Pre-6am.

We open with thundering classical, in the form of Rossini’s headbanging William Tell Overture, move to Albinoni’s Oboe Concerto #2 in D minor, Op. 9 No. 2.

I have to pause.

Albinoni, the Italian Baroque composer, is a musical figure about whom I know little. I plan to listen to him more, as I also plan to read Amor Towles’ two non-A Gentleman in Moscow* novels. The reason I have not listened to more Albinoni or read more Towles has nothing to do with not liking my first experience with them. It has everything to do with liking a singular thing they created so much that I want to let it breathe. I want to let it sit. I want to absorb it, enjoy it, let it wash over. Savor. I want to savor. Is that silly? Yes, a little so. But I also think there’s some thoughtful thinking to do, in a FOMO world, about slowly ingesting, digesting, savoring that which we are most moved by.

I remember years ago having the same feeling about Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. A feeling of warmth, of almost-overwhelming nostalgia, joy, and bittersweet beauty at something so stunning in its power to move.

It is a disservice to great artists to ignore the rest of their output - but I’d like to think it’s also a sign of respect to find the proper amount to appreciate and absorb the singular works they have created that will stand the tests of time.

To create works of such beauty and power, in words or music, to transform and elevate the human spirit…

We closed out with the gorgeous Never Enough from the musical The Greatest Showman.

And that is how we start a Wednesday morning.

And yes, I do have playlists set up for each day of the week.

( *thank you to my S-I-L Meilani for introducing me to this gem of a novel several years ago )

The games we play and the skills we learn.

A 15-year old battled a 6-year after he pulls out our Simpsons’ chess set, gifted to us two years ago by a kind woman named Ann who we occasionally see walking the backroads of our mountain with a cheery smile.

A 12-year old battled a 3-year old at a memory game.

Time jump:

I later played the younger ones a memory game round. “Played” doesn’t quite do justice. I “engaged in battle.” The 6-year old currently sits atop the throne of this game. His memory and recall are blowing us away, and the 3-year old is not far behind - but he is behind. We battle on, and I almost, almost beat him. Finally I lose, 12-10. But I do take down our youngest, at a paltry and surprising 2 matches. I’ll take the silver; it won’t be long til I’m off the podium completely.

I took advantage of these competitions to sneak in several pages of Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything, a fascinating 2022 book by Kelly Weill that digs back to the early 1800s in examining the ways we began to accept the abnormal as normal, conjecture as fact, and blatant falsehoods as truth.

Bible : Though I walk through: the Number 23, David, BFFs, true love.

I read the 23rd Psalm aloud. I think we shall memorize it. It is something I have never done, but I remember my Grandpa reciting it from memory. It is a good memory. A beautiful passage.

We read the story of David and Jonathan.

Five things about David, Michal & Jonathan:

King Saul, in one of those authoritarian whirlwind brain spins of an idea, promised his daughter Michael to David if he would kill a hundred Philistines - an impossible task. According to the Midrash, David did so, and the proof he provided was in the form of a hundred Philistine foreskins. This is not a detail you generally hear in children’s Bible stories.
So David ended up marrying Michal. She protected him, within their home, from her dad and his ongoing violent jealousy toward David. Her brother Jonathan protected David outside. They were a sibling tag team protectorate of David. Pretty cool.
I would like to know more about how David and Jonathan became such fast friends to begin with. I’m tired of prequels when it comes to movies, but when it comes to the Old Testament, there’s so many times I want to know the backstory of a particular relationship or happening.
I imagine again and again what it might be like to be a woman in these circumstances - to be treated as property, to be handed over, gifted, sold…and although we are talking about 3,000 years ago, this mindset is not eradicated. I just cannot wrap my mind around the idea of how a good person can morally justify the concept of slavery or owning another human as property, or the relational equivocating of giving your daughter away. I know, alliances and power struggles and all that. I speak from the seat of of 21st century knowledge, Monday morning-quarterbacking, and modern self-righteousness, and I’m aware of that. But still. Is any of this relevant today, in terms of looking at the types of rules, laws, and mindsets that seek to enslave, control, or diminish someone based on gender?
Michal is an unheralded, unrecognized hero of the Old Testament. I mean, she stood up to her dad, she got given away not once but twice, yet she stood by both her husband and her brother.

Character : modesty and trustworthiness.

We talked about how it’s okay to be proud of something you do, but how are appropriate ways to express that without bragging, showing off, or diminishing others.

We talked about trustworthiness and how important it is to keep your word.

Math and the probability of my following through on something.

I assisted a 7th grader with Probability. This is one of the most fun middle school areas of math to study, in my opinion.

I intended and planned to do math with a 3- and 6-year old, but never did, even though I said I would, thereby violating one of the character traits we had previously talked about. I did not intentionally not do it with them. There were other matters and needs that came up, and I never got back to it. It was not the first time that has happened. It may not be the last.

Gaining knowledge about the hypocrisy of adults is surely one of the great losses of childhood innocence.

Reading and books.

Our 6-year old is doing a wonderful job with reading. I’ve tried to find the right balance of pushing and backing off; it’s not a huge deal to us whether he reads this year or next year or the year after, or…

…I think I mean this, but there’s probably some hypocrisy in that statement. I love books and reading and the way they are a gateway to so much learning; a giant set of doors swung open to the imagination and to infinite universes.

I suppose from this standpoint, I see a 6-year old who is in one of those magical periods of life where so many things seem to happen easily. The amount he is absorbing and progressing and soaking in and retaining is astonishing - of course I’m proud of him being him, but I’m not saying this as a proud parent of just him: six years old, thereabouts, is a fertile field of discovery for so, so much, and I love it. So I guess in terms of reading, I probably do nudge and push sometimes more than I should because I know how much it will mean to him, knowing him, once it fully clicks. It will click, and he’s doing well, but it’s still work. I want stories and books and reading to be fun, and yet also, as with so many times, in order to fully appreciate a new skill or discipline or area of knowledge, you need to get past the initial threshold. That’s what we’re trying to help him through, and trying to enjoy the present, because once it clicks, once he’s fully independently reading…it’s off to the races.

We also had different sessions reading outside. The Little Prince. A book about geography and mountains and rivers and continents.

I love reading outside.

Short story : Raymond Carver’s Popular Mechanics (1981).

Some might question the stories and books I sometimes choose to discuss with our kids. Fair question. I have medium and long answers, but the short one is this: I am a person of faith - skepticism, but also enough deep-rooted faith to be a significant catalyst in how we raise our family. One of the most important books to us is the Bible.

What does Raymond Carver have to do with the Bible?

The Bible covers the gamut of…a lot of things. A lot of things, including the dynamics of human relationships. The Bible is filled with some of the most cold-blooded, ruthless, brutal, hard-to-understand tales you will ever, ever read. A lot of times our memory and experience of these stories is the filtered version, as told to children. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with this. There’s different levels of details we provide at different ages and stages. But when you care about something, you have to be able to examine it. Honestly and critically. That’s how I choose to face the Bible, in all its complexity and difficulty and paradoxes and sometimes-seeming irrelevancy. How do you connect so many ideas from it to today, to the world we live in now?

One big answer, for me, is relationships. Relationships transcend time and place, although those may be significant factors. Why do we care about certain figures in the Bible, and not about others? For the same reasons we care about some characters in any story and don’t care about other ones - or rather, why we root for a protagonist and against antagonist. And these aren’t absolute. They’re relative, and messy, and complicated. Relationships are. We don’t need to wallow in the messiness and ugliness and difficulty of human relationships. Yet we also can’t - and shouldn’t - absorb only the happy, pretty, positive ones. We need mirrors and we need stories to help us empathize better and understand the challenges others face.

How do we frame some of these stories in ways that illuminate or help us understand humanity today? How about King Solomon and the two mothers?

Few writers could craft a short story about relationships as well as Raymond Carver. The sparseness and utility of his writing has been analyzed many times by many, but experiencing any one of his stories gives an immediate deep-end immersion into just quickly and efficiently he could sink a reader into a situation, in just a handful of sentences.

This is what I said to the Olders:

Today’s short story: “Popular Mechanics” by Raymond Carver (1981). It’s very short.

Raymond Carver is considered one of the great short story writers of all time. He’s often mentioned in the same breath as Flannery O’Connor, O Henry, Hemingway, Twain, etc. Not what you’d call a humorist though.

Please respond to these five things. Text me when done, then we’ll talk after.

(There will be spoilers)

1. What do you notice about the dialog?

2. What Biblical story does it make you think of?

3. Any idea why the couple is splitting up? Take a conjecture. Does it matter, within the context of the story, why?

4. What about the setting? We don’t get much description. What are some details that give a sense of the tone?

5. Talk about the last line. What happens and what does it mean?

We’ll move on to something lighter after this.

Sampling of what they said:

We don’t know their names, it only says she said and he said. There are no quotation marks.
The King Solomon story where the two women are fighting over the baby.
Maybe they’re splitting up because of the child? It doesn’t really matter within the context of the story because all we need to know is they’re splitting up. We don’t necessarily need a reason.
They mention a kitchen, a stove and a flowerpot. A rainy dark day. It sets a dark tone for the story.
I think it means the baby got dropped or pulled on. I think it means the baby didn’t survive…?

It was a very depressing and sad story, that left me with many questions at the end. I would give it a B

This was a simply written story with many complex themes. B+

We had a good discussion, and moved on to topics of greater brevity shortly after.

Interchanges, quotes, and dialogues.

“How many days until Sabbath?” - a 3-year old inquiring about his favorite day of the week.

“I’m bored.” -a 6-year old, watching me carefully with a barely-suppressed grin, knowing my feelings and mandate on that word used in that context.

“How’re the smoothies I made?” I asked the kids late in the afternoon.

“Really really really good!” My youngest son said, as they sat in the warm sun on the front porch.

“It’s okay,” my nephew declared, turning his 9-year old head around to answer. “Actually…I would actually say it’s fairly bland.”

“Well,” I said, carefully considering my response, “It’s a smoothie not a milkshake so they don’t have much sugar. I guess I did ask, so thank you for answering honestly.”

I took another sip, and honestly, he was right.

Challenges

A bike chain that keeps coming off.

A 6-year old in accusatory tears and anger over a 12-year accidentally stepping on his foot; refusing to accept that it might have been an accident.

A 6-year old and 3-year old in angry dialog and frustration over…someone accidentally stepping on the other’s stomach. This led to a long mandatory conversation with me about The Golden Rule, about listening to each other, and about conflict resolution.

Art / Music : Dmitri Shostakovich.

Our 3-year old reminded me, from 7am on, that we needed to do composers. Every week - although there have been plenty of skipped weeks - I have tried to take us on a quick survey of a particular composer, beginning with Baroque, segueing into Classical, then Romantic, and finally finishing up with the Modern era, as well as a little contemporary mix of folk, roots, pop, rock, blues, and jazz. I have them illustrate, on 8x11 photo paper and with Sharpies, that particular composer.

Today we studied Dmitri Shostakovich on the front porch, in the afternoon sun.

Five things about Dmitri Shostakovich

He was a Russian, Soviet-era composer and pianist whose legacy, despite being sometimes controversial, places him amongst the greats of the 20th century, alongside Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ravel, and Rachmaninov - to name a few.
His 15 symphonies and other works were written in the era of Stalinism. He spent a career constantly either in trouble, or with the fear of being in trouble and disgrace with the totalitarian Communist government, who required all art and music to be appropriately supportive and patriotic toward the State.
He somehow managed to keep composing, creating music that sometimes found favor with the government and sometimes didn’t. Creating art in any form that is supposed to service an ideology is difficult, if not impossible, but Shostakovich found a way to keep going, in spite of being in constant fear - with good reason - over how it might be perceived or received. There were different points at which his works were outright banned and he was publicly isolated and humiliated.
Was he a supportive Communist or a closet dissident? That debate goes on, and perhaps places him in such company as Galileo: to what degree did he capitulate, and to what degree did he resist?
His works are often dark, moody, or sad. There’s recurring motifs and progressions that showcase his obsession with recurring elements. If you enjoy Mahler or Stravinsky, you might appreciate his explorations into tone and contrast.

Miscellaneous.

Farm.

They headed off in the sunshine to engage in their weekly farm labor. They were gifted the opportunity to practice shoveling copious amount of animal poop, and they felt afterwards it might be a good idea to shower sometime.

I said what I always say when they’re heading off to labor: “Proud of you for working, even when you don’t feel like it!”

They did what they always do, which is passive-aggressively shake their heads. I can almost feel their eyes rolling in annoyance at me. But I can also feel the strength of their sunshine smiles and toned arms tightening with the joy of work done hard and work done well. There is a satisfaction that comes with that, even if it takes a while to acknowledge.

Driving.

She is progressing well with driving. We went out and practiced turning, parking, and moving around neighborhoods and school zones. She also experienced her first angry driver: a pair of early-20 something women in a sedan, angry at her for driving the speed limit, and apparently patience-less, despite the ‘driver in training’ magnet on the back. She handled it well, and it was good opportunity to talk again about the importance of standing up for yourself and not getting pushed around, pressured or bullied.

Wall Street check-in.

Microsoft leaping to 52-week highs of 311. Apple flying at 173. Etherium clinging sideways to the mid 1800s.

Yes, I make our kids loosely pay attention to these things.

The little ways of a Wednesday.

We ate outside on our dirty, messy front porch. We played frisbee afterwards. A 12-year rode his 6-year old brother’s bike around the driveway with a big silly grin. My nephew joined us on the lawn to read a couple more books.

Becca and I finished watching Champions with our 12-year old while his sister was in driver’s ed.

It was a Wednesday. It was good.

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