Before Staying Overnight at Grandma's

My son says:

"When you're here,
and I'm there,
and you're dreaming—
will you come and locate me?"

JRN 101: The Secret Language of Newsrooms

Recently, someone asked what op-ed meant -- was the "op" for "opinion"? Well, it could be. Most newspapers, magazines and etc. have their own in-house style. In my experience, however, op means "opposite." This is just the beginning of a joy ride with language and meaning. To wit:

op-ed is "opposite editorial" — a physical location, usually directly opposite of ...

editorials, which are unsigned opinions, usually based on an editorial board's consensus, and part of...

The editorial pages, which are written by...

The opinion department, which is not to be confused with ...

The editorial department, which has its own zip code in a typical newsroom. Opinion vs. editorial is an important distinction, on the order of church vs. state, because opinion writes opinionated editorials; editorial writes objective news and features, and writers in editorial would get shot if they wrote an editorial (for the opinion department, that is) in most places.

Communication, baby. It's a fabulous business.

And remember: Magazines are books.

Jack and "The Man"

For my son's last day of school, we took him out for lunch. He picked his favorite diner—J&S Hamburg, a downtown institution. This small, white, cinderblock building has big strawberry shakes and regulars who hang out and give my son quarters for the M&M dispenser. Jack's loved the place since he began having opinions on such matters, and as a mom, it's perfect. Nothing too fancy. People are charmed, vs. affronted, if a kid stands up and shouts "Hi! I'm Jack!" They let him spin on the stools, instead of shooing him off for scaredy-cat liability reasons.

But things are changing. For one, they just banned smoking. And secondly, the end times have arrived. The demolition next door is in full swing. Developers are razing a former auto dealership in order to build a four-story complex of apartments, offices and storefronts, including a new home for our beloved diner. J&S will be bulldozed, to make way for a parking lot.

We're collectively sad about this. "Can't we have any small buildings?" I ask, rhetorically.

After we pull in, Jack darts over to the construction zone, where a yellow scooper truck is biting a tangle of steel beams. Jack turns to me, and quotes SpongeBob:

"Smells like big business."

***

Inside, before we leave, the waitress congratulates Jack on "graduating" from kindergarten.

"I'm a first-grader now."

"How nice!" she says.

"Why can't we have any small buildings?" he asks her.

She thinks for a second, then gets this nonsequitor. "I know," she commiserates. "All the buildings are big." She assures him that the new J&S will be nice. Jack says he likes this one. They're at a standstill.

"But you can take that with you." He turns around and points to a black-and-white picture on the wall. It's a vintage photo of diner, maybe from the 1930s.

"Yes, we can," she says. "And we're taking the grill too."

"What else are you taking?" he asks.

"I'm not sure," she says.

"The plates?"

"I don't know," she says.

"The radio?"

"I don't know," she says.

"Everything that's detached?" he asks.

She blinked at him. "I don't know."

"But you are taking the picture," he says, clarifying the situation, content to nail down at least one fact in this ever-changing world.

One of Those Days: Walking on Broken Glass

Blogger Seth Godin has a lovely post today on the good-vibe environment. He should've visited my house this morning for the antithesis. It was one of those mornings, where everything's gone rotten, quickly and mercilessly, capped by my son tossing clothes across the hall, missing the doorway and hitting a large mirror, which we watched fall in slow motion, hitting a chandelier, and then everything shattered, with little shards raining down on the pile of bedding I'd pulled off at 3 a.m. when my son threw up in bed.

Lovely. So what did I do? After tending the immediate issue — get away from the glass, check for injuries — did I turn this into a teaching moment, demonstrating can-do spirit when things go awry? No. I felt overwhelmed. I nearly cried.

Godin asks in his post: "Who's in charge of the vibe at your place? " Well, duh. It's me. And, as a single parent, only me. And I totally abdicated this morning, which created vibe of chaos. This mess — and my reaction to it — could be traced back to one simple act: a late cup of coffee. It set off a chain reaction. I couldn't sleep, then was too deeply asleep to hear my son coughing, so I didn't wake in time to spare him (and the sheets), then we woke late, then I was rushing both of us, setting a disorganized and unruly vibe, the kind that leads to boys going a little wild and throwing things. And I was too tired to do anything but melt down, instead of hugging him and saying how happy I was that he wasn't hurt.

I know, bad parenting moments happen, and it's not the end of the world. But now it's time to pull it together and turn things around, to take charge of the vibe: throw out the glass, put in a good day's work, hug my boy and have some fun, and get us both to bed in time for a long night of sweet dreams.

Dear Schools: Teach Our Children Well

Here's my boy, on his first day of kindergarten. Today's his last full day of kindergarten. Nothing says tempus fugit like children.

The clock also is ticking on Central Grade School, the historic brick elementary across the street where Jackson attends. Will it still be open in two years? Or, worst case, will the district raze it, pocketing millions for its primo land value, as other Michigan districts have done?

That's a good question. And we've only a few weeks till my district decides about closing three more schools.

Elementary schools are closing nationwide, and the reason isn't some muddy mix of societal trends and inflation and rising property costs. It's a simple matter of numbers. Enrollments are declining because there aren't as many school-age children as there were 10 years ago. Population is cyclical: Baby Boom, baby bust, mini-baby-boom, mini-baby-bust. And that's where we are now, a mini baby bust. In many communities, birth rates began declining by more than 25 percent in the mid-'90s. Add to the mix programs in many states that allow students to attend new charter schools on the public dime, and we've got empty classrooms across the nation. It's simple math.

Yes, it's a problem, and school districts are handling it by closing elementary after elementary. There are a number of issues here that affect all of us, whether we have kids or not, and I've written about many of them (see links below). But beyond those very important issues is something new that I'm concerned about-- the big picture of school-construction, nationwide.

School Deconstruction, Meet School Construction
In March I received a press release titled "Record School Construction," that began: "Dear Colleague, As you know, California's Proposition 1D passed on November 7, 2006 and authorized $10.4 billion in education construction in California. Similarly ambitious construction agendas are arising across the nation for Education." The release directs us to a new online catalog of firms that provide constructions services to school districts.

So there's that -- record construction -- and then there's a record number of schools closing.

So is the right question this: What the...?

What comes to mind right now is .... Journalism Rule No. 1: Follow the Money. Because this needs some explaining.

I realize in some cases, things need updating and populations shift, but none of that is happening on a record scale. What is happening is that as schools are shuttered, billions are going to construction and renovation. My district, which is closing in on shuttering its fourth, fifth and sixth elementaries in a few short years, has simultaneously undertaken massive renovations of two of the least populated elementary schools, stripping those schools to their bones and redoing them in high style. Why? Are we short of money, or are we not?

On top of that , billions of dollars were spent in the '90s to accommodate the mini-baby-boom that graduated several years ago. My own district built new junior and senior high schools. And today, to keep them filled, they're shifting elementary students (sixth-graders) up into junior high, creating even more empty classrooms in elementaries.

The thing I've heard no one mention is this: With all that mid- to late-90s construction, every district nationwide already could see that the mini-baby-boom was ending soon. Most if not all the kids who would populate these newly built junior and senior highs one day soon were already born--and there were definitely too few of them. What were school boards thinking when they asked for bonds and paid for bricks, foundations and new desks? Did they expect that 25 to 50 percent more children would just ... materialize?

The cost to folks in my district for those mid-'90s bond issues has been $270 a year on average. For five years worth of needed classroom expansion? Wouldn't Quonset huts been a better choice?

What it's looking like is that I'll be paying $8,100, all told, for this: Building unnecessary schools in farm fields, closing vibrant and historic neighborhood schools, subsidizing the local building trade, and, possibly, watching my son spend in hour commuting on a bus that's chugging $3-a-gallon fuel.

What does this teach our children?
Related Links: Two Essays on Central Grade School
—You can find a reprint of an essay on my neighborhood school at YourPlace. The story won first place in this online magazine's first essay contest, and I remain honored.
—For a look at the land-use and community implications of school closing, check out my essay at the Michigan Land Use Institute's Elm Street Writers Group, where I float some ideas for co-use of facilities.

##

Game On: Clan of the Cave Writers

Today begins a two-month novel-writing challenge with a writer friend, part of my endless quest for motivators that actually work. This latest offensive is prompted in part by reading Steven Pressfield's "The War of Art," a tough-love homage to creativity that sweeps away all our "yeah, but..." detractors and tells us to just sit down and do this thing.

Pressfield contends that we're programmed, genetically, against creative action. As cave folk, we either worked with the group, hunting and gathering, or died. Well, writing is an act of self that doesn't necessarily generate prehistoric berries, leg of pterodactyl or wooly mammoth fur -- and if you're not pulling your weight, you might get voted off the island. And then what? Writing also physically separates us from The Group. In cave times, being on your own meant imminent death. (I mean, what if you had the flu and a sabertooth tiger stumbled across you? Could you run fast enough? No, you could not.)

So our deep-down self resists, with all its got, anything that could separate us from the safety of the group, because apparently our genes can't tell time. (Don't be mad at yourself--you're just trying to stay alive.) And because we're so evolved, that resistance can get extremely sophisticated.

Beating our own self-immobilization is a matter of getting up every day and disabling resistance before it figures out what's going on. How? Just sit down and do this thing. Write. Rituals help ritualize this, and habituating writing lets your autopilot fight resistance so you don't have to (at least not as much). This is an unending battle, and you're going to need allies to cover your back, especially on weak days. If you don't take the offensive, every day, resistance will begin making its case. You'll want to spring clean, analyze your childhood, question your work, suffer incurable maladies, create relationship dramas and fiscal crises, all to prevent yourself from working. Sound familiar?

Yes! It does! Because I only know two writers who actually sit down and write their novels without a deadline, without kicking and screaming and having their lives fall to pieces. Two, god love 'em, out of scores and scores. That's all. (Maybe they need their own diarama?)

Thanks for the insight, Mr. Pressfield.I'm going to take a stab at sitting down every day with fiction for the next two months, and see if I can mud-wrestle my inner mini cave-me to the forest floor.

Check out "The War of Art" here.

Unsubscribed!

A few months ago, at breakfast, my son pointed to page one in the daily paper and asked "is he hurt?" It was an AP photo from Iraq showing a car bombing, a man slumped over, dead. I lied and said he'd had an accident.

"The ambulance will be there soon," I said. My son was visibly relieved.

In the old days, newspapers policed themselves on the matter of corpses. Most simply didn't show them, the same way they didn't use the F word repeatedly as an adjective. But things change. I saw my first corpse in the local paper about 10 years ago, someone who'd died in a boating accident. Today, it's not at all uncommon. And my firetruck-loving son--who's got a built-in radar for emergency situations--always notices.

Last summer, he found some papers from September 12, 2001, and came running to ask what happened. "Bad guys," I said. He seemed to get it. These were burning buildings, after all. Not people. Recently, he found another front page and wanted to understand what those men were doing. They were Iraqis mourning, wailing painfully over the corpses right there in front of them, bodies half wrapped in white cotton, laying on a street curb.

Journalism rule no. 27: Don't make readers wince at the storytelling itself. Stories--the very real things that happen in this world-- may make readers wince and scream and cry and pass out because life can be a wretched, brutal, unmerciful thing, filled with as much misery and Guantanamo as mom's love and the Magic Kingdom. But storytelling, the device that conveys information, the photos and words, doesn't have to be cruel or flip or screaming in your face to get the point across. The story itself is enough.

My son didn't get it -- those bodies on the curb.

"Are they dead?" he asked.

"I think so," I said, thinking maybe I shouldn't shield him so much.

"But the ambulance will come and make them alive again," he said, decisively. It was not a question.

He believes so powerfully in the inevitability of rescue. That ambulances and firetrucks can--and will--fix everything. Even mortality. And it breaks my heart to know that one day, the world will reveal its truth: there's a terrible shortage of rescues and heroes.

One day he'll learn that. But not today.

*

Not so long ago, I began avoiding the daily paper, despite my obsession with Jumble and Sudoku. They'd sit for days on my snowy porch. Then I tossed them in a pile. Until one day I realized I was totally ignoring the news. I just wasn't doing it. And it wasn't just that my son chancing upon images of death and destruction was as inappropriate for a 5-year-old as stumbling across a Playboy or internet porn. It's that the news, right now, is just too much. The stories themselves hurt too much.

I called to unsubscribe a couple times but hung up out of total cognitive dissonance. How could a journalist unsubscribe? How could I leave a paper where I once, long long ago, was a reporter and editor? Well, it turns out that you just can. And finally, when the stack of unread papers reached 2 feet, I realized my indecision was making a mess, probably killing a whole aspen tree or something, and so I called, and I didn't hang up.

Now at breakfast we look at the morning sun or argue about how much cartoon-watching is healthy or look at the calendar and talk about all the things coming up--the birthday parties, vacations, picnics and parades.

It's liberating.

It's peaceful.

And life is beautiful, even if it's not. And that's okay. For now ...

Beyond the Tipping Point: Green Mac-n-Cheese

I was disproportionately overjoyed to find Kraft organic mac-n-cheese at the local grocery store recently, a clear sign that we've hit the tipping point in the go-green-go-organic race to the moon.

Now, I feel a little vulnerable here, outing myself, admitting I use boxed anything for dinner, but ... hey ... it happens. Even with those supermoms out there. At some point in the journey, we come to peace with the reality that we can do a lot, but we have our down days. The days when "what's for dinner?" is a tipping point into some sort of nuclear meltdown. Enter convenience foods.

Boxed mac-n-cheese give us a little break, now and then, from meal making. It's that simple. As with delivered pizza, it's a little like having a staff, if only for one meal. And now, with the advent of mass-produced organic boxed foods, mother's little helpers don't contain ten-syllable ingredients, cost $8 a serving, or take more than 12 minutes from start to finish. Hallelujah.

I know in some circuits, there's great debate about multinationals and organics. Yes, I'd prefer to be paying for locally made, organic, affordable convenience foods. But until that's available, I'd like to say thanks for all the foodmakers out there -- big and small, high and low -- who are helping us out with dinner and giving healthier foods, inch by inch, macaroni by macaroni.

Jack's Macs

Until this year, when my son encountered untampered-with macaroni and cheese at school (and liked it like that), we'd mix something (anything) into this childhood staple. Sometimes I'd hide things so he was getting vegetables without even knowing it. And usually I make homemade macaroni and cheese. Here's what we'd do:

Homemade: This is a no-bake version that's fairly quick and easy. Cook up several cups of macaroni. Any macaroni works, but our favorite is white spelt, which is usually only available at co-ops, and even then sporadically. (Rice macaroni seems to get a little soggy.) I douse each serving with a simple cheese sauce. Make a white sauce (2 T. butter, melted; stir in 2 T. flour until it's congealed; add 1 cup liquid (milk, broth) slowly, stirring as you go to eliminate lumps; toss in a cup or two of cheese (sharp cheddar seems to work best, but I use whatever's on hand.) For flour, use whatever works for you. We've used whole grain spelt flour, which has kind of a rustic autumn taste to it, and rice flour, which is really refined tasting (but doesn't store well, so don't do leftovers with it.)

Spinach-Tomato: This is the only kind of macaroni and cheese my son would eat for a year, between about 2-1/2 and 3-1/2. Just toss in (canned or fresh) tomatoes and (fresh) spinach. It's that simple. I always chopped the spinach into tiny slivers. For homemade, I'd mix everything together after the sauce/macaroni were ready, for boxed, just toss it all in at the end. There's enough heat there to warm the tomatoes and wilt the spinach. Grate some Parmesan on top if you like it.

Broccoli: If your child loves fresh broccoli (or cauliflower or asparagus), chop some up and toss it in. With homemade, I cook the broccoli in the cheese sauce. With boxed, I toss it in with the macaroni to cook. When my son was small, I chopped broccoli into tiny pieces, almost mincing it, but the pieces grew larger as he did.

Hiders: Best bets are onions, zucchini and summer squash. Cut them into pieces smaller than the macaroni, either cook in sauce (for homemade), with macaroni (boxed), or saute them separately until they're translucent. Be sure to peel the squashes so they can go undetected. Warning: Skip the onions if your child can detect them. These hiders also work well in spaghetti sauce (try finely finely sliced fresh spinach too).

Smallfish Clover: The Secret Lives of Boys

My dear friend, writer Heather Shaw, just launched a small cooperative press and is blogging her journey publishing "Smallfish Clover," a young adult novel about the adventures of an American boy who loses himself in a Peruvian market. It's a larger-than-life quest/adventure filled with street waifs, medicine girls, street theater and incredible writing.

I love how Heather gets kids and honors the epic worlds inside them. Here's a quote by Orson Scott Card from her web site, www.iamopress.com:

We forget, in our society, that adolescence, for males at least, is not the age of preparation-for-career or getting-an-education, even though that's what we compel them to do.

Adolescence is the age of heroism. The age of poetry. The age of great dreams and noble ideals. The age of sacrifice…

…They hunger for something great to do. When cynical liars get to them, men of this age can be talked into strapping bombs on their bodies and blowing themselves up.

Pre-order her book here. Keep up on her publishing adventures at SmallfishClover.typepad.com. And hats off to Heather for undertaking her own epic journey.

Boys rule, TV drools

A few weeks into kindergarten, my son casually informed me: "Girls are cool; boys are dumb."

This felt like a gut punch. "Where did you hear that?" I asked.

"I don't know. Maybe at school?"

"Well it's not true," I said. "Girls are cool, but boys are cool too -- way cool. You are definitely a cool kid. And you're all smart."

He looked at me and took this in. "Okay," he said, and zoomed off to crash some trucks.

I thought this kind of gender nonsense was as passe as moon boots and Nixon. I wonder why, in this lovely new millennium, this kind of thing ever became part of my son's frame of reference. Why, as he's entering kindergarten, did he have to get smacked with the notion that he's dumb because he's a boy? This is a child whose vocabulary doesn't even include the word dumb -- I'd never heard him say it. This is a child who's always felt empowered. At age two he proclaimed, "I am as big as the air!" And age three, he distilled democracy and the election process to its bottom line: "I am the boss of the country!"

And so I'd like to track down the parent of the child or children who said "boys are dumb," who afflicted my son by proxy, and give them the Kim Possible Kung-Fu treatment, in the same way I'd want to Kung-Fu someone who negligently infected my boy with a deadly virus. They caused my boy, at age five, to doubt his worth. To deflate. To consider for the first time that he's not as big as the air. And that is definitely not cool.

Let it snow II: Fire and ice

I was still sleeping the other morning when my boy, in his Thomas the Tank Engine jammies, crawled up next to me and stared out the window at the falling pre-dawn snow. "Mom?" he said. "A lot of people have died already. Right?"

I open my eyes and look at his still-sleepy face. "Right," I said.

He takes this in. I thought I should probably think of something to say, but what? I want to tell him we're immortal, that (to crib from Kurt Vonnegut) everything is beautiful and nothing hurts here on this planet. That it's a perpetually snowy, sleepy, jammied-up and cozy-with-mom place. I want to tell him not to think about these kinds of things, that it's forbidden until he's at least 21, or he'll be grounded.

"Why do you ask?" I finally say.

"There have been a lot of crashes and fires," he quickly replies.

"Yes," I say. "there have been."

He looks at me and smiles his 5-year-old smile. "But it's okay." And he tackles me.

Jack's crash-and-burn gear

Let it snow ... please

Here's an essay from last year on snow shoveling, which hopefully will help remind January what season it is.

SHOVELING GAME

Winter’s first snow is a happy magic—shimmery flakes falling from the black sky, sparkly white covering up barren grass. Last year, when the first flurries descended from heaven, my 3-year-old son and assorted relatives fell over each other trying to get out and play. We scrambled for mittens. We threw snowballs, made a teetering snowman, stuck out our tongues for flakes. We fell backward into the powder and made angels. Later we went to bed, cozy against the cold, listening for snowplows, snug and exhilarated by winter’s white.

The next morning, the newspaper skidded onto the white-white-white sidewalk. Inside was a handwritten note: “Please shovel the walk.”

Oh.

That.

Each season has its magic. Each season also has its chores. Now, shoveling shouldn’t be difficult but I’d never actually done it in any meaningful or comprehensive way. It was as if I’d had a get-out-of-jail-free card: Someone else had always cleared the paths. Until now. So--still giddy with snow fever—my son, Jackson, and I headed to the store to buy shovels.

He zeroed in on a pint-sized orange model and was off, pushing it up and down the aisle, making snowplow noises as I stared at the grownup options. Scoop or shovel? Bent or straight handle? Metal or plastic edge? How hard could this be? “You’re going to need a metal edge with all the snow we get,” said a fellow shopper offered.

My son drove his shovel back and forth, unfazed by the choices. He gets it, I thought.

“Don’t forget pellets,” another shopper said. “You don’t want ice.”

I grabbed pellets and a sober gray model with a metal edge and, as my son snowplowed his orange shovel to the checkout, calculated just how much snow we really do get: something like twelve feet a year, give or take. Take the cubic weight (I guessed oh seven pounds) and multiply it by all the walkways and driveways, paths and porches. Well, the winter’s scary math equaled something like, oh, 25,000 pounds of snow, all for me and my shovel to push around.

That night, I parked the shovel on the porch and planned to call the neighbor kid first thing in the morning.

And that night, we got a ton of snow. My son is a boy who dreams of machinery—bucket trucks, front-end loaders, firetrucks. Useful machines, made to do useful things. That night he dreamed of his very own useful tool, his new orange shovel. He woke and sped down the stairs and pulled his boots on over his footie pajamas and told me to hurry please hurry.

“We have to shubbel,” he said urgently. I thought about it for a nanosecond.

“I have to drink coffee.”

“We have to shubbel.”

The universe was commanding him. And I thought, why not? I could go out on a blue-sky sun-bright morning and watch him shovel.

Jackson zigzagged his orange shovel down the drive, then looped back and completed his “racetrack.” He pulled his tricycle out of the garage and positioned himself on the track. As he pedaled, his tires lodged in snow. He pushed and on his pedals, inching forward on the thin track. “Here,” I said, setting my coffee down and grabbing my shovel. “I’ll make it bigger.”

I widened his road and he pedaled like mad, circling and circling, delirious as only toddlers on trikes can be. Then he got up and grabbed his shovel and said, “Come on mom.” He blazed more roads. And I followed. From the backyard to the front. Down the city sidewalk. Up half the neighbors’ walks in our downtown Traverse City block. He cut the trail and I widened it. Then he ran for his Radio Flyer tricycle, and as he pedaled around his mini-autobahn, I sprinkled pellets so ice wouldn’t build up. The drive was nearly clear, so I swiped it a few times to finish up.

The next day we did the same thing. And the next. I never got around to calling the neighbor kid. Day after day, week after week, shoveling became part of our winter rhythms. I woke up happy about going outside into the freezing sunrise with my hot coffee, squinting at the winter dawn. There was something Zen-serene about the pure motions of scraping and pushing, the mindless repetitive movement. Back and forth, tiny diamonds. A red tricycle in snow.

We’d push the snow into a pile that became Jackson’s igloo, with walls and windows, and he’d invite me in for pretend pancakes. We raced our shovels down sidewalks to see who was fastest. We’d throw snowballs at icicles. But mostly we were quiet in the morning, clearing the way together.
As those twelve feet of snow piled up—to my knees, to my waist, above Jackson’s head—the paths became more and more distinct. Soon they were the only passageway from home to the world, our only way out.

And one winter morning, the newspaper skidded up the walk. Inside was a handwritten note: “Nice job on the shoveling.”

Exhale

School starts back up tomorrow and tonight, my boy just couldn't get to sleep. For two hours, he tossed and turned, calling me upstairs to tell me he'd found a solution for the Christmas tree (take it to the chipper truck behind the library tomorrow at 3:30...???), asking for a drink, wanting me to cuddle him. So I did. We sang some songs, which only made things worse--he got up and started dancing in Vogue-like poses to the old Christmas tune, "Hey, Ho, Nobody Home."

"The cough syrup must be keeping you awake," I said. "Lay down. Just relax. Close your eyes."

He tried. He really did.

"I know," he said, finally. "I'll just lay here and breathe everything out of me. Except my name."

Upon dismissing the news that grownups wring out mops: