Ms. 8: (suspiciously) Mommy, did you clean up my room? Me: Yeah, honey, a little bit. I folded a few of those shirts from your floor. Ms. 8: (satisfied) I thought so. There were some pieces of blank space that I didn't put in here.
A philosopher friend asked how it's possible to hold high standards (which, being high, cannot ever be met) and simultaneously be happy.
I thought about that. This is what I thought:
I'm not sure it's impossible to hold standards and live happily.I believe devout religious believers do this - at least some do - because for them, happiness IS the standard, and the quest to achieve the standard is part of a voyage that, although it cannot end in success, will nevertheless (if you're good) get you far enough for those Pearly Gates (even if God cannot be scientifically proven to exist, it IS apparently scientifically proven that believing in Him makes you happier.Quite the quandary right there.)
For those of us with the sense that the mortal coil is all we've got, things get stickier.Today's stickiness (just today's, just anecdotally): I'm sitting on the sofa after work and dinner, laptop in hand, writing a volunteer-related email. Ms. 8's bugging me.Really bugging me.She wants quality time with her Mom.I don't have it to give.I want organizing time and email time and just plain me-time, damnit.I'm laughing falsely and typing and trying to hold it together.I click the wrong thing and open up the NYT.Front image:all those white-wrapped dead children in Gaza.Jeeezusfuckinchr.....!A million things pour through the mind.Hamas' cold-bloodedly calculating strategies about firing from the protection of the populace.Israel's dreams, perennially upheld behind blood-soaked barricades.US sanctimonious complicity.My own willingness to shut eyes, shut purse, turn away.All those grieving parents.All those mothers, just like me....Ms. 8 comes around the edge of the computer."What's that, Mommy?""The newspaper, honey." I close the laptop.I follow her into the kitchen.She's skipping.How can one ever find happiness in so ephemeral a moment as this one small, happy child-skip instant, lost in a morass of my own - and my society's - inadequacies?Oh, God.Or, no, wait - He doesn't exist.
Ms. almost-11 (teary-eyed, screaming): Mom, it was a mistake! I'm great at math! Math is easy for me!
Me (teeth-clenched sotto voce): Honey - I'll look into it, but I'm sure your teachers are grading consistently. You need to understand that sometimes you just don't do A work.
Ms. Almost: Friend X and Friend Y got A's, and they're worse than me! I know they made a mistake! I hate you! You just don't ever believe me!
Me (losing out a bit on the sotto): Honey. I will look into it. And Then We Will Talk.
Dear Teacher:
Ms. Almost was extremely upset last night about her ‘B’ grade in math. She insisted that she finds math easy and (of course!) that Friend X and Friend Y, who got A’s, are “a lot worse in math than I am!” She also claims to have completed all the homework and to have done well on tests.
I certainly realize that there’s a large number of potential reasons that she earned a grade that surprises her. I think our key job at tonight’s parent-teacher conference will be to explain carefully and as thoroughly as possible why she got a B and how the grades are objectively derived using consistent criteria across all students. I’ll do the best I can to support your explanation. My goal is to assist her to accept that she did earn the grade she received (as opposed to having it given to her ‘by mistake’). I’m looking for your help in doing this.
Thank you in advance for helping us to help Ms. Almost improve her performance,
Faith
Faith: After your email, I have looked over Almost's grades and realize I have made a grave error. I must have gotten lost on my grade book when I was recording grades and put the wrong letter grade down. She does in fact have an A and we will quickly correct the error on her card. I am soooooo sorry to have caused her undo stress.
Wherever on the African continent I've touched down, when the plane door opens and conditioned European air dissipates in the cacophonous onrush of sub-Sahara, there's the overriding scent of laterite dust. Traveling afoot or in open-air vehicles, it gets in your hair, suffuses your clothes, tinges your sweat. It's ubiquitous and often unpleasant.
The day I left Africa for the last time, I mourned the loss of laterite. I spent those hours breathing consciously of it; with every inhalation reliving another golden memory. The good, the difficult, the dangerous, the revelatory -- all dust-wrapped and priceless.
If, right now, I were suddenly transported back, there would be nothing there of that last day's supercharged emotion. Even if you mourn it often, and even if you return - you
never have the totality of a place-and-people in quite the same way as you had it for the flash of time just
before your departure.
Is anticipative nostalgia so painful because it is so fleeting?
I have a friend who's leaving a long-time home he loves, where he has roots and family, obligations and adulation, on all sides. Every time he turns around, there's another farewell, another joking jibe belying teary eye, another lengthy embrace, another last look at a long-loved sight. My friend's a world traveler with plenty of relocation in his past, but he didn't want to make this move right now. There's an angry 'what-if' patina on all his nostalgia. He sees the final good-bye streaking toward him at unstoppable
speed. He's sad, he's happy, he's angry, he's resolved, he's
overwhelmed.
The thing about 'always having Paris' (as a metaphor for any loss of great magnitude), is that you actually don't. You only 'have Paris' in that fulgent instant just before you turn resolutely away from an abandoned dream: the moment when you know, with all your soul, how precious it is; and, simultaneously, how integral to your being it was.
Repainting the shade-side of our rickety haybarn (plastered
to the steeply-angled ladder lover-like), everything was dim, grey, sticky and
precarious.Except - suddenly - there was
a fairy-dance of light against the eaves: an ever-changing chiaroscuro as the
morning sun glanced on the muddy sheep-trough under the downspout.
Pause for the bigger picture.
Things are difficult right now.
But no, no, not the usual way.There's no news of divorce, money trouble, ailing children, or any known
untoward couplings (except for me and my paint-spattered aluminum ladder).
There’s rough stuff at the office.A colleague, working around to “everything
might be okay in the end – or even a lot better “ (which it might; absolutely
it might) nevertheless said, to quote:“the human aspect is undeniably fucked
up.”
The human aspect is undeniably easy to fuck up.Everyone does.Institutions are particularly prone.And if we get out of this with that verdict, we will pretty much undeniably all be better off in the
end.
The jury’s currently out on that one.
Seeking solace in metaphor, I was stricken by this morning’s
chance vision.Out of sheep piss, drainwater,
and the blindingly steamy morning sun, off a weathered bit of aging
siding:something glittering, pure,
lovely, and untainted.
