Taking a photographic walk down memory lane for the year and there are three of you who might want to join me.
Quinn turned 17!
I hatched some eggs!
I went to Galveston, saw dolphins, drove boats.
Jazz band went to state!
Rich and I went to New York! There were fireflies.
A family portrait was taken at Oregon Country Fair by a kind stranger.
I went tidepooling! (I plan to do much more of that in 2025.)
I went to Kodiak twice… love it there. Fin whales were my favorite wildlife sighting, but there were many contenders for that role. Practiced my new boat skills. Backed the boat trailer down Anton Larsen Bay ramp successfully!
I did not take gratitude for a grade. But I am grateful for this year!
I was full of gratitude moments yesterday, but was not on social media to share, so please accept my belated day 22 gratitude. I accompanied fifty-three high school students (band and friends) and two teachers to Portland for a very full day (from an 8:30 departure Friday all the way until the kids said “we’re at school on a Saturday” when we got off the bus at 1:30 am.) I have written about band kids before and my love for them. Yesterday, being with them as they visited the music department of PSU, I loved the tiny insights into their psyches revealed by the questions they asked and observations they made aloud. As we took a self-guided tour of campus, I loved how they looked up and took pictures of tall buildings. I loved watching them arrive on the rec field and expode into activity: run, skip, hacky-sack, jump for the goal posts, race, climb, kick a water bottle, manifest a soccer ball out of the bushes, flop on the ground and be with each other. As we ate pizza at an arcade, I loved filling the water pitcher eleven times and hydrating them as they refueled, cheered each other on at silly games, discovered infinite ways to play with a rubber chicken, sang a friend happy birthday, and in the case of Quinn and his friend, performed a good chunk of the Hamilton score a cappella and in harmony. I loved helping a student who wasn’t feeling well feel better, and I loved sitting in the very last row of the Arlene Schnitzer’s upper balcony and seeing them absorb Mariachi Sol de Mexico perform a phenomenal show. I loved the way some of our students glowed to have their first language predominate the show, the way they knew the call and response parts of the songs, when to clap to the beat, the way they got up and spun each other at the back of the hall like it was their own quinceañera. I loved the way some of our students cheered and laughed, remarked how they understood none of the words, absorbed that moment of empathy for the students who feel that way most of the time instead of only on a field trip. I loved how all of our students instantly lit their phones up when the band called for the crowd to do so. I loved watching them sway back and forth, combining their individual tiny lights and reaching for the sky.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 23
11/23/24
After one friend (and gratitude reader) I saw today remarked that it might be a good nacho night, my bestie sent me this photo. Even though it’s hot dogs and mac-n-cheese tonight, I’m grateful for easy dinner and friends who celebrate mediocrity in the kitchen.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 24
11/24/24
I am grateful for a weekend with Quinn during which he designed a fleet of fantasy ships he can use as D and D shipboard adventures. He knew I might have a small clue about ships, having lived on and sailed them for a couple of years long ago, so he asked me a zillion questions. Types of ships, names of masts, how many decks, how many crow’s nests (he was disappointed in the answer), what is a stun’sl, below decks configurations, how many crew, what was that word again? (The word was bulkhead.) I taught him beam and draft, fore main and mizzen, topgallant and royal, that the lazarette would be an ideal location for a character to stow away, and we even discussed skysails. We talked about the shapes of hulls, the lines to control sails, and how the rig is meant to flex. He decided “difficult terrain” would be an appropriate penalty for pretty much any character without high dexterity, anywhere on board a ship, and I agreed. It brought back a lot of memories, but mostly just made me grateful for every minute I get to spend with him.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 25
11/25/24
I am grateful for a dinner of bbq brisket and ribs made by the same guy who catered our wedding. I am grateful for my fabulous mother-in-law who picked up the food for us and kept us company while we feasted.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 26
11/26/24
I am grateful for my birthday boy brother B, and my unbirthday boy brother T. I always do this on B’s birthday and I’m not going to start bucking tradition in the ninth year. Instead I’ll find the photos that make me smile the widest from our visit this past June: T at my nephew’s baseball game keeping the sun off his delicate skin with a dainty pink umbrella; B and Dad standing in the potato field they’d just planted. My reasons are still the same: they are great brothers, great dads, great uncles, great men, great at doing specific things like punk power chords or defragmenting your hard drive. I am grateful for their sporadic text messages, whether they feature roman numerals or not. I heard there was quite a bumper crop of potatoes this year.
~30 days of gratitude~ days 27 and 28
11/27 and 11/28/24
Two quick gratitudes for two very good, full days. I choose kitties and pie.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 29
Observed 12/1/24
I’ve been both busy and full of sinus pressure for a couple of days, so I’m getting to penultimate gratitude a few days behind schedule. Luckily, I’m still not taking this class for a grade. Indulge my semi-lucid gratitude musing for today.
Sometimes Quinn talks to me about physics.
“Picture a flash of light above your head moving out in all directions. The second that flash begins, it is impossible for you to ever get outside of that light, because to do so you’d have to travel faster than light.”
“Mmm.”
“That’s your light cone. It gets bigger as time progresses, and a greater area of the world is illuminated in that light. You also have a past light cone that defines all the area where anything can travel at up to the speed of light to reach where you are right now and give you information about the past, so anything you can have ever experienced is also defined by where you are right now.”
“Whoaaa.”
I told Quinn I thought this was a great metaphor. He thought that was silly but I’m sticking with my metaphor assertion. Because I have so often found light to be a part of the conversation about gratitude, I think they are intertwined. I can picture the act of choosing to pay attention to gratitude as a type of light, and maybe this gratitude light, too, moves outward, maybe it defines a cone of experience around me, maybe it informs and enfolds within itself everything about my past, everything about my future. Maybe all of it comes back to this moment I am in right now.
And even if I am a glow slug in the midnight zone of the high-pressure, chilled-to-the-bone, fully dark ocean, I can make my own light, a flash that moves outward, a pulse that grows and expands and defines an area around me.
I learned a few more things about the glowing nudibranchs. The research carried out on this species was based on none other than the research vessel Western Flyer. Iykyk. But on the nudibranchs themselves: They are a marvel of evolution: they represent the third independent evolution of bioluminescence in nudibranchs, and they swim and evade predators, unlike their nearest known relatives who typically crawl on the sea floor. They are so evolved that they have created their own family, like a lot of us are known to do when we don’t fit easily into the classification schemes of others. They are growing on me, these dark-dwelling light-makers with their soft, transparent hearts.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 30
Observed 12/2/24
I am grateful for paid sick leave and a day of Tea, Tay, and Turkey Broth (shoutout to bestie for the playlist and we are grateful for music in case we haven’t said so this year).
I am grateful for several days in a row of sunshine! I am grateful for all the forms of light that have shined on this November. A non-exhaustive list might include:
Friday night lights
clarity
light cone
sunrise
stage lights
cousin Rita
head lamp
sunlight on water
sunlight on kitten fur
glow slugs
cell phone lights in the hands of teenagers, swaying
you, and you, and you.
I am sincerely grateful for all of you and your comments and hearts and grocery store acknowledgements. Thank you for beaming your lights my way, too. If you are among those for whom the light has seemed dimmer than usual this November, I am sending you as many beams of bioluminescence as I am able.
When Rich was driving me home from the funeral I mentioned earlier this month, one of the darkest days of this November, we noticed someone’s not-put-away-yet Halloween decoration, a skeleton perched as though it was driving an antique tractor alongside the highway. It was too dark to get a good photo, but the image has stuck with me anyway. No matter how lovely and wonderful a life we might be privileged to enjoy (and I am so lucky, comfortable, and privileged), it does feel as though the whole machine we are rolling forward on is an antique and that there is a reckless skeleton behind the wheel. No ocean of gratitude, no arena of swaying teenagers with their phones lit up, can change that. Loss and death and grief, we do not get to escape them.
I have thought about it a lot, and without veering into the toxic positivity lane, I have decided to keep myself hitched to the gratitude wagon. I will strive for mediocrity and honesty in this practice, always.
Thanks everyone, for climbing in the wagon with me again after all these years.
I am grateful for the music program in our schools, and for watching Quinn come up through it. As a pandemic middle schooler, his music career was interrupted for quite some time, but he has had some excellent teachers and students to study with. A fall concert features the very beginning band playing a series of quarter notes, part of a scale, and a rendition of hot cross buns. I am grateful to be part of a crowd who applauds hot cross buns with wild enthusiasm. The teacher acknowledged that you can’t get to symphonic band without hot cross buns. Tonight the symphonic band featured a senior percussionist on bells, crash cymbals, and snare drum. I am grateful to be his mama.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 9
11/9/24
I am grateful for the pieces of community connectedness that have become my routine over the years. Bumping into a friend at the co-op, buying my coffee beans from folks I hold dear. I am grateful for the beauty of my early Saturday mornings, painting the most gorgeous vegetables you’ve ever seen onto a blank palette of pavement. The veggies are fading into the fall hues, but I’ll stubbornly arrange them in rainbows until all that’s left is green and beige. I saved you one of my favorites from earlier in the season, too. And this morning’s sunrise was worth being up for.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 10
11/10/24
I am grateful for a nice phone chat with my mom today.
(would love to give photo credit if the internet provided such info)
~30 days of gratitude~ day 11
11/11/24
There’s a veteran in my family lineage who I only learned about last year. She was my mom’s cousin Rita, a family member I never knew about nor met, and who died at some point while I was growing up. Like many working class families, both my mom’s and dad’s side of my family are filled with men who served. I heard about all of the men, but I never heard about Rita.
It seemed like it dawned on Mom last year that I might be interested in a woman in our family who defied gender expectations. Family is wonderful and weird, and sometimes you learn something that makes you make more sense to yourself.
She told me Rita ferried airplanes in World War II!!! She was in the Navy, and was something called a SPAR, Mom said. She told me Rita never married. She talked to her from time to time over the years Rita lived in Manhattan, where she worked as an administrative assistant after the war.
I’ve fact checked, and it turns out the things Mom told me do not entirely align, but I am bringing up Rita today because it’s Veteran’s Day and a woman veteran in my family is a story I very much want to know more about.
I’ve learned that SPARs were women who served in the Coast Guard, who did not ferry planes; women in the Navy were WAVEs, and ditto, no flying. The idea with women in the war was of course not to replace men, but to fill in for the men stateside so the men could serve overseas. I mean, we all know Rosie the riveter was not in it to bruise anyone’s ego. So these women were civil servants, and most were not considered full military. However, in the Army Air Forces a few women actually got to fly. WASPs or Women Airforce Service Pilots, they were called. And I am not sure whether Rita was a WASP because her name is not in the internet list I found, but if she ferried planes, then she must have been a WASP. There are three Ritas, no Donnellys, and all the Ritas had married names also listed. I do not know if our unmarried Rita was a WASP who is not listed (I’m guessing the list is not exhaustive), whether she flew under a pseudonym (was she one of the Madges or Barbaras or Lillians?), whether she was a SPAR or a WAVE and somehow still flew, or whether none of this happened.
But here are some things that did happen in the WASPs: Of 1830 trainees, 1102 flew United States military aircraft.
That is how few women they allowed to train of the over 25,000 applicants.
In May 1944 TIME magazine reported that a certain Congressman wanted to end the WASPs rather than see them elevated to actual military. “Unnecessary and undesirable” was the title of the article. This man argued that the women were taking jobs that could and should be done by men, that it cost too much to train the women, downplayed their qualifications, and invalidated the important and significant work they had done. Congress killed the bill that would have given these women their due designation as service members.
After all, 38 of them died in the line of duty. Their families had to pay for their bodies to be flown home. Their coffins were not draped in flags. Their families received no gold stars. After all, the women were just civilians, and the survivors left the WASPs and quietly faded back into the fabric of American life. And some of them got married and did things expected of women.
In the 1970s the Airforce announced it would “for the first time,” allow women to fly its aircraft, and if I had been a WASP, that really would have chapped my ass, too. Until then they had not felt anyone owed them anything, but now they made some noise. But wouldn’t you know, they still received a ton of resistance to receiving the veteran status they requested, though there was no denying they deserved it. That thing where people who have a right believe that someone else being given a right that they enjoy will somehow detract from their ability to flex their right.
But rights are not pie, so President Carter signed the bill in 1977 that granted the WASPs retroactive “active duty” status for their service, and in 1979 they received honorable discharge papers.
So I guess it isn’t that surprising that I’d never heard of her, never heard of her service, and still haven’t connected all the dots about my first cousin once removed, Rita. But if she was still alive I’d sure like to ask her about it, and tell her I’m grateful for her service.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 12
11/12/24
In a time when it feels like so much of what I care about is under threat, I am grateful for moments when the being in front of me requires so much care that they are all I can focus on. Caring for beings is my thing. This is Kylo Ren, of the wild back yard bayou. She has decided I’m okay, and that I may attempt to tame her. She spent her first night in her kitty condo last night. Tonight at dark, when it was time for me to wander by headlamp into the deep maw of the backyard and air lift her to safety, it turned out that she was already nestled in her condo bed, ready to be tucked in for the night. I’ve entered my cat lady era, y’all.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 13
11/13/24
I’m grateful for all this rain, and also for the break in the rain during my lunch break so I could take a walk.
Did November 1st sneak up on me? Yes. And no. I knew it was coming, but it arrived in the blink of an eye. So after a jam-packed Friday, it’ll be a shortie for day one.
Michael J. Fox says, “My optimism is fueled by my gratitude. And with gratitude, optimism is sustainable.”
I’m grateful for this borrowed wisdom because optimism seems crucial in this moment, and if gratitude can fuel it, it is just one more reason to kick off another year of 30 days of gratitude.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 2
11/2/24
I am grateful to have been under the Friday night lights for last night’s high school football game. I am no big fan of football, although I am a reluctant fantasy football player to fit in with the guys at work. (Okay, maybe I still don’t fit in; I called my team She-rah Princess of Sportsball.) I root for my husband’s team and my family’s team, because it matters to them, while harboring no illusions nor denial of the toxic aspects of the sport. At any rate, I’ve attended all the home football games at NHS the past three years while Quinn has been playing at the games in the pep band. You all definitely know by now that I’m a band mom.
PSA: the band kids are in danger if we don’t defeat the felon. The homophobic, transphobic, anti-Department of Education, anti-gun-safety, anti-choice, anti-environment, hatred-fueled candidate for president. Please vote for the band kids: for their safety, their ability to be themselves in the world, their autonomy in their own bodies.
Last night, in their final game after a mostly losing season, our team won in an epic manner, and it was senior night, during which the football team seniors and the cheer team seniors were honored, and I have a band senior (the band seniors stayed invisible in their corner of the bandstands, but whatever.) And the band sounded great, and the cheer team is always amazing, and the football team was winning, and the kid who usually plays the drum set had to leave at halftime.
For the second half of the game, Quinn got his chance, at long last, to put down the bass drum and sit at the drum set and play all the songs he has been practicing throughout high school. This was something he had ardently wished to do. I was so grateful to be there to witness it, to take inordinate amounts of video of the fight song, let’s go band, pokerface, funkytown, tequila, school’s out for summer, the hey song, and all the songs he got to play. He also got to play the snare drum, as he alternated with his snare drum player friend so they could both have a chance on drum set. You know that thing the drummers get to do, to start off the song, where they whack their sticks together above their heads, to give the rhythm for the song they are all about to start playing? Watching your kid do that particular thing, to lead the band, is a crazy awesome feeling.
There is so much going on in the wide world and my own much smaller world, that it is difficult to even know how I feel on a spectrum from despair to joy, from anger to hope, much less what to write. But I was jumping on the bleacher seats, fist pumping and screaming at the top of my lungs happy last night when that boy carried that ball down the field, and my boy whacked his sticks to make the band play the fight song. I am grateful for one uninhibited moment of joy.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 3
11/3/24
A friend I met in an online group when our boys were infants, so a friend I have now known for seventeen years, posted a confession sometime this past year about her gratitude practice. She said that sometimes she wonders if it can be another form of spiritual bypassing or toxic positivity. At the same time, she shared that she believes her gratitude has been life saving for her in the years since her oldest son died. This woman has done so much awe-inspiring work on raising awareness around grief, and I take her thoughts on gratitude very seriously. I commented on her post that I, too, wonder about the potential for harm coming from a practice that has such good intent. I’ve thought about this so much in the months since our exchange. Don’t worry, I’m not quitting, I just never want to show up to the gratitude without being authentic.
It’s like this: there is a lot that goes on in any given day. Yes, I can almost always find something I feel grateful about during a given day, but also? Some days, there are some very large elephants in the room that make it more difficult to access gratitude, and more importantly, I would not want to negate all other valid feelings by trying to tamp them down beneath a gratitude that is forced.
Take today for example. I am super grateful for yet another annual fill-your-pantry market, another bucket of honey, another freezer full of humanely raised meat. I am ever so grateful for my husband who drove me not once, but twice, to the valley, and sat with me through a very difficult event.
But not mentioning that the event he was driving me to was one where we witnessed and joined in the grief of a family whose twelve-year-old son has died, would feel wrong. To not acknowledge sadness doesn’t do my gratitude practice any favors. I am not just going to say I am grateful for the life of this boy while I am so torn up that it is over. I don’t want to use gratitude just to spin every negative thing that happens into positive vibes.
So I guess that’s another thing to be grateful for: increasing clarity about exactly what my gratitude practice means to me. I am earning this over the years. Today’s clarity: I’m not interested in weaponizing gratitude.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 4
11/4/24
After some weekends, it’s possible to be grateful for Monday. I am grateful for a productive day scrubbing a fish tank until it sparkled. I am grateful for a simple evening of tuna melts (thank you local fishing community for supplying cans of tuna that have spoiled us for life against grocery store cans), strawberry ice cream, and watching Farm Aid with Rich while we each provide a resting surface for a cat.
~30 days of gratitude~ day 5 and 6
11/5 and 11/6/24
Speaking of elephants in the room, I couldn’t really post last night. But this morning someone on social media somewhere quoted lines from a piece by Ursula K. Le Guin:
“The death way or the life way? The high road of the warrior, or the river road?
I know what I want. I want to live with courage, with compassion, in patience, in peace.
The way of the warrior fully admits only the first of these, and wholly denies the last.
The way of the water admits them all.
The flow of a river is a model for me of courage that can keep me going—carry me through the bad places, the bad times. A courage that is compliant always seeking the best way, the easiest way, but if not finding any easy way still, always, going on.”
I spent most of my day walking around the lab, controlling the flow of water, or being baffled by my inability to control it. I was grateful for the distraction, something to focus on, something to keep my body moving. I had a short break and took a walk on the estuary trail, paused and listened to the sound of the water for a few minutes. And then I went on.
As for tonight, I am grateful for the official meal of November, served proudly on national nacho day.
Here is the full blog post the quote is borrowed from. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/119-the-election-lao-tzu-a-cup-of-water
~30 days of gratitude~ day 7
11/7/24
I am grateful for date night, same dreamy husband, different year. He is good to talk to. Five stars, would marry again.
In keeping with tradition, here is the grid of birthdays:
We will celebrate Quinn’s seventeenth birthday next weekend when he is home, but I could not let the day pass without marking it in my usual way, wandering through random tidbits of science and math and literature while reminiscing about this young man I have had the privilege of raising.
My photos of Quinn as he approaches seventeen are of him playing in band, and of him holding kittens. These seem to be the two moments he doesn’t mind having his photos taken, so I will take what I can get. Luckily, others were holding cameras at Quinn’s winter band concert, and I have another band parent and Quinn’s English teacher to credit with some of those images.
Seventeen is the seventh prime number. It is the only prime number which is the sum of four consecutive primes (2 + 3 + 5 + 7) because any other set of four primes results in an even number. It’s a lucky number of Euler, which is different from the way 13 was lucky, but still quull. In abstract algebra, seventeen is a supersingular prime, the explanation of which I had no comprehension of, which is probably a sign I never took abstract algebra, but I still think supersingular sounds intriguing.
Quullest photo. This was taken by Q’s English teacher.
Quinn is not taking math this year as a junior, but he would still be the only person I know who will find some of these tidbits quull, like the fact that the Pythagoreans abominated the number seventeen (I imagine he will giggle at this). I think he will be tickled that Carl Gauss chose mathematics as his profession because of his proof that heptadecagons (polygons with seventeen sides) can be constructed with a compass and unmarked ruler, and that this is because seventeen is a Fermat prime, whatever that is. Quinn likes Carl Gauss as much or more than the next seventeen-year-old. I think Quinn would like that there are seventeen fully supported stellations in an icosahedron. And I also think he will find it interesting that seventeen is the minimum number of givens needed in a Sudoku with a single solution.
According to MIT, seventeen is “the least random number,” which is because it is the most commonly chosen number when someone is asked to choose a random number from 1 to 20, according to several experiments.
Quinn is taking chemistry this year, and the element with the atomic number 17 is chlorine (which rhymes). Also, it reminds me of swim lessons. The element with a molecular weight of seventeen is ammonia. Which reminds me of diapers. Doesn’t time fly?
But the subject Quinn has been the most excited about this year (possibly with the exception of band) is English. So it will bring me great joy to remind him that the Haiku form has seventeen syllables (5 + 7 + 5). In other literary greatness, seventeen is when a wizard comes of age, and is the number of sickles in a galleon in wizard currency.
There are the same longings as ever. I wish I had more time with him. I wish I had his birthday with him. I wish I could fully support his stellations.
When we left off at sixteen, NASA was getting ready to launch a mission to space object 16-Psyche, an asteroid made of iron and other metals. The launch was successful in October, and in December, the spacecraft turned on its cameras successfully, the moment on a space mission called “first light.” The craft will fly by Mars in 2026, receiving a gravity assist from the planet named after the god of war, and then will continue on to Psyche, arriving in 2029. This asteroid may be a planetesimal, the building block of a planet, or in other words, an opportunity to look at what our own planet looks like on the inside. Our own earth is a hunk of metal at its inaccessible center, and this is our chance to learn more about our own core. Maybe. Or find out something else.
Messier space object 17 is the swan nebula. What is a nebula, you might ask? So might I.
A nebula is
Luminescent star-forming
Interstellar stuff
From my vantage point crowd controlling the middle school band at the winter concert, I got this back-of-the-band shot of my tall drummer.
Nebulae are those colorful, foggy space places whose images would make good Trapper Keeper covers, and they are full of cosmic dust. They are the places where the particles of cosmic dust clump together and attract tumbleweeds of more material until they give birth to a star. I picture a grain of sand in the mushy mantle of an oyster gathering ocean bits to form a pearl, only space. After the stars get born, the remaining material leftover is thought to be the makings of planets and their rings, their moons, their comets and asteroids. A nebula is like a solar system womb, then. And the swan nebula is one of the largest star-wombs in our Milky Way.
NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M. Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team and ESA
Wombs. Milky ways. Quick subject change before I get too weepy.
Cicadas! Some species of cicada have a seventeen-year life cycle. Probably a lot of people already know this, but every time I hear it, I still think it’s miraculous. Between mating seasons, they are buried underground for seventeen years. This seems excessive and impossible and also has very cool ecological reason and rhyme. Also there are fossil cicadas dating back to the Triassic in Australia. Automatically quull.
Also, the periodical cicadas (including the 17-year varieties) are part of the genus Magicicada. I just learned this and I think it’s magical.
Magicicada
Underground for seventeen
That seems excessive
Cicadas are of course known most for their music, and as musicians, they are basically percussionists. I can keep going.
Did you know that the different stages of nymphs that develop during the 99.5% of their life that takes place underground are known as instars? There are few words I love as much as “instar.” See star-womb nebula discussion above.
There are a hypothetical thirty broods in the Magicicada genus, which are exclusive to North America. Many of the hypothetical broods have not been observed. I try to wrap my head around this and picture the type of nerd whose job it was to hypothesize mathematically occurring cicada broods, and I am picturing someone not that different from Quinn. (They numbered the broods with Roman Numerals. Am I wrong?)
We will not be enjoying roasted cicadas for Quinn’s birthday, though this is a culturally important delicacy to the Onondaga people.
Despite the hypothetical brood abundance, only fifteen of the broods are known to survive today, and their timelines are mapped out for our entomology ecotouring convenience. Brood XIII, the Northern Illinois brood from the Midwest, is a seventeen-year cicada expected to emerge in 2024. The next time they do, Quinn will be turning 34.
Maybe it’s the sunbeams I stared into through my camera lens yesterday, as our band gathered into the staging area, or the pollen in the air, or maybe I have something in my eye. Pretty sure I’m allergic to backlit sun-drenched brass sections looking like angels are bending from the sky to kiss their foreheads.
I had the privilege of chaperoning the NHS marching band to the Starlight Parade in Portland yesterday. I love our band. I love watching them embody something Glennon Doyle says: “We belong to each other.” I love watching them lift their chin to let a friend reach in and close the clasp at their throat or adjust the chin strap on their shako (that’s what the hats are called). “I trust you,” they say, exposing their vulnerable soft parts. “I can be trusted,” they say, with their helpful hands.
I loved looking into the eyes of each student with a squirt bottle in my hand and saying silently, “Trust me.”
“I trust you,” they say silently. They open their mouth.
We used to call it “baby bird style” when Quinn was in second grade and we’d squirt water into the open mouths of the kids on field trips. I realize/remember when I watch another band mom, Carol, hydrating them, that our mouths open, too. It is so human, so motherly. Here comes the airplane. Ever since we started squirting things in their mouth as babes in arms, from breasts or bottles, spoons or fingers, we’ve opened our mouth when we want them to open theirs. We are mirrors.
Speaking of they/them. Happy Pride. I know one reason the band room is home to many kids is that they don’t exactly fit the regularly sanctioned acceptable categories of high school. The band room is home to the neurodivergent, the nonbinary, the nonconforming. Which is why I like taking them to Portland, where the 2023 Starlight parade Grand Marshal is Poison Waters, a drag performer and social activist. I like the exhibit behind us in the parade being TriMet, the bus I rode to work while I was pregnant with Quinn, with the slogan All Are Welcome. I like the Portland crowd with their rainbow light sabers and their heart-shaped glasses and their clowns on bicycles and their llamas on leashes and their boy children in tutus and their girl children in dinosaur crocs and all their children dancing and wielding guns that fire nothing but bubbles.
I like that their band teacher introduced so many of the end-of-year awards at their spring concert using they/their as he talked about each student, however they identified. I like that they can be boys tucking ponytails up into shakos with bobby pins and girls with pixie cuts or pigtails and nonbinary young people being whoever they want to be.
I like how kids from a rural coastal town go to a city fair. When told to be in groups of no fewer than three, their threes adhered to each other like Velcro and grew into fifteens, wandering under huge, gnarled city trees, venturing together into the dust-mote-filled sunbeams to hop on carnival rides, then congregating again under the boughs to loan each other cash for slushies and elephant ears. I like how they belong to each other.
They all have doubts and fears and preoccupations. I know I did as a teenager. I want to tell them… I still have so many doubts and fears and preoccupations, most recently upon my return to being a band mom who barely sees my son. The last Starlight parade we attended, I had a sixth grader who lived with me half time. Since then, a pandemic pulled us apart. We are coming back together. We are still here. We are not the same. But we still belong to each other. The band room is still home. I want to tell them to keep reaching for what they love, and especially for the people they love.
A beautiful mural featuring a blue bird up at the top of a tall building on SW 2nd and Salmon caught my eye, and I felt sure it had not been there four years ago on the parade route. Sure enough, this painting, called Inheritance, was created just last year. In it, an elder’s hands offer a bowl to a younger set of hands. The bowl brims with fir cones, trilliums, and butterflies.
I want to tell them: Look up, little birds. Do not let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t look up.
Also, there will be school bus fender benders, anxiety, garment bag chaos, missing shoes, forgotten backpacks, mood swings, vomit, blisters, dying phone batteries, and body odor.
There are enormous bands before us and behind us, with military-level discipline and polish and prestige, plumes spearing from their caps in waterfalls of sparkle and glitz. The band behind us filled at least four buses, maybe more. But I’ll take these kids, these coastal sardines packed into one bus, the ones who worked for their uniforms (the sophomores through graduating seniors remember the many nights they haunted the haunted house in 2019), with their proud plumes of blue feathers. I’ll take them and I’ll tell them silently with my eyes: Soar.
It’s time for the traditional Quinn’s birthday post. First of all, sixteen is a very satisfying number for making a grid of birthdays:
Some facts about sixteen… that’s XVI for you Roman numeral fans.
One of my favorite photos of Quinn this year, embodying his drum sticks with the football team in the background.
Sixteen is the fourth power of two (which makes me think of the Indigo Girls… “I’m stronger than the monsters beneath your bed, smarter than the tricks played on your heart….”)
Quinn says 16 is the basis of hexadecimal, whatever that is, but that he hasn’t learned hexadecimal quite yet. Apparently it is a goal.
It’s the atomic number of sulfur, the element of “brimstone,” but it’s also the molecular weight of oxygen, making up 21% of the atmosphere, literally the air I breathe, and 86% of the weight of the ocean, a big reason I breathe it.
Timpani are quull!
There are sixteen pawns in a chess set, and each player has sixteen pieces to start a chess game. Quinn is as insatiable with games as he always has been, at least last I checked, which was when he was 15 years and 361 days old, roughly 15.99, over this past weekend when we played several rounds of Tiny Epic Dinosaurs.
A sixteenth note is also called a semiquaver. I think it will be fun to discuss hemidemisemiquavers with him at some point. A true highlight of life right now is watching Quinn emerge on the stage of high school life through his involvement in concert band, pep band, and now jazz band.
Rich’s awesome birthday present find, a “Dungies and Dragons” shirt.
He’ll be marching in the spring and jamming in his bedroom with new cymbals added to his drum set.
There will also be more cowbell.
But don’t expect him to be able to blow out sixteen candles in one go. He’s a percussionist, not a wind player.
I see two things: my brother Brendan’s laugh, and some light-trick butterfly-hearts fluttering.
Traditionally, I look for astronomical associations with Quinn’s age, and 16 did not disappoint. My favorite find was a huge asteroid called 16-Psyche named for a Greek goddess associated with the human soul. NASA plans to launch a mission to visit it this very year of 2023. Some planets and space objects are given iconic symbols, and the symbol given to 16-Psyche is a butterfly wing topped by a star.
Quinn is the lucky recipient of a snow day from school for his birthday (and his mama was the lucky recipient of a snow day from work, hence she had time to write this post!). Happy sixteenth birthday Quinn!
Quinn spent a ton of time playing with his Turing Tumble set the weekend he got home for Thanksgiving. He told me his math teacher has posters up in her room and one of them is a quote by Albert Einstein that says, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” And he said he really could relate to that. He had me sit with him a lot while he worked on the puzzles he is working on – they are getting insanely complicated, and I am almost no help at all, except I am also willing to sit with it longer, with him. So he has gotten a lot of the algorithms solved (such an amazing game/toy/puzzle/brain stretcher/birthday present) and he feels really great when he achieves one, (I think he is about halfway through the 65 activities) but often there is a period of “I’ll never get this one” just before he cracks the code. He is starting to see that pattern, too, so it makes it easier to trust he will be able to solve it if he stays with it. I love how it is encouraging him to persevere.
While he was sitting with one of the algorithms, he was telling me how it was “just a variation” on the puzzle before, because it was based on registers and counting in binary. You know, like (and he started counting on his fingers… in binary.) My jaw dropped, and he said, “I learned that from Vi.” Of course! (I was not sure how to do justice in words to the amazingness I was witnessing, so I made him do it again on video!)
We had W pancake among family members who came for Thanksgiving, and I just love how she appointed Quinn as her agent. She would need someone to transport something from her hand over to her mom, and she would just glance at Quinn and gesture, and he would jump to do her silent bidding. She crawls over to sit on his lap, completely assured he is one of her people. It reminds me of the way Quinn was sure about Rich’s daughter wanting to color dinosaurs with him when he was five and she was in college.
He was telling someone that all the 7th graders are drinking coffee “these days” and they say it’s what they need to wake up in the morning. He said he thinks because his mom and dad both like it so much, he may like it one day, too, but for now he doesn’t want to drink any. It came up again when we were at home, and it spawned a great conversation about different wiring. He said “caffeine makes people all wired and hyper,” at one point, and I said well, that’s mostly true, but one way you can tell if a person has ADHD is if you feed them caffeine and they calm down – it has the opposite effect on them, because of their brain wiring. So he thought that was fascinating, and it launched a whole other conversation about misunderstandings or misconceptions of what peoples’ learning differences are, and how people think “talented and gifted” means a person should easily have all A grades, and how they don’t realize that there are some things that are really a struggle for him even though he is talented and gifted. I thought it was interesting to hear him identify that way!
We did a lot of logic puzzles this week. We do them a lot while we eat. Sometimes the clues are roundabout and you have to go over them a bunch of times as you accumulate new information in order to make sense of them. And other times a clue will just say “the person who ate toast is not Janet” and you can rule something out directly. Quinn said of one of these clues, “well that was explict” pronounced like I just typed it: “explikt” and I knew he meant explicit so I said explicit, and he said, “it’s not explict?” And I wrote it down so he could see the second i, and he said, “oh, well, in plants vs. zombies, they left out the second i. (Note to self, he learns words from video games! Not just books.)
He is SO LARGE. He needed hugs and snuggles this week, and I do my best but it is hard to actually let him on my lap… I still do, but I basically give him a very short countdown from ten. We invented a “snug” which is a cross between hug and snuggle, it’s not standing, it’s sitting on me, but it’s very, very brief. When we have time, we do longer snuggles on the couch with either his legs or torso draped over me, but not both.
I am reading the self-driven child, a good book recommended on the tilt parenting podcast. This week I was getting to the chapter on radical down time, and how important it is for learning and general well-being, and how we need to stop jam packing our children’s schedules and managing their downtime like, “shouldn’t you be doing SAT test prep if you don’t have something to do right now?” Instead we should say, “let’s snug.”
I just love watching his biweekly swim lesson. He is the absolute most awkward swimmer the world has ever seen and is so earnest and so into working on improving! This was the first time she attempted to teach him backstroke! He has been working on front crawl for a few lessons now, and he is impressively gangly at it so far, but she figured she’d try backstroke. The first attempt on his back, his arms were still going forward so he just folded in half and sank to the bottom. The next attempts were comically awkward too, but he improved each time. He would get his arms kind of going, but then lean his head too far back and reverse somersault and go under. He would get his arms kind of going but get stuck and you could see his arm pause mid stroke so he could think what his other arm needed to do… long pauses. He’d sometimes roll onto his side or go under again, because of whatever he ended up doing with whichever arm. He was working on the hands so his elbow would be bent at a 90 degree angle, or he’d work on the arms but just get stuck in the middle. His teacher is so good with him. And he just kept going back and starting again.
When he woke up Friday to do his math review he made it out of bed over to the couch and laid back down. He needed extra rest more than math review. Radical down time. So I encouraged him to not stress the math if he felt he could handle doing it over the weekend and he said he could. It crossed my mind he had seemed extra emotional and hungry all week, so I had him get up to the measuring station and put a new mark on the wall – sure enough, he is growing.
Friday was going to be committed cubs day, the second one of the year, and he missed the first one and sorely wanted to be included in it this time. He had a few assignments he needed to have teachers sign off on, and he did a lot to chip away at it over the course of the week, but got home Thursday night and was down because he had forgotten his one last signature, which he could have gotten during class because the assignment was finished. I let him problem solve, and he decided there was still a chance he could do it in the morning, and while that did not guarantee he could do CC day, he wanted to still try. He told me Mrs. F had said they would be free reading in class Friday so people could finish up assignments, and so his plan was to ask her right away to go see Mr B to get his last signature. He even put a post-it note in his book (Ender – speaker for the dead) right with the bookmark, so he would remember to do it even if he went to start doing his free reading. When he came out of school on Friday, he was so pleased because, “I made it in!”
Speaking of Ender, Quinn loved the concept of paired beings from the books. In the story, piggies are paired with trees as an adaptation to protect them from a planet-wide plague. Quinn stretched the concept to a human-star pairing.
I had encouraged him to speak his idea into a google doc so he could harness the way his brain is able to articulate ideas verbally much more quickly than he can get those ideas to come out of his typing fingers. I had been talking to him about the speech-to-text options on numerous occasions, but had not gotten him to try it yet, and this was the perfect opportunity. Here is my transcript of an audio recording I took as a backup while he was speaking into a doc:
“…And then once the star gets even stronger it would start smashing carbon into oxygen and once it gets to its strongest point which is usually right before it supernovas, it starts smashing oxygen into iron and I was thinking, well, if you created some sort of, like, could a man, could human beings create a man made star that could smash together stuff to create like an atom with a whole bunch of stuff like a whole bunch of protons and electrons and neutrons and then harness that… and this would be a star that’s the size of like a chrome book, it would be a really small star… like you could fit it in a fish tank… or in a drum. But then the star would create something like fermium atoms or something like that and the fermium atoms would then be used in like a nuclear laboratory or something like that and you would split the fermium atom into like a whole bunch of neutrons and protons and electrons, and you would use those neutrons and protons and electrons to basically make a whole bunch of atoms out of those separated piles of neutrons and protons and electrons. And then if the theory went right then it would become like speaker for the dead where all the animals on Lusitania are paired with a plant and they basically just coexist so it would be something like each human would create like their own star, their own personal little star the size of their chromebook, or their drum, if they have one, and then use their star to like get some fermium atoms, which they would split up, and then use those atom pieces to make more atoms to get the star bigger, and then like once the human dies of old age, the star should then be approximately the size of a human, and at that point the star would then use its power of making atoms to create another human, like create a new human child, at which point it would supernova and then that human child would grow up with its own personal star and so on and you could pair humans and stars… with like a weird biological bond but yeah… and then… yeah….”
“So that’s what you wanted to get out of your brain onto the page! Isn’t that awesome, look…”
“And I typed several paragraphs!”
“And so adams are going to have to change spelling so do this cool trick ready? Go up to edit on the bar, and go to the find and replace, find all “adam” and replace with “atom”. So if you said a word 50 times and it did them all the wrong way you can just replace.”
“You can replace all adams. And ‘madams’ haha.”
“’When sister gets even stronger’… I think it’s supposed to be ‘when the star’…..”
I wanted to capture a raw version of what it’s like trying to hang in there with this kid who is mashing up Ender’s game and the periodic table, contemplating the synthetic elements of the actinides series and seeing what he can do with them to advance the genre of science fiction! I’m trying to provide him some tools, fitting those in edgewise, trying to keep my head above the current as the absolutely torrential flood of imagination comes pouring out. This is a pretty great example of what it’s like.
This month had some sadness; Quinn’s friend Pippin is moving away.
His voice has lowered dramatically the past month or two. I am not hearing a lot of cracking, but what I have noticed is that his laugh remains a few octaves above his speaking voice. I do not know if he will keep that long term, but hearing him reminds me so much of my older brother’s voice and laugh right now, the way he speaks in a mellow tenor but his laugh reaches up to tickle the rafters. My brother’s laugh is one of my very favorite laughs in the world, and one of my very favorite things about him, and it would not be a disappointment if Quinn inherited this trait. Even if it is for a temporary period, I’m thoroughly enjoying the way his laughs ring in the air, jingling like the bells at the upper reach of his mallets, perhaps because they contrast so with his new low speaking register in the timpani section.
At his band concert, his teacher made a brief intro of the first song, little drummer boy, saying they did have one of those (M is very small), and also a not-so-little drummer boy, and a drummer girl. Mine is the not-so-little one! He was on the snare drum for all three songs! And he was absolutely wonderful! He played both with and without the snares engaged (the beginning of little drummer boy starts out with it disengaged and sounding like a tom). He played some pretty complicated parts! Triplets, rolls, lots of variations. He did so well! He was holding so still for the first song I wasn’t convinced he was drumming, but then on the several measures he was not playing but counting, he bopped around just like he used to when he was playing sleigh bells last year. I think the rhythms he was playing were seriously challenging, enough to really keep him on his toes!
Last weekend was Turing tumble, this weekend was Rubik’s cube!
He worked on his cube for the entire day Saturday while I was at farmer’s market, and solved it. By the time I got home, he was a pro. If you watch that very long video, you can see him solve it again, and if you notice he is not pleased, it is because he “figured out” that there are “multiple solves” to the cube, based on the orientation of the Rubik’s emblem on the white face of the cube; there is a solution where it is right side up, and if you have it in the stand you can see red, yellow, blue. Apparently, he spent a good part of the day after solving it his first time, trying to get it solved to that solution, and it was thwarting him. Because perfectionism. But also because of staying with the problem longer.
After farmer’s market we went to get a Christmas tree. After we chose our tree and the helper had set it into our truck, Rich went to pay, but Quinn noticed the tree wasn’t all the way tucked in so the tailgate would close. Quinn jumped up and angled the trunk where it needed to go in the one corner so the top would go in the opposite corner and not stick out the back. I love it when I see him take initiative to fix something or do a job that needs doing, without being asked or having it pointed out at all.
When we got home I asked him to work on cleaning up his room a little bit so that his Turing tumble could move from the living room back to his room to make room for the tree. He just jumped right to it, no complaints, and organized some of his Jurassic park legos that he had out on the floor into a lego box, and put the instruction booklets into the right section of the accordion file, etc., again without me having to point out or assist with these steps.
In his video production elective, he learned about a fun music making module in chrome. For science he had to make a poster about an element in the periodic table, so he picked boron. He really liked the boron entry in his elements book.
He worked on cubing quite a bit more, and he also sent me a bunch of texts about wanting to collect all the different ones. He has the standard 3×3 one, but wants to get 2×2 next, then 4×4, 5×5 etc up to 11×11. Then and only then does he want to get the triangle and other shape ones.
Handmade solstice present for his dad.
I feel grateful for having gone through what we did when Quinn was little, and approaching learning in a self-driven way from the start, because he ended up knowing the difference between school and learning, and still knows it. Otherwise I doubt he would spend weekends doing hard puzzles, or light up like a Christmas tree this morning when I said “I’ve heard you can program robots to solve Rubik’s cubes” as we drove to school. The boy has a lego robotics kit coming to him for Christmas, so I know future weekends will be occupied with such things.
Finally, for the grand finale this month, Quinn rocked his Half green belt test!
I am grateful that it is gratitude month! It’s year number four of me NanoPoblano-ing my way through the month of November on the subject of gratitude, and this year I found myself looking forward to November, which is an odd sensation for me, hater of the cold darkness that I am. This is not just because October was haunted house month, aka Exhaustion and Lack of Free Time month, and November means haunted house season is at its end. It’s also because the best cure for autumn exhaustion and ennui that I have found is a daily bowl of thankful soup. (Haha, just kidding. A plate of gratitude nachos is what we eat at our house.)
I am grateful for the way the band boosters haunted house showed me the generous side of this community. I met and got to know some wonderful people throughout the past few months. Whether it was watching a team of guys build the whole structure to plan on a Thursday, for free, then having the lead builder walk up and insist on paying for his ticket, handing my child over to the moms who do know how to apply makeup each night he participated, or having a football parent hand me a big donation check, this whole experience really made me feel grateful for this community.
Last night was the final haunted house for the season and I am still processing the toughest moment of the whole experience for me. I sold a ticket to an adult sized male child. I counted back his change, and as he turned to get in line, I noticed he had on a large backpack made of the same authentic looking materials as the fatigues he was wearing. I said aloud to my ticket booth teammate that I was concerned about his backpack, and kept my eyes glued to him while he joined the end of the line of 50 or so people, set his backpack on the ground, unzipped it, and pulled out a gun.
I flew out of the booth and over to where he stood, inches from him though he had quickly tucked the rifle back into the pack, and as he had showed it to some teens across the rope from him, I had noticed an orange tip. The situation de-escalated quickly, though the teen seemed unable to understand why I wouldn’t allow him to enter the haunted house with his backpack. “It’s just an airsoft rifle. I won’t take it out in there.”
Though there are many things that unsettled me about this experience, about the common sense gaps of this apparently harmless kid, who concluded that it would be a good choice to brandish a non-lethal but extremely realistic and not completely harmless weapon on public fairgrounds at a school function, I also learned a lot. I know I fancied myself a person who would step up to help in a real gun situation, which as a mom in our current day and age, you know I have imagined a time or two. In that moment, the shape of a gun was being pulled from a bag, and I was in flight towards it, the various disarms, blocks, and strikes I know flashing through my mind, simultaneous with the knowledge that I do NOT know all I would need to safely disarm an active shooter. (How grateful I am that this was not that scenario cannot be really expressed in words.) I now know that I am actually that type of person, not just in imagination. Even though this situation was a false alarm, for the seconds it took me to react, it was all too real.
I’m a little bummed to start off the gratitude challenge with being grateful for this new, albeit heavy, self-knowledge. I almost want to change topics, but one thing I have learned with mindfulness practices is that I should really handle what’s foremost in my mind right now, to stay as human as I can, as whole and integrated as I can.
I also wonder if this is the point of the gratitude challenge. We’re heading into the lengthening darkness, and yet we have a choice how we perceive the passage of the dark, wet, months as well as how we process difficult events and experiences. I think it is all part of choosing a thought process shaped by gratitude, even when peering into the shadows.
11/2/19
~30 days of gratitude~ day 2
In August Rich and I visited the corner of my parents’ farm where the migrating monarchs were a kaleidoscope of wings wheeling among a rainbow of tall flowers. I took a million photos, journaled descriptive language, and vowed to myself that “as summer floats south on the wings of the magical creatures we witnessed, I will reserve a part of my heart as a sanctuary for the butterflies of summer.”
Dwelling on gratitude as the days grow very dark and cold is, to me, a bit like keeping the habitat open for the butterflies, holding space for what needs to take root to foster their ability to thrive. It doesn’t mean I can ever keep the clouds from passing over that habitat, or stop the clock on the passage of the seasons. What I can do is watch the clouds passing over, trusting they are not here to stay. Contemplating darkness doesn’t mean it will become a permanent condition. And indeed, I seemed to have launched this round of gratitude posts by delving into the shadows. While it was summer, I watched the butterflies alight on each flower, pausing to drink in sweetness, lifting upward on the next air current. While it’s winter, it takes all my courage to descend into the dark, but I trust that I will emerge next spring transformed by whatever develops in the darkness.
The caterpillar entering the chrysalis is of course not an activity/metaphor of fall and winter. Still, there is something about how they go inward and turn into caterpillar soup (caterpillar nachos don’t sound any more appetizing) that resonates in autumn. The chrysalis is a slow cooker of broth seasoned with imaginal cells, those bits of the crawling being that code for the dream of flying it has always known as its destiny. A little trust in the process, a little rearrangement of the molten materials, and out comes a winged creature.
It may take more years of this practice before I can truly feel thankful for darkness, or the meltdown it initiates in me. Simmering in my slow cooker today, I’m grateful for memories of summer, excellent walks with my husband, and butterflies.
11/3/19
~30 days of gratitude~ day 3
I am grateful for the extra hour today, as long as I don’t think about what it means about the brevity of daylight during upcoming evenings. I used it to catch up on a seriously backlogged grocery list. I left my son to his homework. He is rising to the executive functioning occasion so majestically right now, planning his work and then actually following the plan, setting his own timers and hearing them go off. I wandered off to re-stock baking powder and vanilla and all the autumn baking needs. As I watched the fragrant curry powder, cumin, and coriander fill the paper bags in the bulk spice section, I pondered the soap opera phrase about sand through the hourglass. I remembered back to when Quinn was mostly unsuccessful at joining any preschools, due to his refusal to adhere to anyone’s agenda but his own. As one group moved obediently to snack time while Quinn persisted in pressing playdough through his garlic press, unable to move on just because someone suggested it was cleanup time, I mused how these moments of three-year-old parenting were moving more like playdough through the garlic press than sand through the hourglass. Fast forward to now, and time seems to be moving more like the zesty chipotle, the flaky oregano, rushing out of their jars in great dollops and clumps.
Tonight, I decided I hadn’t used my extra hour yet and took a bath. Winning at daylight savings, and feeling grateful.
11/4/19
~30 days of gratitude~ day 4
By day four of the gratitude month, gratitude starts to become the predominant lens through which I view my day. It becomes easier to really taste the layers of flavor in that gulp of coffee rather than just pour it down the hatch. It is a joy to be able to take the overflowing compost container outside to the pile before work, because the daylight has shifted to the before-work segment of the day. Seeing memories pop up about “cracking the homework whip” just one year ago makes the progress I’m seeing in my kid seem even more sweet, having retired my whip some time ago. A Roy Orbison serenade and a wood stove fire started out my Monday just right, and it has stayed right all day. Before and after work hugs are bookends to contain my internal pages, regulate my breathing, keep my overthinking in check. The boy has decided on a night off from homework after a long day of testing, and is diving into the next book after Ender’s Game. The man is sipping whiskey and reclining. The kitties are basking in the glow of the wood stove. And I am playing with words, one of my favorite things to do.
11/5/19
~30 days of gratitude~ day 5
Quinn and I drove to school, gray sweatshirts the unanimous clothing choice of the gray dawn commute. He was probably imagining his into a flash suit, deeply engrossed in Ender’s world. I was imagining the silver-gray Arctic cod I would be measuring all morning. As I pulled into work, the sun was partially obscured behind the sleek blue-gray clouds, like the still-sleeping eye of a great blue whale, buoyed along on a slim layer of pink krill. Before I could park, the whale had plunged below the surface, taking the krill with it, and all was back to gray and smooth and placid.
I am usually more of a rainbow type of gal than an appreciator of gray, but as I look around for ways to be thankful for what is, my appreciation of this subtle hue family grows. The photo I did get (not the sky whale) was from the afternoon; still gray, but I notice there is usually some silver, gold, or even pink hiding along the edges of the grays, whether in muted skyscapes or the flashing sides of tiny fish, and so much texture and nuance. I think it is a worthy cause, this consideration of the gray areas. Today I am grateful for new perspectives.
11/6/19
~30 days of gratitude~ day 6
I learned that the monarch butterflies on their overwintering grounds are called The Souls.
A soul cannot be assigned to an organ system or even to the body at all, though it seems to be tied to it by the most infinitesimally thin heartstring.
You can’t point at your soul, but you can feel a tug on the string every so often. Like when I walked into the break room at work earlier this week to find a pile of donated Halloween candy on the table, m&ms and milky ways. My Nana, who died when I was 4, always had m&ms and milky ways for my older brother and I to choose from (he usually chose a milky way and I usually chose m&ms) when we would visit. Tug tug. This time I chose a milky way.
She is always with me, within me like rings of a tree, like if you look at us in cross section, each of us might be made of concentric circles holding inside the generations that have come before.
You can’t really point at gratitude either, but you can feel it. I spend November blabbing all about it, trying to point at it with words, but they are approximations at best (still, a worthy pastime that keeps me out of trouble). The more I contemplate it, what it is and what it means, the less it is about each discrete item I’m thankful for, and the more it is an awareness of being swaddled in a blanket of blessings, a coating of live butterflies surrounding my tree, encrusting its bark with all the joy of flight, the hope of survival through another winter, the optimism with which I look at the next generational ring growing outward from me, and from the source that is also my source.
we visited baby pancake w and quinn was great with her. she woke up from a nap sooner than expected and i had handed her over to him but she had started fussing in his arms, so i went to reach out and take her back thinking he might be worried or uncomfortable with her being fussy. he said, “no, just hand me her binky.” and the cutest ever mini-me moment of her falling asleep on him followed. he really is my son. he puts babies to sleep, and likes to read in the bathtub.
then he was so sleepy from having her sleep on him (it overcame him instantly) he was yawning and asked me to put something by his head for a pillow.
green home tour
At spring conferences, just about every teacher said a version of, “i just love the way his mind works/i am fascinated by the way he thinks/i love his mind/he has a great mind.” Also in the mix were “has such unique perspectives/i look forward to hearing the things he will say/he is one of the only students who gets all of my jokes.” The overall conference experience seemed to speak to the teachers’ recognition of an amazing amount of growth and adaptation to middle school for quinn.
quinn encountered some opportunities for growth in asserting himself this month. At the prospect of not being allowed to play his instrument and march in the parade due to a uniform shortage, he let his teacher know where he stood. He negotiated a deal in which he only marched if he got to play, which meant he would only march in the second of the two parades, but would also not have to march while carrying a banner instead of playing. I was pretty frustrated with him being excluded from playing, but opted to try to model making the best of a bad situation for quinn by volunteering for the band boosters, instead of encouraging him to stop going to rehearsals or quitting the band. On the side, however, rich got to hear quite a few rants about how kids join band so they don’t have to be cut from the team! I feel it is important for quinn that i find a way to support him continuing with band, as i heard him telling colleagues that band is his favorite subject in school (with math being his favorite subject at home, apparently. Oh the things i learn when listening to conversations he has with other adults!)
quinn did well using the days off for conferences to catch up on travel hacking assignments. It can take him a long time to do them but he is coming along. one assignment was 10 questions about a chosen “underrated” travel location (chosen from a list). he picked western australia “because penguin island is right off the coast of western australia!” and he had answered all but one question when i checked on him- but it was question 5 (not 10!! not the last one! he skipped ahead and answered 6-10! a tiny but significant success!) and he said to me, “i’ve read 15 articles to answer this question!” then wrote his answer. the question was “what do australians think of americans?” and his answer (after reading 15 articles) was the one sentence, “Australians like us as individuals, but they don’t know what to make of us as a whole.”
and if i wasn’t hung up on “maybe more than one sentence would be good”, i would be able to pay more attention to how succinct an answer that is about how citizens of other countries often feel about americans. the thing is, he learned and summarized and synthesized information from 15 articles and i just don’t know how apparent that is to teachers from just the one sentence.
Going down the google rabbit hole is a major reason his classwork often doesn’t get done – it is hard for him to regulate browsing and manage his time simultaneously (each is a difficult executive function skill on its own, so the pair of skills is difficult squared), because there is more to learn everywhere you turn on the internet!
he has been spending more time on duolingo working on his italian!
~more cowbell~
books
we finished listening to moon over manifest which was written by the same author as navigating early which we adored last month (clare vanderpool is the author). this one was awesome, too. i like when quinn listens ahead, then he listens to whatever part i’m on and says “‘you have to hear this part!” it reveals parts he really liked or thought were intense or wants me to also pay close attention to.
I’ve been reading born on a blue day by daniel tammet, which i learned about in the authors note in navigating early. it has me almost in tears in parts that read so much like quinn. The author so eloquently described how social situations are hard for someone with asperger’s, how teachers would see him as spacing out when he was engaged in other thinking. he even talks about difficulties riding bikes and swimming, and uncoordinated walking because of looking at his feet. i still sometimes waffle back to my stance of quinn maybe being an aspie with a bunch of neurotypical quirks from having a quirky mama, rather than the other way around. In the first chapter he describes his extreme number-color synesthesia. prompted by a paragraph about “showing work” in math and how in his brain there wasn’t “work,” there was an answer, and how he struggled to follow the “carry the one” rules the teacher wanted him to use, quinn said, “i bet he had trouble in school.”
when quinn got home one friday i had finished adding legs to his lego table (grateful my husband helped me with this project; much lego activity ensued) and i had also added a new extra green shelf to his room. he was all ready to put his whole life of fred series of books in one place, in order, on said shelf, filling the rest with finished lego creations. he has been reading one of his birthday books called elements about the periodic table. the writing is hilarious, a little rick riordan-esque, and he is memorizing lines. he was reading aloud to me about how most metals are a dull gray in elemental form, and that there are only 3 metals that are non-gray: gold, copper and cesium. gold is nice but expensive, so a lot of people make jewelry out of copper because it is also not gray and much cheaper than gold. As far as the third option, “the main disadvantage of cesium as a metal for making jewelry is that it explodes on contact with skin.” he started giggling like crazy. he woke up the next morning quoting it to me, and laughed all over again. he is also reading the stars beneath our feet (a novel about a 12 year old boy in harlem; we heard about it when signing him up for summer TAG program and although he did not want to take the book discussion class, he did want me to check the book out of the library so he could read it). and of course, he is still reading calculus when the mood strikes. i impulse-bought him chess mathematics which is a chess math puzzle book, which i didn’t know to google until i read about a chess math puzzle in born on a blue day. he hasn’t picked that up yet but i know he will soon – still strewing like an unschooler over here. he has also been re-reading percy jackson’s greek heroes.
since he was doing state testing for two weeks out of this month, it was nice to see him want to come home and learn/read/absorb. he seems to have percolated on state testing and decided to go ahead and do it, with no fanfare and no fuss.
School vs learning
There was a post in my raising poppies group from a mom who was wondering how we keep our poppies’ learning lights from being dimmed by the damage public school can do, and described how her son’s had been so dampened in a year. I am ever watchful for this while quinn is in public school, and it is the thing that would cause me to go back into battle with his dad to fight to home school. It was good for me to reflect on how quinn has been able to, i don’t know how, draw a very big distinction between what is Learning and what is School. School he tolerates and likes for social reasons, and for being able to play in Band. Learning is what he is always doing (and loves, and thirsts for, in fact he seems driven more by this than by food or water!), and if you ask him where he learns best, he will say at home. He is double accelerated in School math (doing algebra) and comes home and grudgingly does the homework assignment so that he can go read his Life of Fred calculus book. It seems particular to his personality to be able to keep his light burning in spite of how school circumstances can sometimes seem bent on dimming it. I am thankful for the bright spots in his schooling, such as the teachers who recognize his wonderful mind, who do what they can to encourage his light to continue to shine brightly.
mother’s day brunch
May-whelm
Looking ahead to summer, quinn is getting excited for paleontology camp, theatre camp, and tag adventures in learning. I also spoke with a karate mom friend about working with him one on one for swim lessons. I have stopped saying “yet” attached to “he doesn’t ride a bike” this year, he simply doesn’t ride a bike and it is well with my soul. But by golly, the lad will swim.
May is 42 kinds of busy with school, marching band rehearsals, karate classes, as well as thinking ahead and signing up for all of what the summer will bring. One day i wrote, “may is overwhelm month. tonight we had papa murphy’s (take and bake pizza) for dinner. tomorrow probably nachos.”
Quinn also found may to be overwhelming on at least one occasion. he had a momentary bout of resenting activities because of not having enough spare time. he said he doesn’t understand why other kids don’t feel this way and are all about the activities and don’t need down time, and i told him it was good to know this about himself. We had a good discussion about honoring that need, prioritizing goals, finding balance, all things i want him to be reflecting on regularly.
a butterfly wing topped by a star.
