Shakespeare in the Park

I've been feeling pretty down on city living lately. I think it started with my trip to my mom's through some of the prettiest river road scenery Iowa, Missouri, and Minnesota have to offer. While I was at my mom's place, I was struck by how quiet her street was, and how freely the kids could wander without worrying about being hit by a speeding car--a real concern on our street here in St. Paul.

My yearning for quiet continued as the neighbors next door got more and more raucous (though things have calmed down for now since one of the neighbors was ushered out by three of St. Paul's Finest, as I wrote about in a previous post). My yearning for security sharpened as my kids and I walked to the corner store the other day to get milk and candy, and fumes of pot smoke wafted out of a car parked in front of the store, right near where Bridger was locking up his bike.

My reading material lately has not exactly inspired calm or peace of mind. First, I was reading a book called Distracted, which posited that our reliance on electronic media was going to lead to another dark age. Then I read the new book about Columbine. And because I wasn't depressed and jittery enough after that, I picked the book Beautiful Boy off the library shelf, a heart-rending memoir by the father of a young man addicted to crystal meth.

"It's terrifying," I told my husband.

"Then why are you reading it?" he asked.

"Because," I said. "I want to know the parameters of how bad things can get. I want to know if there's anything I can do to help prevent that kind of thing now."

Then some friends of ours sent me a link with pictures of the house they just bought in rural Wisconsin, after years of hard work and struggle and living in a teeny rental place with their young daughters. I looked at the photos, the picture windows framing forest in every direction, the big deck, the garden. I sighed. I was happy for them. Overjoyed, even. But I also felt a deep, jealous yearning. I want that, too, I thought. But for now and probably a long time to come, we are very much anchored here--in this old 1912 Late Victorian four-square, this neighborhood.

Today, though, something shifted for me. A weight lifted. The kids and I went to Newell Park, a lovely neighborhood park with a shady canopy of mature oak trees, to see a free outdoor performance of The Tempest (Brian opted to stay home, enjoy the silence, and read the paper on the couch). We'd gotten ready ahead of time by reading a picture book version of the play by Bruce Coville, so the kids were familiar enough with the story to identify the characters milling around before the show. I'd told them that if the actors were good enough, they'd be able to understand the emotions and action of the play by the body language and facial expressions, even if the language wasn't always familiar.

I expected they'd watch a scene or two and then start whining to go to the playground. Uh-uh. They sat there entranced the whole hour-and-a-half (it was a skillfullly abridged version of the play). Cassidy was so riveted, when I told her I needed to go to the bathroom and asked if she wanted to go with me, she said no, that she'd stay on the blanket with Bridger and keep watching. This is the girl who often howls if I go from one floor of the house to another without taking her with me.

But after all, what's not to like for a kid? You have a dancing, singing monster, an enchanted island, a magician with a fancy purple cape, an airy spirit painted the colors of the sky, guys wielding swords, a beautiful and noble young girl falling in love with a prince. After all our fairy tale-spinning, the world of The Tempest was utterly familiar ground to them.

Up at the park building, a big multigenerational party was in full swing. Picnickers hung out at shady tables. A group of kids and adults was playing pick-up softball at the park diamond, a few dozen yards away from the Shakespeare performance. Suddenly, living in the city wasn't feeling so bad. It had its rewards, just as living in the woods would have its own set of rewards.

Near the very end of the play came Miranda's famous speech, delivered upon seeing a group of men other than her father for the first time in her adult life (she's been stranded on an island with her magician father and assorted spirits since she was two).

"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!"

Her father tersely replies, "'Tis new to thee."

I got tears in my eyes--such a lovely, perfect distillation of innocence and experience, wonder and gimlet-eyed realism--and deeply, darkly funny as delivered by the actors.

When I told my husband about it later, he said, "I can imagine saying exactly the same kind of thing to Cassidy when she's a teenager."

Four hundred years ago, a man in England wrote a play. A group of people performed it in a shady natural amphitheater of oaks and grass today, in a land still referred to in Europe as the New World when the playwright was alive. It's still new in many ways, this world of ours. New and old, both--fresh and weary, all at once. Today my children got their first taste of Shakespeare, the best possible experience I could have imagined for them, and my heart feels lighter and more grateful than it has in weeks.

There are a few more performances of The Tempest left in the Twin Cities if you're interested. You can find a schedule here.

Honest Scrap

Kate Hopper, the writer, teacher, and community builder behind the blog Mother Words:  Mothers Who Write, recently tagged this blog with an Honest Scrap Award--ironically, right as I was beginning to question if I should even keep doing a blog.  (Insert Homer Simpson-style headsmack here--Dope!)  All it took was that li'l' bit of acknowledgement, and the blogging bug has bitten me anew. 

The Honest Scrap Award is a sort of blogging chain letter that lets bloggers recognize blogs they find brilliant in content or design.  (Thank you so much, Kate, for the kind acknowledgment.)  Kate also awarded another blog I'd already found through Mother Words, Lynne Marie Wanamaker's Mind Body Mama, and two others, The Blue Suitcase and Maggie World, that I was happy to discover, as well).

I hereby bestow the Honest Scrap Award on the three blogs that I turn to most often for inspiration, provocation, insight, and electronic companionship:

Unschooling is Dreamy

A friend of mine's funny, energizing chronicle of her family's unschooling life, including one son obsessed with rockets and the Wicked Witch of the West, and a younger son with a penchant for impish destruction and mayhem. 

Just Enough, and Nothing More

An exhaustive, beautifully organized compendium of parenting and homeschooling information--not so much a blog as a treasure chest, in my opinion.  

Wonder Farm

Patricia Zaballos's blog chronicles her family's pursuit of creativity, which takes a wonderful variety of forms, from her daughter's miniature Indian kitchen diorama to Patricia's year-long study of excellent personal essayists. I found her blog via her dead-on "Waldorf guilt" posts, and I've been hooked ever since.

Wear your Honest Scrap with pride, ladies, and do share the love!

I am supposed to list ten honest things about myself as part of the whole Honest Scrap protocol.  If you are one of the bloggers listed above, feel free to skip this step if it doesn't appeal to you.  It did appeal to me, however, so here goes:

1.  I actually really do like being forty, and like my friend Katrina, I think my friends look more beautiful as they get older, not less, because, as Katrina put it, you can see more of their lives in their faces now.

2.  I tend to think that the secret to happiness is the right schedule.

3.  I had an obsessive crush on Heath Ledger's Joker character last summer, at the height of The Dark Knight hype.

4.  As a kid, I forced my friends to act in basement theatrical versions of the books I'd read recently, and I always gave myself the leading role, because after all, I was the one who'd read the book.  Jane Eyre and Gone With the Wind were two long-running productions. When I told my friends about the plot of Wuthering Heights, two of my ensemble's players rolled their eyes at each other and asked snarkily, "I wonder who's going to play Cathy?"

5.  I am utterly fixated on the idea of self-improvement, perhaps to the exclusion of actual peace and happiness.

6.  I'm good at beginning things, but I have a hard time finishing things.  My husband laughs (when he's not cringing) at the way I put jars of jelly that have the faintest smear of jelly back in the fridge for someone else to finish off, or how I'll leave a box of crackers with one cracker in it on the shelf for months.  Endings make me deeply uneasy.

7.  I dream of living deep in the woods in northern Minnesota, Oregon, or Montana when I am an old lady.  I would love to be doing that right now, actually, but can't because A) My husband and I have sunk way too much money into this house to try to move now, B) I could never in a million years "stage" this house for buyers without completely losing my mind at this point in my life, and C) I would miss the friends I have here too much and all the things I've grown used to here in St. Paul.  

8.  I set out as a mother determined to be more patient and understanding than my mother was with me, but I think I am actually more consistently crabby than she was.

9.  I am very good at noticing what my children are interested in and finding them more information and resources to explore those interests.  I'm also extremely generous when it comes to playing make-believe games and stories with them, though not as generous as they'd probably like me to be.

10.  It has been over seven years since my husband and I have gone out on a nighttime, stay-out-dancing-til-the-bars close kind of date, or even a go-see-a-movie-in-a-theater-that-isn't-a-matinee date.  The last time my husband and I went on a date, we took a walk along the Mississippi, had lunch, then spent the last half-hour or so of our date at the LIBRARY.  That's the kind of unrepentant dorks WE are.

All right, that's enough honesty for one post.  Over and out.

Current Interests

A short post for a change--I just wanted an excuse to share some photos, basically.  Cassidy has been pretty interested in pregnancy and birth ever since we participated in a Blessingway for a pregnant friend of ours a few weeks ago.  If you're not familiar with that ceremony, it's a celebration for a woman about to give birth, a chance to revel in community support and her own strength, as opposed to the standard baby shower, which as I understand it celebrates a woman's ability to accumulate a lot of crap from Babies R Us.  The first time I attended a Blessingway, I thought, I hope Cass gets to have one of these some day, and I hope that she and I will have the kind of relationship that she'll want me to be there with her if she does.  

At the Blessingway, we all tossed a ball of red yarn back and forth across the circle until we were all woven together in a giant web, and then we snipped off the yarn to make bracelets for ourselves, bracelets we wore until we heard our friend had had her baby, a tradition Cassidy found fascinating and one that kept our friend very much in our minds and hearts.  

The day Cass found out our friend's baby had been born, she put a balloon under her dress and enacted her own "baby's" birth again and again.  Again, I found myself thinking about my daughter as a potential future mother.  And what I thought was, please let me be the kind of mother she would want to have with her when she gives birth.  But if she doesn't want me there for her own good reasons, let me understand and give her room to have the birth she wants to have.

As for Bridger, well, he is just all about taking photos of Legos scenes lately, as I've alluded to.  We've been having really fun conversations about the emotional impact of close-ups, when long shots are most effective, and so on.  He's always been very observant and visually oriented, noticing details and patterns in picture books and movies that sail right past me; for instance, after we watched Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus," he picked out that the tattered bit of star from a circus tent that Chaplin is holding at the very end of the film, after the circus has picked up and left him behind, is the same star that was featured earlier in the movie when he first met the girl he loved and lost.  I was flabbergasted that he'd picked up on that and remembered it.

It is fascinating to me to see the ways Bridger's visual and storytelling orientation are expressing themselves right now, and to watch his joy and concentration as he sets up his intricate, endlessly unspooling stories all over the house.

Overwhelming, or Just a Good Challenge?

I knew I wanted to marry my husband Brian the day I misread a plane itinerary and we missed our flight home from Thanksgiving with his family, the first major holiday he and I spent together. I burst into tears when I realized what had happened.  My husband paused, thought things over, and said calmly, "I've always wondered what would happen if I missed a flight.  Now I'll get to find out."  

This man, I thought, would be good to have around in a crisis.  This one's a keeper.

It strikes me that one of the main things I would love for my children (and myself) to learn is that setbacks and obstacles are simply part of life, part of the waves we have to surf, part of the weather we have to dress for.  Obstacles and setbacks and mistakes are not something we have to rail against and tear our hair out about and wildly beat our breasts over or expend gobs of energy regretting.  They are simply a condition of learning and being human and being part of a world that is imperfect and uncontrollable.  And as my husband says, the only way to avoid making mistakes is to do nothing, and that would be a mistake.  I have such a hard time remembering that, though, I sometimes wonder how I'll ever be able to convey to my kids that making a mistake really doesn't mean you're a big worthless screw-up--it just means you're trying something difficult or that there's something additional you need to learn or do in order to succeed.  

I thought about all that last week when something happened that I didn't expect.  I had organized an information table for our neighborhood library at a local festival.  I'd arranged to pick up the table we were going to borrow for the event the morning of the festival.  "If I'm not there, I'll leave it on the side of the house for you," the woman had told me.  

Brian was out of town, so I had to haul the kids along to the festival along with the chairs, the informational pamphlets, the postcards to the mayor, and all the other assorted info table swag.  I stopped to pick up the table.  No one home.  No table anywhere to be found outside the house.  I had no phone number for the table's owner.  I got back in the car and started talking out loud, trying to figure out what my Plan B was.  I decided to stop by two other neighbors' houses who'd also offered tables, but neither was home.

By this time, I was starting to get a little weepy and self-pitying.  I tried to stay calm, knowing that this was an opportunity to model a productive response to a setback for the kids.  I tried to be honest about my frustrations:  "She probably just spaced it out.  But this is why it's important for people to follow through on something they commit to doing, because when they don't, it can cause trouble for the people who were relying on them."  I let them hear me think out loud about how to solve the problem:  "Well, I guess I'll just go home and get our card table for now, and I'll stop by her house later on when I get a chance to see if I can get the bigger table from her."

I am not going to pretend that there weren't a few "shit, shit, shits," muttered darkly under my breath in the midst of all my more reasonable utterances.  But in the end, it all worked out.  We made do for a while with a much-too-small table and eventually were able to borrow a bigger one from another non-profit group at the festival.  My kids got to see that things can indeed work out even when there's a glitch or two in the original plan.  My next aspiration is to learn to greet setbacks with actual joy!  Like, oh, goodie, I get to practice my problem-solving skills.  Or, oh, won't this be interesting to see how this plays out?  Perhaps when I'm 80 or so, I'll get there. . .  

Years ago, I remember talking to a friend's husband who was opening his own recording studio in Uptown Minneapolis.  He was in his early twenties, and he'd inherited his start-up capital due to a tragic circumstance:  both his parents had died.  Knowing he wanted to start a band and run a recording studio, he'd quit college and instead rented an apartment down in New Orleans, all by myself, so he could be alone to study up independently on sound engineering and equipment and write a lot of good songs to get his band off on the right foot.  He chose New Orleans, he said, because he could be alone and therefore not distracted by his social life at home, but when he wanted a social atmosphere, it would be easy to find.  The rich musical inspiration didn't hurt, either.

Now, after his self-imposed course of study, he was building a recording studio, all by himself.  Things were still in a state of chaos when I was talking to him.  He pointed to various areas of the construction site and explained where he'd put the recording booth, where he'd put the mixing board, and so on.  

"It seems so overwhelming!" I said, seeing all the obstacles between him and completion.

He looked genuinely surprised.  "Nah," he said with a relaxed shrug.  "It's just a really great challenge."

That was 1995.  He is now a successful recording engineer and musician, making his living doing what he likes, facing setbacks with a cool confidence in his own ability to figure things out--at least as far as I can tell.  

So is my life overwhelming, or is it just a really good challenge?  How I answer that question really shapes the whole process, don't you think?

Slow Learner

So much is changing lately.  Spring is turning to summer (though you wouldn't know it, with our temperatures in the 40s and 50s this weekend, it feels downright autumnal).  We have all sorts of new neighbors in the four-plex next door, one of whom was escorted out of the building today by three St. Paul police officers while carrying his worldly possessions in a garbage bag. 

I have to say it was a little unnerving for me to arrive home from a four-year-old friend's birthday party to three squad cars next door.  Cassidy didn't even seem to really notice--she was too busy making sure her pink balloon from the party didn't blow away--but Bridger was very curious and wanted to know if we could find out why the police were there.   After the police were gone, I talked to a few neighbors and they said it appeared to be a domestic situation and probable eviction of a boyfriend who'd been staying with a woman who lives in the building.  In any case, I sincerely hope that all involved will be safe.  All I know for sure is that warmer weather has brought louder parties next door, louder, sometimes angry voices in the fourplex's back yard, and new challenges to my feelings of security in my home.  I'm trying to work on staying in the present without letting fears run away with me, and trying to find little ways to connect with the people on the other side of the chain-link fence. 

For me, the biggest change lately is that our beloved homeschooling play group looks as if it might be breaking off into some smaller splinter groups.  It's probably a healthy development, but it leaves me feeling up in the air and a little scared about what our routine is going to look like and which friends we might not see as frequently and easily.  For the last two years, we've met most Tuesdays and it's been amazingly idyllic as far as I'm concerned.  But the group has experienced a rapid spike in growth this spring, and for my family and a few others, it's just gotten too big and crazy to be fun any more.  I'm hopeful that we can all handle the changes in a way that leaves friendships intact.

Another change is that I'm going to be serving on a task force to look for ways to keep our neighborhood library open.  The city wants the library to "partner" with an unnamed non-profit to reduce costs and/or bring in revenue.  I just want to make sure that partnership doesn't equal "we turn the library into a non-profit organization's office space and you can come pick up books you've reserved online at a little kiosk."  Uh-uh.  That ain't gonna fly.  I'm nervous about getting involved in the political process in a way I never have before, but excited to learn from the experience and hopefully strengthen my ability to stay clear about what I think is right while listening to others' opinions.

As far as the kids are concerned, play continues begetting learning around here.  Bridger's obsessed with Power Miners Legos and setting up sequential scenes with them, a sort of stop-motion animation without the animation.  He really enjoys taking pictures of his scenes, too, leading him to learn all sorts of things about close-ups, background, foreground, angles of shots, and so on.  My husband Brian got a slew of kids' books about mining from the library, so he and Bridger have been reading together about the gold rush and the working conditions of 19th-century British miners and learning intriguing new words like "gangue," (pronounced "gang," it means the sludge and mud surrounding the desired mineral you're mining for).  Who knows where it will all lead?

Cassidy is looking forward to starting a preschool music and movement class at a new Celtic cultural center in our neighborhood.  It'll feature Irish music and some Irish-dance style steps.  She's been bouncy since she was tiny--as a baby, she got around not so much by crawling but by bouncing from place to place on her rear end, and as a toddler, she didn't walk, she hopped.  Everywhere.  She still hops and bounces so much that she already has the calves of an athlete, firm, meaty little wedges like the ones you see on hard-core bicycling enthusiasts.  I think Irish dance might just be the dance for her.

So, as I said--many changes.  I keep trying to remember something a mama friend of mine said last week.  We were talking about how much longer it takes to get things done and how much you have to resign yourself to slowing down after you have kids.

"I have to slow down three times as much as I think I do just to be able to listen to them," she said with a laugh.

Her words have been reinforced for me all the more by a book I'm reading now called Distracted:  The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, by Maggie Jackson.  Like the title, the book's a little melodramatic at times, but her central premise rings true to me:  that we are so busy juggling multiple tasks, connecting with multiple people via the Internet, and racing around at breakneck pace, we are losing our capacity for extended reflection and concentration.  She tells the story of a psychology professor who helped a chronic overeater overcome his addiction to drive-thru food.  The professor simply asked the man to pull over to the side of the road to eat, instead of eating while he drove.  My God, this food tastes awful, the man realized.  I imagine him shaking his head and laughing.  I imagine him throwing his crappy foil-wrapped burger out the window.  I imagine the combination of sadness and liberation he must have felt, and I feel a kind of release, too.

How many times am I just like that man, scarfing down the moments of my life without really tasting them, rushing to get to the next moment?  It's only when I slow down that I notice the ways that my life tastes awful, and the ways it tastes really, really sweet.