My Childhood is Not My Son's

I saw in the paper today that the festival in Pamplona is beginning this week and that they will be running bulls through the street. And if your like me, when you hear the word "Pamplona", you immediately get a picture of Ernest Hemingway in your head. It’s strange how certain words have immediate connection to vivid images.

For example, this week we got our first watermelon. And as I take my first bite of watermelon, I see my childhood friends (two boys, who in this post will remain unnamed). It seems like my brother and I had watermelon at their house all the time in the summer.

An image comes to my mind of us 4 boys, all sitting just outside their front door in the bare dirt where a bush once lived. (This is the same dirt in which we found their frozen cat one February, and the same planter in which we once mutilated a catfish as we tried to de-bone it.) In my mind, we are sitting in the hot shade, in wet cut-offs, with watermelon juice on our chins and our bare feet in the dust of the barren planter. We have seed spitting contests, then spit them at each other, then return, running and jumping back into their rusting round pool.

I was lucky to have an absolutely beautiful childhood. My friends and I had tons of free play time away from any adults. We did everything a kid could want. We were allowed to wander and to experiment and to sometimes get seriously hurt. But it was wonderful, and those memories sustain me to this day.

And as I’ve written before, I sometimes worry that my children are not allowed the same free time. I never did much in the way of organized sports, partly because it would have cut into my freedom. I certainly didn’t relish going to soccer or baseball. In fact I think it was more like dread. Soccer was OK, but I hated running laps or standing at the plate for fast pitch baseball. My son on the other hand truly enjoys his sports. He loves a competitive sport and a demanding coach. Is this is because he does not have the freedom I once had?

My wife and I try to give him as much freedom as a 10 year old can have. No doubt, he has seen much more than I did at his age. He knows how to navigate the city, knows an extremely wide variety of people, and he likes to help me build and repair things.

In the summer, he and his sister live at the swimming pool. They go early in the morning for swim team, and sometime stay until evening. They don’t just swim. They play capture the flag and kick the soccer ball. They eat there and meet new friends there. They do much of what I did, except less dunking and throwing of rocks ... and yes their watermelon is seedless.

So yes, I worry about my son, but I also need to recognize he is not me. He is a different personality, and he is living his own childhood, not mine. And if I step back an look at him growing into a young man... I think he's turning out alright.

Danny the Champion of the World

"I really loved living in that gypsy caravan. I loved it especially in the evenings when I was tucked up in my bunk and my father was telling me stories. The kerosene lamp was turned low, and I could see lumps of wood glowing red-hot in the old stove, and wonderful it was was to be lying there snug and warm in my bunk in that little room. Most wonderful of all was the feeling that when I went to sleep, my father would still be there, very close to me, siting in his chair by the fire, or lying in the bunk above my own."

Last paragraph of Chapter 1 of Danny the Champion of the World, by Roald Dahl

What a fantastic storyteller. Every kid loves his books.

Coaches

I did not play sports much growing up. Well, that's not entirely true, as we played lots of neighborhood baseball and stuff like that. There was a summer or two where we played baseball almost every day. But as far as organized sports I only endured soccer for a couple years, and no other sports. It just didn't interest me, and my parents gave me the choice. Plus I wasn't very good.

But despite my lack of athletic abilities, I remember fondly my two soccer coaches. One was Mr E. I don't think he knew much about soccer, but he was a good man, who gave a lot of his time. He wore cut-off jeans and his son played with us. The other coach, Mr V, was an immigrant who obviously knew the sport well. He had a mentally handicapped son, who was about my age, and the son would help with the equipment etc.. Mr. V was an exceptionally kind man. I remember one particular instance, in which one kid on our team who was overweight was being harangued by the rest of us for taking so long to do his laps, and Mr. V had a talk with us about it. And I am sure that he wanted to be coaching his son, not a bunch of stranger's kids, but his son was not able to play, so he treated us as his own.

I am remembering all this as I sit and watch my son being coached at wrestling. Now this is a sport that until last month, I had never even seen, much less participated in. But my son is much more into this stuff than I ever was, and he asked about wrestling, and it seemed like a good fit. But I sit here and watch these men come in 3 nights a week and organize a whole wrestling program completely as volunteers including Sunday tournaments. And what reminded me of my childhood coaches was when I saw one of the wrestling coaches coming into practice holding a daughter with Down's Syndrome. And he started the coaching session holding her until his wife could get there. And I remembered my soccer coach from 30 years ago, kindly holding his son's hand while he coached other parent's kids.

Why do they do it? They seem to take the responsibility as a fact of life. Whatever the reasons, I really appreciate it. Thanks guys.

Daughters Turn Men Liberal

...We document evidence that having daughters leads people to be more sympathetic to left-wing parties. Giving birth to sons, by contrast, seems to make people more likely to vote for a right-wing party....people who parent only daughters are more likely to hold feminist views... - link

Eight Years Old

There is something amazing about a boy who is just turning 8. All skinny, action, laughing and playfulness. And he is old enough to be thinking too. Thinking a lot. But the most wonderful thing is that he loves his father so much. Despite protestations to this and continuing arguing and fighting, he cannot hide it. And he dreams of doing more and more things with dad. Maybe ride bikes, or make a tree house or just wrestle a bit. I'm quite certain his dreams are full of things like this, and so are dad's. And when every day is filled with teachers and sisters, and afterschool activities, it becomes too rare that a boy and his father can just play or work together. But when it happens, it is so joyful. And it is all made sweeter by the knowledge that it will not last.

See this related poem at Tidings of Magpies.

Good Teachers are Like Gold

For Christmas, one of my son's teachers gave each of his students a note with a bit of candy. This particular teacher is male and is quite strict, and is probably my son's least favorite teacher. My son feels he is terrible at the subject and resists going to that class. What I immediately noticed about the note he sent home with my son though is that it was written in cursive, which most second graders cannot read. My son didn't even know what the note was about.

Now take another teacher. My son loves this woman teacher. Yesterday she sent home a note thanking him for the cookies he brought her for Christmas. The note was very simple words and written very clearly, obviously meant for the boy to read. It said in large writing "you're the best". This meant so much to my son, that he held the card all evening.

He woke up this morning wanting to go to school because of this teacher. To this teacher, I say: You are the best...

Aggressive Boys

We're not sure if we have issues with our boy, or if he is just being a boy.

Of course, being my wife's son, he is quite handsome, and he has deep emotion and I think he connects well with other boys. But everything with him is a competition. He wants to fight, and he wants to win. And when he doesn't, he rages.

It's hard for me to relate to this, because I don't think I was like this. He really gets aggressive while playing sports or doing anything. Everything is a competition. I can see him looking around and seeing how he fits in the world, how he compares to the other kids at school or on the soccer team.

Maybe this book "Raising Cain", would have some relavence.

Soccer in Washington Park

While kicking the soccer ball in the park, a group of kids surrounded us and played. One kid (not shown) made quick attatchment to me. He said "do you play with your son a lot?" Me: "yeah" Him: "I wish you were my dad." That was heavy.

mushrooms:

Ta-Nehisi Coates

I'm consistently amazed at the coolness of building family. The first two years are drudgery, no doubt. But then it just becomes awesome. ...I'm often surprised by the sheer fun of the whole project. My Dad once told me something that has stuck with me for years. The saddest thing about so many black fathers--and fathers in general--quitting on their kids is that, invaribly, they cheat themselves more than they actually cheat the kid. I've seen a lot of folks turn out fine without knowing their second parent. But the absent parent, permenantly loses that link, that ability to share the things that once excited them, that chance to relive their own childhood with their flesh and blood

- Ta-Nehisi Coates, "the young James Joyce of the hip hop generation."

The Beautiful Struggle (8 minutes):

The Prince of Frogtown

In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff bluejeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers, I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn't hold out any longer than that first poor fool did. It took something as powerful as that, as girls, to tug me away from this tribe of sunburned little boys, to scatter us from this place of double-dog dares, Blow Pops, Cherry bombs, Indian burns, chicken fights, and giggling, half-wit choruses of "Bald-Headed Man from China." Maybe we should have nailed up a sign _NO GIRLS ALLOWED- and lived out our lives here, to fight mean bulls from the safe side of a barbed-wire fence with a cape cut from a red tank top, and duel to the death with swords sliced off a weeping willow tree. I don't know what kind of man I turned out to be, but I was good at being a boy. Then, a thrust to the heart only bent against my chest, in a place where I could look straight into the Alabama sun through a water-smoothed nugget of glass, and tell myself it was a shipwrecked emerald instead of just a piece from a broken bottle of Mountain Dew.

-first paragraph of a great summer read, a book all about fathers and sons.... "The Prince of Frogtown" by Rick Bragg

Big Brothers Started in OTR

Did you know that the Big Brother Big Sister program was started in Over-the-Rhine in 1903?

The Big Brother movement was started in Cincinnati in 1903 by businessman Irv Westheimer. His idea to reach out to fatherless boys gained support in Cincinnati, then spread coast-to-coast and expanded to include young girls. There are now nearly 500 Big Brother Big Sister agencies in the United States.

It is a great program, and I had no idea it started here.

Factory Tours

When I was a kid, I distinctly remember our school class touring Procter and Gamble to see soap being made and packaged. I also remember going to the factory where my dad worked and seeing huge stamping machines and the men, die-makers with their work aprons covered in fine metal shavings. It is good for kids to see how things are made. Unfortunately P&G doesn't do tours anymore, but there are lots of other factories that offer tours. Check out this site to find a list of factory tours across the country. Nearby are things like the Toyota factory in Georgetown, KY and the Airstream factory in Jackson Center, OH. The car factory could make a good scout or school field trip.

Pinewood Derby Cars

Tiger Cub (six year olds) Pinewood Derby Cars. The plain wooden one won.

 

Some of the older kid's cars. The black one won.