Corners of Minds

Did you ever--if you are female--listen to a boy/man watching a sporting event and wonder how on earth he knew all that stuff about where the player had gone to college and how many touchdowns he'd scored last season and what his RBI was and all that other sports trivia that seems completely impossible to keep in mind?

To me, that stuff always seemed hopelessly complex, relatively useless, and difficult to retain. Like, say, memorizing numerical codes for colors or something else equally mundane.

But here in my own house lately, I can see the process starting. Son has long loved watching sports with his dad.  Last year, his questions were all about the rules of the game.  This year, he's moved on to asking about strategies. But in addition, he is suddenly, without any apparent effort, absorbing the kind of sports knowledge that his father manages to retain without even trying.  Son has known, for most of this college football season, not only the rankings of key teams we care about (mostly Wisconsin's Badgers), but also who else needed to win or lose what other games in order for Wisconsin to move up in the rankings.  He knows not only the names of key players--even on rival teams--but also what numbers they wear on their jerseys, how many points they scored last week, and what the most outstanding plays of the games were then, so that he knows what to watch out for now.

His mind is a font of "trivia" about scores, players, averages, teams, rankings, plays, and who had an easy week.

I no longer find it mind-boggling how men know this stuff because the answer is suddenly crystal clear: they know it because their fathers taught them how to learn it back when they were in first grade, so that by the time they were in high school, accumulating that knowledge and filing it away in the proper places for easy recall was simply second nature.

Sort of like the way that I can talk on the phone, fold laundry, pack tomorrow's school bags for each kid who has different supplies, and log a reminder about the dentist appointments all at the same time.  Or how I can hold in my head who has dance/sports/library/gym/art on what days, and what time I have to show up for Motor Moms the second week of December, and whose birthdays need buying for, and the dates I need to mail out stuff for Hanukkah as opposed to Christmas, and when Son has run out of pants and needs more laundry done, and what size snow boots everyone needs this year, and whether it's time to buy more stamps or not.

It's not that I think men couldn't hold these things in their heads. In fact, unlike me, Husband is particularly good at remembering the random things we need at the grocery story--you know, the things that we only buy once in a blue moon, so they're out of the regular route through the store.  I contend that I have a harder time remembering these things because I am always shopping with one or two kids in tow, so I am distracted, whereas he goes to the store alone, on his way home from work.  But the truth is, I'm a hopelessly bad at remembering the random groceries we need.

On the other hand, I can shop for the holidays and remember all the appointments for a whole family full of people with little trouble--all while doing at least two things at the same time because doing only one thing at a time is a waste of time.

I think, the older I get, that it is simply a matter of priorities: a human brain only has so much space for the leftovers. You know, the things that are tiny and not part of any bigger picture. Stuff like: pick up the dry-cleaning, order Mom flowers, and schedule your annual exam now because you know the doctor always books three months out and you are due for one in March.

And some people choose to fill those corners and crevices of their minds with the tiny tasks that occupy the "idle" moments of the day, with reminders and lists and keep-the-family-running-smoothly minutia, while other people choose to fill those corners with batting averages and running records, scores, ranks and plays.

We could call this a gendered choice, and in some ways in our culture it is.  We are more likely to find women adept at multi-tasking and men adept at sports facts.  But it's certainly not the case that we each wouldn't be capable of the other, were we only interested in it. I know plenty of women sports fans who know all this stuff; I just am not interested enough in sports to bother tucking away those facts into the limited number of brain cells I have available for more important things like which day of the week is the next Drinks Night out with my friends.  And I know men who do the bulk of the family-appointment-planning-detail-oriented stuff (though, admittedly, not as many as I know women who are fonts of sports knowledge).

Still, I do find it fascinating to realize that there is no question that the gender acculturation happens early: Son is addicted to sports, and to spending time with Daddy, while Daughter is more interested in art and would rather come cook with me than watch a game of any kind on TV. And, without meaning to, we reinforce this by taking Son out to play sports during halftime, while keeping Daughter in to help bake the cookies.  And by teaching through example: Mama isn't that interested in sports, so Daughter isn't either.

It would bother me, this realization that I am apparently inculcating gender stereotypes into my children already at this tender age, and despite the fact that I resist doing so as much as I can.  However, I also know that my boy loves to read and is a wonder at sympathy, while my daughter is physically fearless and strong.  So I've decided to let the sports fandom slide.  Daddy and Son can watch their games on the weekend; Daughter and I will do "projects" of every description instead.

But I am determined that somehow, through all of this, I will teach this boy to multi-task too.  After all, why on earth would you spend half an hour on the phone without getting all that laundry folded at the same time?

On Letters

Do you remember, back in the day, when if you wanted to get in touch with someone who didn't live in your town, you wrote a letter? This required an actual pen, and paper, and time. You needed the quiet of an afternoon and a table in a sunny corner, or a blustery evening and a comforting mug of tea, or a wintery morning with the flakes softly falling and the coffee brewing.  You needed the physical and emotional space to compose.  You had to be able to think about what you wanted to say and how you wanted to say it.  More than that, you wanted to be able to think about what you wanted to say and how to say it.  You actually spent time crafting your prose--or, at the very least, writing complete sentences in which one might find attention even to obscure grammar rules like not ending with a preposition.

You couldn't just dash off a quick three lines, hit "send"and have an answer by 2pm. Sure, if you were alive in 1845 in London, you could do that.  Back then, the post came three times a day, and you could send a letter across town at 10am inviting someone to dinner and know by 3pm whether to set an extra place or not. 

But if you were born this side of the turn of the twentieth century, or in the vastly bigger spaces of the United States, you wrote letters to which you would not have answers for days.  You sent something off on a Tuesday knowing full well that if your correspondent were really dedicated and wrote you back almost instantly, you still wouldn't have a reply until a week from Friday. And that was okay.  You went about the rest of your life, secure in the knowledge that your words were winging their way to your family/friends/beloved, and then in nine days or so, you started haunting the mailbox, eagerly anticipating the reply.

I had an epistolary relationship once (even just the word "epistolary" makes me happy). I was in college and had fallen in love during my junior year abroad.  Once I came home, I found myself every night writing a portion of a letter to him.  He did the same. Once I'd filled all the pages I could fill and still keep the letter's weight low enough that I would only need one international stamp (which cost the princely sum of 50 cents) to send it, I would mail the letter.  This was almost always every five days.  And every five days, I would get a letter from him.  Of course, the letter I got was not in response to the one I'd just sent.  Instead, we concocted our own convoluted kind of correspondence, in which we partially told each other what was going on in our lives, partly answered questions that had come in the last letter, and partly just prattled on about how goo-goo-eyed we felt about each other.

Interesting aside: The fastest I ever got mail from the US to England was three days, but that letter was an exception; it was a particularly important one that I'd spent hours writing, and I lost it on the way to the Post Office to buy the stamp. Apparently, some kind soul put it in the mailbox for me. It reached my boyfriend as if it had traveled by special messenger -- without any stamp at all...  I was convinced at the time that true love really could conquer all.

Of course, I learned true love could not win out in every situation.  Such as, when you have decided that since you are so far apart, seeing other people will be a good idea.  Or when you come to the realization that the person whose letters you love is not actually a person whose person you love.  But still, the power of the letters is seductive.

I am thinking about this right now because the weather has just turned cold.  Over the course of today, the temperature dropped more than fifteen degrees--and that was during the sunny hours.  I have eaten myself completely silly, drunk multiple cups of coffee and tea, and generally found myself retreating inwards to the warmth of blankets over my knees and other cozy things.  And this is the time when I begin to think of letters, when I miss the pen-and-ink correspondences that I used to have with my friends all those years ago before email and cell phones and text messages and eight frillion other ways to find out instantly how they are doing.

I miss those slow, pleasurable hours of writing.  I miss the thrill of seeing well-known handwriting adorning an envelope in my mailbox.  I miss the spreading happiness of reading the words someone else has taken the time to pen.

I am terrible at letter writing these days. I tend to rely on email and phone calls just like everyone else. But I am thinking, lately, that perhaps I should go back to it.  Perhaps I should set aside a few hours each week to write to my friends.  Perhaps they would even write me back.  You might think that there is nothing that can be said in a letter that you can't convey more efficiently in some other way--and I will agree with you as to the communication of facts. It is faster by far to pass on information in other ways.  But there are things that letters convey that no other media can manage, things about time and tone and thought, about eloquence, about the poetry of life.  Things, I think, that we may be sadly lacking in our hyper-media age.

It is that last, that sense of poetry, that makes me want to make a place for letters again in my life. Language is too precious to be reduced to mere conveyance of information. At least, in my world.

That Trick of the Light

There is a certain quality of light on late-fall days that induces melancholy in me.  It is golden light but somehow seems a little thin.  It shines through the bare branches of the trees in the latter half of the afternoon but holds no warmth; its only promise is that the chill in the air will deepen, the darkness will set in early, the recent summer freshness of the earth will continue to brown.

It's odd, this light, and it's odd what it does to me.

I normally love the changing of the seasons.  I adore that crispness in the air that hearkens fall and alluring reminds me of turtlenecks and soft scarves, warm cups of coffee and the earthy scent of fallen leaves.  I like to rake and watch my children splashing in the red-orange-yellow piles. I like to know that the heat of summer has abated and to anticipate the coming snows. I relish putting on dark, rich colors like cranberry and chocolate brown. I luxuriate in the idea of wrapping myself in cozy sweaters and snuggling under blankets to read.

And yet, on an afternoon like today's, when it seems the only music that random selection provides to me is mournful, when the sky is a wan, half-hearted shade of blue, when my dearest friends all live in other states or have journeyed out of town, I cannot help but feel as washed out as the sky.

I long for something sharp and wonderful...

...For a glimpse of the stars such as one can only see while camping in the desert: intense crystals pulsing with promise against the endless depth of blackest night.

...Or for the taste of a new food: peppery hot and surprising in its fragrance.

...Or for the thunderclap of falling in love: that shock of warmth spreading outward from the belly that hits when one first acknowledges "I love you, I love you, I love you"--whether the object of that love is man or baby or woman or friend.

I am surrounded by love, of course. My children climbed into the bed this morning before six, insinuated themselves under the covers, draped themselves over me, curled their arms possessively around my neck, bickered over who would lie close enough to nuzzle my hair. My sleepy husband's bare feet rubbed my own as we made room for the small beings filled with the largest love.

It is not a literal lack on which this trick of light shines. It is a merely a soulful gap, a melancholy moment of emptiness fueled by the ambivalent breath of the wind that cuts across my face as I retrieve the mail.

It is the light, no doubt, that quickens poets to give wordful wings to their introspections.

It is the light that makes me wish that for a day, I could be bird or wind or light. Or, at the very least, poet.

In Our Own Image

We all parent our children hoping they will become kind and conscientious. We want them to be motivated, hard-working, and goal-oriented. We want them to find things at which they can become successful, and we hope that they will be happy and well-rounded and interesting.

But we also, deep inside, want them to be a little bit like us.

We want them to be athletic if we ourselves are sporty. We want them to love coaxing small tender plants from the earth if we are gardeners. We hope they will be math whizzes if we are engineers or painters if we are artists.  We want them to be sensitive or pragmatic, creative or architectural, just as we are.

And, if we are lovers of words, we want them to fall in love with reading too.

It's no surprise, perhaps, that the first grade son of a literature professor is already a pretty competent reader. As his teacher told us at parent-teacher conferences today, he can read pretty much any words that you put in front of him.  (It's the decoding of implicit meaning that is more difficult.)

But far more heart-warming than his teacher's matter-of-fact statement of Son's abilities was the incident a few days ago on the bus.

I had a friend over, and we were drinking tea and waiting for the school bus to arrive.  The main street that leads to our subdivision is under pretty major repaving construction right now, so the bus is sometimes delayed by the one-lane traffic. 

About five minutes after the bus normally arrives, I heard Son unlocking the side door of the house with his key.  I opened the front door wider, only to see the bus sitting right in front of our driveway, facing the wrong way. It was weird, this positioning of the bus, and I couldn't quite figure it out, since the bus was only a few minutes later than normal. The driver waved to me, almost frantically, reassuringly, smiling all the while and pointing at Son who was letting himself in by the other door.  I nodded to her, and she drove off.

"Why are you using your key?" I asked him.

He looked at me, a little discombobulated. "I forgot to get off the bus," he said.

Since he was, in fact, off the bus and standing in our front hall, I was a little confused. "But why are you using your key?" I asked again--pointing out that the front door was open and I was home.

He looked at me a little shyly, and then smiled. "I was reading," he said simply. "I didn't see that the bus was at our stop, so I didn't get off. And the driver didn't see me. But then, when all the other kids were off the bus, she noticed me. So she brought me home."  And then, without any sense of the momentous nature of this event in my eyes, he sauntered away, dropping his backpack on the ground and seeking after a snack.

I stood stunned in the hallway.

My boy. MY boy. My boy. So deep in a book that he forgot to get off the school bus.

There are some things you cannot teach but can only hope one day to witness. For a mother who is also a lover of literature, one of those things is a child so immersed in reading that all the rest of the world fades away.

I have had my moment.

I can only hope it sticks.

I can only hope that, somehow, I have managed to raise a reader.

Just like me.