The Lofty Chronicles

~ Lauren’s Childhood at Light Morning ~

Part Ten: Earrings, Bicycles, and Power Bracelets
(continued)

Growing up

Autumn 1993 (continued)

Space (Monday, 15 November 1993) “Dad, can we–”

“No.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“I don’t need to know. It’s been one thing after another, nickel-and-dime stuff, for the past hour. I’ve had a long day. Except for meals, this is the first time I’ve stopped moving since I got up this morning. I need some space to just sit here and do nothing for a few minutes.”

“O.K. O.K. You don’t have to be so grumpy.”

Lauren’s right, but I’m in no mood to say so. I’m feeling the truth of one of our most popular calligraphic pieces, “Sometimes being around small children is like being nibbled to death by ducks.”

My respite lasts about 30 seconds. Then my daughter bounces into the chair beside me, magazine in hand.

“Hey, Dad, look at–”

“Arrrghhh,” I shout. “I said I needed space. Space, space, space!!!”

Lauren sulks over to another corner of the room, gets out some paper and markers, and immerses herself in drawing.

Ten minutes later, having recovered at least some semblance of equilibrium, I walk over to make amends.

“What are you working on?” I ask.

“Space, space, space!!!” she exclaims without looking up. “Can’t you see I’m busy? I need some space!”

I can’t help but laugh. The mimicry is perfect. She holds up this “poor-me” drawing and then smiles her forgiveness.

“Let’s see if we can find something fun to do together,” I say.

She stashes away her art equipment and immediately comes up with a list of about six ways of having fun together.

Reflections (Sunday, 28 November 1993) “Mom, what color eyes do I have?” Lauren’s been studying herself in the mirror for quite a while.

“I’d say you have greenish-brown eyes,” Joyce says.

A long silence, with Lauren still in front of the mirror.

Then, “Mom, which color eyes do you think are the most penetrating?”

Joyce barely manages to suppress a smile, wondering what Lauren’s been reading recently.

“I think you have lovely eyes,” she says.

Lauren nods, looks pensive for a moment, and then goes back to studying her reflection in the mirror.

Kung Fu (Friday, 3 December 1993) “Why don’t you tell me about Kung Fu,” I ask Lauren, as we sit in front of a tape recorder. “Pretend that your Grandpas and Grandmas and your aunts and uncles don’t know anything about Kung Fu and you’re going to describe it for them.”

“O.K. Kung Fu is really cool. It has lots of awesome kicks and lots of cool stuff. It’s a martial art.”

“Describe a typical Friday when you go over for your class?”

“Laurel and Leia and Myra and Claire and I are in the class, besides Diane–she’s our teacher. Before the class starts, we’re hanging around waiting for everyone to arrive. Or sometimes we go and play in Laurel’s room. Then when we start the class we all sit down in a circle and Diane asks us, ‘How are you?’ and, ‘How’s your day been?’

“Then we stand up and do our posts. We put our arms out in front of us and we pretend like we’re looking at a post in the middle of the circle. We put our left foot forward and then our right foot forward. Then we sit down and do breath of life.”

“What’s breath of life?”

(Covering the microphone with her hand and whispering:) “Are you going to make me explain everything?”

“Yes, because…”

(With great exasperation:) “Dad, there’s everything in Kung Fu! It’ll take ages! All right, it’s like Dad’s going to make me explain everything, so you probably want to skip over this part.

“Anyways… Are you going to make me explain everything?”

“Yes, because…”

“Even if I forget some of it?”

(Laughing:) “I can’t ask you to explain something you forget. But, you see, no one knows what breath of life is.”

“How do you know Andrew doesn’t?”

“Well, [my brother] Andrew might, because he does Karate. But other people might not know what breath of life is.”

(Further exasperation:) “All right. Fine. Breath of life is something where we sit down and breathe in through our nose and out through our mouth for a couple of minutes. And while we’re breathing we think about the center of our body. Then we do our hand exercises and other exercises and then we start our walk. That’s where we do kicks and spins and stuff like that. Of course, we have to bow before that.

“And Diane lets us teach different things sometimes. We do one of our moves and then the others bow to us one at a time, and do the same move we did. (You bow to honor your opponent.) After our walks and our flows–where we can do any moves we want–she tells us stories and we do our posts again and that’s it.”

Lauren could, of course, have gone on a greater length, but the above gives a feel for one of her current passions. It’s fun to watch her practice her flows and kicks and spins down the middle of the living room in the community shelter, soon after we’ve finished a meal. She’s getting good, and loves it. Can’t wait until next Friday’s lesson.

Beatitude (Sunday, 12 December 1993) We went over to Doug and Stan’s for dinner last night. This morning, seemingly out of the blue, Lauren says to Joyce, “I’m really blessed to live in this neighborhood. Everybody’s so different. And I get along so well with everybody. I get a taste of everything.”

(One of my favorite photos)

The Pearl (Wednesday, 15 December 1993) A week or so ago, Adam was eating a bowl of home-made oyster stew over at Misty Mountain, where he’s living now, and nearly broke a tooth on a small pearl. When he told us about it, Lauren was intrigued. She wanted to know how big and what color it was, how pearls are formed, and whether they’re found in creatures other than oysters.

So when Adam arrives for Tuesday night meeting, he gives Lauren a small package. She is delighted, upon opening it, to find the small pearl.

Joyce and I glance at each other and smile. Both of us are struck by how curiously appropriate Adam’s present is, given the circumstances of the past two years and the slow transmutation of that trauma into grace. Truly a pearl of great price. And how exquisitely we out-picture the rich tapestry of our inner lives into something as mundane as an oyster stew.

Lauren’s Reading List (Thursday, 16 December 1993) Joyce awakens before dawn today to find Lauren in bed, reading by flashlight. This inspires me to draw up a list of the books Lauren’s read this year. So I ask her for help in compiling the list.

“You want kind of long books, right?” she says. “Not kid’s books?”

I nod.

She disappears into her room and comes out a short while later with an armful. Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Disgusting Sneakers (“the first long book I read from beginning to end”) is there. So is a Radio Shack comic book called “Whiz Kids,” which we picked up free at a fair last summer. Also several of the 60-page illustrated comics we got for her: Robinson Crusoe, The Prince and the Pauper, and The Time Machine.

Then there’s a collection of her current favorites-volumes 1 and 2 of The Baby-Sitters Club by Ann Martin (Kristy’s Great Idea and Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls) and volumes 1 through 6 of Sweet Valley Twins by Francine Pascal (Best Friends, Teacher’s Pet, The Haunted House, Choosing Sides, Sneaking Out, and The New Girl).

“What about Alice in Wonderland?” I ask. “Weren’t you reading that not too long ago?”

“Yeah, but I still have another chapter to go on it.”

“What books are you reading now?” I inquire, knowing to use the plural. Lauren loves to be working on numerous books simultaneously, switching back and forth between them as the mood strikes her. And sure enough, she rattles off another half dozen titles.

The Best Five Minutes of My Life (Sunday, 19 December 1993) We’ve come down to our house after supper. I spontaneously suggest a round of massage: Lauren and I to rub Joyce for five minutes, then Lauren and Joyce to rub me, then Joyce and I to rub Lauren. The suggestion is met with quizzical looks, followed by nods of assent.

Fifteen minutes later, Lauren is lying contentedly on the floor, the lingering touch of her parents’ hands on her head and back and feet. She lets out a long, slow sigh of contentment.

“This,” she murmurs, “has been the best five minutes of my life.”

[A year goes by before I pick up my journal again, and then only for a final few entries. In December 1994, my journaling, and therefore The Lofty Chronicles, draw to a close.]

The Power Bracelet (Thursday, 1 December 1994) I’m working upstairs in the loft, cutting calligraphy mats. There’s a knock at the front door. It’s Sage.

“Hey Lauren, how ya doin’?”

“Great.”

“I hear you got a Power Bracelet!”

“Yeah.”

“Will you help me get it?”

“Sure.”

Then there’s mostly silence for a while, broken only by the soft drift of electronic music wafting up the stairs. Occasionally I catch a phrase or two.

Sage is apparently telling Lauren about his previous evening: “I played and played and played practically without stopping.”

Lauren: “Go back into the forest where that treasure chest place is.”

Sage: “I’ve got 37 pieces of Magic Powder.”

For those without ready access to 8- or 10-year-olds, the above conversation may sound obscure. Two weeks ago I would have been equally puzzled. But that was before the arrival of Game Boy. Now the small, portable, Nintendo-like electronic game is my daughter’s almost constant companion. It’s impressive to see just how absorbing it is.

The silence downstairs is broken by Lauren’s excited exclamation. “Holy moly! Awesome!”

“What did you guys find?” I call down.

“Nothing.”

A pause, followed by a polite elaboration. “A fairy place.”

“A what?”

Patiently: “A place where there are fairies.”

More silence. These games are well designed. Lauren’s not completely obsessive. She lays down the Game Boy to eat meals and, surprisingly, to read. But for now, at least while the tide of novelty is running strong, she’s devoting quite a few hours a day to exploring this electronic labyrinth.

The two players downstairs have reached the Game Boy version of Terra Incognita.

“I’m someplace I’ve never been before,” Lauren murmurs.

To which Sage rather plaintively replies, “Where’s Seashell Mansion?”

Starting Over (Saturday, 3 December 1994) We’re down at our house, hustling to get ready to leave for a day in Blacksburg–lunch with a friend, library research on real estate law in the afternoon, folk dancing in the evening. Lauren’s been reading up to the last minute. Now she’s frantically trying to get dressed.

“I can’t find any sweat shirts anywhere,” she moans, trying on various clothing combinations in front of the mirror.

“If you hadn’t waited until the last minute,” says Joyce, who’s trying to back off a headache. And they get into a brief squabble about procrastination and appropriate attire.

Then, after a few moments of silence, comes the turn-around.

Lauren looks over at Joyce. “Can we start the day over?”

Joyce smiles. “Sure.”

“Hi, mom.”

“Hi, kid.”

Lauren finishes dressing and we move into our day, the clothing issue having evaporated as quickly as it arose. The issue’s never the issue, I marvel to myself, except when we get stuck in it. Then, until we’re able to extricate ourselves, there’s nothing but the issue.

Girl Talk (Wednesday, 21 December 1994) Without going into inappropriate details, I’ll simply report that as Lauren wends her way toward adolescence, she and Joyce have been developing an important rapport. Lovely strands of sisterhood and friendship weaving into the mother-daughter tapestry. Long talks about bodies and boys.

Occasionally, walking into a roomful of sudden silence and conspiratorial smiles, I realize that I’ve intruded into some of their “girl talk.” Lauren’s lucky (whatever that may mean) to have such a fine mom.

Epilogue

Lauren and Joyce

Lauren and Joyce celebrating Lauren’s graduation
(summa cum laude) from our local community college
with a degree in communications design in May 2005.

~ Lauren’s Childhood at Light Morning ~

Part Ten: Earrings, Bicycles, and Power Bracelets

The road goes ever on and on... (by Lauren)

Autumn 1993

I Hate Home Schooling (Friday, 15 October 1993) Doro’s car pulls in the driveway shortly before supper this evening. Lauren gets out, thanks Doro for the ride back from Kung Fu practice, and says good-bye to Claire and Bryan, Claire’s 10-year-old brother. Doro is turning the car around and heading home when I come out of the community shelter to see how Kung Fu has gone.

“I hate home schooling!” are Lauren’s first words.

I’m startled, never having heard her express that feeling before.

“How so?”

“Bryan was teasing me about math on the way home. Asking me questions like, ‘What’s 9 times 7?’ or ‘What’s 12 times 8?’ I don’t know those big numbers yet! He was showing off and making me feel stupid.”

“That wasn’t very nice.”

Then, feeling my way cautiously, I add, “Hasn’t mom been nudging you to learn the rest of your multiplication tables?”

“Yeah. But that stuff’s boring.”

I nod my agreement.

“Look,” I say. “Why don’t you and I practice the multiplication tables secretly. Then when you’ve learned them, you can surprise Joyce. And the next time Bryan tries to tease you about them, you can surprise the heck out of him, too.”

Lauren’s eyes light up.

“That would be fun. When can we start?”

“We’ll start tonight. You can help me grind grain after supper and we’ll practice where no one can hear us. And after you’ve learned the first half of the times tables, through the 6’s, I’ll buy you something special, like some noodles or soups that you like, as a prize. And when you get all the way through the 12’s…”

“I want to learn the 13’s, too!”

“When you get through the 13’s, then, you’ll get another reward.”

“O.K. We’ll start tonight. But don’t tell mom. This is going to be a surprise.”

[As a footnote to this rare and transparent resort to bribery, I recently bumped into an article from U.S. News and World Report, entitled "Tarnished Trophies," and pointing out the risks of using rewards as motivation.]

Wedding Cake (Saturday, 16 October 1993) We’re celebrating Adam’s birthday here tonight. Alice has brought along the birthday cake, which is delicious. Lauren loves it. Savoring her last bite, she sighs, “This is a great cake. When I get married, I’m going to have a cake just like this for my wedding.”

Baby Shower (Monday, 18 October 1993) Lauren attended her first baby shower yesterday. Ron’s brother, Curtis, and his wife, Lisa, are expecting their first child in November. There was added cause for celebration because Lisa’s first pregnancy, last year, had to be terminated when the child’s skull didn’t develop properly. Everything’s looking fine this time.

In prior years, Lauren hasn’t been old enough to accompany Joyce to a Blessing Way, which is a more ritualistic and Native American-inspired version of the baby shower. Lisa, however, grew up in Copper Hill. She came out of the traditional “old-timer” culture, rather than the alternative “newcomer” culture which Curtis represents. So it was appropriate that Lisa’s celebration be a baby shower rather than a Blessing Way.

When the invitation arrived in the mail several weeks ago, Lauren was thrilled to see that it was addressed to “Marlene, Joyce and Lauren.” I could almost see Lauren’s self-image shifting as she studied the envelope–one of those subtle, transitional moments in a child’s life, like losing the first baby tooth or spending the first night away from home. The invitation told Lauren that she had been accepted into the special circle of Lisa’s “women friends.”

This honor, I must add, didn’t prevent Lauren from being herself at the shower. After the presents had been opened, and the womanly talk had turned to stories of babies and birthings, Lauren slipped outside to join Curtis, Peter and Sage (the exiled males) for a rousing game of two-on-two basketball. It was perhaps the high point of her afternoon.

Yet Lisa’s gesture, and the celebration of the impending birth, clearly touched Lauren, for upon coming home yesterday, she made a lovely pencil sketch which beautifully captures Lisa’s shy, maternal excitement. After finishing the drawing, Lauren found a mat and a frame for it, wrapped it up, and delivered it to Lisa this afternoon.

Mothers (Tuesday, 19 October 1993) Lauren is prepping for Lisa’s baby shower. Part of the ritual calls for each woman to share her mother-line with the circle of other women. Lauren is practicing.

“I’m Lauren. Daughter of Joyce. Daughter of Lilly. Daughter of Dana. Daughter of…”

She hesitates.

“Daughter of Mellie,” I prompt.

“Daughter of Mellie. Daughter of…”

Another pause. Then, with what I swear is a straight face, “Can you get me to Eve?”

Multiplication by Moonlight (Wednesday, 20 October 1993) Lauren and I are walking down to the house sometime after supper. It’s already dark, but a bright moon lights our path. We’re walking slowly, practicing the multiplication tables as we go.

“What’s 5 times 9?” I ask.

“45.”

“What’s 6 times 9?”

There’s a pause while Lauren searches her memory.

“Remember the nine trick,” I say. “When you multiply something by nine, the digits of the answer have to add up to nine.”

“54.”

“Right. How about 2 times 9?”

“18.”

We pause on the little slope between the garden shed and the vineyard, both of us knowing we’ll have to stop when we reach the house, because Joyce is there and we don’t want to spoil the surprise.

So we lie down on the grass, looking up at the moon and the stars and the light clouds overhead.

“What’s 4 times 13?”

Another pause.

“That’s your deck of cards trick,” I remind her.

“Oh yeah. 13 cards and 4 suits makes 52 cards in the deck. 4 times 13 is 52.”

“Good. How about 3 times 13?”

The lesson drifts on, both of us savoring this classroom of the moment, practicing multiplication by moonlight.

“Snakes in the Cave” (Friday, 22 October 1993) Lauren awakens this morning with a powerful dream and tapes it for me to transcribe. Yesterday she was sitting on my lap while reading me a story. The dream seems to be speaking to several related themes–Lauren’s approaching puberty; Oedipal issues; and the ongoing healing from her and Myra’s involvement with Adam the summer before last. My transcription follows.

“I’m sitting on Daddy’s lap in this cave thing. And there are lots of snakes and everything. Sage and Chris and Myra are there, too. We’re looking around and Chris puts his foot into a little puddle. It seems like it has scum on it. Then the scum clears away and you can see a copperhead.

“So he takes his foot back out of the puddle.

“Then I look up and there’s this snake that looks like it’s going to bite Daddy or me. And it’s like black with green and orange, and I think yellow stripes. It’s disgusting looking. It’s huge. There are millions of other snakes in there. It’s weird.

“There are some snakes in the way of where we’d normally get out. So we have to jump over them. It seems like a mining place where they have a horse stall. There’s a beam with boards across it and a doorway without a door, like the horse stall down at Alysia’s.

“So we jump onto the beam and hang on. And there are lots of rats. Then we jump across again and get out. I’m scared. Very scared.”

The Spanish Impulse (Wednesday, 27 October 1993) Roger and Tarcila joined us for pancakes a couple of Sundays ago. Roger’s a carpenter, specializing in restoring church steeples. He’s been in New York for several months, but prices were high and work scarce, so he’s giving Virginia a try.

Tarcila is Chilean. She and Roger met in Tarcila’s home town in southern Chile a number of years ago. They have lived there since, with periodic job-related journeys to the States.

Tarcila and Lauren hit it off right away. Tarcila’s learning English; Lauren decided she wanted to learn Spanish. Soon they had paper and pencil in hand and were huddled on the couch, teaching each other phrases and making word lists.

Tarcila’s been back several times since her first visit. She and Lauren are continuing their language work/play. Tom, who also knows Spanish, got some material out of the library and bought a Berlitz Spanish tape for Lauren. Joyce and I ordered something similar from one of the home schooling catalogues. The tapes are well done, geared to kids, with lots of catchy songs and music.

This has been a good exercise in home education. We had been weighing various language options for Lauren–French (Joyce and I both studied it in school, but it has little, if any, use in daily life); Esperanto (we have an audio cassette course for it, and there’s the family background, but it’s even more esoteric than French); and Spanish (which makes more sense, given this country’s demographic trends, but toward which I’ve had a curious prejudice).

Following the principle of child-led learning, and taking advantage of Lauren’s impulse and of the present opportunity, it appears that Spanish has been chosen. In a way, it’s better that all three of us will be starting from the beginning. It levels the playing field. And now I’ll have the chance to explore my subtle prejudice.

Two Worlds (Wednesday, 3 November 1993) Lauren awakens this morning with an understanding about the world of dreams. It is there as soon as she comes out of sleep. She shares it almost immediately with Joyce and then, over lunch, with the rest of us.

“As soon as I woke up I knew that there are two worlds. And that dreams are just covering up the other world, or only letting you see part of it.”

“You mean while you’re sleeping,” we ask, “that dreams are covering up the other world?”

“Yeah, that’s the other world. And dreams are only showing you pieces of it.”

“Do you know which it is? Are dreams covering up the other world or just showing you pieces of it?”

“I think sometimes they’re covering it up and sometimes they’re just showing me pieces. And sometimes dreams are like postcards from that other world.”

Lauren, Rose and Shara at Kindra's birth

Earrings (Tuesday, 9 November 1993) Today’s the big day, the long-awaited day, the day toward which Lauren has been counting down for the past six weeks. No, it’s not Christmas or her birthday, the two red-letter days on a child’s internal calendar. But almost as special. Today Lauren’s newly pierced ears become fully functional.

Her resolve had ripened sometime in September.

“Dad, I want to get my ears pierced. Mom says it’s O.K. with her. Is it O.K. with you?”

“Are you ready for it,” I ask, remembering her earlier ambivalence.

“Yes!”

“Go for it, then.”

With a little assistance, she calls around Roanoke and finds someplace that will do the deed. (“Ears pierced free with the purchase of three sets of earrings!”) On our next town trip, she and Joyce go into the store and enact one of those classic mother/daughter coming-of-age rituals.

“It didn’t hurt too much,” Lauren reports. “They used one of those ear-piercing guns. [Whatever happened to ice cubes and bloody needles?]. There was a little crunching noise and then it was done. The lady said I did real well. She said sometimes the girls scream and holler.”

Lauren grins and shows me the two tiny gold studs that will keep the holes in her ear lobes open; the three pairs of earrings she purchased; and the little bottle of disinfectant that she’ll be swabbing on the wounds morning and night for the next six weeks.

Those weeks had dragged by with agonizing slowness. Lauren did the obligatory swabbing religiously, with barely a reminder needed. She also took a meticulous inventory of Joyce’s earring collection. (“Mom, will I be able to borrow this pair? Or this pair? How ’bout these?”) But mostly she kept an eye on the calendar.

Now, at last, the magical day has arrived. We’re in Arden, visiting family and friends. At the very crack of dawn, out come the studs and on go a new pair of earrings. (“How do they look, Dad? Do you like them?”) Her poor ears get quite a workout their first day on the job, with Lauren trying on and changing earrings a couple of dozen times at least.

To top it off, we visit Peg and Lew (my aunt and uncle) after supper. Lew just “happens” to make earrings. Bringing out a small collection, he tells Lauren she can choose a pair as a present. She eventually narrows the field down to two, but is unable to go any further.

“I’d like this pair as the present,” she tells Lew. “Thank you! And could I buy this other pair?”

Lew very graciously, and with a twinkle in his eyes, agrees. Lauren leaves beaming, with sparkling silver dangling from her suddenly grown-up ears.

I Keep Pinching Myself (Wednesday, 10 November 1993) Here’s a short story about complementary impulses. We’ve driven north to visit family and friends and also to peddle some calligraphy. Our new marketing strategy (all 5×7 size, a smaller display box, wholesale price just under $100, direct sale only, and focusing on metaphysical bookstores) has been wildly successful. Just about every storekeeper than has seen the calligraphy has wanted it. By the time we get to the next store on our list, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, only two of the eight displays we brought with us remain unsold.

This particular store, however, is closed and won’t open up for another two hours. By then we are hoping to have a good start on our long drive home.

“Come on,” I say to Lauren, who is standing in front of the closed store with me, gazing wistfully at the selection of used children’s books. “Let’s hit the road.”

So we re-trace our steps to the van. But as we pass one of the other shops on the street, Lauren suddenly says, “Let’s try to sell a display here.”

I glance at the store. It’s a tiny gift shop. Pleasant, but with no hint of anything metaphysical, or even unorthodox.

“No way,” I say to myself. And to Lauren, “Why not?”

After all, if I’m wanting her learn to trust her impulses, here’s an opportunity. So we walk into the store and I lay out my line to the lady behind the counter.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t afford to buy anything more until after the first of the year. But I might be interested then.”

I explain that we’re from out of town and are only passing through. Like gypsies, I muse, selling crafts from door to door, with our gypsy wagon van parked outside.

“Do you have any with you?” she asks. “I’d at least like to look at them to see if I want to order some in January.”

I go out to the gypsy wagon, get a display, and bring it in.

She browses through it, stopping to chuckle or to nod appreciatively at various pieces, asks about prices, and then reaches under the counter for her checkbook. A moment later we’re back on the street, Lauren clutching a check for $98 and grinning broadly.

“See?!” she exults. “I told you that would be a good store to stop at.”

“You sure got that one right,” I agree, slowly realizing that the niche for our calligraphy may be bigger than I had thought.

An hour later, heading south toward home, we pass Swarthmore, where I grew up.

“Let’s get sub sandwiches for lunch,” I say, impulsively turning down Chester Road.

We park the van by the train station in downtown Swarthmore and order the subs. Lauren and Joyce humor my nostalgia as I reminisce about riding the train to Philly on rainy Saturday afternoons to play pinball in the 30th Street station, or putting pennies on the railroad tracks to be squashed into flat copper discs, or carrying my bike down the stairs of the underpass and then up the other side.

Remembering how central a bicycle had been during my early teen years, I re-affirm my intention to get Lauren a decent bike. Her little “starter bike” has finally fallen apart. What she really needs, on our hilly, graveled back roads, is the kind of mountain bike that I have. One with safe, fat, treaded tires and a good range of gears. I’d already done sufficient phone research to know what brands to look for and to avoid and what prices to expect.

After lunch, we drive out of town. Just outside Swarthmore, I stop at a gas station to get directions to a connecting route to the interstate highway. Next to the gas station is a bike shop. In the bike shop is The Perfect Bike. The perfect size. The perfect brand. The perfect color. The perfect price.

Lauren test-drives it around the parking lot.

“Does it ride well?” we ask. “Do you like it? Is the color right? Do you want it?”

“Yes,” she cries. “Yes! Yes! YES!!!”

Many hours later, droning down the long stretch of I-81 from Winchester to Roanoke, I catch Lauren in the rear-view mirror. She’s gazing lovingly at Spokes, as she has named her new bike.

“I can’t believe it,” she says. “I just can’t believe it. I keep pinching myself to make sure Spokes is really there. I can’t wait to get home!”

“Well,” I say. “You got the idea to take our calligraphy into that unlikely gift store and we walked out with a check. I got the idea to stop by Swarthmore for subs and we left with a bike. Sometimes trusting impulses can pay off big-time. We’re happy you’re so happy.”

“Oh, I am,” she replies. “I am.”

The tie-dye kid

~ Lauren’s Childhood at Light Morning ~

Part Nine: Guardians
(continued)

Red knot (by Lauren)

Summer 1993 (continued)

Lauren’s Guardianship (Monday, 9 August 1993) I finally sign my will today, after a long delay due to some delicate problem-solving. My father has been advising Joyce and me to include instructions about Lauren’s guardianship in our wills. Lacking any specified criteria and preferences, he says, the courts would decide where to place her in the event of our deaths. So we started exploring this question and quickly realized just how complex and difficult it was.

In short, Joyce and Lauren and I decided to ask Vins and Bev to be Lauren’s guardians. I’ve known Vinnie since grade school. He was my best friend at Swarthmore High and we’ve kept in pretty close touch since then, through happy times and sad. Bev, his wife, is a wonderfully warm woman. They have two sons, Greg (a couple years older than Lauren) and Stephen (who was born last year). They live is Penn Valley, a suburb of Philadelphia that reminds me of Swarthmore.

So that’s the short account. The full story would take more time and space that seems available to me. But I’ll aim for some middle ground, starting with this lengthy passage from a letter I wrote to Vins and Bev last April, shortly after we returned from our trip to California to celebrate Hope and Caleb’s 50th wedding anniversary.

“It’s taken a while to catch up on all the loose ends around here. I have an inherited disposition (blame it on my father) toward procrastination. Over the past few years I’ve seen more vividly how loose ends tend to accumulate and rob me of my energy. Maybe it’s my age (Dylan’s refrain comes to mind, ‘maybe it’s the weather or something like that’), but my energy has become increasingly precious. Curtailing my tendency to procrastinate has freed up a lot of what had previously been wasted. It’s been, and to a lesser extent continues to be, a hard struggle, which makes the successes all the more satisfying.

“Speaking of aging (and getting toward the point of this letter) we seem to have been dancing with a greater awareness of our mortality lately. Someone shared a book with Joyce that Helen Nearing recently wrote. The final chapter tells of Scott’s death, at age 100, several years ago. He wanted his death to be graceful, so after reaching the century mark he gradually stopped eating. The fast ended with his peaceful death, in his own bed, with Helen at his side.

“Then a neighbor and good friend was called to Michigan. Her mother was dying of emphysema. As the executor of her mother’s living will, and in consultation with the rest of the family and the attending physicians, it was Doro’s responsibility to request that the life support systems be disconnected. It was a poignant moment. Her mother was still in and out of consciousness. But after the medical paraphernalia had been removed and most of the medications discontinued, they were able to take her home, where she regained enough lucidity to spend time with her former husband and her children before lapsing into a final sleep.

“The stories of the two deaths were catalytic. I recalled a dream I had, not long ago, about being on a lake and stopping at the cabin of an elderly widow. Her husband had just died. She showed me his study. Other than one or two pieces of paper–things he’d been working on at the time of his death–everything was in order. He had left few, if any loose ends. Upon awakening, I felt a sudden connection between my on-going wrestling with procrastination and my need to ‘put my affairs in order’; to make all possible arrangements for my eventual demise.

“Others here in the community must have experienced something similar, for attention started turning to wills and living wills, preferences for burial or cremation, questions about viewings and wakes. We also tried to feel our way into this culture’s pervasive pattern of denial concerning death and marveled at how much this denial blinds us to the experiences and wisdom of other cultures, many of which see death as a doorway, an opportunity, something to be prepared for and looked forward to. All of this seems foreign to me (maybe it’s my agnostic upbringing) and yet intriguing.

“Working on my will, though, kept these abstract speculations grounded, so to speak. Most of the will-work was pretty straightforward. My father had sent a model will, along with some comments and suggestions. The one real stumper concerned Lauren. In the unlikely event that Joyce and I should die simultaneously, my father recommended that we name a guardian for her, in order to forestall some judge rendering a decision about her placement without the benefit of knowing her, or us, or our wishes.

“You two were on a short list of people we felt good about asking to consider being Lauren’s guardians. The reason the list is so short is that, somewhat to our surprise, not many of our immediate family or friends meet all the criteria we’re hoping for–someone we’re close to, and who we feel might be willing to open their hearts and home to Lauren in the unlikely but of course possible event of our deaths within the next ten years; someone who has been part of a relatively stable marriage and has had first-hand experience with children of their own (none of my brothers or my sister, for example, have children, Lauren being the only grandchild on either side of the family); someone, too, with common sense and familiarity with financial matters, for in the event of our deaths, Lauren becomes heir to some fairly significant assets from both sides.

“We’ve started to talk with the folks that came to mind–to heart, rather– and this letter is part of that exploration. It would be much easier in person, of course, but I’m not sure when we’ll next be getting up to Philadelphia. So perhaps this letter can be as a feeler or a seed.

“Despite all my talk about wills and wakes, I have no intimations of an untimely death. Quite the contrary, I expect to live on for quite some time. Maybe this has to do with a sense of unfinished business down here. A vision or ‘child’ that still needs our love and attention. But on the other hand, maybe my expectations of living to a ripe old age are simply denial. The cocky stance of a sassy immortal.

“In any case, my affairs won’t be ‘in order’ while this question of a guardian for Lauren remains unresolved. So take it into your hearts and let us know what you find there. Whatever you discover–a sense of rightness, or of reservations, or a need to talk it over with us in person–will be helpful. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to explore it with a few other couples. We hold the belief that whatever is best for everyone involved will make itself known.”

Lauren, Pilar, Myra

While awaiting a reply from Vins and Bev, we talked with another friend, Jo, about the possibility of she and her husband, Richard, becoming Lauren’s guardians. Jo has known and loved Lauren for many years. They have an especially close and warm relationship. Richard, who we’ve only met once, is a doctor. He’s been attempting, in the face of entrenched resistance from the orthodox medical community, to weave a more holistic approach into his practice. Jo and Richard live in North Carolina and have two sons, both of whom are in college.

We also considered several other couples in the more immediate vicinity. But we kept bumping into significant obstacles. Either their heart connection with Lauren wasn’t strong enough, or the marriage was going through difficult times, or the sudden stress of adding a nine-year-old girl to their family felt as though it would be too great a burden.

We came close to raising the question with Wes and Shara, who lived here at Light Morning several years ago, prior to moving to Roanoke, where Shara got her RN nursing degree. They have a daughter who is slightly younger than Lauren and are expecting a second child in February. Wes and Shara hold many of the quirky, unorthodox values that we’ve been striving to embody the past twenty years, and Shara’s an especially warm and nurturing woman and mother. But they’re in a transitional phase in their lives right now, actively engaged in deciding where to put down roots, where to plant their perennials and make their stand. It didn’t feel appropriate, therefore, to ask them to consider being Lauren’s guardians.

Fortunately, both Vins and Bev and Jo and Richard, after giving our request careful thought, wrote to tell us of their willingness. We were deeply touched. We added the necessary sentences to the draft copies of our wills and were about ready to ask the folks living here to witness our signatures.

Ron, however, who, along with Marlene and Tom, had been kept appraised of the decision-making process, suddenly got in touch with some surprisingly strong inner resistance to our intended course of action. He felt that both for Lauren’s sake and for that of the community we should find some way to allow her to remain here in the event of our deaths.

My initial reaction to this was something less than fully empathic.

“Why did you wait until the last minute to voice your reservations?” I asked. “We’ve already explored the local alternatives carefully and weren’t able to find one that felt viable.”

And to myself, “Whose decision is this, anyway?”

My frustration and impatience were tempered, however, in several important ways–by Ron and Lauren’s love for one another; by my own understanding of how tricky it can be to get in touch with deep emotions; and by an awareness that such a weighty decision didn’t belong to Joyce and Lauren and I alone, but must include the others with whom we share our daily lives. So we told Ron that we would put aside our wills (so to speak) and stay open to the process until we could find something that everyone could feel O.K. with.

I used the intervening weeks to step more fully into Ron’s shoes. I felt the devastation of losing Lauren on the very heels of having lost Joyce and me. I felt Lauren being suddenly deprived not only of her parents but of her home, the rest of her community family, and all her friends as well. I felt her loss of home education, and many of the other values that weave into and make possible this on-going experiment in “child-led learning.”

Ron, meanwhile, was putting a lot of energy into trying to formulate a practical local alternative. His efforts stretched my heart. But he was unable to come up with something that could realistically and simultaneously meet the needs of everyone involved, the criteria that Joyce and I had established, and the inevitable scrutiny of Lauren’s bereaved and concerned grandparents, aunts and uncles.

So we ended up agreeing to implement the wills as they were, with Vins and Bev as Lauren’s guardians, and Jo and Richard, whose parenting cycle is out-of-sync with ours (their children having already left the nest) as back-up guardians. Ron felt that his needs and concerns had been “heard,” and that his rightful participation in the decision-making process had been honored. He also gained a deeper appreciation for the complexity of the question.

We also agreed that there is no “perfect solution” to such a problem, and that many of the values we all share have already taken root within Lauren’s psyche and will remain there, secure, regardless of what doors open or close for her in the future.

And that about concludes a very abbreviated account of choosing guardians for Lauren.

Trying to figure out what’s best for one’s child is neither simple nor easy. I’m just glad this culture doesn’t endorse the practice of arranged marriages.

The Childhood of the Gods (Tuesday, 24 August 1993) I’m walking down a side street in Salem, having just dropped our van off at the mechanics. In a factory parking lot I see a young man underneath his car, replacing the muffler.

Later in the day, on my way to pick up the van, I pass the same parking lot. The young man and his car are gone, but his old muffler is still there, lying on the ground. My first reaction is to shake my head at the insensitivity and immaturity of the person who had simply left his loose end behind as litter for someone else to take care of.

Hard on the heels of this conditioned response, however, comes a phrase that drifts through the back of my mind: the childhood of the gods. And with these words comes peace, and acceptance, and a feeling of warmth for the man I had just been criticizing. It’s as though his foibles (and my own, and everyone else’s) have suddenly been put into a radically different perspective.

Once more I bless the opportunity of being a parent. Had Lauren not come into our lives, had I not changed her diapers and picked up her messes and watched the slow growth of her thoughtfulness and awareness and responsibility, the ripening of her inner beauty, then these words, “the childhood of the gods,” would have been a mere shadowy abstraction, rather than an emotionally compelling and spiritually startling insight.

Slanguage (Sunday, 29 August 1993) For a kid who’s somewhat “out of the loop,” Lauren picks up popular kid slang and culture with great ease and agility, probably a combination of spending time with her publicly schooled friends and the occasional T.V. watching in Ron and Marlene’s basement.

“Radical,” “dude” and “awesome” are all stock-in-trade expressions, along with their fused forms, such as “dudical” (dude & radical) and “dudacious” (dude & audacious?). Then there’s “No Duh,” a rough translation of which might be, “what you just said is so absurdly obvious that it barely merits a response.” (“Lauren, it’s looking like rain. You might want to bring along your umbrella.” “No Duh!”)

[You have to remember this is backwoods Virginia. I'm sure most mainline kids have long since gone on to other phrases.]

Finally, there’s what I’ve come to call “the burp chant.” Any time that a belch issues forth (and especially if an adult happens to suggest that the proper response might be a polite “excuse me”–which, if pressed, Lauren will modify to “ex-squeeze me”), the following poetic retort can be confidently expected:

“I’m sorry for my rudeness, it wasn’t very smart,
But if it had come out the other end, it would have been a fart.”

So please ex-squeeze me, dudes, for so rudely including such an awesomely crude limerick in these hallowed chronicles.

Lauren with sword

~ Lauren’s Childhood at Light Morning ~

Part Nine: Guardians

Lauren on the back porch

Summer 1993

Marathon Visiting (Tuesday, 1 June 1993) Lauren’s been on the visiting circuit lately. Not long ago, she was hesitant to spend the night away from home. She’s making up for it now. She slept over at Claire’s several nights ago, then both girls went to Roanoke and spent the night at Rose’s. They came back from Rose’s yesterday and spent last night here. Today they’re off to Claire’s again. While we’re happy to see her so at ease socially, we do miss having her around. A little taste of what’s in store for us down the road a ways.

Tom’s Note (Monday, 7 June 1993) I left a copy of the Spring edition of The Lofty Chronicles in the community shelter last night for folks to look at. I found a note from Tom on it this morning: “Many thanks for sharing the attached. They are wonder-filled and I can well imagine that a young lady will one day enjoy them time and again–just as she now does [the] Star Wars [audio tapes], etc. etc.”

And just as she now enjoys pulling down and studying the two-volume album of her “baby pictures.” That’s my primary motivation for keeping this going. In addition to bridging some of the geographical distances between Lauren and her grandparents, aunts and uncles, I want her to be able to have a collection of verbal vignettes from her childhood. Hopefully she’ll find a few clues here as she grows into a deeper exploration of who she is and what her gifts are.

[And when you reach this part of the story, sweetheart, your dad sends hugs and kisses and wishes you well.]

Homework (Monday, 7 June 1993) Lauren came home the other day from playing at Claire’s, who still has another week or so of school before summer vacation begins. Today Lauren asks Joyce for some math homework. Joyce looks surprised. She complies, however, and writes out a page of problems. Lauren works on them for a few minutes. Then, shoving the sheet aside, she announces, “I hate homework.” Joyce and I grin. It is pretty apparent that Lauren had listened to Claire’s complaints about homework and wanted to try the words and the feeling on for size. But before she could denounce homework, she had to manifest some.

Baseball Practice (Monday, 7 June 1993) A nice pattern has been evolving lately on Sunday mornings. Ron’s younger brother Curty, who lives down the road, is a big sports fan and likes to coach kids. He spends a lot of time practicing with his nephew, Peter. He has also coached several school teams.

Ron asked Curty if he wanted to come over for pancakes now and then on Sunday mornings and, after breakfast, give Lauren and Sage some baseball practice. Curty liked the idea. So the two kids have been getting some good coaching once a week.

The Ear Ache (Thursday, 17 June 1993) Early Sunday morning, Lauren woke us up in tears, saying that one of her teeth was hurting her real bad and that her ear was aching, too. The tooth was a loose one that we’ve been trying to encourage to come out for several weeks, ever since the orthodontist told us that its removal would make room for a permanent tooth that’s needing to come in.

We assumed that, as happened once before, the old tooth had hung in there too long and was starting to abscess, causing the pain. So we immediately started feeding her garlic, as a natural antibiotic, and dabbed some clove oil on her gums, around the loose tooth, to help with the pain.

The pain persisted, however, and we reluctantly shifted to kids’ Tylenol. We don’t like to use it, and have only had to do so once before. By masking the pain, it disrupts two important feedback mechanisms–the pain itself, plus the body’s temperature–making it more difficult to monitor what’s going on. But it’s also hard to see one’s child suffering. So we gave her a few tablets and she was eventually able to fall back to sleep.

After breakfast, I called Eric, our dentist. He had previously given us his home phone number and had told us he’d be glad to meet us at his office any time we had a dental emergency. There was no answer, however. Nor were we able to reach him all day. Turns out he was away for the weekend…

[A note added later--Events outpaced my willingness or ability to keep up with them. To make a long story short, we finally got Lauren to the dentist Monday morning, after the repeated and generally successful use of hot vinegar compresses on her ear. Eric said that it was likely a viral infection which was causing the ear ache, rather than her loose tooth.

The pain persisted, so we called Luther, Lauren's pediatrician. He was out of town for the week. So with some trepidation--Luther is aware of our non-traditional approach to medical treatment and is fairly supportive of it--we called the back-up pediatrician. She was very nice and surprisingly receptive to our concerns about antibiotics. Most of the parents she talks to are coming from the other side: wanting to get a prescription immediately, whether or not it's medically necessary. Being a mother herself, she shares our concerns about the down-side of antibiotics and only uses them on her own children as a last resort, when, she added, they can be a blessing.

She listened carefully to my description of the symptoms and how the ear ache was responding to what we were doing. I told her I didn't want to risk a ruptured ear drum and potential hearing loss, and would turn to antibiotics reluctantly, if it became necessary. She suggested that we continue what we were doing for another day or two, monitor the ear carefully, and get back to her soon.

We re-doubled our various prayers and therapies, and the next day the infection backed off. Lauren couldn't hear out of that ear very well for several days, which made us nervous. But the doctor said that was to be expected following an ear infection and that the hearing would shortly return to normal. Which it did.]

The Rainbow Snail (by Lauren)

Rising to the Occasion (Sunday, 27 June 1993) We had a strange “chance encounter” this evening, on our way home from celebrating the tenth anniversary of Zephyr, a nearby intentional community. It has been a two-day affair and Lauren has thoroughly enjoyed herself–playing exuberantly with some of her friends, swimming in the pond, and occasionally joining us for a round or two of sweats in the sauna.

Now, as we pass Smith’s Store and turn off Route 221 at dusk, on the last leg of our homeward journey, we are feeling clear and mellow and happy to be close to home. Descending the steep hill, we notice that a car has gone off the road on the other side. It’s part way down a steep embankment, on its side, pinned against a tree. The driver, a woman, is struggling to get out of the car.

We brake to a stop, jump out of the van and run across the street and down the embankment. The woman is probably in her late 30’s or early 40’s. Says her name is Regina. She is uninjured, but very disoriented. And very drunk.

She asks me to help pull her car back onto the road. Taking a quick look at how the car is wedged against the tree, I tell her that the only way her car is going to get back on the road is with the help of a tow truck. This really seems to frighten her, but seeing no other alternative, she asks us to call for one. She also wants me to call a friend of hers in Roanoke.

I go to a house beside the road and place the calls. By the time I return, several other neighbors are standing by the roadside. Someone tells Regina that Amos, who mans the tow truck at Reeds Garage, will be obligated to report the accident to the State Police. She panics.

“Who has a screwdriver?” she demands.

No one has one, so she scrambles drunkenly down the bank to the back of her car. When Amos pulls up, she is frantically using her keys in a vain attempt to remove the license plate from the car. Amos looks at her, listens to her slurred request that he get her car out of the ditch (“Right now!”) and tells her that he’d have to inform the police first.

When her pleadings fail to sway him, Regina tells him to get lost. Amos nods impassively, raises his eyebrows slightly to the neighbors, and drives away. Regina clambers back up to the road and watches him go, her frantic activity suddenly collapsing into a fierce despair.

“I’ll just have to walk back to Roanoke, then,” she says.

“If you walk along 221 at this time of night,” someone offers, “you’re likely to get yourself killed. No one’s going to be able to see you.”

“So what?!” she shoots back.

“Listen, Regina,” I say. “Your friend’s on his way up here. He can take you home.”

“I don’t have a home any more. I don’t have anything any more. It’s too late for that.”

And turning her back on us, she heads toward 221, striding up the hill somewhat erratically, but with surprising speed and determination.

Joyce and I look at each other wordlessly, get back into the van with Lauren, turn it around, and go after Regina. We stop her twice to try to talk her into coming home with us and waiting there for the arrival of her friend. She fluctuates wildly between expressing heartfelt appreciation for our caring about her and telling us, in no uncertain terms, to stay the hell out of her life.

On the third try, Joyce jumps out of the van, grabs hold off of Regina and says, “Listen, you turkey. I don’t care whether or not this is our business or whether we’re butting into your life. We’re not about to let you stagger drunkenly down 221 and get creamed by some car doing 60 mph. So shut up and get your ass into the van.”

And she pulls open the sliding side door.

Regina stares at her, wide-eyed and irate. She opens her mouth to get off a stinging retort, looks at Joyce again, then closes her mouth and climbs meekly into the van. Joyce closes the door, locks it, and climbs into the passenger’s seat.

“Let’s go home,” she says.

On the way to Light Morning, Regina’s mood continues to fluctuate wildly–self-pity one moment, vituperative anger the next, and insightful lucidity the next. I keep a constant eye on the rear-view mirror, more than a little apprehensive about having this distraught and perhaps dangerously unbalanced woman sitting next to Lauren in the back seat. But Lauren rises to the occasion, calmly consoling Regina and telling her that everything’s going to be all right. Gradually, the gentle concern coming from the child next to her begins to soften some of her sharp edges.

During her lucid intervals, Regina tells us about having lost her job, her house, most of her family and friends, and now her car and her hope. She had driven up to Twin Falls this afternoon, walked across the treacherously slippery creek just above the falls (a crossing that has cost more than a few careless hikers their lives), and then prayed to God for something, anything, to turn her life around and give her a reason to keep on living.

She had brought along a bottle of something to deaden her pain. But this had only caused her, upon leaving Twin Falls, to lose control of her car. And so we had found her struggling in her car at dusk–trapped, dazed and desperate.

Listening to her speak, as we near Light Morning, I recall my fire experience and Ron’s Christmas experience–people reaching the end of their tether, the pressures becoming too intense, the cultural and psychological binding spells fraying, and then the swift, sudden descent into the maelstrom of what is commonly called a “nervous breakdown.” And yet, along with the blithering idiocy, the emotional roller-coaster ride, and the incoherent psychic turbulence, can also come unexpected and very precious gifts of self-awareness and renewal.

I don’t know if Regina’s crisis will bless her in this way. We pull the van to a stop above Ron and Marlene’s house. Ron comes out and helps her inside. Marlene offers her a cigarette, several cups of coffee, and a listening ear. An hour later her friend Donny arrives, thanks us, and takes Regina home. And our long weekend at last draws to a close.

Rabbit, Rabbit (Saturday, 3 July 1993) Lauren has just suffered a big loss. She’s been eagerly anticipating spending a week with Joyce at the Augusta Folk Life Center in West Virginia, where Joyce has been an assistant calligraphy instructor for quite a few years. This would have been the third time that Lauren’s accompanied her. Lauren loves it there and had an especially wonderful time last year–the friends and the food, the music and the dancing.

This year, however, not quite enough students signed up for the calligraphy course to justify the expense of an assistant instructor during these tight economic times. Even though Lauren had been forewarned that this might happen, she was still devastated when the letter arrived and Joyce had to break the news to her.

Joyce’s own disappointment was tempered by the relief of not having to expend the significant amount of time and energy needed to pull off such a trip. Lauren’s misery, however, is unmitigated.

On the morning of July 1st she had made a valiant and successful effort to remember to say “Rabbit, Rabbit” immediately upon awakening. Superstition has it that if these are the first words uttered on the first day of a new month it will bring a person good luck.

Lauren had followed this magical ritual faithfully, praying for the trip to Augusta to come through. But both the universe and her personal good luck charm had failed her. Now she stands before me, her eyes filled with tears.

“I am never, ever,” she says passionately, “going to say ‘Rabbit, Rabbit’ again.”

Then all the pain and disappointment come pouring out and she sobs in my arms.

Myra and Lauren

Thanks, Dad (Saturday, 10 July 1993) Lauren’s been away on overnight visits at friends’ houses for the past three nights. This afternoon, while I’m up at the community shelter, she comes back from Claire’s, breathlessly wanting to extend the streak to four.

I look at her. The enthusiasm seems a bit strained. She looks wired. Over-extended.

“No,” I reply. “Three nights away is plenty.”

She begs and pleads and rants and sulks for a few minutes. Then, seeming to sense that her unusual reaction is only reinforcing my feeling of “no,” she pouts off down to the house.

Half an hour later, I go to the house myself to package calligraphy. Lauren is cuddled up in an arm chair, a book in one hand, a rice cake in the other. She looks up from her book. With clear eyes and a calm voice, she says, “Thanks, Dad, for making me stay home. I guess this is where I really wanted to be.”

I hug her and turn toward the calligraphy.

Joyce and I generally give Lauren plenty of leeway when it comes to choosing what she wants to do and where she wants to go. This time my flexibility (in being willing to shift to a more traditional “father knows best” mode) and Lauren’s flexibility (in being able to acknowledge her true needs) both felt good.

Julius Caesar (Sunday, 11 July 1993) “Hey, Dad. Where did the name ‘July’ come from?”

We’re in the kitchen. Lauren’s helping me prepare a meal.

“When they re-worked the calendar a long time ago,” I reply, “they named July in honor of a Roman emperor named Julius Caesar. July comes from his name, Julius.”

“Is he related to Little Caesar’s, that pizza place in Roanoke?”

“Well, sort of,” I say, chuckling to myself. “Pizza is supposedly an Italian food, even though I seem to recall hearing that it was first served in this country, and Rome, which is the capital of Italy, used to be the capital of the Roman Empire and is where the Roman emperors, including Julius Caesar, lived.”

“Did they live in Caesar’s Palace?”

I steal a quick glance in her direction to see if she’s pulling my leg. Her face, however, says the question is genuine.

“I think Caesar’s Palace is a gambling casino in Las Vegas,” I reply. “It’s just a catchy name.”

This seems to satisfy her for the moment because the questions stop. I continue cutting onions for the spaghetti sauce, wondering about home education, and the differences between education and schooling, and what cultural literacy means, and how the inner geography of the mind takes magical shape as we grow through childhood, becoming a blending of what’s impressed upon us from the outside and what’s already there (intrinsic, inherent, unique) prior to the receipt of any impressions.

~ Lauren’s Childhood at Light Morning ~

Part Eight: Learning How to Wish Wisely
(continued)

Lauren with Kivrin

Spring 1993 (continued)

A Letter to Adam ( Saturday, 10 April 1993) There’s no easy way of keeping The Lofty Chronicles current, especially when it comes to the ongoing interpersonal work concerning Adam’s abuse of the two girls a year ago at this time. But to not at least refer to that work would leave an artificial and misleading vacuum in these pages.

I sent the following letter to Adam, for example, after a rather spirited meeting between him, the folks living here at Light Morning, and Doro, as a representative of the wider neighborhood. The context is Adam’s pending move back to Roanoke–a halfway home, if you will, between his intense therapy work in D.C. over the past couple of seasons, and a closer re-integration into the neighborhood.

“I want to share with you that I felt Friday evening went well. It probably didn’t unfold quite the way anyone expected. But if the intent was to continue our processing, and to involve others (such as Doro and Jo) in that circle in a meaningful way, our efforts were successful.

“I’m also feeling the need to briefly recapitulate and expand the point of view that I have been advocating the last couple of times that we’ve talked. My initial reservations about your imminent return–imminent in the sense of time and/or proximity–were based on a perception that your empathy was still constricted (lack of expressed remorse, at least to Lauren, Joyce and I, plus your apparent inability to anticipate and appreciate the concerns of the neighborhood), and that you’d be coming back into an environment that would almost surely include a strong dose of rejection and stress.

“Since I pretty much share your understanding that your activities with the girls grew out of a combination of impaired empathy, high anxiety about rejection, and reduced ability to handle stress, I have had some apprehensions about your return to just such an environment. My concerns are both for your own well-being, and for the possibility (however slight) of a recurrence of your problem. This concern has been tempered, however, by a recognition of the impressive therapeutic efforts you’ve made over the past six months or so.

“Last Friday evening, however, I was more than a little dismayed by a stance that you and your therapist seem to be taking–namely, that there is no possibility of recurrence and that my fears are ‘ridiculous and absurd.’

“I was outraged by these assertions, and told you so, with more than a little heat. While I appreciate your need to reassure yourself and us and the rest of the neighborhood that ‘it can’t happen again,’ your adamant and uncompromising stance only serves to deepen my reservations and shake my faith in your therapist.

“My basic impression of Friday night is that you were trying to ’sell us’ on a belief that the possibility of recurrence is non-existent. Again, your strategy is understandable and, for the most part, I agree that the likelihood of your falling back into a pattern of abuse is quite negligible.

“But to take an absolutist position and say that such a possibility is non-existent is, from the place where I view the world, both unwise and untrue. Untrue, for the reasons mentioned above; and unwise, because a good salesman always strives to listen to his prospective clients, and to take their perceptions, needs, and reservations seriously, rather than dismissing and/or attacking them.

“Besides, there’s an inherent contradiction in your insistence that your problem is already behind you. If there’s no possibility of a recurrence, why are you planning to spend another 2-plus years in a therapeutic program in Roanoke?

“Finally, I deeply believe that your assertions are not only unwise and untrue, but are also dangerous. If you convince yourself that ‘it can’t happen again,’ you run the risk of blinding yourself to the warning signals of recurrence.

“‘It can’t happen again’ translates too easily into ‘it can’t be happening again.’

“Turning a blind eye to the unpleasant and/or the impossible is a good way to get blind-sided.

“I don’t at all want to diminish the significance, Adam, of the inner healing work you’ve done and are doing. Nor, once again, do I believe that a recurrence is much of a likelihood. I’m simply urging you to find the strength and the wisdom to chart a creative middle course between your need to offer reassurances to us (and to yourself), on the one hand, and your recognition, on the other, that the roots underlying your symptoms are deep, tangled, and tenacious, and that you’ll be wrestling with those roots, and with their various symptomatic outgrowths, for a long time to come.

“This is where we can all find common ground. We’re all facing compulsive tendencies, murky guilts from the past, deep needs for healing and forgiveness. I pray that this community and neighborhood will rise to the challenge of owning and assimilating our shadows, rather than projecting most of them out upon you. I admire your courage in presenting us with this opportunity.”

Lauren’s First Finished Book ( Thursday, 15 April 1993) Lauren proudly announces today that she has just finished reading her first full-length book, front to back, first page to last. She has quite a few reading projects going on simultaneously these days, all at various stages of completion. She’s a chapter away from finishing Alice in Wonderland, for example.

But the honor of “first finished book” goes to Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Disgusting Sneakers. I’d never heard of Encyclopedia Brown before. Apparently he’s a kid detective. The book is part of the Weekly Reader series that came in last year.

Myra was over the other day, and instead of playing with the Barbie dolls together, she and Lauren each picked out a book to read. Myra selected Encyclopedia Brown, but only got half way through it before having to go home. Spurred on by this bit of friendly reading rivalry, Lauren promptly picked up the book and read it cover to cover.

Sleuthing is a popular theme these days. A week or so ago, Lauren was deeply immersed in Freddy the Detective (“the best book I’ve ever read”). And her favorite computer program (“Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?”) is a world geography course, cleverly disguised as a private-eye, chase-the-crooks-across-the-continents game.

Perhaps it’s age-related, and the skills and qualities exercised by a master detective–tracking down clues, thinking things out, solving problems–correlate with those being developed by children of Lauren’s age.

As a postscript, it turns out that I’m not completely tuned in to contemporary children’s literature. Several days after reading about the case of the disgusting sneakers, Lauren is browsing through the shelves of the Roanoke library and comes upon a whole series of Encyclopedia Brown titles.

“There are at least eleven of them, Dad!” she exudes, on her way to the circulation desk to check one of them out.

Magic Wand ("Good thing, Bad ring, Don't be a green thing.")

Wishes ( Friday, 16 April 1993) I’m sitting in the van with Lauren, in the parking lot of Radio Shack. Joyce has gone into the store to fine-tune her selection of a tape player/radio for Lauren’s birthday. I’m distracting Lauren while Joyce shops for her present. Next stop on our itinerary is the Roanoke airport. My mother Hope is arriving from California for the festivities.

“If you could have your choice,” Lauren asks, “what would you want–a million, million, million dollars or as many wishes as you wanted?”

“That’s easy,” I reply. “I’d take the wishes. Then if I wanted some money, I could just wish for it.”

“Yeah. I’d take the wishes, too. And do you know what I’d wish for?”

“What?”

“I’d wish that I could go into any story, like the stories we’re reading now, and become part of that story for as long as I wanted, and change it around however I wanted to, and then be able to come back out of it again at any time.”

“That would be a fun wish. What else would you wish for?”

“I’d wish for a flying carpet and to be able to fly.”

“Why would you need to be able to fly if you had a flying carpet?”

“Because if the flying carpet got tired and needed a rest when I was going somewhere, I could just get off and still keep on flying.”

“What else would you wish for?” I ask.

“That I had lots and lots of money and I’d give it all to the poor people. You think that’s a good idea?”

“I don’t know. What else?”

“I’d wish that all the food that is bad for me is really good for me, and that all the food that is good for me is good for me, too.”

“What else?”

“That I could become any age I want to, and that I could live as long as I want to live. How ’bout you?”

“Well, I guess my first wish would be for the wisdom to wish wisely.”

“Me, too,” she replies. “That would be a good wish.”

“Maybe that’s what we’re doing here,” I muse. “I mean here on this planet. Learning how to wish wisely. Maybe all those magic stories are true, and we can have just about anything we wish for. The only thing is, it takes a long time before we begin to see that we’re already getting what we wish for. Once we see it, we can learn to wish more wisely.”

“But,” Lauren objects, “I’m wishing that you and me and Mom and Hopie could be at the Western Sizzlin’ salad bar right now, and not have to wait for it to happen.”

“You wished it pretty well, though,” I remind her. “You were the one who really wanted to go to Western Sizzlin’ and you kept after us until we agreed. And now we’re almost there. Look, here comes Joyce. We’re off to the airport to pick up Hopie, and the next stop after that is the salad bar. Your wish is just about to come true.”

Ironically, by the time we get to Western Sizzlin’, Lauren is so revved up that she eats too much and/or too fast. After a long retreat in the rest room she comes back with a queasy look on her face.

“I’m never going to eat here again,” she exclaims.

I don’t have the heart to remind her of our earlier conversation, and of the long, slow, and pricey journey of learning how to wish wisely.

Balloons (by Lauren)

Graphic Design (Monday, 19 April 1993) Here’s one of Lauren’s recent drawings. The original is much larger (8 ½ X 11). Lauren told me that she drew the cluster of circles first. Then, after she’d colored them in, they reminded her of balloons, so she added the strings. Finally, she decided the balloons needed some background, which is how the apartment building came into the picture.

Lauren’s Rich ( Wednesday, 21 April 1993) Lauren celebrated her birthday yesterday afternoon. She had 16 friends over. We picked up all the public school kids in our van when the bus dropped them off by the pond. Those from Blue Mountain were driven in by their parents.

Toby and Rosie couldn’t come–the former due to possible appendicitis; the latter has chicken pox. Sage made a cameo appearance; he’s recovering from pneumonia. Thank god for the good weather. I would have had to scramble to entertain 16 kids inside, most of whom had already been cooped up in school all day.

When Alice came for her children toward the end of the party, she said, “When I picked up Myra here last Saturday, after she’d spent the night with Lauren, and we were driving home, she said, ‘You know, Lauren’s rich.’

“‘ How do you mean,’ I asked her.

“‘Well, she has a nice room, and a big green yard, and a garden you can play in, and people in different houses, like Ron and Marlene and Tom, that she can visit whenever she wants to. She’s rich.’”

According to normal economic indicators, we live so far below the poverty line that we don’t even show up on the radar screen. Yet we feel anything but poor. Myra, in her own way, was picking up on some of the values that are slowly emerging here. A new definition of wealth.

Four Girls in a Hammock ( Saturday, 24 April 1993) It’s Easter Sunday. David and Mary are having a potluck supper and bonfire for some of the neighborhood. Wes comes, too, and brings Rose. The kids are running around, having fun in a rough and tumble sort of way.

We eat supper. Dusk falls. And the gathering’s center of gravity shifts to the fire circle.

After a long while, I’m ready to head for home. I look for Lauren and at first can’t find her. Then I notice that the four girls–Lauren, Myra, Rose, and Claire–are cuddled up in David and Mary’s big hammock, talking quietly together.

Maybe it’s the twilight and the fire. Maybe it’s the contrast with the boys, who are still rough-housing around in the woods. Maybe it’s some sixth sense that I’m able to tune into. Whatever it is, any thought of leaving immediately vanishes. Something very special is going on in that hammock; something I don’t even dream of interrupting.

So I go back to the fire circle and continue my conversations.

Some 45 minutes later, other parents finally make the move to bring the evening to a close. I look over at the hammock. The four girls are still immersed in their private, intimate world. Sage (who had raided the hammock earlier, along with some of the other boys, only to be turned away by the girls’ outrage and the adults’ disapproval) is now standing almost shyly beside it, gently rocking it back and forth, as though he, too, has been captured my the magic of the spell.

Still next to the fire, I am talking with Wes about his and Shara’s dilemma of where to move–back to Celo; or to Virginia Beach; or Arizona; or Copper Hill. They’ve been wrestling with their decision for a long time without finding any clarity.

Now their daughter, Rose, emerges from the hammock, runs over to her dad at just this point in our conversation, and says, “I want to spend the night at Claire’s tonight.”

Wes’ mouth drops open. Rose hardly even knew Claire before this evening, and Wes barely knows her parents. Doesn’t even know where they live.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“Yes!”

To make a long story short, Rose spent the night down the road with Claire; Wes had a powerful dream that night about someone needing to return to “the hills of Floyd County” in order to regain his powers; he and Shara are now actively searching for land in the neighborhood; and Wes is starting to work part-time for Terrell and Diane, who live across the road from Claire.

In some weird way, it feels as though those four girls spent a magical twilight hour of bonding in that hammock on Easter Sunday, and that the intangible feeling which gestated there became a catalyst that transformed Wes and Shara’s indecision into decisiveness.

The biblical phrase comes to mind: “A little child shall lead them.”

My Best Night Yet ( Sunday, 16 May 1993) We pick Lauren up at Claire’s late this afternoon. She has spent the night there.

“This was my best night yet,” she announces as we’re driving home. “I didn’t miss you and Mom at all, and I slept well the whole night.”

One more tiny but important step out of the shelter of the home and into the numinous world of friends and adventures and independence. A small going forth on her part; a bit of letting go on ours. Mutual stretching.

Making Friends ( Monday, 17 May 1993) “How do you make friends so easily,” I ask Lauren this evening while we’re getting ready to brush our teeth.

“What do you mean?”

“I was talking with Mary the other day. She told me about taking you to Blue Mountain School Thursday afternoon, to rendezvous for Onya’s birthday party. She said that when you walked into the third-grade room, and Onya saw you, she gave you this warm smile and said kind of shyly, ‘Hi, Lauren,’ like she was really happy to see you. Then Onya asked you to help her with her after-school chores, because she wanted to be with you.

“And when Joyce and I picked you up at the party,” I continue, “it’s like you and Onya are best friends. Now, you’ve only met her twice, right? First at Abbie’s mom’s wedding; and then for a couple of hours at the Barter Faire. Now you’re real close and seem to like each other a lot. So what I’m wondering is, how do you make friends so easily?”

Lauren gives me a big grin and kind of shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“Ah, come on. You must have some idea about why it’s so easy for you or how you do it?”

Another grin and shake of the head.

“Well, it’s a wonderful gift,” I say. “I’m happy for you.”

Later in the day, I glance at Tom’s Reader’s Digest and see an article entitled something like, “How To Help Your Children Make Friends.” I smile and shake my own head and don’t even bother to look at it.

The Pot of Gold ( Wednesday, 19 May 1993) Another round of Lauren wondering about wishes. I’m in the garden, weeding the onions. She’s beside me on the path, more or less helping, but mostly engaging me in conversation.

“What would you do if you found a pot of gold?” she asks.

“Well,” I reply, using my standard stalling word, “I can’t really think of anything I’d want to buy with it. So maybe I’d find a Genie somewhere and see if he’d be interested in trading me something for the gold.”

“What would you want to trade it for?” she says, dropping any pretense of helping me weed.

“I’d say, ‘Genie, I can’t figure out how to do all the things I want to do in any particular day. So maybe you could help me by either giving me some extra hours each day, or by showing me how to use the hours I already have more wisely. And if you’d help me do that, Genie, I’d give you this pot of gold.’”

“Hmm,” Lauren says, pondering my wish. I get the feeling it’s kind of a stretch for her, as though the concerns of a forty-seven-year-old aren’t quite in sync with those of a nine-year-old.

Then I ask what wish she’d like from the Genie in exchange for the pot of gold, and the make-believe goes on, with me being the Genie and she being the little girl. The Genie tells her that she can only have one wish, and that she has to really want it, and really believe that the Genie can make it come true.

“And the Genie’s going to give you a special test,” I say, “that you have to pass before you make your wish. Any Genie who’s worth a brass lamp doesn’t just give out wishes without a test. Do you want the test?”

She nods, cautiously.

“O.K. The test is that this particular gardening Genie needs some more tools from the tool shed. So I’ll tell you what the tools are, and you go get them for me. But I’ll only tell you what the tools are once, and you have to bring me exactly what I ask for in order to pass the test. No wrong tools, no missing tools, no extra tools. Do you still want to take it?”

She considers this a moment.

Then, “Dad, let’s step outside the game a minute. If we do this, you’ll get your tools. Real tools. But my wish will only be a pretend wish. Right?”

“Nope. Real tools, real wish.”

She considers some more.

“O.K. What are the tools?”

I name off 6 or 8 tools, slowly, one at a time, but only once. She listens carefully and heads up toward the tool shed. I go back to my weeding, wondering what kind of wild wish this rash Genie will be presented with if Lauren succeeds in passing the test.

Now I happen to believe that wishes not only can be answered, but are being answered–all the time. It’s just that we haven’t yet learned to recognize everything we’re wishing for, or to understand why we would ever have wished for some of the crazy things we get.

But that’s kind of high-falootin’ mumbo-jumbo for some Genie to lay on a nine-year-old. So this particular Genie is doing strong praying as he weeds his onions and waits for the little girl to get back with the tools.

He doesn’t have to wait long. Soon Lauren returns with a cartful of hoes and rakes and shovels. The Genie inspects them carefully, one by one.

“All right, little girl,” he says, with just a trace of trepidation. “You pass the test. What one wish do you want from the Genie?”

“I wish,” says the little girl, “that you’d be able to go for more walks with me and do more things with me.”

Short and to the point.

And obviously directed not to the magical Genie, but to the busy Dad. The busy Dad who, just a moment ago, had been willing to trade his own pot of gold for a few more hours or a bit more wisdom each day.

“Done!” says the Dad. “Your wish is granted. At the beginning of each week, you can ask me to do one not-too-huge extra project with you, or go on one not-too-outlandish special hike, and I will make room for your wish in my oh-so-busy week.”

Then the little girl thanks the Genie and hugs the Dad and runs off to play elsewhere.

The Genie feels a bit relieved; the wish could have been a lot harder to handle. And the Dad goes back to weeding the onions. But what he’s really wondering is, “Now how can I come up with that pot of gold that the Genie’s going to want in exchange for those few extra hours?”

~ Lauren’s Childhood at Light Morning ~

Part Eight: Learning How to Wish Wisely

Lauren and Pilar

Spring 1992

A Shared Love of Tolkien (Saturday, 6 March 1993) Joyce went to Virginia Beach with Wes and Shara this weekend to visit Kathey and her new-born. Lauren and I are continuing to read our bedtime story, which is currently the final volume of The Lord of the Rings. During this evening’s session, we arrive at one of the many passages that Joyce and I have loved over the years. As I begin to read it to her I wonder what, if any, response she’ll have.

At this point in the story, the quest has been completed. A company of travelers, including Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and the hobbits, are returning to their respective homes. They have come near to the Gates of Moria.

Here now for seven days they tarried, for the time was at hand for another parting which they were loath to make. Soon, Celeborn and Galadriel and their folk would turn eastward… They had journeyed thus far by the west-ways, for they had much to speak of with Elrond and with Gandalf, and here they lingered to converse with their friends. Often long after the hobbits were wrapped in sleep they would sit together under the stars, recalling the ages that were gone and all their joys and labors in the world, or holding council, concerning the days to come.

If any wanderer had chanced to pass, little would he have seen or heard, and it would have seemed to him only that he saw gray figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now lost in unpeopled lands. For they did not move or speak with mouth, looking from mind to mind; and only their shining eyes stirred and kindled as their thoughts went to and fro.

“That’s neat!” Lauren exclaims, as I finish reading the passage to her.

I look up, strangely moved that she should be touched in much the same way that Joyce and I were so many years before. It’s a special moment when the love you feel for something is reflected back to you in the eyes of another.

I smile, nod, and return to the story.

Reaching For an Answer (Sunday, 7 March 1993) A woman named Bridget came by this morning after breakfast. Several of us are sitting on the deck of the community shelter with her, talking. It’s her second visit. She and her husband are building a house in Patrick Country and are having trouble with hostile neighbors. It’s hard to tell how much of the trouble is real and how much is a product of their paranoia. They had similar problems is North Carolina, before moving to Virginia.

Lauren’s on the porch with us for most of the conversation–climbing in the poplar tree; munching left-over popcorn; talking with Squid (a neighbor whose visit coincided with Bridget’s); or reading one of her books.

She listens as Bridget explains how they had ignored their real estate agent’s warnings about the neighborhood before they bought the land. Bridget is wondering what kind of security lights they might install. We discreetly suggest that perhaps it’s more a question of inner security, and that there might be some significance to the recurring pattern of being persecuted by their neighbors.

Later in the afternoon, Lauren is helping me gather firewood. As we’re carrying logs and branches to the saw buck, she asks, “Why do you think Bridget’s having the same problem here that she had in North Carolina?”

“That’s a good question,” I reply, instantly reaching for an answer. Metaphysical abstractions are clearly inappropriate. So where is something from her own experience that I can build upon? After drawing a momentary blank, the answer “comes” to me.

“Remember that wonderful magnet game you created the other day?” I ask.

I’m referring to one of Lauren’s recent projects. She took a large piece of heavy paper and drew houses and garages and stores on it, all connected by a network of streets. It was like an aerial view of a small village. Then she got a block of staples from the desk, broke off about an inch of it, and laid it flat-side down on one of the streets. This was her car.

Finally, she got out a large magnet. Holding the paper village in one hand, and moving the magnet around underneath it with the other, she caused her “car” to drive down the street, stop at one of the stores, and then return home, turn into the driveway, and park in the garage. It was fun to watch the vehicle moving magically through the village, seemingly of its own volition.

Lauren nods, remembering.

“Well,” I continue, “we’ve come to believe that everything we feel strongly about–all our hopes and fears and needs and beliefs–are like the magnet in that game of yours. You can’t see the magnet under the piece of paper; it’s hidden. And if you don’t know it’s there, the little car seems to be moving all by itself.

“Even if you do know the magnet’s there, the car looks like it’s moving all by itself. And if you look at the magnet and the car together, you still can’t see how it works, because you can’t see the magnetic connection between the magnet and the car; you can’t see that connection passing through the paper to make the car move. But we know the connection’s there, even if we can’t see it.

“Maybe it’s like that with Bridget. Maybe she has some deep fear about people doing bad things to her. Who knows where the fear came from? We don’t know her very well. But maybe her fear is like that magnet under your paper village. It caused her to move to that place in North Carolina where her neighbors were mean to her. Then she wanted to get away, so she drove to Virginia. But that magnet was still under her car, and it pulled her to the very place in Patrick country where she’d have to deal with mean neighbors again.

“It almost seems,” I conclude, “like the magnet’s playing a dirty trick on Bridget. She wanted to get away from the trouble in North Carolina, and she ends up right in the middle of more trouble in Virginia. But we can’t run away from trouble. And that’s a good thing, because we wouldn’t learn very much if we could just pack up and move away from our problems.

“So the magnet keeps drawing to us whatever we need to learn more about. But it doesn’t just bring hard, yucky things; it brings nice things, too. It’s a mighty strange and magical magnet, and all my words don’t hardly touch on how mysterious it is. But that game you invented is a wonderful way to think about how it works.”

We go back to hauling logs and branches. Not wanting my words to outlast Lauren’s interest, I don’t go on to say that the magnet of my sudden need for an answer to her question about Bridget had drawn the image of her game to me, or that perhaps Jesus had been probing the mysteries of magnetism when he said, “Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened.”

The Grace Thing ( Monday, 8 March 1993) Joyce, Lauren, and I are walking up to the community shelter for lunch. “Remember how I used to open my eyes and look around during the grace thing?” Lauren asks, seemingly out of the blue.

“You mean during the silent grace circle before our meals?”

“Yeah. Now I’m not doing that so much any more.”

“What are you doing instead?”

“Well, you know,” she says, with an embarrassed shrug. “Sort of saying thanks.”

After lunch, Joyce and Lauren continue the conversation while working in the garden. They talked about the difference between “sending out” and “receiving” thoughts and energy. Lauren says that she isn’t sure sometimes whether what she’s “receiving” is coming from her own mind or from someplace else.

Joyce acknowledges that she has a similar problem trying to evaluate her own “input.” Later, Joyce tells me she had been surprisingly touched by the exploration of a shared growing edge with her daughter.

Piece, Niece, Geese ( Friday, 19 March 1993) Lauren is reading Freddy the Detective to herself. It’s a series I enjoyed at her age. She looks over at me. “What does p-i-e-c-e spell?”

“Piece,” I tell her. “It’s part of a family of words that all sound the same. Like fall, ball, wall. Piece and niece, for example, sound the same and are spelled the same, with just a different first letter for each word.”

Then, reaching for further illustrations, my associative mind betrays me down a path strewn with deviant misfits.

“Piece, niece, geese,” I find myself saying. “Fleece. Peace. Crease.”

“Yikes!” I conclude lamely. “You sure picked a good word to show how crazy the English language can be. No wonder kids like you, and people from different countries, have such a hard time learning how to read and write so-called ‘plain English.’”

Jumping on Couches and Kids ( Friday, 19 March 1993) It’s lunchtime. Maybe it’s cabin fever (having been cooped up inside for a long string of wet, chilly days), but Lauren’s energy level seems stuck on overdrive. She doesn’t walk to the table to get more carrot sticks; she runs! Then runs back to her seat on the couch, arriving at her destination by way of a flying leap.

“Lauren!” I say, my exasperation clinging to her name. “How many times do we have to tell you?! Please don’t jump on the furniture like that. It tears the fabric and busts up the springs.”

She looks at me calmly for a moment. Then, with disarming frankness, replies, “It’s nice to have a few things to do that adults don’t like.”

Her candor startles me into empathy.

“Yeah,” I say slowly, “I guess if I lived in a world filled with big people, each with a long list of do’s and don’ts, I might feel the same.”

“And if someone’s really been getting on my case,” she continues, in the same calm tone, “I might do one of those things just to get back at them.”

“I know what that feels like,” I reply. “I do it myself once in a while. But it doesn’t work; it just escalates things.”

“I know,” she says, “but sometimes I do it anyway.”

Playing the incident back through my mind after lunch, I remember a journal entry from a couple of years ago. I search for it in the computer and find it. It’s from March of 1991. “Tonight as we’re coming down from the Community Shelter and Lauren is prancing around, running off some of her prodigious energy, she says, ‘I must have been born with a lot of jump in me, because I love to jump and run around so much.’”

The Great Curlers Experiment (Joyce, Lauren, Marlene)

Lauren’s New “Do” ( Saturday, 20 March 1993) Marlene’s been setting her hair with curlers now and then. Lauren got intrigued and asked Joyce to pick her up a set. Joyce did so. This afternoon the three of them come down to the house all grins and giggles, Lauren be-decked with curlers. It’s an odd sight. I grab my camera and pose them on our back porch for a quick picture.

At supper, Lauren shows up in her new “do.” We all do a double-take, then smile appreciatively at the long, curly locks. Her hair looks good, but somehow strange, too. It reminds me of her recent comments about a “shrunken teenager.”

Lauren apparently has mixed feelings herself. After spending quite a while in front of the mirror, eying herself from every conceivable angle, she finally decides, with a wrinkle of her nose, that she doesn’t much like it. She’s happy to have her normal hair back again the next morning and allows as how she’ll “never do that again.”

So I recorded the “before (in curlers)” look for posterity, but never had the chance to get a photo of the curls themselves.

Bedtime Stories ( Monday, 22 March 1993) Lauren has been lobbying today for a re-read of the Riddle Master trilogy. I tell her that it seems like we just read it recently, but promise to look up the list of her bedtime stories in my journal.

I do so, and discover that our last reading of Riddle Master was longer ago than I thought. So her lobbying is successful and we’ll start the first volume tonight. It’s a hard choice: re-reading an old favorite or exploring a new book. We just finished re-reading another old favorite, The Lord of the Rings.

The following list is our bedtime stories from the past year. It doesn’t include the huge number of books that all of us have read to her during the daytime hours, nor the books she’s read to herself. And the list may be somewhat incomplete. We tried to reconstruct it from memory, and probably missed a few.

The Prince and the Pauper, Twain
The Dark is Rising, Cooper
Abbey Burgess: Lighthouse Heroine, Jones & Sargeant
The Lord of the Rings (three volumes), Tolkien

Broken Record ( Friday, 26 March 1993) Lauren’s helping me cook. She’s making a funny, repetitive, stuttering sound with her voice. “Don’t I sound like a broken record?” she asks.

“Almost, but not quite,” I reply, wondering where she picked up the phrase. “The sound needs to be more abrupt and insistent.”

Then a wild thought flashes through my mind.

“Lauren, have you ever seen a record?”

She pauses.

“I don’t think so. Maybe I saw one on TV one time.”

Her response rocks me. Somehow, having Lauren grow up with computers, a technology that was inconceivable in my youth, doesn’t pack nearly the same punch as suddenly realizing that the LP and 45 records that I grew up with and loved as a child have become an abstract museum piece to my daughter.

At least Lauren has played with the wonderful little Hermes typewriter that I wrote all my college papers on and that now gathers dust in the loft of the community shelter. She has never even seen a record. Her entire exposure to music has come through cassette tapes.

Amazing!

What’s Dynamic? ( Monday, 29 March 1993) Joyce is sharing an amusingly bizarre story she heard on the radio today. An engaged couple is in a serious car wreck. The woman is hospitalized in critical condition. Her fiancé, though, is pronounced dead at the scene of the accident and is transported to the morgue.

The reports of the man’s death, however, are apparently premature. For he “wakes up” to find himself enclosed in a cold metal box. Horrified by the sudden realization of his predicament, he starts to scream. The startled morgue attendants hear the muffled cries and rush to release him.

According to this supposedly true story, he is then conveyed to the bedside of his fiancée, who, having previously been informed of his death, refuses to believe her eyes. She is certain that she is either hallucinating, or has gone to heaven and is being met by the one she loves. None of his passionate words can convince her, at first, that he is standing before her in the flesh.

Joyce concludes the story with a laugh, saying, “This couple’s dynamic was certainly different from Robert’s and mine. Can you imagine Robert telling me something and me adamantly refusing to believe him?”

Then Lauren, who has been listening to the story, pipes up. “Mom, what’s ‘dynamic’?”

Her question triggers a long talk about the qualities of being projective and receptive in relationships between men and women, between children and adults, and between Lauren’s younger friends and her older friends. Interesting how a funny story can open doors into important questions.

Snowmelt (Friday, 2 April 1993) Joyce conveys a disturbing piece of environmental news today. Perhaps I’ve become inured to most of the ecological hazards facing us. We try to remain aware of the vast web of effects that our attitudes and actions have upon the planet, and to keep adjusting our lifestyle accordingly. In some ways we’ve made significant changes; in others, we still have far to go. But ironically, the very act of keeping in touch with the litany of environmental crises hardens us to them. Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least a tough skin. Part of our emotional self-defense.

In this area of the country, for example, there’s a growing problem with acid rain. Being downwind from the huge coal-fired generating plants in the Ohio River valley, our streams and forests and farms are becoming increasingly acidified. Trees and aquatic creatures are already dying. And we don’t begin to know the full effects of it as yet. It’s an affliction, moreover, from which there is no easy release, given this culture’s voracious appetite for electricity.

But again, the more pressing a problem is, and the more we hear about it, the less of an impact it seems to have. Unless it happens to slip in through a side door of our awareness; through a chink in our emotional armor.

Joyce’s report has to do with one of the after-effects of our recent blizzard. We were snowed in for almost a week. The enormous snowplow clearing our local road broke down in a great drift by the pond and had to be dragged away by another monstrous machine. It was a wonderful storm.

Lauren, Becky, and Nathan dug “dens” in the snow banks by the driveway–large, cave-like rooms beneath the solid crust, connected by smaller passageways. The hills and houses and woods and fields were all blanketed in white. After the elemental fury of the storm, which meteorologists now believe was an off-season hurricane, the world felt quiet, peaceful, pristine.

Then came some warm March days. The snow melted, swelling the streams, causing minor flooding in Roanoke. And, according to the news account that Joyce is telling us about, killing most of the trout that had just been stocked in the Roanoke River. It wasn’t the runoff itself that had killed the fish, she explains. It was the melted snow’s high level of acidity. The trout had succumbed to what the biologists were describing as “acid snow.”

It is this phrase, “acid snow,” which somehow pierces my emotional armor. I remember the small, speckled brook trout I once caught with my bare hands in Free State Creek. Lauren and I had been enchanted by their glistening beauty as we watched them swim around in a small pool we constructed for them by the edge of the stream.

Then I recall Lauren and the other kids, just after the blizzard, tunneling into the snow drifts with flushed, laughing faces, pausing only to refresh themselves with great gulps of powdery snow. Then I see, in my mind’s eye, scores of trout floating belly-up in the snow-swollen Roanoke River.

“My god!” I exclaim, with a sickening sense of apprehension, “what have we done to the snow?”

Dear Mom ( Sunday, 4 April 1993) One of Lauren’s friends spent the night. They’ve been playing together all day. At one point, after the two girls have gone up to the community shelter to swing on the grape vine swing, or maybe conduct an archaeological dig in an early Poff family midden, Joyce finds a note from Lauren on her desk.

“Dear Mom,” it reads. “Why is my friend so downhearted? How do you get people to cheer up? Love, Lauren.”

At the bottom of the note she has written, “P.S. I love you and Dad and I love me.”

The Flip Side of John Gatto (Wednesday, 7 April 1993) We have received in the mail a “complimentary” copy of the maiden issue of a glossy new home schooling magazine. It has a Christian focus. Much of the home schooling momentum in Virginia and elsewhere derives from the fundamentalists’ dismay over what they perceive as a tilt on the part of public schools toward humanism.

These Christian home-schooling advocates are in the vanguard of those lobbying the legislature to protect and extend the rights of families to home school their children. We have certainly benefited from their efforts over the years. When we first came to Virginia, for example, it was illegal to educate your children yourself. Briah and the other kids had to duck down in the seats of the car when we’d drive through our little town during school hours, so that we wouldn’t end up in court facing truancy charges. Now home schooling is a legally sanctioned option.

One of the articles in this magazine is about college-level home study courses. The author describes a woman who is midway through home schooling her ten(!) children. Her pattern is to have the kids receive their high school equivalency diploma at age 11; their B.A. degree at age 15; and a Masters degree at age 16. After that, they’re on their own.

I don’t know which aspect of the story impresses Joyce and I more–the woman’s admirable tenacity, or her frightening inflexibility. It certainly feels like the flip side of John Gatto. Not that a learner-led child may not go on to get a Masters degree at age 16; but that all ten children should “choose” to do so hints at a zealous and probably overbearing parental agenda.

Pile of Four Girls (Lauren, Claire, Rose, Kindra)