Simple Tools
Dear Scriptor,
It has been three weeks at least since the last letter. There was no sudden catastrophe, no horror-story, no problem at all. Indeed, life is pretty dang good right now. But things are changing in our world, and I no longer intend to write to you all as regularly. I figured I would explain. (And no doubt explain at unneeded length, which is my wont.)
With Our Fathers
As our children’s summer birthday’s approach (including the literal day-of-birth for the fifth member of our family, more about that here), a father’s (or at least this father’s) mind trespasses into the realm of remembrance and nostalgia. I know our children are still very young, but we put Gremlin #2 in shorts and a shirt yesterday and our baby suddenly looked like a big girl, more three than not-yet-two. Meanwhile our four-year-old has made us intimately familiar with that venerable parental adage ‘She’s four, going on fourteen’.
I’m reminded of that ‘Lean In’ movement a decade ago, the ‘How to Have It All’ push for women to join the workforce more completely. The best argument against it I remember wasn’t, ‘Women shouldn’t have to work harder than men to have it all’, which was probably the loudest argument against it (at least in my circle). The best argument against it I remember was, ‘Men don’t have it all. No one can have it all, at least not at once.’ We are limited creatures, and there are seasons in life.
And that reminds me of something I’ve written about before (back in my letter “Four Happy Years”). Early in having two children, when I was flogging myself half-to-death trying to do everything, my wife talked to me about glass balls and wooden balls. This is how I described it in “Four Happy Years”:
My wife talks about glass balls and wood balls. However much we might want to juggle the wood balls, if we drop one it’s no big deal. We can just pick it up later, when we have time or energy or what-have-you. If we drop a glass ball, it’s game over. That ball’s gone. I would add a third ball-type here: the iron ball. This is the one that will not break if we drop it but it will damn well hurt. Keeping up habits is an iron ball, in our children as well as in ourselves. One can pick up the habit of putting books away after a month of letting them lie wherever the child is moved to toss them, but it’ll be a lot harder than just keeping the habit up to begin with.
I still think this is the right way to think about the world. We have glass balls, wooden ball, and iron balls. Working out and eating well, in all honesty just health generally — physical, intellectual, spiritual — are iron balls. Keeping up relationships, keeping finances together, keeping one’s deadlines and responsibilities to others, those are glass balls. (And even there, most finances are probably just — “just” — iron balls which would really, really hurt if they landed on your foot). Wooden balls are basically everything else. Though often we try to “escalate” (to use a modern piece of jargon) wooden balls to something more.
Man, O man do I want to wish I could write five hours a day. I wish I could read three hours a day. I can barely do either for more than one, though. And that being the case, I have to make fine and delicate decisions as to what I shall attend to for what time I have.
I don’t know why people say ‘You can have it all’. Maybe they’re rich and have others do for them what most of us mortals have to do for ourselves. If we had twice our income, we could pay a governess to attend to our children and I could have those hours to write and to read.
And yet, if we did — that wouldn’t give me more time but simply reallocate my time.
Watching our children grow is the ultimate glass ball. I will never get back the time I watch our not-quite-two-year-old put on her shoes for the first time, that moment when our four-year-old straps her younger sister into the carseat without us asking. If we were to hire a governess, I wouldn’t be the one reading them Mother Goose and Winnie the Pooh. I wouldn’t get to see my wife teach drawing, or practice piano, or make bracelets with them.
Something has to give, and I’m afraid it will be these letters. Not completely! But they will no longer be weekly, probably not even monthly. I’ll explain what I’m doing instead in THE SHED.
Flowerbeds
Hubert Robert (1733-1808) was a Romantic painter, noted for his semi-fantastical landscapes and his capricci. “Capricci” are architectural paintings with some fantastical element. In the first picture, we have the Louvre’s Grand Gallery, expanded and beautified. In the second picture, we have the Louvre’s Grand Gallery in ruins. Both are capricci.
These are the options that seem to lay before us. It’s arrogant in the extreme, but one of the reason I’m laying my keyboard down in these writings is because I believe my work is the work of civilization. There are others far more important in this struggle (indeed, almost everyone is), but I have a part to play. And I intend to play it without shirking.
Projet d'aménagement de la Grande Galerie du Louvre (Project from the Expansion of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre), Hubert Robert, 1796
Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre en ruines (Imaginary View of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre in Ruins), Hubert Robert, 1796
The Schoolroom
This year, I’ve written twice (here and here) about teaching our four-year-old to read. Let’s make that thrice! And then something, as Monty Python says, “completely different”.
We have abandoned the book we were using, though by that I mean no slight on the book. In all honesty, I continue to think the girl is just too young to read, but certainly the ‘lessons’ as outlined were too fast or complex for her.
I suspect it was too fast. While there was a good deal of review, as much as older children need and more than most anyone gets, I think it was simply too much for a girl who didn’t really understand how any of it worked. After she’d perfectly explained that ‘c’ says /k/, ‘a’ says /ah/, and ‘t’ says /t/, I’d ask her to ‘now put the sounds together’, and for weeks she’d say a kid version of ‘I don’t know what that means or how to do it’. And though I could demonstrate, she neither remembered it next day nor could extrapolate my demonstration of reading ‘cat’ to any attempt to say ‘mat’, though she knew the /mm/ sound just as well as any of the others.
So I dropped the book and have been running her through “her blocks” several times a week now. What that looks like is me taking out those child blocks with the letters on them and picking out ‘A’ and ‘T’. I put them together to make ‘AT’. Then I put other letters before it. I run through them several times on their own with her, and then I place them together to get her “reading” all the ‘-at’ words in a sentence like, ‘The fat rat sat at the mat next to a cat who wore a hat, and the fat rat pat the cat with a bat.’ This seems to be working, in that she’s remember each word more often and even recognizing them in books we read together (her excitement upon seeing Cat in the Hat!!!).
I got this strategy from the inestimable Charlotte Mason, whose life I continue to mean to write for you all (now a great deal further off than I originally thought). What’s striking about reading Miss Mason is that she would often prevent mistakes we as parents seem intent on making, like making our children cry because they can’t figure out ‘f’, ‘e’, ‘e’, and ‘t’ make ‘feet’.
One of her maxims, of sorts, is to deal with “living books” and “living ideas”, or, in other words, that much of the artificiality we manufacture to make things “easier” on children actually has the effect of deadening them to the world. I saw this recently.
For the same four-year-old (poor girl, the eldest, who gets all our experiments and ignorance and mistakes thrust upon her), I’ve been trying to find good Catholic podcasts for her to listen to. The one she does like has stopped publishing new episodes, and the others she could give or take. My desire here isn’t only because I want to induct her into a culture which we’ve joined but which is foreign to the rest of our family, but because she has been asking many questions which I can only half-answers. The easiest of these was ‘What’s the difference between an Apostle and a Disciple?’ Good question!
Anyway, while I was trying to find a proper podcast for her, I also looked for resources for myself so that I could answer future questions. One of those sources I went to was the Baltimore Catechism. And — lo and behold — as I was listening to it on my own while washing the dishes, I turn to find my daughter standing on her tower and sort of staring off into space. So I pause it, ready for her questions.
“Can we play the podcast more, Papa?”
“Eh… you want me to just play the Catechism?”
“What you were just paying, can we play that again?"
“… Sure.”
It’s child-sized without being childish. It mades none of the funny sounds, playful noises, sing-songy voices of the various Catholic Kids podcasts. In fact, its “production value” is rather extraordinarily low. I could do better on this computer, with my full sound recording experience being poems I’ve recorded for family and friends (and you all, the other week).
And yet that’s what she’s glommed onto. She doesn’t want or need the fancy phonics system I learnt with a fancy, “100 Million Children Taught” book. She wants to play with blocks and spell out silly sentences. She doesn’t want the fancy podcasts, she wants more Baltimore Catechism. I think I can accommodate her.
The Amphitheater
Jerry Seinfeld is getting a bunch of flak for some of the stuff in this graduation speech. But, then again, when (now especially but ever in history really) do public figures escape flak. Whatever’s “being said” about this, I found the talk clever and funny, which I suspected, but also touching and wise, which I did not.
I found it touching when he said, about giving advice to them, “I’m done”. He was saying he’s 70, and his race has been run. But he wants them to prosper and thrive. “I’m done. You’re just beginning.”
And I found his three rules for life, which I won’t spoil, wise. Nothing earth-shattering exactly. He hasn’t opened a virgin vein in philosophy which will redefine our understanding of eudaimonia, but he’s expressed what we all know (and yet always do seem to forget) well. May we remember it.
The Shed
I almost excluded this section as unnecessary, and you all may wonder why I’m so chatty in these letters. Partially it’s because that’s my nature, but partially it’s because I believe I ‘owe you’. You are all my investors, as it were. Not in money; none of you pay me (you cheapskates!). But you do give me your time, and that (as I talked about in WITH OUR FATHERS) is more precious.
You all have given me your time, and so I feel I owe you some explanation for what I am doing, what I will be doing, and why. Since the New Year, I have been taking classes with the House of Humane Letters. So far I’ve taken a Fairy Tale class, and then with several friends from that class and elsewhere we’ve been going through Northrop Frye’s Bible and Literature lectures. In August (within two months of our son’s birth!) I will start the House of Humane Letter’s How to Read Literature course, and I will be doing it live, for a year. All of these have taken a good amount of time, time I will not have to spare when we have three children on our hands (and our legs, our feet, our arms, hanging from our necks).
On top of that, these letters I started to write so as to force myself to finish my book have taken on a life of their own and become an interference with writing. I have written only a couple new chapters of my book. I have edited few short stories and written none. I have taken no further steps into writing the screenplay for The Song of Roland. I have a rough draft of a novel mouldering in cyberspace.
As I’ve said again and again (and again, and surely more times than those besides), I talk big in these pages with very little to show for it. I would like to take some time over the next several years to see if I can show something for it. Thither shall I set my bow and sail as best I can.
Which doesn’t mean I’ll be sending you no more letters. I certainly shall send you all a letter if any other work of mine gets published. Be not surprised, however, if these letters come much more seldom (though as likely as not at no shorter length — let’s be honest here). Thank you for the attention so far; I hope to do more and more to deserve it.
Reviso et Peroratio
The other day, I wrote on Twitter:
And while I was writing most of the above, there was a freak-out in this house. Gremlin #1 did not want to wear pants.
Now, to save her honor a little, I shall say she did want to wear clothes. She wasn’t arguing for dancing about naked all day. She wanted to wear a dress, and that’s normally great. Except we were getting ready to go to my dad’s “farm” (animal-less since some tenants had chickens in the 90s), and the last time we went without pants on she acquired two- or three-dozen ticks. We did not want a repeat performance of that. So we told her she had to wear pants, and she cried.
My wife and I had also been fighting. Nothing serious, and we’re perfectly over it, but it was just one of those ‘Let’s not talk to each other until the end of the day, shall we not’ fights. So we didn’t. And then at the end of the day, she realize she hadn’t felt baby move for hours, maybe all day. Indeed, she noticed right when he is usually the most active during the day. And yet he wasn’t moving at all.
(Now, obviously if something had actually been wrong with him, I wouldn’t be sticking any of that here, or likely talking about it at all. He’s fine, and my point lies elsewhere.)
We were concerned enough to message my mom (she lives about a mile from us) so that she could be prepared, and instead of just waiting by her phone she drove to my aunt’s (my aunt lives next door to us) so she could walk over at a word. And she did, for after another forty-five minutes of still not feeling him, we went to the hospital.
Describing our trip to the hospital would likely be even more boring than it would be unnecessary. Yet it was almost a perfect end to the day, for a call to the hospital, even one assuring us All Is Well, puts the petty fighting of our marriage or the petty anger at our daughter’s silly crying (we compromised, by the way, and she wore pants under her dress) into rather sharp perspective. It always does. And yet we never remember. The trap (the crime!) of being human.
It reminds me of what Chesterton says about Original Sin:
Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin -- a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument.
And I think I’ll leave you there. God bless you and keep you. I’ll be around again occasionally.
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Until next we meet, I remain your fellow,
Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff