On Change, and the Gradual Nature of Arrival

I wrote "Arrivals" almost eight years ago, and have thought of the day my son was born every year since, on the week of his birthday.

 

http://awelvers.blogspot.com/2010/09/arrivals.html?m=0

Most of these nine years have been characterized by a necessary fierce independence. It gave me the power of strength, at times when strength was called for the most, and at other times created a wall which isolated me from those who did not have a similar life experience.

This year has been one of intense change. I have learned much about the strength one can derive from leaning on others, even strangers. I have learned that independence is important, but sharing pain and struggles can create a web of connection that is ten times as strong as any wall.

I have learned that difference of opinion does not prevent kinship and community. And Langston, my precious boy, whose steps I watch still with fear and worry, I have learned to let him fall, to let him fail, and learned to listen to his own requests for independence, as hard as that is to hear. Finally - hardest and most terrifying of all - I learned to let him love and look up to Rob, to know that I am not the only center of his world any more, and that is good and right.

Once, I was proud to hold his little hand, to be the reason he is. Now, I grow prouder and prouder to let him go, in small ways, away from me towards his own destinations. 

 

 

All Rhoads Lead to Art

It started with the one in the Museum of Science in Boston, the one called Archimedean Excogitation.  We could have stayed there for hours. Langston studied the balls, rolling down tracks, dancing over xylophone keys, falling into the fork of a mill to be pulled up, up, up.  Langston has always been fascinated with chain reactions. I remember his love of the water cycle model at the Children’s Museum of New Hampshire in Dover. There, you turn a crank and this apparatus allows balls that represent drops of water to be lifted up, rolling down a Rhoads-ian track to collect in several places. A push of a button and the “precipitation” is released, balls ricocheting down plexiglass panels to accumulate at the bottom of a ramp.  Every science museum has some display of the physics of Rube Goldberg-type contraptions and chain reactions, and it is to these places we are drawn, always.

When I asked Langston about his favorite part of our Boston adventure, which included a hotel stay, a trip to Legoland and the New England Aquarium, and more, he describes the George Rhoads sculpture as one of the greatest highlights.  Looking up Rhoads online, I learned that he has made some two dozen kinetic sculptures, flung across the globe from Japan to Spain to Oklahoma. And two are in Massachusetts, so of course, I thought the perfect rainy day plan would be to visit the second one.

We planned our trip, but one thing or another always got in the way. Then, one perfectly overcast day this spring break, we hopped in the car and drove to Logan Airport to see George Rhoads’s Exercise in Fugality. None of the airport maps indicated where the art piece was to be found, so we looked it up online and learned that it was down on the arrival level of Terminal E.

If I were the administrator responsible for placing and maintaining Rhoads’s creation, it would have been placed in the middle of departures, something to walk around, to marvel at, to get lost in as we do with a good book, endangering our punctuality, so precious in transit.

Instead, it is tucked away against a wall, behind a luggage carousel, no curious arriving travelers willing to expend a last ounce of energy circling the glass which encases its moving parts as my son did that day, noting the infinity of travel it houses.

And it was broken.

There was a little plaque on the side of the glass with a number to call in case of malfunction. I dialed it immediately, to hear a bored and indifferent male voice tell me he would “send one of my guys down when I can.” During the half hour or so that we lingered, he didn’t. 

The disappointment did not dampen my son’s fascination with the sculpture, however. For minutes, he walked around the large glass cube, following an imaginary ball on the paths it could take through wire tracks, down ramps, up pulley-drawn hooks. Rain pelted the windows and I watched him through glass, watched his intellect dissect the structure and its possibilities.

I thought of my students, and their similar processes in play, how they build things that break and fail, and then try again. The other day a kindergarten girl made a spinning propeller, with one long rectangular block placed atop of a pile of shorter, differently-sized one. “Can you video this?” she asked me, getting ready to launch the propeller’s precarious spin. I wished now that I had.

I don’t know what chain reactions my son’s mind will invent. I do know however, that I would make a pilgrimage with him to visit every one of George Rhoads’s sculpture, if he wished it, if time and resources allowed it. His fascination is fuel for invention, for creativity, and in the movement of the objects and events of his life, it will allow him to connect with people, which is the greatest challenge of all.

Langston asked to go back to the airport “tomorrow,” and sadly, I told him it was unlikely that the sculpture would be repaired by then. We will write a letter. But in the meantime, we have sculptures of our own to invent.

Y'all sound stupid. Literally. Dislike.

Or, Things People Should Stop Saying

Literally: If you'd like to put some emphasis into your statement, trying saying "genuinely." More often than not, that's what you're going for.

Y'all: It doesn't make you sound cute, country, and cuddly. It makes you sound uneducated.

Any verb without noun or object, as a statement of strong emotion: I know this is a by-product of social media responses, but again, it reads as lazy. Whatever happened to the lessons we learned with Schoolhouse Rock? Love. Need. Want. Dislike. How much effort is really required to write, "I love what you wrote. I need this pair of shoes/mug with my favorite rock star on it/t-shirt, I dislike that bullying is so commonplace"?

So, in the interest of becoming the articulate people we once were, let's re-visit the wise words of Mr. Morton's narrator. Mr. Morton is the subject of the sentence, and what the predicate says, he does.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdUXxdmhIsw

"Pain and Beauty, Our Constant Bedfellows." - N.B.

I have not written a blog entry in a year. This is irrelevant. There have been moments, when the beauty or pain of being* has awakened some hackneyed narrator, emitting a phrase, an observation, some appeal to - something, and I have been without a pen, a notebook, a thing to pause and use in order to be in words.

Moments ago:

I was looking over the images of the school week, mapping experiences in my mind, when Langston escaped from his required expectations of slumber to hand me something which must have drifted to the floor when I moved things around on the bulletin board in his room. "I found this," he said, handing a slip of paper to me, turning and striding back to the moon and the soft Easter bunny he sleeps with.

It was a ticket stub from our first movie together - the first one we saw in a theater - and I was transported.  The date reads 01/23/16. I'm sure I pinned it to the bulletin board in a thoughtless way. Yet that date will have such weight with me now, now that I think of the courage it must taken my son to walk into such a massive space, to perch in the maw of a cinema chair, all for the love of a new Star Wars.

We'd seen commercials of course, and through coloring books and the overheard conversations of peers, he knew the names of characters well: BB-8. Rey. Finn. And so on.

And though I knew that there were sensory friendly showings of most films locally, on the date it was available, there was snow, and night, and unlike my boy, I was not brave.

Langston made it through about 40 minutes of the film. He took it in, and I'll never know the full story of his impressions, but later he would list all of our movie outings as he does our adventures in plain but precise detail. If it was hard to manage lights flashing, explosions blasting, quick dialogue and a flurry of movement, he does not say.

Do you remember E.T.? I remember reading how Spielberg put his camera down low, so we'd see things from E.T.'s height, from the physical point of view of a child. The past seven years, my world has been filtered through this lens. Before Langston was born, I always knew that when I had a child, I would stare at mine with such fascination, like following light through a prism.

Having my kid, one of our kids of the future, has presented me with an awareness of the mass of sensory information that we mere neuro-typicals could never, ever begin to map with our puny, typical brains.  The other evening, he was humming a harmony to something, punctuated by a /zh/. I knew this song, and it took me a minute to realize, "Are you singing the song of my printer?" "Yes."

I have worked hard to make a home where my son and I hold full, long, giggly, fascinated conversations. Sometimes I wonder, not a little self-righteously, how many harmonies other humans would hear if they took fewer selfies and read a book more often than they read a meme. (I do all those things too, admittedly, though in moderation. I hope.)  I am proud of my son's innate visual-spatial talents, and doubly proud of his hard-earned academic and social skills.  The thing I wonder most, staring at the scrap of a movie ticket, is if I hadn't worked so hard, if I hadn't begged for every last bit of advice from OT's and special educator friends, would my child have wandered out of his room to politely hand me this souvenir?  Would he ask if I'm okay when I groan about being sore after I run? Would he take as much delight in this, our favorite of all Jack Handey lines?:

"The crow seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw."

Here's a thought: instead of posting a picture of a waterfall with the words "Be present" in front of it in some bastardized typeface, find time to study the things that interest you the most, things that are the hardest, the most beautiful, and the most painful.

Don't use a quote. Write your own things, as saccharine, disorganized and blathering as the above.

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*in my cups

Because we are food for worms, lads.

This entry will begin without a proper introduction.

I remember my first year here, the panic attacks that took me to the emergency room a few times, and the fears for my son, whose health and growth seemed to be tenuous, as I grappled to nurture my child, in a maelstrom of worry and insecurity.  The funny thing is, the second time I went to the emergency room, a security guard smiled as he opened the door for me - it was the father of one of my students. And the receptionist who checked us in said immediately, "You're Langston's mom, right?" And it turns out, her daughter was in Langston's day care class. I should have known then that I was home.

I recently commented to a friend that I was inclined to make an unwise decision to enjoy his company. What a silly pretension, when it was the tendency* to incline towards foolishness which led me to New Hampshire in the first place.**

We all know Robin Williams' sincere, whispery inspirations from Dead Poets' Society, and I'm sure a collection of odious memes out there distill his heartfelt performance into fortune-cookie-sized deep-thoughts images on the Internets.

Last week, as I wrestled with a new health-related fear, it made me think two things. First, how different my circumstances are presently from my early Newmarket days, and second, that measuring one's enjoyment of present pleasures against some cultural norms of what is wise, expected, and culturally or socially appropriate is just plain stupid. We are food for worms, and damn it, I will enjoy what I want the most.
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* I first spelled tendency as ten-dancy. Because if you have a tendency, you should dance in its direction. Ten times. Which just made me look up whether there is a word like twice and thrice for ten times. There isn't, but if there was, shouldn't it be dice?

**Well, that, and a teaching job.

Langston cracks jokes now. I mean, I suppose he always has, but these recent jokes are surprising, and original, in his special Langston way. Every day, at day care, they begin meals with a "Bon Appetit, it's time to eat."  And while I'm not sure if they regularly cue friends with a "1-2-3..." beforehand to recite this in unison, I was told by one of L.'s teachers recently that after she jokingly inserted "Pickle!" instead of the usual chorus of "Bon Appetit," Langston divined his own invention, "1....2....3....SAND CASTLE!" he announced one day, riffing in his own way on the pickle joke.

Another time, Langston made some comment about diapers, that I didn't quite make out initially. I was surprised to hear him mention diapers, as he hasn't worn them in ages. "Whaaat?" I intoned, a la, "Say WHAAAT?" minus the "say" part. Now, Langston repeats the the scene, complete with my incredulous, "Whaaaat?" and he bows in laughter, over and over, until I declare that our enjoyment of the bit must, sadly, be all done.

His expressions of love have also increased. He loves greeting people, hugging them firmly, and has more and more frequent reminders: "I love you, Mommy."  Apparently the other day he told a little girl in his preschool class, "Love you?" and she told the teacher right away, astonished, "He just said he LOVES ME!"

Oh, Langston.