The Year of Living Dangerously

It’s now been six weeks since my year as Isabel’s teacher ended with her graduation from Cold Spring School.  The graduation ceremony itself was a lot of fun.  The students decided to perform a series of skits based on their years at the school.  This year’s group had twenty students and they all took part in the brainstorming, writing, editing, and sharpening of each skit.  As you can imagine, it was quite an involved process.  I am not a big fan of group writing endeavors, since they are very hard work and often the final product sounds like it was written by a committee.  In this case, however, the final scripts were far more focused and funnier than the early drafts and the improvement was due to the input of everyone.  It was great for me to see the process play itself out with such entertaining results.

            It was also great for me to see Isabel’s role in the whole process.  She had some valuable ideas that really worked, and she also had other ideas that needed to be cut.  She handled both situations with grace and aplomb.  And because I was her teacher, I got to see firsthand how it all played out.  I saw the give and take in the group as people took the risk to put their ideas out and have their peers pronounce judgment on them.  I got to see what very few parents ever get to see—I watched my own daughter just be herself in the classroom and on the playground and on field trips.  In the end, it feels like I got a huge gift this year.

In addition to the unusual circumstance of having me as her teacher, Isabel also suffered through the fact that Erica was in Ithaca and San Diego for big chunks of the school year.  Not only was I Isabel’s teacher, I was also her single parent.  There were days when we spent every waking minute together.  The poor child.  I would not wish that on anyone.  I have already told her this in private, but I want to thank her out loud and in public for making this past school year go as well as it possibly could.  This could have been a very hard year and instead it was a pleasure.

I am a firm believer that we are all born with a temperament that is at the root of who we are our whole lives.  Our basic orientation to the world does not change.  What does change is the expression of that temperament.  We are creatures of context.  For as many discrete groups of people there are whose opinions we care about, we have that many different expressions of our personality.  We are not the same with our co-workers as we are with our siblings.  We act differently alone on the subway than we do in the car with a spouse.  And we are different with our friends than we are with our parents.

More times than I can count I have told parents about the behavior of their child in my class and they have said something like, “Wow. She is nothing like that at home.”  Nine times out of ten, the school behavior is more in keeping with what they hope their child will be like.  Especially with twelve-year olds, how a kid behaves at home is the worst of all their many expressions.  Generally, this is healthy.  It means home is where they feel most secure and they can let out the nastiness that they know would be out of bounds in the rest of the world.  Many researchers and teachers refer to 12-, 13-, and 14-year olds and Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde for this very reason.

Another benefit of the year was that Isabel got to see me doing my job.  I never got to see my father at work.  He sold insurance and worked in an office and it would not have been practical, nor would it ever have crossed his mind to bring me to work with him.  I really like teaching and over the years I have gotten to the point where I am not awful at it.  There were times this year when I certainly forgot my daughter was in the class.  She became just one more student in the group.  And just as she has a school personality that differs from her home personality, I have a work personality that is not the same as my home personality.  I can’t help but believe that it was good for Isabel to see me doing my job and truly liking it. 

What I got this year was access to the Isabel I would not have ever seen otherwise.  She was still recognizably herself, but she was different, too.  The Isabel I saw in school was more helpful, more conscientious, more empathetic, more outspoken, more of a leader, and a little bit more of a troublemaker than the Isabel I see in other realms.  There were times during the year when Isabel simply forgot her father was in the room.  I was instead her teacher.  And from this new position I was both farther away and closer.  Farther away, because Isabel wasn’t saying to herself “What do I want my parents to see of me?” and closer, because Isabel wasn’t asking herself “What do I want my parents to see of me?”  She was “unfiltered” in a way, or at least “differently filtered.”  The Isabel I got to see was the one she brings out into the world when she is away from me and Erica.  For this and many other reasons, this was my best teaching year yet.

Good Day

I saw Isabel from across the field.  She was wearing a flower-print gingham dress and a blue bonnet that tied under her chin.  It took just a moment to recognize her.  I was sitting on a bench, signaling to the world my preference that I be left alone by reading Quiet, by Susan Cain.  Isabel was in a group of four girls, all dressed similarly anachronistically and they were deep in conversation.

As her group passed my bench she looked up and said “Good Day” and mid-greeting realized I wasn’t just any old tourist—I was her Dad.  And it was good to see, in that moment when the realization hit, that her face lit up in a flash of a smile that lasted just a millisecond before she was back in character.  She allowed herself a surreptitious wave and walked on, not even looking over her shoulder to see if I would follow.

She has been at King’s Landing Provincial Park in New Brunswick, Canada this week.  Erica has been in Ithaca, working.  And I have been lonely.

King’s Landing has a summer camp program they call Visiting Cousins.  In a business model Tom Sawyer would be proud of, boys and girls from all over pay money to come and live the life of children in the 1830s.  They dress and act the part of townspeople as tourists roam the village.  The kids get a fun, unplugged week and the park gets to fill itself with “townspeople.”

That is why Isabel was in gingham and a bonnet—she was a Canadian schoolgirl from the 1830s.   When I saw her it was Friday afternoon and I was there to pick her up and bring her back to New Haven for our final week of life in Connecticut.  I missed her all week while she was gone and I was excited to see her again.  Now that she is twelve I know that there might be some tough times coming for us.  Teenage girls and their fathers don’t always get along so well and I have no reason to think we will be any different.

So, in that moment when Isabel recognized me, I was so relieved to see something flitter across her face that was not annoyance or disappointment or embarrassment or hatred or resignation or anything else that might be there in the coming few years.  If I let myself admit it, what I saw on her face was love.  The one thousand mile round trip to pick her up is a small price to pay for that millisecond.

A Few More Beautiful Things

I have not posted each day, but I have been noticing some beautiful things this week and it really has helped me not get lost in the stress of mortgage applications and searching for a job and writing Progress Reports for my 20 students.

One thing I saw was the sparkle in the eyes of a one-year old friend of ours as she splashed naked in a kiddie pool on a 90 degree day.  Her pool was in the shade, she was naked, the water felt refreshing, and life was good.  All of this and more showed in her eyes.

Another thing was the interplay of sunlight and dark clouds as some fairly severe thunderstorms ripped through on Sunday afternoon.  The clouds were towering cumulonimbus and they were saturated.  The bottoms were turbulent and the tops were boiling higher as I watched--pushed by updrafts to over 30,000 feet.  At one point Isabel and I drove into a wall of rain.  One second it was clear with blue skies directly overhead and the next we could see a white wall of rain coming north up Whitney Avenue.  We drove into the wall and it felt like going through a waterfall.

One other beautiful thing I saw this week was Monday night at the Bodyology workout place I go to sometimes in Hamden.  Their workouts are tough.  They are generally comprised of both strength and cardio components and they demand high reps at high intensity with minimal resting time.  These workouts consistently kick my ass.  Everything is timed, and the big red numbers on the timer are visible from everywhere in the room.  Monday's workout was especially hard and as I neared the end I wasn't sure if I could make it all the way through without hurling or quitting.  But I did.  And this is the beautiful thing I took away from that night:

Chuck It

My dog Ginger loves to chase a particular kind of orange rubber ball.  It has a blue pattern pressed into it, it flies long distances when thrown with a Chuck-it, and it bounces unusually high.  Plus, I imagine it feels good to chew on.  The beautiful thing I saw yesterday was the unbridled joy with which Ginger runs when I throw her orange and blue ball high into the air and well out into a big field.  She looks like an outfielder with a bead on a long fly ball that might or might not make it over the fence.  She does not catch the ball on the fly.  Part of the fun for her seems to be to let the ball bounce and then try to catch it as it comes down from it 12- or even 15-foot high bounce.  When conditions are right, she can do this over and over and over again and not lose interest. 

            Yesterday, conditions were right.  She threw herself into the pursuit of that ball again and again, each time launching her body up as the ball came down from its bounce and snagging it out of the air a good five or six feet off the ground.  Sometimes she had the trajectory just a little bit off and the ball would bounce off her snout and careen away at an unpredictable angle.  When this happened she would lunge after the ball and hunt it down like a baby rabbit.  She was so clearly having fun that it made me feel good, too. 

            Dog owners like to believe they have access to their dogs’ inner lives and emotional states.  Maybe we do, maybe we don’t.  (The whole enterprise leaves quite a lot of room for projection if you ask me.)  But in this case, I think I can tell what Ginger is feeling.  I think I can tell because there are times when I have had the very same feeling.  For me it isn’t an orange and blue bouncy ball.  Instead, it is a 187-gram Frisbee thrown far and high out across a huge grassy field.

            When conditions are right, I can chase these Frisbees down from below and snag them out of thin air at a dead run, stop on a dime, turn, and launch the Frisbee back to the person who threw it.  And then do it again.  And again.  And again.  The world goes away and all there is is the Frisbee and the chase and these two things are all there needs to be for a while.

            Eventually, Ginger tired of the game yesterday.  It was very hot and very humid and she had expended a lot of energy.  But for a little while I got to experience some vicarious joy as she sprinted full out across the grassy fields of Edgerton with her eyes focused upward on that orange and blue ball and the rest of the world disappeared.

Beautiful Things

I have been feeling a bit stressed lately.  We are moving.  I don’t yet have a job.  The job I am leaving was perfect.  I am not sure where my daughter will be going to school next year.  My wife is starting a new job.  Blah, blah, blah.  I know that all of these things will be great two months from now.  We will have survived the whole moving process.  I will have a job I like and feel good about.  Cold Spring School will survive—and even thrive—without me.  Isabel will be happily taken in and swallowed up by a new school with good teachers and good friends.  Erica will be making her new job her own and doing it with style and skill.  Yet…I worry.

One way I deal with the stress is to run.  Today it was close to 90 at noon and I hit the road anyway for a good, hard four-miler partially up East Rock.  While I run my mind goes fairly blank and my body relaxes.  When I am done the endorphins do their job and I feel good for a bit.  It’s a bit like magic, actually.  Within reason, this thing that makes me feel better is also good for me.

While I was running today I decided to help myself in another way, as well.  I am familiar with the research into happiness that has shown that where we focus our attention can have a big effect on our overall mood.  If we brood and stew and focus on all the unknowns and losses (actual and potential), we will be in a bad place.  But consciously making ourselves lookat the upside of things or focus on the things we are grateful for can boost our mood and leave us happier. 

What reminded me of this was a downy woodpecker.  It was on the branch of a shrub I ran by.  It did not see me coming and by the time it knew I was there, I was within five feet of it.  Downies are small woodpeckers—smaller than robins and cardinals.  They have a checked black-and-white appearance and often hang out at feeders with nuthatches and chickadees.  They, along with other species of woodpeckers, have a distinct way of flying.  They flap their wings a few times and then glide a bit.  As they glide, they lose a little altitude.  Then they flap some more and gain that altitude back.  This repeats over and over.  It looks like they are tracing out a somewhat-flattened sine curve through the air. 

The downy I startled today hopped off its branch and into the air directly in front of me at eye-level.  I had never been that close to a woodpecker before and the red spot on its head was brilliant in the sunshine.  I am not a sentimental guy about animals, but this bird was about as cute as it gets.  And then rather than flying left, (into the bushes), or right, (across the street and into the woods), this particular Downy flew immediately in front of me for a good fifty feet—maybe even seventy-five.  It rose and fell, rose and fell, like it was stitching up a rip in the fabric of the air.  It was beautiful to see.

So I took that image with me today and decided that I would write about it as my Beautiful Thing for today.  I also decided that I will write about one beautiful every day for the next month.  By that time, I should be moved into a new house and maybe even starting a new job.  I am considering this an exercise in conscious happiness.