Midlife Meditation

We all know who they are. They're the children whose names we learn first. Sometimes it's on the first day, when they're wearing stickers to identify them. Sometimes it's not until we're on bus duty, and they've got a special tag on their backpacks because that's how we distinguish kindergartners from the rest of the school and make sure they get on the right buses or in the right cars. Sometimes we get it from a classmate of the child who pulls on our shirt to tattle: "Brian's hitting." If it's just an off day, that may not be enough to sear Brian's name into our memory bank. But if it's par for Brian's course, if we're going to be repeatedly using his name and not to praise him for what a lovely child he's being, then that's a name we'll remember for a good long time. These are the standout children, the children who, years after I've moved on from whatever school they were at, a still remember with a...

Good God, make it stop! And why can't I tear my eyes away? Football scares me. I've written about this before, and I encourage you to peruse that post (as well as this one , which suggests the human tendency to turn even safety equipment into weapons if it will create an advantage in a competition is what occasioned the Flood). The elegant game of baseball aside, football really is America's sport. No other sport merges bone-crushing violence with arcane bureaucratic rule manipulation as elegantly and telegenically as American football. These two components--violence and creative rule avoidance--are the most American of vices. The US tax code is as voluminous as it is because every Congressional addition to it, whether its purpose is to plug a loophole or streamline a provision, provokes an equal and opposite reaction from tax accountants and the capitalists who hire them to find even more convoluted ways to shelter their income from the IRS. Lest you think...

I really don't want to have a conversation with this guy. On my way home yesterday, I found myself behind a Cadillac with a vanity plate that nearly took my breath away: "NRA YES." It was accompanied by a half dozen right-wing bumper stickers espousing the standard NRA talking points--I think one of them said "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," and there was one about the Second Amendment, one about blaming Democrats for Obamacare (ludicrous, because it was concessions to Republicans that made the damn thing so complicated, rather than a clean, efficient Medicare for all)--and I was so struck by what I was seeing that, when we came to a stop light, I snapped a picture with my phone. I did this as surreptitiously as I could for reasons I'm about to go into, and the result is that only the license plate is legible in the photo, but that in itself tells the story quite well. That license plate and those stickers...

What has this robot got to be happy about? Certainly not how well his software is running where I work. I don't teach in a gym anymore, but I do teach in a computer lab. Scott School is short on space. There are not enough classrooms for the students we already have, and we actually had to add a class this year. Meanwhile, arts programs are expanding: music is now year-round, and we just added a part-time art teacher for half the year. This forced an issue that should have been addressed last year when, as I reported consistently, the gym proved an impossible place to teach music. Over the summer, there was a realignment of facilities, and the English Language Development classroom was shut down, with one third of it turned into a computer lab and, on the other side of a divider, the rest of it now the music room. This is still far from ideal. For the most part, teachers choose the other computer lab, off the library, when their students need some screen time, but oc...

A flashback: The first semester of our last year of seminary, my first wife and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in married student housing next door to a fellow student and his wife. We had a toddler, they had two pre-school aged children. They were friendly Texans, and we got along well at first. One day I was visiting them when I noticed a paddle hanging on the wall. The husband saw my eyes on it, and chuckled, making a joke about how nothing else would get his kids' attention. I may have smiled weakly, nervous about sharing my real feeling about hitting a small child with a piece of wood. I know I became uncomfortable with these people from then on. As the semester progressed, both our child and their children had trouble sleeping. One night I was up with Sarah, who would not go down in her crib, when I heard screaming from next door--probably what was keeping her awake. I could just make out enough of the words to realize our neighbors were trying to get their c...

Of course young me can't just take the advice of old me lying down. Even though at 22 my tendency was to be far more respectful of authority than most young adults I meet, by the time I reached my early 30s, that had worn off. When it comes to insolence, I was a late bloomer, but bloom I did. And when I talked back, I did so with all the rhetorical powers I had honed as a preacher, taking on whomever I was pissed at point by point, not stopping until I had immersed every argument a would-be mentor might make in a bath of boiling logical scorn. So now, without further ado, I project myself back nineteen years. Young Mark holds in his hands a letter from the future filled with the typical platitudinous valedictory advice middle-aged men cannot help dishing out to adults young enough to be their sons and daughters. He pores over it, highlights flimsy arguments, feels his blood boiling at the Hallmark Graduation Book quality of the thing. He sets it beside his keyboard--it...

Stew tries to get through to his youthful self. Passing Strange  was only on stage for a few months in 2008. I heard about it on NPR, as composer/author/narrator/lead singer Stew talked with Terry Gross and and Kurt Andersen about his autobiographical brainchild, a two hour coming-of-age rock opera filled with humor, angst, and gorgeous music. The snippets I heard on Fresh Air  and Studio 360  were enough to make me want to see it or, barring that, to listen to the soundtrack; and yet somehow I never did. It faded from my memory until, scrolling through the Comcast menu (we just switched), I discovered it had been filmed by Spike Lee and was going to play on Showtime. Amy and I watched it Sunday, and it was riveting. Stew is on stage for the entire show, singing the story of his youth with such power that we could not believe he could sustain it for a single performance, let alone a three-month run of nightly shows. All the performances were of that caliber. Th...

There are two talks every parent dreads having with his or her young adult children. The first--the "where babies and STDs come from, and how to prevent those things from happening" talk--really only needs one good, awkward run through, and frequently that's just to confirm what you've always suspected, namely that your kid knows plenty about penises, vaginas, intercourse, procreation, sexually transmitted diseases, and the pros and cons of all the various prevention methods. The second talk is the one that really matters. It's also the one you're going to have to repeat over and over again, possibly as long as you and your child are both taking up space on the planet. It's about breaking up. I recently attained a milestone in my life as both a parent and step-parent: all my kids have been through breakups. They've managed it with varying degrees of success. Sometimes they've been the dumpers, sometimes the dumpees. They've manifes...

There's nothing like the slow smile of recognition when a child realizes I'm not a stranger, after all. I taught at Margaret Scott School from September through January last year, then changed schools until the end of the year. The plan was for me to remain at Hartley, the other school, until next January, then switch back to Scott for a full year. This way, the PE teacher I was trading places with and I could move just once a calendar year, yet still do full half-years at each school. But then plans changed: the Portland Arts Tax kicked in, and my position was altered to have me at Scott full-time, year-round. It was hard to say goodbye to the Hartley students in June, knowing I wouldn't be coming back at all. It was also nerve-wracking to have no idea where I would be teaching in September: I'd been in the gym, a location that, except for convenience to the administration, becomes more unworkable in my mind the farther I get from it. With PE continuing fo...