Coffee Stain: I’m _So_ Gay

Or at least that’s what a student said I was.

The student wasn’t too happy with an answer I gave to a request and then in the next few minutes used her creative energies to pull a picture of me off the school’s web directory into a MS Word(r) document and write in a 24-point bold script “He is so Gay!” Mind you, the students were working on an annotated bibliography about an important jouralism person or publication during the classtime–At least that is what I had intended the time to be used for.

So, what did I do? Mostly what I normally do: ignored it. She was upset because I didn’t grant permission for her request and funneled her ire into Microsoft Word (and I can deal with that). I have that effect on some of my students: I make them mad sometimes and I’m okay with that. Question is: should I have been upset at being called “so Gay” or even that the student was using a “derrogatory term” to channel her passive agreesive anger?

Again, I chose not to respond. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. What I usually do in these situations is pretend to ignore the behavior, the comment, the DDJD LookSneerCurse. But what I then will do is use proximity: I lean or walk in the student’s general direction. I might walk right by their desk. But most of all, I will make sure that the student knows that I acknowledge their presence by my presence and that’s about it.

Besides, I think she was having a bad day anyway.

Now on the “so Gay” part. I grew up in Northern California during the 70s and 80s and I have generally, for the first part of my teaching career, been trying to remind the students and youth (and perhaps adults) in Northern Indiana that to call someone “Gay” borders on being homophobic. And, as a sidenote, it really is the worst thing to call another male student (as if to be gay is to be one on the Highway to Hell).

And so, I would have a talk with my classes as it came up (as someone loudly would namecall another student “gay”) and remind my students of what exactly they were saying. And generally, like most teacher lectures on proper EmilyPost “be nice to one another” lessons go, it fell on CharlieBrown AdultTalking “wa wa waa, wa wa waa.” You get the picture and you hear the tone. The problem, though, is that I wasn’t any better than my students were: I and my friends, did the same things and made fun the gay community also.

As I mentioned before, I grew up in Northern California and our family moved to the Russian River community during my 8th grade year and then back for grades 10-12. We lived near the community of Guerneville and we had fun saying some things about the folk that would come up during the weekends and the summer. See, Guerneville, as I remember hearing, was a fairly “clean town” and “many of the business were owned by people who were gay” (mind you, we lived about 60 miles north of San Francisco and to many of my students that means I lived by the gayest community the world). And so– and I learned this from a high schooler whom we thought was cool (probably because we was stoned most of the time…no kidding)– we would yell out the window some name or title when our car went by two men holding hands along the sidewalk or road.

I’m not proud of it; I’m just saying that I did it.

Along with that, my church buddies would come out and visit me and one particularly funny kid in our group thought Guerneville should have a tagline underneath the city limits sign: Guerneville: Where the women are women and the men are to. And we laughed and thought we all were quite witty (remember, to be funny as an adolescent wins more points than being good-looking and being a decent athlete).

So, when I denied the student’s request to go to her locker so she could retrieve her electronic listening device, I wasn’t really shocked that she used a term, though I don’t think was too witty, to project her distaste for my declining her request.

Before you remind me of my duty as a classroom teacher of a public school, think for a moment and remember that we all are guilty of name-calling. It is human and yes, it is ugly, but it is very human to do so.

Though one of my former newspaper students, who happens to be African-American (see how careful I worded that), calls me her “wigger.” She’ll say “Hey, are you my ‘wigger'” and I’ll remind her that she realizes that I can’t say the same thing back to her and she’ll say “I know.”

Now that’s witty.

Consolidating webspace

bashing education is no longer…well, as far as a separate site, I’ve just deleted the wordpress.com blog and moved all the entries over here to vergilscoffee.com. (And, perhaps, you can imagine why).

My hopes for bashing education will still live and I figure that instead of having special sites for special topics really doesn’t make too much sense (especially because I wasn’t generating a lot of content on bashing education anyway).

So, I’m doing what many other are: consolidating all the stuff we have out there and trying to put it in one place–one Miscellaneous place, if I may–and let you the reader stumble upon and find stuff here.

Setting up DesktopBSD in the Basement

And it’s the wireless that’s giving me problems now. (Oh, btw, that’s the original eMac 700 box in the corner…which is still kicking fine).

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Save Big Money at Menards!

On a trip to Menards, I ponder store music and arrangement of merchandise: I left with only one more item than I planned on.

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Sledding fun

Times of being a kid are great. 

A Merry Lego Santa Claus Family Portrait

The first 15 minutes of the Lego® Store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago is fairly entertaining; anything beyond that becomes a form of Chinese lead torture.

It’s what they love now, Legos®, and both Evan and Colin arrange much of their living space around the mighty investment into the building brick sets. Evan counted up how many pieces are dedicated to the Lego® Star Wars® sets and the number is approximately 11, 561.

We have a lot Legos® in our house.

And I think we can justify the purchases on the idea that both Evan and Colin still play with the Legos®. They might rebuild the set or might morph together sets and create new vehicles for Luke or Yoda or Darth Vader to do a flyby over Luke the cat. And as parents we like the idea of the boys creating stuff from bricks; it’s the good stuff of play. And it’s really hard to break the little things and no batteries are required.

But they do burn…or melt as I found out in 3rd grade.

The story is sometimes still in dispute, and is probably as controversial as the fire alarm story. In the fire alarm story (and I’m not kidding, my brother who is 5 years my senior and I still “discuss” it) I am the victim of a coercive brother. In the fire alarm story (it’s amazing how much of our childhood had some type of pyromania in them) Mike and I are at Yulupa Elementary School and it’s summer. And we’re roaming the hallways of school and around the corner from the water fountain by the bathrooms was a red “Pull for Fire” object about 4 feet up the wall. I’m watching Mike and he says (at least from my version of the story) that nothing happens when you pull it and he pulls it (or at least it appears that he has) and nothing happens. Then he says, “Now you try it.”

You cannot turn off a school fire alarm by banging your shoe against it. Apparently you need a key. Also, it is difficult to run across an uneven field and across a busy road with a shoe on your left foot and the other shoe in your hand: it just isn’t efficient in trying to make a quick get away when you hear the fire trucks coming to the school where you have just pulled the fire alarm. Lastly, it’s amazing that you might know that your brother has tricked you into doing something bad, and yet you still will be at his beckon call when he tries another stunt on you.

But that wasn’t the case with the Lego® house that we built when my mother was away. It was a group project: Mike, Steph and I are digging through the basket of Legos® and we’ve decided we’re building a mansion. We use the large green plate pieces for the foundation and then begin the two-story structure. We give up a strict color scheme on the second story when we run out of red bricks, but we’ve finished the house. It has windows, a door and a chimney.

See where this story is headed?

Again, I maintain that it was Mike’s idea, but perhaps we all wanted it and Mike lit the paper that we stuffed through the top of the chimney and I think I remember running for some reason (as if that would save me from the nasty burning Lego® house that was all of one foot high). The fire (or smoldering) was put out and we quickly cleaned up the mess and I even think we did the cartoon whistle-with-hands-behind-backs strolling about the house toward the door to the back yard.

Mom was not happy when she found out. It wasn’t the melting plastic from our realistic Lego® 2-story, but perhaps she even swore something silly when we sat down to eat dinner sometime later (that day or week or perhaps a month) and she saw the burn stain in her beautiful oak table.

Later, I was playing with the Legos® and found that some of the melted pieces didn’t make it into the garbage. I might have even used the evidence against Mike or Steph, but more than that, I didn’t have enough pieces to build whatever structure I was making at the time.

My sons haven’t discovered the wonders of fire but their lives do encompass Legos® and building and creation. I’m sure (and I know…I’ve heard it) they try and make their creations real: through battle sounds and often tossing the plane or ship into the spinning blades of their bedroom ceiling fan.

And it continues to amaze me that when we go to the Lego® Store in Chicago around Xmas that we will inevitably stop by the Lego® Santa Claus, in his sleigh, with his reindeer. We will gather around the big guy in Red Suit (lots of red bricks) and get a picture of our entire family much like a family picture during Thanksgiving in Schamburg or during the summer in Pennsylvania.

Coffee Stains: The Five People you meet in School

I’ve just finished emailing a former student and saying that I couldn’t attend her wedding reception in a few weeks. And it’s got me thinking about a previous comment that I’ve made to a student when they asked “Do you like all of your students?” To which I replied simply “No.” And I think that conversation then pushed the limits of typical classroom scripting when the same student asked “Are there teachers here that you don’t like?” And I simply said “Of course.”

And you can probably see where the script goes from there…well actually this is more improv stuff as we’ve strayed from some point about Sentence Patten 2 and making sure that the verbs are in the same tense to create balance. It’s the stuff I like about school: the unscripted things.

“What teacher or teachers don’t you like?” he asks and before I can answer he says, wisely: “You said we can ask anything…you said that you are looking for us to ask honest questions…”

(I hope you can envision that smiling, smart alecky senior boy, trying to use the teacher’s words again him). It’s a double-dog dare moment and I still answer him truthfully in front of the class.

Nope, not going to tell you my response because you didn’t ask the question. But I think it may be safe to say that teachers are as much students in school as the students are.

My mom tells me that she simply couldn’t find me and that the office would call her and say “Mrs. Judson, your son is here at the school. Will you be picking him up?” The son was me and I was 4 years old. I wasn’t in preschool and I wasn’t enrolled. And here’s how I remember it:

When my mom wasn’t looking, I would simply walk down Washoe Court, turn left on Neotomas Ave, cross Tachevah Drive and walk across the amazingly large field to Yulupa Elementary school. You’d run into the original playground first (the one with “all things metal-tubed”: monkey bars, balancing bars, swinging bars and lots of kid-smashed sawdust). The community chipped in a couple years later (I think the National Guard even showed up) and built a huge playground to the southeast out of recycled tires. Anyway, from the playground you crossed the blacktop and headed through a corridor and I decided to turn right and opened the door in the corner.

No one saw me slip in and so I waited a moment, closed the door and saw that several classes were spread out this enormous open space (California was still playing with the open classroom concept). I scouted the groups, found one that seemed interesting, and simply plopped myself indian-style (as we called it then…now it’s “criss-cross apple sauce,” so my sons tell me) and listened to the story being told.

I’m not sure how long it took, but eventually (I think it was about an hour) I was asked a question by an adult (such as “So what is your name?”). And I remember her looking at me with that look. I think the expression was a cross between the look that Julie Vogel gave me after our first kiss and the look that Lois gives me when I say something in which I am trying to cross a social line. And I think it was my response that prompted the look, because, I’m told, I had a speech problem. Apparently, as my mom reminds me, I was inarticulate and what came out of my mouth sounded more Chinese than English.

[Insert way-too-obvious student quip here such as: “Not much has changed, eh?”]

The adult then walked me to the office (sort of that “lost boy in the big mall thing” scene) and I was greeted by soothing and understanding tones (yes, I could understand English…I just couldn’t speak it very well). The secretary (that’s what we called them back then) called my mother while I got to do “real school work”: color. Mom arrives, nervous smiles/apologies/thankyou’s, driving away in the 1968 Ford Galaxie.

I don’t think she yelled at me, but I think I remember some type of “You had me worried” thematic explanation. What I do remember is that I couldn’t wait to go back…and so I did–a year later–sort of legally. My mom’s gift to me was to sort of fudge my birthday date so that I could be in school a bit earlier than originally planned. And that was okay by me, because I couldn’t wait.

And I have to say, most days I still can’t wait to get to school. And I find that what I like and hate about school is about the same as when I was a student. Under the “Things I like” list, and at the top, is one of the reasons why I keep coming back. Sorry, it’s not students. They’re probably second or third. But really, it’s the same reason why students come to school: their friends. I like the people I work with. We drink coffee and occasionally go out to breakfast and, yes, we might even sit by the same people at lunch. We have stuff in common and we know each other and they let me hang around with them. Yes, students are a big part of my day, but frankly, you people don’t stick around for very long. I’m not sure if you realized this, but we get you for maybe an hour or two a trimester and then you’ve graduated. The constant in my work are the people I work with and that’s what brings me back.

Ah, I can see the smart alecky kid ready to ask about the things I hate and to that I will list the usual suspects (and, btw, some of these are fairly universal along many career lines):

• A seemingly endless amount of non-classroom things-to-do that simply lack cohesion, for the purpose of trying to show something that the organization is not. (Busy work)
• A loss of vision of what we are really here for and in its place check lists from outside experts who are not even practitioners of education. (Vision)
• A underlying, smirky and patronizing attitude from the people that make the decisions– that don’t acknowledge the teacher as professional. (Respect)
• A society that has given into the notion that one can effectively, efficiently, and accurately quantify learning. (People as numbers)
• A belief that all people learn the same way and the same pace and that a moving target called a “benchmark” is the trump card for whether a student passes or fails. (No achievable goals)
• A notion that education is the magic bullet for all of societies ills. (“We can always do better”)
• A belief that students are simply not as smart as they were back when and that schools are simply watering down the basics of a good education.
• And, my favorite: A “commonsense” notion that education’s purpose is to turn out better workers in society (say nothing about living and thinking).

I simply hate and abhor those things; some are out of ignorance and most are simply not true.

And I take a look at the list of things that I like and the things that I hate and I think “Not much has changed from when I was a student.” I have about five or so people that I really like and, I have control issues. And, I still sometimes show up in the classroom simply speaking something Chinese…oh, that’s for next year.

Stikkit to Lesson Plans

(And my apologies to Stikkit for the lousy title).

I’m as interested as the next teacher who likes the technology stuff to get organized. Lesson planning is no exception.

Most of us began our scripting of beautiful lesson plans with those really nice spiral-bound Lesson Plan books that even gave us some overview of the basics of a lesson plan and perhaps, a refresher of Bloom’s taxonomy. And so, each year, I would faithful chart out my beginning days of the trimester during the beginning of the year meetings and feel good that I had “planned out” or “organized” my classes. I had a plan and I had a book to keep those plans in.

Then, like many other types of organizers, I would miss a day and then a week. I would scratch down an outline of the day in my composition book or on a sticky note only to neglect my faithful Lesson Plan Book.

Enter the power (and distraction) of the computer and the internet and now we’re faced with countless possibilities in managing the shape of how our classes will look, feel, act, and move. Many mimic the paper version of the Lesson Planner Book that we grew up with; others will add lots of Standards-based features. In the end, I really could not take any of those programs seriously.

Most of last year, I used Dave Winer’s OPML editor. In a sense, I used the outlining feature because it was simple, fast and very flexible. It was fairly transferable to other programs and was very easy to create sub plans. I really liked that there were both a Mac and a Windows version of the program so that I could work from home and at school on my plans.

But because of some glitch with my computer, I really couldn’t use the OPML editor this school year. So, I went back to the paper Lesson Planner Book, but still longed for an easier way to keep track of my day-to-day plans (for I would sometimes forget to update the plans in the book). I found myself writing daily plans on sticky notes.

Because I’ve listen to Merlin Mann on other podcasts, I checked out Stikkits awhile ago and then didn’t see the value for yet another sticky note metaphor. A week ago, when trying to decide to organize my student publication class, I returned to Stikkit and decided to take it for a spin in organizing my stuff through a favorite metaphor (who doesn’t love the sticky note? Sort of a twitter on a piece of paper).

And though I went with a wiki for organizing my student publications class, I found that Stikkit is really smart and cool and easy to use.I won’t take much time explaining how to use the site as I would encourage to start playing around and look at the online help; create some Stikkits and see what happens to those notes.

I like Stikkits for lesson planning because it does remain flexible and “thinks” through some of my items and cross references certain items to todo things or time-sensitive stuff. I have an overall shape for my classes (the big picture) along with the pacing of the weeks (what I want to accomplish). Lesson plans, as I see it, are the outline to carry out that shape or intent of the day–it’s a set list that you may have for a gig; it’s the songs with a few transitions and key changes and perhaps a few words to help move the performance along. For me, it’s not necessary to mark down all of the details (that seems to come in other documents); for me, the plan is enough information that I or someone (such as a sub) could work their way through the class. (If I’ve done my job right, students already have an idea of the pacing of my class).

So I’ve using Stikkits for that past few days and I think I’ve found my lesson planner. From this example, I list my classes and use the todo key term (-) to indicate something to check off. The rest of the example is enough information, in an outline form, to help prompt me through my classes. Some feature that I really like are the tagging feature (which, for right now, I just put at the bottom) and the Discussion tab, which I use for my own reflection on the day or ways that I could use Stikkits more effectively.

My only misgiving with the program as a lesson planner is printing: it’s not very clean and there’s extra stuff (the side bar, for example) that shows up on the printed page. The only really reason why I need to print out my lesson is in case I need a substitute teacher. In that case, I plan on doing a copy/paste into a word processor for formating prettiness (and clarity for the sub). (Update: I’m ill today and I tried this, and it works great: I just copied from Flock [a Firefox-based browser] and pasted into a new OpenOffice doc and the result was very pretty: all formating transfered as it should).

One of my favorite things about Stikkits is that I find out how dang simple it is and yet how that simplicity can be very powerful; I learn something new almost everyday. I could see how I really don’t need GoogleNotebook nor GoogleCalendar because through the strong sticky note metaphor, I can keep all my notes in one place. And, if you’ve done some GTD stuff or training, then you will find how Stikkits fit right well in managing tasks.

I’ll give up an update in a week to let know you know what I’ve learned (and, if I’ve kept up with Stikkits).

Coffee Stains: Bet your bottom dollar

Annie was my second cassette purchase; The Muppet Movie, the first.

Sure, I had owned several LPs (mostly from the soundtrack genre), but when we got our first tape recorder, our view of music changed forever. We could, you see, record one of our records onto the tape and then hit the REWIND button and listen to that song or songs whenever we wanted. And this gave way to the concept of making a tape for someone. I did it for my friends and later for Lori when we were courting.

I think we still have the tape and…well, hold on for a few moments, let me get it (I think it’s in the impossible-to-open drawer below the built-in china cabinet thing). It might be… (Oh, and by the way, “It’s a hardknock life” is playing..yes, it’s the Annie soundtrack). Be right back (Oh, now she’s singing “Tomorrow“…warm feelings…”clears away the cobwebs and sorrow”…and “say, oh!”)

[Steps away from the eMac for moment]

Okay, I’m back and I couldn’t find it: I think it’s upstairs. I did find the following tapes: My Songs: Evan (one of those tapes where the singer inserts your name in the song), American Pie (Don McLean–1988), and Lori’s first cassette tape: You Light Up My Life (Debby Boone–1977). We get into these conversations when remembering the good old days of our music, often. Recently it began with my telling Lori about my trip to Martin’s:

“So,” I say, ” I got the creamer and coffee and the sandwich rolls and then made my way over to the Starbucks.”
“Did you get me anything?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “I thought you wouldn’t want anything.”
“Oh,” she responds.
“Anyway,” I ,because I want to tell the punch line. “So, the bartista–person is making my latte thing…I know, I wanted something different. Guess what she’s humming?”
“No!” she says.
And then I hum, which isn’t a super reliable way of getting music across to another human being, but for some reason that’s the mode I went with…and she got it.
“Yep! Uncanny, eh” I say and then we start singing/humming the words/tune of “Maybe” from Annie.

Then I remind Lori that my second cassette purchase was the soundtrack to Annie; The Muppet Movie, the first. She mentions the Debbie Boone tape and perhaps she sings (with great emotion, mind you) “And you, LIGHT up my life…”

We both like music, and I wouldn’t claim that we’re eclectic (which is a common response to “what kind of music do you like?”); no, we’re pretty predictable. She was listening to the radio during the early ’80s while I was amassing quite a soundtrack collection (which was started with The Muppet Movie and Annie). And so, it’s no surprise that I would make Lori a tape for our first year anniversary of courting (yes, I know it’s dating…courting sounds a bit more formal).

It’s roughly 90 minutes of my favorite songs of that time with commentary between each song (yes, it is dreadfully painful to listen to…simply cruel to anyone who hears it). And I think Lori listened to the whole tape once (until we found it 10 years later and abandoned the tape’s second listen). The title of the tape: “365 days with Lori Bickel.” And no, I will not digitize the thing; it really needs to be put out of its misery–or ours.

The tape recorder that evening in a dorm room in Winona Lake, Indiana was my way of creating a thing for Lori. And back in the 1970s when we got our first Panasonic Tape Recorder (it was red plastic with a black handle) my sister and I would create a wide variety of stuff. Most were silly little skits that always seemed to end with some guy falling off a very high cliff into a very deep valley floor (I think it was usually the Grand Canyon…we’d seen the two-part Brady Bunch vacation enough times to know what it looked and sounded like…though no one fell off the cliff).

And here’s how it’s done:

You’d start with a high pitch “Ahhhhhh” and slowly descended to a lower, more intense and louder “Ahhhh” and a the last moment you’d take you thumb and “squish” the built-in microphone. It was a really cool sound and we really thought that’s what a body impacting the Grand Canyon floor sounded like. We were suckers.

And we all are, aren’t we: suckers? We’re predictable as much as we say that we are “an individual.” We will hum some silly line from some silly Disney film or some silly Broadway song. And sometimes I have to catch myself, because I might just enjoy the moment too much. Someone might see or hear my silly humming song, that might break out in a full-blown “The sun will come out, tomorrow!”

Okay, well, I need to pick up the boys. Looking forward to listening to the “Xmas Music for the Van, volume 2.5” CD.

“Maybe”

Coffee Stains: Revisiting Original Writing in view of recent events

Perhaps you might consider it cheating (me creating something new each week and using something that I’ve written a couple years ago) but it’s on my mind. It’s a part of a much longer piece that I wrote at the (get ready, lots of initials and capitalized words coming your way) Indiana Teachers of Writing National Writing Project Advanced Institute (or, ITW-NP AI) at Notre Dame University back in 2003. My goal for the week was to write 10,000 words–good or bad– personal narrative stuff and lots of experimenting and playing with language (which could be another way of saying: “Eh, it may just be crap”).

This is not a good thing to say in evaluating your own writing, but this is my favorite passage from the summer. I say that with some reluctance because the general rule or wisdom within writing is that if you really love it, cut it out. You are no longer objective about your work and you have fallen in love with your words. You simply can not judge the relationship between nouns and verbs and the syntax and tone and pacing with any clarity: your mind is cluttered with smiles and self-congratulations.

And I know that, but I still like it.

Here’s the setting: I’ve just written about how my father and mother got divorced and that he is now restricted to his car when he picks us–Mike, Stephany and me–up for the court-okayed visits. I begin this section my father’s car and the joy of getting it washed, then, the part I like at Bodega Dunes.

I do, though think of Bodega Bay with my father after the initial divorce proceedings. He’d pick us up in his white Cadillac equipped with power windows and an 8-track player. I remember Neil Diamond most of all and hearing “Sweet Caroline” when he took us through the Bubble Machine car wash located off of 4th Street in Santa Rosa. This wasn’t like the car wash on Steele Avenue where you had to get out of the car and watch it move through brushes and various stages of the washing process. No, in the Bubble Machine you stayed in the car and viewed the water and soap and cleansing from the inside. And Preston would say, “This is just like being the submarine” and I believed him. His service in the Navy had him stationed on a sub for some months and who was I to argue with him. He was my father and father’s always right, isn’t he? I find that when we are in the van and the boys are strapped into their seats and we’re beckoned to pull forward into the car wash at the Phillips 66 station by Goshen Middle School, I’ll smile. Invariably I tell the boys with giddy delight, “We’re going through the Bubble Machine” and they’ll laugh not so much they know the reference but because dad has said something funny.
Preston took us to the beach one Saturday or at least he had told us the last time that he dropped us off that we’d be going to the Dunes the next time. It didn’t look good with the grey clouds and 65-degree weather in town. And we knew this would be a problem because the coast, like the City (San Francisco) was always 15 degrees cooler than Santa Rosa. We heard the honk and followed the wave (he was confined to staying in the car during this part of the divorce process). We loaded into the back seat and headed for the coast by way of Highway 12. He assuaged our fears when he told us that though it looked grey, we were still going to the Dunes. We were going to fly a kite.
Sebastopol, apple orchards, windy roads with steep inclines, the town of Bodega where some of The Birds was filmed, the graveyard on the right side where we had played on the tombstones when we got a flat tire last year and then Highway 1. Highway 1 is the epitome of Northern California coastal driving. It’s the romantic, drive with the top down, leisurely wind the car up the coast with curves and hairpin turns that made you one with the Pacific Ocean. The Bodega Dunes is the first major beach you come to and we made the left-turn into the long gravel road to its parking lot.
Grey, windy, salt misty cold, a divorced father with his divorced children making an outing of the day. He said that we could add string to make the kite go higher and we chorused for the extension into the heavens. He was kind to us and he seemed to be focused on our gathering, of our flying of this kite. Perhaps we laughed and were giddy like the way my sons get excited about something we all do together that has that sense of awe and newness about it. It’s that moment that completely takes you over and take a clear, focused snap shot of the wide-angle image of the time and place and emotion and snap!
The sting broke and the scene stops and we look to Preston and Mike is running after the line but it remains out of reach and Stephany is upset and we look to Dad with questions and he looks and says that it’s lost.
We are back in the car. No 8-track is playing or at least I can’t hear it now but I am looking, searching out the window for our kite. We turn onto Highway 12 and still no sign of the kite or back in the apple orchards and I think I might have been asking the question aloud or maybe he saw me through the rearview mirror because he said, “It must have floated somewhere far away.” I still look out the window for the kite when we visit Bodega Bay. Maybe it’s out of habit or maybe it’s out of hope.

Recently, my sister visited us and we both ran in the Grand Rapids Marathon (great race, by the way). On our way home from the South Bend Airport via the 20 bypass, she mentioned that she and Mike had been in contact with Preston in the past year. I haven’t heard from my father since the last court-ordered support check in 1987. He didn’t respond to my college graduation card, nor my wedding invitation, nor Evan’s birth (I think we gave up and didn’t bother sending a birth announcement for Colin). I was, surprised at the news.

And it’s at this point where I am supposed to reflect on something heavy, about all of the issues that I’ve struggled with stuff because I haven’t had contact with my father in 30 years. But that won’t happen. I think I understand why he didn’t maintain contact and I think that sometimes we just need to leave people to their private lives instead of making it into something that is truly about us and not so much them.

I still like what I wrote, though.