seeing the future

These are days when there’s breakfast to make, there’s dance classes, there’s pneumonia. We detail a schedule around parent-teacher conferences and martial arts and Girl Scout cookie sales meetings and the violin lesson. There’s the dinner routine and did-you-wash-your-hands and the homework that needs to be done and what note do I need to sign? and you need to take a bath. None of it was unimaginable. All of it is a surprise. It’s frantic tied up in busy intersecting with the job and the bills and the sprinkler system and the sound that the car is still making. We wouldn’t have it another way, but it’s still tiring and some days you wonder if it is supposed to be easier; couldn’t it be easier? When will it get easier?

I then think about ten years from now. I’ll come home. It will be quiet — no homework at the table or arguing upstairs or violin being practiced. In ten years — only ten years — they’ll both be away, I imagine studying in dormitories or walking across a campus or boiling water to stew noodles in. And here at home it will be quiet, two forks independently clanging against plates holding meals that had to be prepared for two instead of four. How was your day? followed by answers not about the school lunch or the kid who has lice or the spelling test, but about the far less interesting. It will be pleasant, nice, quiet, restful, and at least a little bit empty.

the cover of Rolling Stone

When I was much younger I used to interview myself. Actually, I was being interviewed by someone else, but since the someone else wasn’t actually present, my 12-year-old self had to fill in and play both the roll of the interviewer and “me.” “Me,” in such instances, was often a point guard for a basketball team or part of a famous rock band. I was practicing for a day in the future when I’d be faced with the tough questions, the public scrutiny, the burden of fame.

I haven’t really had to shoulder such burdens. I guess the ultimate dream is still to make the cover or Rolling Stone, but it’s not really disappointing nor surprising to not end up in such a place. There are other possibilities, still a bit too much to hope for, but maybe more realistic. Take the science section of the New York Times, for example. Any piece will do, but this one in particular (with the accompanying video) is now my very favorite.

This comes out tomorrow morning, I think. And I even think that I didn’t get misquoted or, worse, correctly quoted for saying something completely wrong. A couple of lines, some help with the video alongside (which is really very well done) and the text within, and my name. It’s incredibly fun to see your own name in the font named after that paper; almost as fun as to be described as “a physics professor . . . who broke away from his teaching duties” to watch the aerialists. It turned out, after hearing and reading the science writer explain this, that I was spending the afternoon teaching after all. It got learned, and spit out again into newsprint. Not quite the cover of Rolling Stone, but almost, at least for a boy like me.

worry

It’s strangely easy to worry about pneumonia. You know exactly what to fear, what the outcome could be. You know what to hope for and what to worry about. When it’s your ten-year-old, you know what not to say out loud, what to try not to even think. She will get better, or she won’t. And while it was always most likely that she would get better, the knowledge of the alternative is too much to bear. Easy to worry about, because the hope and the fear is so clear. We focus on the hospital visits and the x-rays and prescriptions and care, and things like vacuuming and grading and appointments and bathing are set aside. That’s what I mean when I say it’s easy to worry about pneumonia. It has all our attention, and everything else can get ignored.

And she did get better, eventually. The burden of the real worry is off our shoulders. That’s better, easier than the worrying, of course.

But now I get to think of the other things to worry about. I suppose the capacity to worry is an internal reservoir that will always be ready to be filled with something. The somethings aren’t usually important, and pneumonia does a good job of reminding me of that. They still need to be done, though.

Recently, in sharp contrast to a life-or-death worry, I’ve been fretting over replacing a phone whose time has come, whose battery doesn’t charge, whose capacity to do things is less than what I’ve wanted. I carry around with me a phone, an iPod Touch, and usually a leather bound journal. It’s interesting how with each improvement to my organization with some new device I also have this extra clutter. The exception to this is probably the journal, where I jot down little pieces of everything from meeting notes to lists of things to pick up at the store to brainstorming. I recently lost it — I still don’t really know where I left it, except that it was turned in a few days later at the lost and found of our science lab. So, apparently, it was somewhere in the science lab, but it still could have been anywhere there. I’d had this fear that there was something written in that notebook that I’d lost forever and would never get back, a genius idea or beginning of a project that would never see the light of day. It turns out, now that I have the journal safely back in my hands, that all those notes were amazingly inconsequential. Maybe there’s one page in there that’s worth something. Besides that there are a few receipts that will get me reimbursed for some batteries I bought at the hardware store.

The worry that I’ve faced with the new phone investigation is that I want the phone to also be the thing that hosts my to do lists, email, calculator, random note taker — all the things that my iPod currently does so well for me. So the problem? The worry? Well, it’s a new device, a different operating system. So I’ve spent countless time investigating different software options that will work on the device and the computer and my idiosyncrasies to replace my current system. In other words: my current, most tedious “to do” is to find a replacement “to do” task management system. Yes, I actually worry about these kinds of things. How to organize my time to find a software and hardware system to organize my time? Maybe it’s a break from worrying about pneumonia, or maybe it’s a way to ignore other things to worry about. Or, maybe, I’m so discombobulated that I’ve reached this point.

These are the things that are hard to worry about. They aren’t as important as pneumonia, obviously, and that’s exactly part of what makes them hard to worry about. When the options aren’t life-or-death, but how to best make sense of stupid details, and which stupid details to consider when finding the right stupid-detail-organizing software . . . well, it’s all ridiculously stupid. And that’s what I finally concluded. I took a deep breath. I realized that I didn’t need a synchronized list of to-do items in my pocket every moment. They’ll be sitting on my desk. If I think of another one — inevitable — I’ll jot myself a note and set it aside. Or I’ll email it to myself, or call myself, or record a voice memo, or . . . Well, that’s a new worry. Maybe I should dump the handheld electronic device entirely and just make that leather journal a little more valuable.

images

I have a guilty love for imagery and metaphor. I say “guilty” because I know, or at least believe, that in this teaching gig I can’t simply give students my own images, metaphors, analogies. They have to create them on their own, rather than the hand-me-down-jacket kind of images that I give out and feel so clever about even before I’ve finished the sentence. Today I was telling students how I mark their papers and suggesting that my marks and comments were like a jazz improv, a Miles Davis muted trumpet that gets to skat on top of the piano comp they lay down; the small check marks are me just nodding my head or standing aside in the shadows, smoking, but still engaged. They looked at me. My English colleague was impressed, though, and that was good enough to be happy with the image.

Images are most impressive when they don’t have to be described, when they are just there. Of course, someone has to frame the image, expose it, capture it. This is my fascination with Karyn’s work. It’s not like there aren’t other people who are in the same situations and with cameras, but she knows what to look for and what to do. Similarly, this morning, Backpacker Magazine sent me notice of their award winning photos for the year. This one was my favorite:

I dont’ even have to tell you what I like about this image. You already know. You see it too. That’s the beauty of the image.

Yesterday, Trouble sent me this image from a few years ago:

Maybe I have to tell you a little more about this one, but not much. It would be helpful to know that the woman up front, whom we’ll just call “Dr. Smith,” is teaching about 200 other academics how to line dance. Why? Because we asked Dr. Smith to do this, because we told them all to stand up. Included in the group is my doctoral advisor, co-authors, academics I’ve cited, and individuals who reform education and scholarship on international levels. I’m in there, somewhere. And we said “clap” or “step to the right” and they did. Receiving the photo, the memory, the image, did me more good than any other 20kB attachment I could imagine. It reminds me of past fun, accomplishments, and friends. Equally important, it reminds me that extraordinary results come from simple directives and a little gumption. Step to the right, watch Dr. Smith, and smile for the camera so that I can remember this image.

on learning

For Christmas this year I was surprised by the girls with a beautiful new guitar. I picked up guitar for about 10 minutes in college when I realized that I couldn’t fit a piano in a dorm room. That was a useful semester, and I came along with it pretty well, years of piano and understandings of chord progressions under my belt for background. The guitar and lessons themselves, though, were “classical,” both in form and function. A classical guitar has a wider neck than the more standard folk guitar. It also sported nylon strings, so it had a decidedly different sound than its more popular counterpart. I also didn’t invest too terribly much money into it — I was a college sophomore — and I’ve not so secretly always wanted to upgrade it. It’s been close to 20 years.

When I practice or play (whichever you’d like to call it), especially for the first week, my fingers would look raw, indented from the thin, tight steel strings. I’d show Karyn the deep wounds in my fingertips that produced blisters later replaced by irregular callouses. She looked at these as injuries, but I was proud and delighted by this evidence of progress, a reward for exertion. My fingers are not only remembering chord transitions, but they are actually building themselves up for this kind of work. Both body and mind are, side by side, building up an ability to play. Each day I can play a little longer and with a little less pain. It’s fantastic progress, and the thick pads on my fingertips are not just some kind of defense, but an indisputable chart of my practice record.

In my job, I try to evaluate and conceptualize learning on many levels. On Friday, I went from trying to guess what faculty need to learn about their own teaching, to a discussion of how our undergraduates view the evaluation of peers in physics labs, to a seminar on how researchers frame the act of “science” while they’re doing their scientific research. It’s all fairly cloudy, abstract, and interesting. Sometimes, even for me, it just gets tiring. I go to Anna’s ballet class and observe other orientations to learning. The instructor says things like “don’t cheat your fifth,” and I spiral into this contemplation about what this means, and how the discourse of a 10-year-old’s dance class describes the epistemological underpinnings of dance. I watch the freestyle aerial skiers in their practice, and I’m just as riveted wondering how they are thinking, mid-air and mid-stunt, as I am with the physics of the sport of it all. I preach, for lack of a better word, to science teaching students about how to direct a curriculum towards higher order goals that lead to a society that is “open, decent, and vital” (in the words of Project2061).

I am loving the guitar first because it’s fun to play a guitar. It comes quickly, in part because I know a little about music in the first place, but mostly because I’m starting at such a remedial place.* This kind of learning, one chord and one callous at a time, is fulfilling because it’s a simple accumulation of skills. In fact, I could continue writing here, working on a university description for the meaning of “scientific inquiry” or reading Our Underachieving Colleges as part of my work, or even start to design the workshop I’m giving for 90 middle school teachers on Tuesday. But there’s the guitar, with the six, sharp, tight strings that will dig into my flesh; I’ll choose that over all the other tasks right now.

_____

*So remedial, in fact, that I wondered how to attach the strap that my family included as part of the guitar package. My guitar has a knob for such an attachment on the base of the guitar, but not on the neck. I went to the web and libraries of video sites to become enlightened. And I was. Just imagine the kind of information one gets when part of your search includes “strap on.” I also learned how to put my strap on — the guitar, I mean.

the octopus

Karyn told me that my sleeping is uneasy, that I imitate our dog. I have this thing where my legs will twitch; it comes and goes. But this time she said it’s different; it’s like when the dog is having a dream that he’s chasing a ball or running after a bird or something. I’m doing the same thing, moving my legs, frantically, methodically, chasing something I can’t catch.

Strangely, it’s actually reassuring to hear this.

Lately I’ve been exhausted. I haven’t been getting huge amounts of sleep, but I’ve certainly had less. Moreover, I’d been able to sleep in over the holidays, yet I still look at bloodshot eyes and a creased brow in the mirror. I don’t feel sleepy, but my body seems to feel tired, spent, wrecked. I can’t understand why, or I couldn’t understand why. Now, though, knowing that I’m running around in my bed all night long . . . well that might explain something.

But now the question is: What the fuck? Really. Who moves around so restlessly in his sleep that he gets out of bed and is still feeling like he’s ready to fall over? And why? Am I chasing a frisbee?

Before Karyn told me that I slept like our dreaming dog, I was beginning to think that either I was ill, chronically depressed, or so completely over-exerted that I couldn’t even evaluate the over-exertion. The latter actually seems the most reasonable, but:

1. It’s not like I haven’t done this (“this” to be explained below) before.
2. There are people around me who are recovering from heart surgery, taking on extra classes because of others dealing with heart surgery, or are married to me (i.e., have to deal with me, which must be more stressful than actually being me). These people work at least as hard and long and stressfully as I do. They seem fine, mostly. At least their eyes aren’t bloodshot as far as I can tell.
3. I have one of the best jobs in the world, I’m sure. And, I’m not hungry, cold, sick, or otherwise put out. I’m in pretty good shape. My biggest problem is that my shoulder hurts and, well, the sleeping-like-a-running-dog thing. In the big context, that’s not so bad.

Okay, then. So why is it that when -S walks by my office she has to ask, “You okay, there, Dr. Johnston?” It’s a happy, whimsical question, but it undoubtedly comes from the crease in my brow and a perhaps a pained look on my face. I don’t mean to make such a face, it just happens sometimes.

So here’s my running hypothesis. I think I’m a metaphorical octopus. The variety and breadth of things going on just happens to be such that I can’t think of any two things at the same time, but I have to hold on to all eight things with eight tentacles simultaneously. I really, honestly, picture myself as a slimy cephalopod, each tentacle holding onto a piece of fine china that’s otherwise bound for the floor and the resulting shattering into pieces. One plate is classes, the other a retreat I’m organizing, another a meeting I go to to fill for the person who isn’t going to work here next year so I want and need to go; there’s a fine teacup that is the consultation with the New York Times reporter which was delightfully fun; and there’s the dessert plate that is the project investigating students’ understanding of science as an institution versus science as a human endeavor and the extra seminar that we scheduled for Friday afternoon; and there’s . . . .well, frankly, there’s more. And, no, it’s not too much. But each of these things requires a different tentacle.

When I was finishing my dissertation I was also teaching, full time. It was exhausting. It was amazing. It was hard. It was so easy. I remember, so vividly, writing that last chapter. It was such a wonderful, gratifying, fulfilling “moment.” I say “moment” because it just happened. It was a short chapter, but it was a summary of the other 300 pages of that beast, and it just wrote itself. It took a second or an hour or a moment or it just became, borne out of the ether. I wrote it in a closet of an office on a makeshift desk that was really an old lab table on an old hand-me-down-piece-of-shit-computer and it was beautiful. I couldn’t do that now, honestly. I could sit there in the closet office and I would sit and stare; and not because I didn’t have the material to write or the time or the energy but because I couldn’t spare the tentacle to do the typing.

I’m starting to realize that I have to organize my days so that I can think more clearly about one thing at a time, check it off, move on. Part of the challenge is simply a part of the job, but I’ve complicated it by having two different roles; and then last Saturday I was extending my week doing another workshop for teachers. And then there’s the colleague who’s losing her job so we fill in the balance because we can’t let that plate shatter on the floor. And then there’s the other things that should be done because who else is going to do them? I need to visit the student teachers. I need to visit the schools. And I need to plan that retreat. There was an NSF grant that got submitted last Thursday. There’s other stuff with the State Office of Education to make sure is kept track of. And then there’s the classes. None of these are too much. I just am not used to having quite this many appendages. I’ll get better. I promise I’ll figure out the printing problem in the first semester lab.

I haven’t heard about England. I’m not going to ask until I have a free channel in my psyche.

This is all to say that I’ve figured out what I’m doing in my sleep. As best as I can imagine, without my consciousness taking any part in any of it, I’m not running like my dog, but instead I’m reaching out to grab those metaphorical plates falling from shelves. Each tentacle holds to each one, with zeal and some faith that those little suction cups will hold tight while I flail another tentacle to grab the proposal I need to put some work into, and perhaps there has to be a quick juggling act of another tentacle as I make sure we have a seminar series lined up. It’s all doable. People around here help me grab some of these falling objects or sweep up pieces. (Thanks.) And, it is strangely comforting to imagine that my dreamless sleep is actually filled with some other world of being an octopus.

Or maybe a dog chasing frisbees.

to be like Jesus Christ: advice

One of the last things I should be doing right now is writing here, simply because there are other things that are on a list of “must do” and I think I now have about an hour to finish them.

They won’t get done. It’s all in an upcoming piece I’ve imagine entitling “the octopus.” But writing that is also one of the last things I should be doing right now.

My friend and colleague laments here about a myriad of things that boils down to the question of “what’s the point?” We are in an age where our big brains make so much pre-judgement and so much technological “innovation” that we essentially are exterminating ourselves from our very planet and convincing ourselves that it’s all going to be okay. People don’t pay attention to data, or don’t realize its meaning, or don’t understand it and would rather ignore it than see it as smoke on the horizon.

Like my colleague, I have to believe that education is the key. Unfortunately, we’ve been working in education for years and have yet to see the flip of the switch that would turn on some societal light bulb of realization. So it becomes undeniably and incredibly frustrating, and I, too, find myself at the bottom of that well all too often. I’d be there right now, except that once in a while you have to stay up at the top and drop a line.

So here’s my advice, my hope. We have to keep doing what we’re doing. We have to believe that people can understand. We have to believe that one person will make a difference. Maybe not the person we’re working with right now, or the next one, or the one after that, but maybe the other one. One by one, there has to be a difference we make. I have to continue to believe that; and when I don’t I hope that someone will drop me a line and pull me back up out of my own well. I don’t have too many hard and fast beliefs anymore, but I have to believe that if a whitebread logging town conservative upbringing product like me can come to think differently, it can happen for others, too. So, we need to help people become all that their undeservingly big brains allow them to be. We need to help them stay in school, learn to read, learn to calculate, learn to see the meaning of data; and at the other end maybe we’ll work to teach our congresspeople to read, to write, to calculate, to see the data. One person at a time. There’s got to be some kid in a third grade classroom who is going to be mayor someday, the Jesus or the Luke Skywalker or the Barack Obama of a generation next.

That might be too much to believe in a time of despair, though. This morning on the bus, the earbuds in my head, Bob Schneider sang the following verse from “Cap’n Kirk.” It struck me as perhaps the best model I could subscribe to when I’m huddled in a fetal position at the bottom of some dark pit. Perhaps it’s just enough to get us through: Just be like Jesus Christ. Historically (or culturally), seems like that would be a pretty good model.

I want to be like Jesus Christ
keep the party moving giving good advice
I don’t need to be no Superman
I just want to do the best I can

Amen.

connections and intersections

I got new shoes a couple of days ago on the way back from returning my mother-in-law to the airport.

This story isn’t so much about the shoes, although they’re fantastic. I’ve caught a shoe-fetish disease from my spouse, although a much milder case of it. I appreciate a new pair of laces, especially when they come with long lasting Vibram soles, and these did. That’s part of the story. See, I went in to the local outdoor shop because it’s where I got my last pair of trail* shoes, now with holes, and because it’s where some teachers at a local junior high school gave me a gift certificate, a nice token for having spent the day with students there. So, I had good reason for patronizing this business. Additionally, completing some trifecta, it was a student from last semester working there who ended up helping me with shoe selections, advice, sizing, and the like. I ended up with a pair of shoes I never would have picked up left to my own devices, but now I’m completely happy with the choice. He steered me in the direction of something that would last a long time and fit my needs. In addition, he rang me up and gave me 30% off the asking price. Grateful, I left the store with the new shoes on my feet and the old ones in the box.

The connection to this local shop, the local teachers, and the former students all meshed together just right. I’m surprised and delighted by how these kinds of intersections seem to weave themselves together in my life. But this is just the prelude to another story. I’ve learned in the last couple of days that connections to the bigger world are more likely than I used to imagine.

A couple of days ago I got an email whose subject line read, “Samanda the Panda.” I suppose that most people receiving such a thing might move the message into a spam folder or otherwise give it short shrift. I knew exactly what the subject meant, though; I just wasn’t sure how it was relevant to a medical doctor from another part of the country. Samanda is the name of a large stuffed panda doll we gave Anna when she was only one year old. Samanda also had a supporting role in a sample science research project I modeled for some students. In that piece, Anna was pictured with Samanda and a stop watch and a variety of pendulum swinging setups. The email went, in part, like so:

… I apologize in advance for inconveniencing you in any way. In my quest for anything panda for my daughter’s 2nd birthday, I came across your “Swinging Bowling Ball Pendulum” research report on the internet (very entertaining and educational). I couldn’t help but notice the beautiful stuffed panda bear, and I was wondering if you could tell me who made the panda or where you purchased the panda. Samanda the Panda seems to be the perfect size and shape! I just had to find out more about her!

Interested and entertained that a mother’s search for a stuffed panda would lead her to my Physics 101 page, I emailed back. I helped by giving a few specifics about brand and dimensions. Maybe this was the best use of my webpage to date.

Just a day before this interaction I had another, out-of-the-blue connection. It was an email from the New York Times. I didn’t think much of the email from nytimes.com at first, because I use it quite a bit in classes, interacting with a representative for our campus that sets up the subscriptions. But this email was from a reporter, one whose work I’ve read. (You probably have too, even if you didn’t know it.) That email went like this:

I’m a science writer at The New York Times, and am writing to you with a somewhat odd request.
I’m going to be in Park City next week to meet and observe an Olympic skier, a freestyle aerialist named Ryan St. Onge, for a story that I’m working on about the physics of this kind of ski jumping. As I’m a journalist, not a physicist (though I have some understanding of what’s going on) I was hoping to entice a physicist or other scientist to watch some of the jumps with me to help me better understand what’s happening.
I came across your name in an Internet search, and given that a lot of what you do is related to physics education I wondered if you might be interested and willing to come to Park City for a few hours next week. I could pay your gas and offer you lunch for your trouble.

It took a few minutes for this to sink in. At first, I thought “ooh fun” followed by “oh maybe someone else would be better for this” follow quickly by something like “holy shit it’s a New York Times science writer asking me to consult on a story!” I still thought that there were others who are more expert in these things than I am, but he did specifically look for someone in “physics education**,” and I have been to see the freestyle aerials before, for the 2002 olympics even. And, I do know enough physics to handle this. And, it will be really fun.

Lessons learned? It’s a small world; or it’s a big world but googlificated so that we can sort it all out. Or, be careful what you put on your webpage; or don’t think too hard about what you put on your webpage because you’re going to be asked about your panda and your freestyle skiing expertise. That’s a pretty fun way to interact with the world.

I’m heading to Park City on Tuesday afternoon to talk physics and skiing, and I’ll be wearing my new shoes.

____

*”Trail” shoes are worn on hiking trails, but for me they’re also worn to run to the bus stop, to bike to work, to teach classes. A friend says it’s all just part of my “affect,” and I’ll take that as a compliment.

**I think it says something that someone’s search for a person in “physics education” landed him at my virtual office door. I’m far from famous, but there’s a niche that my institution has let me carve out that isn’t found at other places in the region. Overall that’s too bad, but in this case it’s good for me.

on love

“Love” is an interesting concept to define, and this time of year makes it all the more interesting. It is both so apparent and so multifaceted that it has at the same time the characteristics of being obvious and nebulous.

I make it no secret that I try to take in at least one poem each day, something that’s made especially easy by their compactness in form. It also doesn’t hurt that they’re easily delivered right to the screen that greets me daily. Yesterday’s piece reminded me of Love and God and Christmas and how I’m unsure of how to understand any of these, but it particularly struck me because of this final piece of Anne Porter’s passage:

There’s not a single inch
Of our whole body
That the Lord does not love

To me, that seemed odd. It’s not odd in my understanding of the Lord — I don’t pretend to understand such things — but in the idea of love. Every inch of our body, you say? I can imagine marvel, appreciate, and ponder all as good verbs for how I might consider the hard, dry skin on my elbow. But “love?” I might be doing a disservice to love and to my elbow to combine the two.

In all the other paragraphs, dear reader, I have edited out of this essay, there were attempts to dissect other examples of love. It led me many places. In summary: Christmas morning with a cup of coffee and pre-dawn joy is still a favorite day of the year for me. I especially love Dickens’ representation of the meaning of Christmas, more than the Book of Matthew’s, even. I think “Santa” is a gateway drug for the hardcore stuff like “Jesus,” and I think I’m okay with that most of the time because I can’t pretend to say I know any better, really. I’m excited and anxious for the traditions that lead up to Christmas morning, including a review of George Bailey’s life, Christmas Eve mass, and Chinese food for dinner, the latter a tradition we’ve long had and further solidified a few years ago when another anonymous patron bought our family’s meal and left before we knew who they were. And that, the miracle of the Chinese restaurant of ‘03, I think has made us better, more loving people. There may be something to Dickens and Bailey and the notion of paying it forward. This year, Karyn made sure a turkey, oranges, books, and $100 were delivered to a family we go to school with, a small part of a larger neighborhood project.

In all that, I was trying to sort out the meaning of “love.” I thought this would be useful in case I ever needed to write the right poem or Book of Matthew or A Christmas Carol. But, obviously, none of these really summarized or defined or even clarified the notion. And probably that’s just as it should be.

To really give me a concrete notion of love, I recall a morning at the bus stop. I watched a girl and her mom walking up the sidewalk towards my corner, traffic on the main artery of town streaming by in both directions, only pausing at the red lights of the intersection where I stood waiting for my ride. As the girl approached the corner to cross the less busy intersecting street, the mom stayed back. She stood like a lighthouse on the far shore while the girl crossed the street to the corner where the school crossing guard was waiting. Then, with him, the 9-year-old girl crossed the fives lanes of the boulevard that could just as easily been the Atlantic. All traffic halted for the black man in the orange vest with the red sign as they made their way from the continent of one curb to the other. All the while, the mom watched on as her daughter crossed this sea, watching her go and seeing her along, but from the opposite street corner. And then, as the girl continued to walk the next two blocks up the hill, the mother continued to watch on, seeing the small figure become smaller and smaller. Mom tilted her head and peered up through trees and around street signs as the daughter made her independent travel up and away. I lost track of the girl, but the mom could still see her (or imagined she could) as the journey continued to the bricks and mortar of the elementary school.

The whole time I watched the mom and I thought that there was a parable for love. It didn’t end with a spark or a celebration, but a calm surveillance from afar. We watch our loved ones leave, but we keep them in our gaze, in our thoughts, wishing them well and wishing they’d stay but pushing them across the street. Half a block beyond the intersection, the girl suddenly stopped, turned and waved to her mother, sending love back across the ocean.

So there’s charity and salvation and fondness in love, but maybe its most profound form is its simplest act: Walking with your child but also letting go of her hand. Letting her walk the rest of the way, but watching to see that she makes it. Or maybe just watching to share in the experience for that one more moment. I’ve been fortunate that others have held my hand but also pushed me out the door; they’ve let me run forward but opened the door when I’ve come back. And they think of me, maybe even waving from the other side of the Atlantic, as I wave back.

the Christmas letter and the truth

The annual tradition of the holiday letter is one that we hold to. Well, sometimes. Each year it’s a little different, but in general K. take pictures of the girls, we pick out a few that make sense and look good for a card. Maybe there’s a theme somewhere — last year G. was screaming in one of the photos, but it looked like she was laughing hysterically while her sister looked with adoration. This got captioned “love and joy.” After we sent out cards out, a few days later we received the C’s card that proclaimed, “peace, love, and joy.” Damn it; we forgot the peace. The C’s had to trump us with “peace.” We secretly hated them, but only because their card was beautiful with beautiful children and beautiful sentiment. Peace — how could we have forgotten?

2008 photoshoot

Anyway, usually there’s a letter or some kind of summary of the kind of year we had. Last year and the year before, we started creating short descriptions of each of us and what had happened over the past year. Other years we did newsletters or photo narratives. This year, for whatever reason, we only sent a photo card. No letter, no summaries, just “happy holidays,” “peace and love” (no “joy” this year — we’re mixing it up), here’s a nice 4×8 card for your wall with our beautiful children. “We didn’t want to bother you with yet another narcissistic form of communication,” is one way of interpreting this. “We were too busy,” is another interpretation. The most truthful, though, is probably, “We were going to, but when it came time to actually try to summarize the year, it was harder than we thought.”

The problem is this: It’s hard to tell the truth in a Christmas letter. I don’t mean that we are naturally apt to lie; it’s hard to really explain the essence of a family and a year. We see no shortage of holiday letters, including my own parents’, listing events, travels, and endeavors. We look forward to a lot of these, but many end up leaving us with no real meaning. It’s sometimes no different than reading the newsletter from the milkman or the real estate agent. How do we get real meaning, truth, out of the one page newsletter?

Now that my grades are turned in, the semester has been put to rest, and the main agenda item for the day is to have the car people check the funny sound that our brakes make, I can reconsider how a true year-end narrative could be composed. One version would go like this:

We’ve been drinking more this year than we used to. A. turned 10 just the other day, and when I mentioned that it would only be 9 years — less than that now, actually — before she left for college, her mother burst into tears. It didn’t help that G. had just had her heart broken a few days before by a 7-year-old boy who tossed aside a card she’d made for him, but we’re sure in the long run this will be good training for life’s long string of disappointments. Better than what she’ll have to face when she grows up, we suppose. I, for example, spent much of the summer wondering if I was dying, when in fact it was probably some combination of stomach acid, an injured shoulder, and anxiety over budgets and new assignments and health. I think I was overly influenced by the real mess-up of our family, my wife, K., who managed to get diagnosed with glaucoma and have two surgeries on the same eye in the window of about a month. She looked terrible with that patch — the children were afraid of her — and she felt worse than she looked. But, we all got a kick out of watching her trying to spoon soup into her mouth with only one eye and no depth perception. We laughed because it was better than imagining what was going to happen next.

Fortunately, we have family to support us. Well, no, strike that. Fortunately, K. & I are able to compare our mothers to see which extreme is really the most difficult, crazy, or simply unreasonable to deal with. On most days it’s a draw, but sometimes one edges out the other, although it’s only on the basis of some action that would, in a court of law, be deemed as evidence for neurosis and thus make the trial impossible to see through. Fortunately, when K. had her first surgery, we learned just how helpful it was to have family stay with us, so that for the second surgery we made sure no person a generation senior to us in our family was within the state boundary. Or any adjoining state, actually. Having one state in between, like the DMZ between North and South Korea, seems to be a good buffer on most days.

Speaking of family, many of you have probably been wondering about my epileptic autistic transgendered brother. No, we didn’t expect to string together those adjectives, either, but that’s what we have…

This could go on, but it would just get more sordid, and it would be hard to figure out where to stop. We fantasize about writing such a letter, though. The shock value alone would be immeasurable. It would also be the perfect contrast to the perfect picture painted by my own parents’ Christmas letter.

It’s funny what kind of truths we write to the people who might only hear from us once a year. We could tell you about the glaucoma and how we don’t know what’s going to happen next, or the brother who forges my dad’s signature. It’s all complicated and mysterious, and maybe these are truths we don’t tell simply because we don’t understand them ourselves. I suppose we also are afraid of letting too much truth out, either because it will then be with us, out in the open like mosquitoes we have to keep flailing at, or maybe because they’re easier to deal with when they’re neatly put away in shoeboxes under our beds. I’ve been meaning to call my brother for weeks now, but I haven’t, and maybe it’s in large part because I don’t want to face his own truths, and try to emote something from his autistic psyche.

I think we probably don’t tell these truths, though, because they don’t actually tell the whole, real truth. The other truth is that we really did laugh when K. couldn’t get the soup to her mouth, guided with her one good eye. We laugh too hard when G. farts at the dinner table. K. usually loves her new job and her students are learning to read, and that’s a really big deal. She gets to walk with the girls, two and a half blocks, to our neighborhood elementary school and they all learn there. I won a university teaching award that I’d coveted for years, and I’m proud to say I won it and a little embarrassed that it meant so much to me. G. earned a purple belt in martial arts for which we cheered and went out to ice cream. A. is getting really good at violin. Both girls love each other and pet the dog and do their homework. We love each other more than we each deserve. K. takes fewer photos, but when she does I’m still awed by the beauty in what she creates. I don’t always understand the new half of my job, and I feel disorganized with it all the time, but I’m liking it and doing things that might even be important. K. didn’t like working at the elementary school at first, feeling like she was stretching herself thin and wasting her time in a bureaucracy, but now she’s loving it and working with the kids. Most of the time. We’re happy. Most of the time. We camped in the Redwoods and played on the beach and hiked in the desert and it was all beautiful beyond words. Even when I reprimanded teenagers for throwing watermelon rinds in the national park from the side of the road, it was still all happy. We are blessed. We have food and clothes and a warm home and one another and, for the first time since before the kids were born, enough extra savings that I could look at Brandi Carlile’s concert tour, see that it intersected with Disneyland over my spring break, make a few phone calls (“only four tickets left on the balcony? then I guess we should get them) and then make the girls guess what I did. I have a really amazing job, and I think I’m doing some important work and I’m good at it. Most of the time. We’re blessed — I said that already — and even though sometimes things are really hard and this year in particular sometimes made my entire body hurt with worry, we’re doing really well. That’s the truth. Most of the time.

It’s true that G.’s heart will be broken again, but her heart is full right now. It’s true that Anna will probably leave for college in only nine years, but she’s here now. And when a heart breaks or when they leave us or when all of the rest of it happens, it will be painful and good at the same time; and that’s how it was this year. And I guess that’s the truth that the picture we sent to friends and relatives is trying to say.