Overheard in April

Before the month is out, I wanted to post the one-liner sentences I overheard over the course of the month. As usual, I am interested in learning the rest of these stories.


"That is the most some of these girls have ever said "no" in their lives."

"I do not believe that I am the target audience for country music."

"Is Hitler your's or someone else's?"

"It's edible, but not enjoyable."

"It can't be that deep."

"Thank you, Max, for judging my sneeze."

Magic

There is a touch of magic in the air of a Little League field on a warm night. Boys sit in the dugout wearing their cleats and clean uniforms, their mouths at work on wads of sweet bubble gum. The breeze carries the voices of the players and the laughter and shouts of their little brothers and sisters at play while parents watch the game.
If you play your cards right, you'll catch a glimpse of the joy on your son's face in that moment when his bat connects and he hits the ball into right field. Or you'll see his careful concentration, his body poised as he stands at 3rd base, ready to run home if the batter gets a hit.
A baseball game has a slow rhythm to it, a leisurely pace punctuated by quick moments of sudden action: with the crack of the bat there is a ball in the air, a catch at first base, a runner to tag before he reaches home plate. In that way, it's a lot like your little boy's childhood: fleeting moments of pure magic that seem to pass in an instant.

Real Life Conversations with JT: Clothing Optional Edition

The Backstory: It is a truism of life in the Garden State that men just don't feel compelled to wear a shirt when they are working in their yard. And their comfort with this level of public nudity is nearly always stunning for its lack of good taste. We're talking about a lot of unwarranted public nudity. So it was that on Saturday, with temps over 90 degrees, the shirts came off, as the boy and I noted while we drove through town.

JT: Look, there's another guy with no shirt.

Mama: Oh my.

JT: Oh Mama, you gotta love Jersey.

At least the pizza is good.

Summer Preview

The weekend featured a taste of summer with temps in the 90s on both Saturday and Sunday. JT had two baseball games (and had three hits out of five at bats). My friend E joined me at the game on Saturday evening and the cousins A & T surprised me at Sunday's 1 pm game (and may I note that it takes real friends to watch a Little League game on a 90 degree afternoon). I planted the rest of my garden late Sunday afternoon and JT and I wrapped up our weekend with a back deck card game while we waited for our outdoor supper to finish on the grill.
The boy even persuaded me to light up the fire pit for a few roasted marshmallows; it's a good thing that I keep the ingredients for smores in the pantry.
At supper last night, JT had so many favorite parts of his day (the surprise game visit by Miss A and Miss T; his double; winning Sunday's game; roasting marshmallows) that he couldn't settle on just one favorite part of his day.

I call that a success.

The Big Five

I teach a group of 9th graders who have a unique talent for taking class in their own direction. While I may come to class prepared to discuss the Iconoclastic Controversy (or some other historical topic), they have another agenda. They are most successful at this game of distractions when they deliver an interesting question. When that happens, the beauty of the course's curriculum is that we can explore the distraction, having fun and learning at the same time.

So it was a few weeks ago that 9th grader A asked me: who are 5 people who most changed the course of the world? We spent the rest of the class period exploring the question. I reserved the right to have some time to compose my final answer and I sent them off to create their own lists.

I figured there was no reason to answer this question on my own, so I recruited help. I sent the question to college professor Jason (he was once a student capable of asking the most engagingly distracting questions himself). And my college roommate (and fellow political science major) Michelle also agreed to play a round.

Now we were cooking with gas.

Jason refused to be bound by the rules of the question and offered up these compelling lists:

Ancient History:
Thucydides
Saint Peter
Genghis Khan
Archimedes
Muhammad

Medium-term History:
Charles Darwin
Joan of Arc
Henry Dunant
Susan B. Anthony
Rene Descartes

Contemporary History:
Eleanor Roosevelt
Sigmund Freud
Mohandas Gandhi
Mao Tse-tung
The dude with that moustache....umm, Hitler

Environmental History:
John Muir
Increase Lapham
Bob LaFollette
Aldo Leopold
Gaylord Nelson
(Oh, hey, they're all from Wisconsin. You're welcome, rest of America!)

My 9th graders had never heard of any of the environmental figures (and may I defer from Jason's Badger State claims and note that Californians also claim a piece of John Muir for their own). But it was their ignorance of Henry Dunant who got their attention. There is nothing as indignant as a smart 9th grader who discovers something previously unknown to them. They set forth to learn about Dunant, who is credited with founding the International Red Cross and was the first recipient of the Nobel Peace prize, and are now a veritable fountain of Dunant knowledge.

Michelle teaches kindergarten and, as a consequence, she knows how to read and follow instructions. She delivered the following 5:

Aristotle
Leonardo daVinci
Copernicus
Gutenberg
Alexander the Great.

And then I composed my list, also opting to also cheat on the assignment. I identified 10 folks grouped into two categories: Philosophers and Leaders:

Philosophers/Thinkers:
Aristotle
Gutenberg
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Jefferson
Karl Marx

My guiding principle in selecting leaders was that they must have been considered a force for good (demonstrating a more optimistic tone than my normal realist's default setting):

Leaders:
Alexander the Great
Queen Elizabeth
Franklin Roosevelt
Nelson Mandela
Gandhi

My class immediately noted that only Michelle followed the instructions, for which they awarded her extra credit. We spent an entire day talking about daVinci, whose nomination they whole-heartedly endorsed. About our mutual selection of Aristotle and Alexander the Great, they had suspicions, feeling that we should have selected one or the other. Fittingly, they voted for Alexander, feeling that the student was busily applying his teacher's lessons and was therefore more deserving of the nomination. I deferred, perhaps wanting credit for that semester of grad school when I read Aristotle on a non-stop basis.

From one question, I got a whole lot of thinking mileage. And now it's your turn. Who makes your Big Five list?

This Week in Supper

On the occasional Friday, I have posted recipes of my own devising (I call that feature Food Friday). I don't have a new recipe for this week but I have been on a tear of good cooking lately, feeling both productive and creative. I think that it's the coming of warm weather that lends itself to my kitchen creativity. Last week's suppers were particularly successful, at least from my point of view (JT may some day write his own blog to complain about what I cook). And so I present: This Week in Supper.

There was Tuesday's pesto tomato grilled sandwich, sautéed spinach with garlic, and cantaloupe. That sandwich is a work in progress and when I have perfected it, I will post the recipe here.
On Wednesday, the pesto was put to work to make pesto pasta and green salad with honey mustard balsamic dressing, feta, pecans, & dried cranberries.
Thursday found the table set with JT's favorite food: guacamole, adobo refried beans, and grilled veggie quesadillas.
I always cook enough to have leftovers for my lunch the next day. I am an extremely ordered cook so at some point this weekend, I will plan suppers for next week. Then I will re-stock the pantry and the process will start all over again.

Bounce, Bounce, Bounce

I opened this box of Bounce (120 fresh-smelling sheets!) on January 5th and yesterday, on April 23rd, I washed my 120th load of laundry for the year. So while it's entirely possible that I've not accomplished much this year, it is clear that we've been quite clean while doing it.

Update: In answer to J's concern, though it's true that I have a good memory for obscure (and useless) facts, in this case I wrote down when I opened the box. I wanted to see how long it would last. And now I know.

Real Life Conversations with JT: Wisdom Beyond His Years Edition

The backstory here is a little more complicated than usual: Our household has a long-running interest in pirates, one that pre-dates today's faddish pirate popularity. Over the years, it's become clear to JT that pirates have a dubious claim on moral value, but his fascination continues unabated. And for the past two years, I have steadily exposed him to politics and the news. This has led to a number of very thoughtful conversations as I've tried to explain the world to JT in terms that he can understand. I want him to have his own political and moral compass, and I want him to understand my values.

So it was that in the past few weeks, we followed the Somali pirate story on NPR. We talked about the situation (including the economic and political chaos in Somalia), we looked at maps to see where these places were, and we cheered when the captain of the Maersk Alabama was rescued by the Navy.

The New York city arrival of Abduwali Abdukhadir Muse, the sole surviving pirate, was particularly fascinating to JT. We looked at the pictures on-line and listened to the NPR story about Muse's appearance in court. Among other things, that story reported that Muse faces the prospect of life in prison and will have an American attorney appointed for him, since he doesn't have funds to pay for his own defense. NPR also reported that when the judge quizzed Muse about his family, Muse cried.

It was this final revelation that struck JT. Questions followed.

JT: If he goes to jail for the rest of his life, will he ever see his family again?

Mama: Well, he will be in an American jail and his family will be far away in Somalia, so I guess that it would be very hard for him to see his family.

JT: Oh.

And then a pause, while my 9 year old contemplated the world as he knows it.

JT: What he did was wrong, Mama, but he must have been desperate to do it, don't you think?

Looks to me like his moral compass is coming along quite nicely..

Cold Comfort

Lately, I've been feeling a sentiment that I don't often feel about politics: frustration. I'm certainly not alone in this sentiment but as someone who has spent the last 20-plus years of her life studying politics, it's a rare experience.

Brief pause while we all calculate the fact that I am now dinosaur old. Gah.

My frustration has to do with the ways in which politics is no longer about leadership but instead is about winning. Lately, I am disappointed by my leaders and the chattering classes. In a bit of irony not lost on me, I'm teaching about FDR's first 100 days in office just as I am watching President Obama accomplish the same. The parallels are too obvious to ignore.

And yet.

In 1933, there was a sense in Congress that the parties must come together to solve the nation's problems; a sense that our nation would sink or swim as one. I do not have that feeling these days. There are so many examples of our failure to work together.

Republicans are irate that Democrats, the party with the majority in both houses of Congress, would dare to pass a budget by majority vote. That process, called reconciliation, is a process Republicans repeatedly used when they had the majority and George Bush was in the White House. And in a largely majoritarian system, it's perfectly reasonable for the party with the majority to go ahead and govern. But the Republicans want to option to filibuster everything.

President Obama's first judicial nominee is a well-respected moderate, James Hamilton. He was chosen precisely to signal the president's willingness to compromise and to get past endless hand-wringing and political conflict over judicial nominations. And what does that earn the president? A screeching speech by Senator James Inohofe, Republican of Oklahoma, pledging to filibuster this nominee. In 2003, when his party controlled the Senate, Inohofe declared that Senate filibuster of presidential judicial nominees would be unconstitutional. Then, and now, Inohofe is a ridiculous buffoon. Surely there is a level-headed Republican willing to call him on it? I wait in vain.

And don't get me started on the Tea Party protests of last week. My favorite moment from that day of nonsense is Texas Governor Rick Perry's declaration that Texas might just secede from the Union (he claims it is the state's constitutional right, suggesting that Texas needs some help with the teaching of U.S. history). Secede? Are you serious?

Newt Gingrich's condemnation of President Obama, who dared to shake the hand of a foreign leader, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, may defuse my amusement about the Tea Party nonsense. Setting aside the insanity of the current Gingrich renaissance, let's just be realistic about America's relationship with the rest of the world. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan could talk with the Soviet Union while they pointed dozens of lethal nuclear weapons at us, but Obama can't shake hands with Chavez? Because, honestly, at the point that our nation's leader cannot be civil to those with whom we disagree.....well, words fail me.

Enough. We have plenty of problems in this nation and in our world. Happily, we don't lack for ideas and resources to begin to address our problems. But if we can't have thoughtful exchanges of policy options; if we can't agree to work together and move ourselves forward, then we will fail.

And if that happens, we will only have ourselves to blame. I don't know about the rest of you, but to me it will be cold comfort.

Daffodil Tuesday: Success!

From last week's lone flower, I now see a full bouquet when I walk outside each morning. And now that the daffodils have seen fit to bloom, the tulips can't be far behind.