Midlife Meditation

Yesterday I said goodbye to Desale. Desale is in the fourth grade. While I can't speak for how he is in his general education classes, I know that he loves learning about music, and is always the most attentive student in the room when I'm teaching. He also goes out of his way to ask me about music outside of class. He's outgoing without being chatty, readily engages teachers in conversation, and is not shy about asking me to play a particular song over the PA during my morning gym duty. Two weeks ago, I started the fourth grade's second recorder unit, teaching them to play "Iko Iko," a New Orleans Mardi Gras song that just happens to be Desale's favorite. Uniquely out of the entire fourth and fifth grades, he began bringing his recorder with him to that morning gathering time (when 2nd, 4th, and 5th graders all wait to be picked up from the gym by their classroom teachers) in hopes of getting some extra coaching from me. This morning, Desale's ...

For a single parent with a low income, summer is hell. My first stint of single parenting was from 1995-96. I was a rural pastor, on minimum salary, with very few resources to drawn on, and my children were very small: 2 and 5 at the beginning of the divorce, 4 and 7 by the time I remarried almost two years later. During the school year, they were with me weekends and holidays. During the summer, I alternated entire weeks. Early on, I discovered a painful reality: on my parenting weeks, I had no freedom. I could only visit people who enjoyed children. I had to do all my office work from home. And I could forget about exercising. They were just too small to be by themselves, and I didn't know my new congregation well enough to ask for babysitting help. Fortunately, rural ministers enjoy far greater flexibility than practitioners of almost any other trade or profession I'm aware of. I survived my first summer largely unscathed, and by the second, I had gained enough experie...

"Not our children, not our problem." The sign was seen at a protest in Murrieta, California, according to reporter Bob Ortega, speaking with Brooke Gladstone on NPR's  On the Media  program last Friday. The moment I heard those words, I knew I had to write about them, that they would haunt me until I did. So here I am. The occasion for that sign was a blockade. Three buses of undocumented children were on their way to a Border Patrol processing station in Murrieta. The demonstrators managed to keep the buses out of Murrieta, but not out of the United States: the buses were simply diverted to a different processing station in Chula Vista. One other accomplishment of the protesters was giving Murrieta a black eye, as the publicity led the town's mayor to write an open letter to the White House apologizing on behalf of his community.  It also delivered a message to the children on the buses, the message of the sign Bob Ortega saw (full disclosure: I Googled that si...

It's the time of year when kids start feeling their oats. In the gym where I teach, I use rolling plastic risers called "Flip Forms" to organize classes, dividing children among the four colored risers as they enter the room. This breaks up clumps of friends and creates ready-made teams that can compete with each other for quietest, most confident singing, best listening, etc. And yes, I know "winning" a competition like this is extrinsic motivation, but at this point in the year, I will pragmatically do whatever it takes to hold their attention long enough to teach a concept. It works up to a point--that point being when the active boys (somehow, it's never girls) start jumping off the top riser, having their own competition to see who can break an ankle first. I move the children to another part of the gym for the next activity, and now the really active boys are wandering over to the risers whenever I'm not looking to continue jumping off of ...

  I called it my single parenting midterm: leave after church on a March Sunday in 1996, drive halfway, spend the night in a hotel, then drive the rest of the way the next day to camp in the Disneyland campground. The following day--Tuesday--we'd have early admission at the park by virtue of staying at an official Disney facility. We'd make the most of it, riding everything appropriate to two small children and their still divorce-shell-shocked father (the papers had only been signed six months earlier), until the park closed at dusk. The following day, we'd drive to Yosemite National Park, spend the night in a cabin, then tour the park for a day. The day after that, we'd drive all the way home. Along the way, we ate many of our meals out of a cooler. This was Spring Break on the cheap. And I mostly pulled it off. It was a simpler time in many ways. Sean and Sarah were 3 and 6, respectively. Their main concern in the car was who got to ride in the front seat next to...