Run, don’t walk. That’s all I have to say. I have just started The Middle Place and already I have tears running down my face.
Kelly is a master. She is like your funnier, more articulate, wiser best friend. She’s also born on August 16th. What else do you need to know?
Found a list on a New York Times blog of the best British writers since 1945 (or some such date). I was frankly surprised to see Philip Larkin at the top of the list. I’ve long loved him, and his peers, in what I think of as a generation of plain-spoken British poets, Auden, Heaney, Larkin.
One of my favorite Larkin passages reminds me very vividly of being a child and being dragged by my father to ADC (another damned cathedral). As much as Hilary and I whined about being taken to church upon church, when I was inside them, I was always moved. The tall windows of stained glass, and the light streaming in, and the hush filled with life.
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Another lovely morning with Whit. First, he slept until 7:30 which is basically the middle of the day. Delightful. Then we went to Starbucks in our PJs and then after some cartoons we met Margo and Colin at the Science Museum. These two are so cute running around together. Plus no accidents for Whit! Yahoo.
This afternoon I went for a run, finally a good one after two days of side cramps, stopping and starting, etc. It is warm and the snow is melting and muddy. I was among a cast of thousands at Fresh Pond, and the afternoon had that “finally!” feeling that we get in the springtime.
Saturday night. White wine (Oyster Bay) and Grace’s OLPC. Whit is in bed after a delightful mother-son afternoon that only included one pee-your-pants incident.
Have been thinking a lot lately about how I think about my children, and am a little worried that I’m not spending enough time building them up. For whatever reasons the past couple of days have led to encounters with people talking about their own children’s exceptional skills at X or Y. I was really struck by the fact that generally, overall, I really think Grace and Whit are ordinary. And let me be clear: this is a great thing. I’ve written before about my steadfast, probably stubborn overcorrection to overscheduling of children – basically Grace and Whit go to school, and that is it. Grace gets one activity a week (in the fall, soccer, in the winter, skating, Saturday mornings both). Whit gets naps and lots of time banging a hammer on his wooden toolbench. I truly, honestly believe that this is the best thing for them. Unstructured time, just plain play.
I don’t think I would describe either Grace or Whit as exceptional on any dimension. And you know what? I don’t think I aspire to that. I think I aspire to raise happy, well-adjusted children who can entertain themselves and who can be who they are. I don’t want to impose a vision of their identities on them, and I don’t want to overprogram them, and I don’t want to already talk about what they are good or bad at. When I think back to my own childhood, I don’t remember thinking I was particularly good at anything or really special in any way. I was just normal, and regular, and what a treat that was!!
But I do have guilt when I hear these other parents talk about their early readers or their child’s particularly impressive physical coordination or early language acquisition. I simply don’t speak of Whit and Grace in those terms. Maybe I should? Am I dooming them to a life of mediocrity by refusing to extol virtues that I don’t really see? Don’t get me wrong: I love my children dearly, and because of that I think they are both downright terrific. I guess I feel like to focus on their exceptional promise and prowess at X or Y is to saddle them with both expectation and limits (if you are already good at X, doesn’t that mean you will by definition focus less on Y?).
I need to spend some more time thinking about this. I tussle with thinking somehow I’m letting Grace and Whit down by not being more flowery in my praise of them, and yet at the same time I keep bumping into my fundamental instincts that point in another direction.
“He felt sure that what he was looking for he already had in his possession. It was a matter of ordering things and getting rid of the unimportant things that cluttered the view.”
– Michael Connelly, City of Bones
(this is a first: finding a quotation that speaks to me in one of my trashy detective books)