museum. The Field Museum is one of my very favorite places. I love the way it captures the diversity of life, and our hunger for order and understanding. It feeds my soul. I wasn't sure how long Pete and Stella would last there, but they were entranced. We closed the place down and took a Lyft over to Greektown for dinner. I want to remember the lake, chill and dark on our right as we headed up LSD, and the way the city skyline shone through the snow as we turned onto Balbo, and Stella's enthusiasm for the Art Institute lions, and Alex and the driver chuckling quietly in the front seats at the conversation in the back. Also: Stella flinching away as gouts of flame shot up from our saganaki, before she ate every bite of her portion.

She curled up across two train seats to sleep on the way home, while Pete and I sat across from her and talked. It would have been a late night for a medium-sized girl otherwise.

***

My 17yo is feeling chatty. He is reading The Scarlet Letter unenthusiastically. He is my most enthusiastic reader, generally: he just finished the Divine Comedy (the whole thing! dang!) and dove right into the Iliad. He is three years into a long-haul experimental fiction project. (He thinks the idea of a Dickens project is revolting (that's a quote), but a multi-year experimental fiction project = AWESOME.) He would like my opinion on an essay called "Lipogrammatic Writing and Its Relationship to the Theme of Physical Fitness in Hawthorne." I would read that, I told him, but I love you more than your English teacher does. He nodded. "I've noticed," he said. (I think this essay is mostly a platform in which he can tell his teacher that A Void is a better book than The Scarlet Letter.)

He's still musing next to me. "Somewhere I'd like to work in the phrase 'Pavlovianly ultra-paradoxical.'" I have confidence in your ability to work that in, I tell him. "You can thank Pynchon for that phrase," he says.

***

I promised him I'd read The Crying of Lot 49. It seems a little wimpy to say that I do not love mid-20th-century American literature. So I won't say it.

But perhaps the amount of time I have spent on chapter 1 speaks for itself.

***

I had a really helpful conversation with my chair this afternoon. She is back from sabbatical and I am glad. I've never had a better boss. Somehow she manages to be generous with her time and encouragement while also getting All The Things done. I think she will probably retire in another year and a half, but I hope not. I went in wincing to read my fall semester teaching evals, remembering that brutal spring grad class, and guess what? They were all fine, all three classes. I had been especially worried about one of the undergrad classes, based on an ominous conversation with a senior faculty member in December. "More than 90% of those students said you were effective in your role," my chair said kindly, reading some snippets aloud to me. "Even students with complaints also have good things to say about you. There is nothing here that concerns me at all."

Phew. I hadn't realized how much anxiety I had been carrying around. 

The worst news

Please pray for my friends whose baby was stillborn today.