Tag: family

The Rudder of Those Around Me

The B flat trumpet is a "she"...

My grandfather is kept alive now by an electrical impulse sent to his heart to make sure it keeps beating. The arthritis that has twisted his hands and feet makes walking and the simplest of tasks both painful and frustrating. At Christmas, I told him the same story three times within ten minutes because he asked me the same question three times.

I did my best to tell the story in the same voice each time because he is the man who taught me how to fly fish, to shoot an arrow, and to appreciate jazz.

He taught me how to drive a tractor and laughed at my great-grandmother when she saw 8yo me alone on the mower and called to let him and my grandmother know I was too young.

When my car caught fire on a bridge and my lack of credit necessitated a co-signer on a loan to buy a new one, he didn’t hesitate the sign the loan or take the opportunity to lead an in-depth explanation of credit history and interest rates.

While he isn’t perfect, my grandfather is as fine a man as I think I’ll ever know, and his body is tired.

In these moments, when the people who have been people for as long as I have been in the world are too close to leaving it, I am my most rudderless.

The character lesson of finding out who I am without my grandfather is one I dread learning.

Still, though, there are moments.

Over Thanksgiving, I stopped at my grandparents’ house. I brought with me a second-hand trumpet I’d picked up, and told my grandfather I was there for a lesson. My grandmother went to the basement and came up with a flugelhorn case. My grandfather opened it, took out the horn, and began our lesson at the kitchen table.

Those same gnarled fingers found each valve exactly as they have for the past six decades of performing in jazz bands, brass bands, and municipal bands. Though it meant pressing with the third knuckle rather than the fingertip, he showed me how far I have left to go to travel in his footsteps.

How could I not laugh when he explained his inability to hit the high notes like he used to was due to a lack of practice rather than allowing himself the out of old age?

Well over an hour into our lesson, it was my grandmother serving me a grilled cheese sandwich, not my grandfather’s energy that resulted in our horns being returned to their cases.

He’s still here, and his presence is a reminder of who I am and how I’ve gotten that way.

87/365 Get Together

One of the best things we do at SLA is get together. This is partially faculty meetings and the side conversations that take place there. It is in the happy hours and birthday celebrations, but it’s also more than that. Those gatherings are about the faculty. The best moments of getting together are around being a school.

In the schools we need, people get together.

It starts in ninth grade. About a month into the school year, a few dedicated parents of upperclassmen staff a bank of phones in the main office. They are calling other parents – the parents of the newest class of students. They are calling to invite them to the annual Back-to-School night. SLA has a BTS night as every school across Philadelphia does to welcome new students and parents and introduce them to the school, the adults and the building.

SLA’s night is different. While those parents are on the phone, they’re not only offering an invitation, they’re making a request, “Bring something to eat.” SLA’s BTS is also a potluck where each new ninth-grade family is invited to bring a dish, something pivotal to the family if possible. Things are better with food.

Our first year of the tradition, Chris was worried we wouldn’t have enough food. A few hundred people would gather in our cafeteria and all we’d have to offer is a cheese platter.

As families started to arrive that first year, so did the food. Everyone who was hungry ate that night (including the students who’d hung around after extracurriculars).

It’s not just the eating, it’s the cementing of community as well. Parents and students sit with the students’ advisers. These are the teachers in the building responsible for groups of 20 students as their crying shoulders, their advocates, their kicks in the butt for their four years of high school. Parents, students, advisers – they all sit together, share a meal in the din of noise in a high school cafe-gym-atorium and begin the get together that will be these students’ tenure in high school.

While they eat, those teachers who work with ninth-grade students circulate, introduce themselves and answer brief questions about what the upcoming year will hold.

Later in the evening, there are formal talks, people introducing themselves through a microphone, but this is not, nor should it be, about speeches. This is about getting together, talking, listening, and welcoming into a community.

Four years later, with many events and meetings in between them, this gathering finds its bookend. The obvious guess would be graduation. That would be wrong. Graduation ceremonies are for the students and their families. Everyone, dressed in their finest, gathers to recognize what may be the students’ proudest achievement to that point. We get together for graduation because we honor what these students have accomplished and the new journey they are beginning.

No, the bookend comes after graduation. The faculty gather together, walk a few blocks to a local restaurant and, weather permitting, sit under the sky alongside their colleagues who each knew these students for at least a semester, and close the chapter on the work of the last four years.

For teachers, this is as much a get together of grieving as it is of celebration. Many will never know where these students end up or what they do with their learning of the last four years. The teachers have done their job and they are now to prepare for the next class, the next back-to-school night and all the students in between. They share food, drink and memories. Some pass the hastily scribbled cards for students for whom they played a key role in the last few years.

These get togethers are as important to the teachers as they are to the students they will meet in the coming Fall. It is a reminder that they have done what they were charged to do, and that it is more than a job. It is also a reminder that time will march on and that this is not a profession for martyrs, but for practitioners.

Getting together, being together, is important in the life of a school. This is different from meeting or happy hour. It is a kind of formative and summative reflection for a community that plants a mile marker for the organization. “We are here, now, together, and we will acknowledge it and remember where we’ve been.” Without taking the time to get together, no group can go anywhere together.

69/365 I am Filled with Hope by the Future of Education

My sister Kirstie is studying to be a health teacher at SIU-E. A few weeks ago, she sent me the text message below. I am already an incredibly proud big brother. My sisters and my brother are the three most amazing people I know. That said, my pride in Kirstie’s words, her learning and her commitment to helping those coming after her has its own space in my heart. In a week where cynicism and coursework have ruled most days, returning to this text has been helpful.

Today I was teaching yoga at Glenwood middle school to a few of the girls pe classes, and I had them do an activity to help with positive thinking and so I told them to write a list of 5 things they like about themselves. A good amount of the girls didn’t have too much trouble, but there were far too many of them that thought it was difficult. The saddest piece of paper I found had only the word “none” written on it. I think that the positive reinforcement needs to start at home, but why can’t our schools help children love themselves too? I believe in what you’re doing Zachary, I hope you do make a difference for every student and help make school a better place for everyone. Middle school is tough, but it shouldn’t be so hard that a 12 year old can’t name one thing they like about him or herself.

I am sad that my little sister has to feel and build her understanding of the places where the world falls down, but I feel much better knowing she’s out there helping to pull it back up.

Things I Know 328 of 365: My brother has finals today

He’s 12.

He’s in the sixth grade.

He has three of them on one day.

Scantron’s included.

Someone stop this.

Things I Know 51 of 365: There are 100 people in the world

Do not compute the totality of your poultry population until all the manifestations of incubation have been entirely completed.

– William Jennings Bryan

I’ve spent this weekend with my godmother and her family.

Karen and my mom met in science class on the first day of seventh grade. Family legend has it they were best friends from then on.

When explaining to people I’d be down in D.C. for a Bat Mitzvah, I’ve been asked for whom. After a few dozen rounds of “my godmother’s youngest daughter,” I switched to “my godsister.”

It slipped out so naturally, I didn’t realize right away that this wasn’t actually a thing. Or, at least, it hadn’t been until now.

If you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends, these people are the family my parents chose for me when I was born.

There’s something pretty tremendous about that.

When I lived in Florida, Ricki, a journalist friend of mine, wrote a profile piece on a local resident who captained a wooden sailboat.

In appreciation for the profile piece, the captain invited Ricki and a few of her friends out on his boat.

The majority of the cruise featured the captain at the helm, me at his side and the three others sunbathing on the bow of the ship.

The captain had spent most of his life on the water, and I took my cue to sit and soak in his stories.

Now, many of them started with, “I can only tell you this because the girls are all up front,” and ended with a good-natured elbow to the ribs, but one thing has stuck with me – right to the stickiest part of my brain – as the other stories have faded away.

“There are 100 people in the world,” said the captain, “The rest are just extras.”

My understanding and interpretation of his words has vacillated and evolved in the intervening years. Always, though, the thought comforts me.

It’s easy to get lost in a world of nearly 7 billion souls or a city of 6 million or even a school of 500.

Remembering there are 100 people in my world, helps me to anchor in the tempest of data, friending, following, redditing, and stumbling upon.

I know 100 is a soft number, and I don’t have a catalog or list anywhere. I tried once to no avail. Knowing they are there proved more important than knowing exactly who they are.

Sometimes, I’ll meet someone I’m certain is a person in my world only to find central casting has sent them for a walk-on role. Sometimes, I’ve absent-mindedly ignored the first moments of what were to become some of my deepest and most lasting friendships.

Nel Noddings writes about the potentiality of being overwhelmed by the responsibility of caring for everyone whom we come into contact. The 100 people in my world are the way I avoid that feeling and keep myself sublimely whelmed by the ethical imperative to care for others.

Though I’ve seen Karen and her family a handful of times in the last couple decades, I am reminded of their place as people in my world.

Something peaceful happens each time I am reminded of this.

Things I Know 16 of 365: I need anchors

We are family.

– Sister Sledge

I write this as I sit at a kitchen table in Connecticut. My cousins (second cousins) sit around me discussing their college experiences and their lives outside of college.

We range from 19 to 31.

We rarely see one another.

They don’t know the ins and outs of my life and I am admittedly unaware of the details of their lives.

Still, we share more distinct genetic markers than those I pass on my walk to school each day.

Knowing that signals a comfort in my brain.

Today, three of us sat silently in the living room reading. We just finished an excellent meal of fettucine alfredo and salad and crusty bread.

Our closest common relative was my great-grandmother who passed away in 1999.

Still, we are family, and we are broke bread, and I love them.

Just now, the photo album from my great-grandmother’s 95th birthday party has come out and we are remarking on the haircuts of our adolescence.

Living at least 700 miles from where I was born for the majority of my adulthood has meant I’ve been away from most of my family.

These moments, these times of sharing meals and memories, are fewer and further between than I’d like.

Tomorrow I’ll travel home and return to my daily existence. Still, I’ll have anchors like tonight and my summer and Christmas trips back to Illinois to remind me who I am and where I come from.

Things I Know 6 of 365: I am loved

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.

– Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

I’ve always known I’m loved.

Always.

Though my parents divorced when I was very young and I’ve never seen their relationship toward one another as a warm one, I was always neutral territory.

For all they disagreed on, they agreed on loving me.

Writing those words seems silly to me.

Of course I was loved. Of course my parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles told me.

And yet, in movies and books, there are moments of revelation where the protagonist’s mother or father (usually father) says, “I love you,” and the protagonist admits it’s the first time this has occurred.

I’ve read or watched more of these moments than I know.

Not until recently, did it strike me that this might not be a fictional device akin to time travel or a cloak of invisibility.

There are children who never actually hear their families tell them they are loved.

Odds are I teach some of them.

Certainly, I could assuage the sadness of this statement by telling myself these children are shown they are loved.

It’s not the same.

My grandmother was showing me she loved me when she read me just one more story at bedtime. The act was exponentially magnified, however, when she said, “And I will always love you – no matter what.”

I knew it was true the way I knew it was true when any other adult in my family admitted I was the recipient of their unconditional love.

Without doubt, it built me to the person I am today.

Because this is my paradigm, I am still struggling with the idea any adult could resist telling the children in their care how much they love them.

I get to spend only an hour with these kids and cannot help but wonder at who they are and all they can do. I can’t imagine how anyone could be keeping their love for these people to themselves.

If any children, no matter how old, doubt they are loved, I want to believe that some adult will intervene and tell them the truth that has been so often told to me.

Would you do that, please?