Go Cubs!

I discovered this evening that I am not a sports bar person.

The Chicago Cubs are in the playoffs that come before the World Series. They're playing the Mets, I'm pretty sure. It's very exciting because the Cubs haven't won the Series since 1908 and the second Back to the Future movie predicted that they would win in 2015. Pretty cool, especially if it happens in real life.

My husband has been watching the games. He grew up watching Chicago baseball, mostly the Cubs, with an uncle who took him and his brother to many games at Wrigley Field. The current playoff games are being shown on a cable station that we don't get, so he started going to the sports bar near us to watch.

I came home today after a long day of teaching, meetings, emails to parents, and the occasional crisis to find that I didn't thaw the ground turkey that I had planned to use for dinner. My husband said, "No problem, I'll just eat at the sports bar." I thought maybe I would just go eat there, too, and then leave. He warned me it could be loud, but he said he'd really like to eat dinner with me.

There were a lot of people in the sports bar. And there were zillions of televisions, all showing the Cubs game. It was pretty loud between the volume of the TVs and the conversation of the patrons. We got a booth and looked over the menus and waited for a waitress. And waited. And waited as one after another they took care of all the tables near us. It was loud enough to make conversation difficult, especially for a person with a naturally soft voice. On top of that, my husband really wanted to watch the game, not talk to me.

I do know how baseball works, but I'm truly not interested enough to follow what's happening on the screen. I was gazing around at all the TVs, the other people in the bar, and wishing I had brought a book. Now that's ridiculous. Who brings a book to a sports bar when a major game is on?

So I left.

I hope they win. I really do.

Summertime!

This week I felt like I was having a short interlude that finally felt like summer. There are many things I like about summer, but I hadn't gotten to experience all of the essential (to me) parts until this week. I like the sunshine and the heat. It is so cold and gloomy for much of the winter in Chicago that sunny, hot days are a treasure. Until recently our summer in Chicago has been rain, rain, rain.

I also like having nothing to do! I like traveling, too, and accomplishing things, but having some days where I can read for hours, or do anything else I please are an important part of refueling for the school year.

On the other hand, I like being able to check some things off my to-do list. All those things that I never seem to have time or energy for during the school year - at least some of them can get done in the summer.

Because I had a chance to play in the orchestra for an opera this month, and I had to put in a lot of time on both rehearsals and practicing the difficult part at home, I hadn't yet experienced that summer restfulness. I loved doing the opera, but it certainly kept me occupied. We leave in a few days for a vacation in California, so this feels like a few days bookended by busyness. I read three books! I reorganized my spice cabinet! I continued going through my books and culling. I walked, I did yoga.

Remember when you were a kid and summer seemed to stretch on forever? Endless days playing outside, riding bikes, going swimming... Nowadays I see the end of summer looming as early as June. It's good to have some of those forever days.

Heroic Dads and Mechanics

Yesterday my daughter Jamie left for a music festival on Madeline Island, which is in Lake Superior. We live in the Chicago area, so there are two ways to get to Madeline Island. One is to fly to Detroit, shuttle to the ferry and ferry across. The other is to drive all the way across Wisconsin, to the ferry, and ferry across. The ferry ride alone is an hour, and driving from our part of Illinois to the ferry is about eight hours. Everyone who has been there says this music festival is truly worth it.

So Jamie arranged to ride with three other attendees, all basically college-age kids. The driver came from Michigan, picked up Jamie and another girl in the Chicago area and the fourth musician from Madison Wisconsin. We were a bit unsettled when the young man from Michigan opened his hood for some reason before they drove away. A little more so when Jamie texted us that the car had 206,000 miles on it. So when she called us to say that the car had broken down in Phillips, Wisconsin, we were not entirely surprised.

But being stranded in a small town in Wisconsin is not a good thing when you are supposed to report to a music festival and you have to catch a ferry to get there. While the kids called the festival staff to see if they could send any help (no, they couldn't), my husband sprang into action at the computer. He called rental car companies to see if anyone would deliver a car to Phillips. He looked up motels in Phillips. And he searched for and called an auto repair shop. With that call, he hit the jackpot. As soon as he said, "My daughter and three other college students are driving to a music festival and their car broke down in Phillips...", the man on the other end said, "Where are they? Give me your daughter's phone number. We'll tow them in. If it's just a part we can probably fix before the shop closes in 45 minutes. Otherwise there's a motel right across the street."

And he did exactly that. He towed the car, found it was a fuse that the faulty A/C blew out, replaced the fuse and disconnected the A/C. (They're going north anyway, how hot can it be on an island in the middle of Lake Superior?) The kids got back on the road, caught the 8:00 ferry and today are presumably making music.

So if your car breaks down in Phillips, Wisconsin, look for Mike. He's our hero today, along with my husband!

Books, books, books

We are at the beginning stages of what has turned into a fairly major renovation. You know, you start by saying, "I'd like to repaint these three rooms," and then it morphs into ripping up the carpeting, replacing it with wood floors, picking new furniture, and now you need new drapes, too.

As part of this upcoming excitement, we need to get rid of stuff we don't need anymore. Old paperwork, extra computers, things we actually forgot that we had, and books.

I love books. Anyone who visits us knows right away that someone in our house loves books. We have two bookcases in our living room full of books, mostly mine, plus more books downstairs in the family room, and a few scattered piles of books begin read or soon to be read here and there. I have books that I have owned for decades, including some from my childhood, and books I bought this month. So cutting down on the number of books is a challenge.

It is perhaps ironic, but one of the biggest helps I have found in cutting back on "stuff" in general is a book! The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: the Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo is unlike any book I have read about decluttering, and I have read quite a few. Ms. Kondo is enormously popular in Japan, where she has a three-month-long waiting list for her services. The book has been on the best seller list here in the U.S. for weeks.

The big difference, I think, between her book and every other organization book, is that she has a much different approach to letting go of your belongings. You must touch everything individually, and if it gives you joy you keep it. If not, you thank it for its service and let it go. It sounds strange, but it works! No more, I'll keep the dress until I lose weight, or I haven't read or finished this book, I need to keep it. She relieves us of the guilt. It's okay to let the object go; it has served its purpose for me.

Though she says to take ALL your books and put them in a pile on the floor, she also says if you have too many books to do this, you can do it by category, which is what I decided to do. I started with cookbooks - I love to cook and I have an extensive collection. I culled and reorganized - I can actually find the book I want now! Today I tackled fiction.

It is hard parting with books. Some books I know I will never reread - okay, they can go. Some books I admit that I will never read - they should go find readers somewhere else. Some books I will reread, they will stay for sure. Then there's all the in-between books - I loved it, but I won't reread it; I really want to read, but will I actually get to it?; I worked hard to put together certain collections of authors, I think I should keep those.

My pile of fiction. The books in the bookcase are not fiction.

Pre-sorting

So I have ended up with a big box of fiction that needs to leave my house. What do you do with books? My son snatched up the Portable Dante and my daughter put dibs on all the James Joyce for her boyfriend. A few books are going to join my class library. (If it sounds like we are such a literary family, you should know that my biggest pile of books that are staying is mysteries!)

What about the rest? I could take them to a used book store, but I think I will instead donate most of them to Better World Books, an online used book store that donates to literacy projects around the world for every book they sell. They have drop boxes in many locations.

I have also had fun using Book Crossing, also an online organization. Book Crossing lets you register your books, put a sticker inside explaining that it is a Book Crossing book, then you leave a book in some public place for someone else to find. On the Book Crossing site, you leave the information about where you left the book. The finder is supposed to check in, saying that he/she found it. Best case, you can track your former book as it travels the world! In reality, I have not "caught" any books in the wild (as they say at Book Crossing) and only one of mine has been caught and journaled. I will probably pick a couple of books to "release to the wild," but an entire box is just too many.

One of my neighbors just started a Little Free Library, a small box containing donated books. You can take a book and leave a book. I left a book there over the weekend. My whole box would be too many for the little box.

Next step - putting the many books I'm keeping back on the shelf!

A Midsummer Night's Dream

I'm playing in an opera this month!

This was quite unexpected. I play (french) horn in several community groups, none of which really does anything in the summer, so this was a nice surprise - and it even pays a bit!

The opera is "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by the British composer Benjamin Britten. He was a 20th century composer, though not an extreme, atonal composer. His music for this opera is atmospheric and gauzy for the enchanted forest and the fairies, romantic for the smitten couples, and peasant-like for the "thespians."

It's written for a very small orchestra. That means that everybody hears you. I'm playing 2nd horn, of two horns, but there's no blending into the background. At last week's rehearsal both of us horn players were sight reading the parts, but now we have a week to practice, so the conductor will be expecting more this week. We haven't heard much of the singers yet as we are rehearsing just the orchestra parts right now.

One of the surprises at the first rehearsal was how young the orchestra members are. I think I am probably about 30 years older than everyone else! I decided it's not a big deal. I'm just here to play. However, it got me thinking about the groups I regularly play in. Every group has it's own personality, I would say. The band I play in is predominantly school band directors. They are very serious about playing well and they all know a lot about band music and conducting. They are a happy, upbeat group and many go out after rehearsal to socialize. The orchestra I belong to is a typical community group. We are mostly adults, with a few high school students. The playing ability ranges from pretty rusty to practically professional, so overall playing is uneven. It's a friendly group, but lacks the cohesiveness that the band full of band directors has. This new opera orchestra is made up of 20-somethings, mostly, who are aiming for a career as performers. I don't sense a group dynamic yet, maybe because it is a pick-up group, but they are all friendly.

I am very happy to have this opportunity. It's been years since I played an opera. It's a challenge that has gotten me practicing new things. I'm excited to hear it with the singers and to see how they plan to stage it. Fun times!

Family, Memories, Legacies

Last week we traveled to Minnesota for my mom's 93rd birthday. Both of my children were able to come this year, along with my brother, his wife and three kids, and my sister and her husband. Every year it's a different combination of people who are able to make it to Minnesota, but it's always good to see whoever comes!

At some point, someone always brings up how lucky we are that we all get along so well. We all know families where someone isn't speaking to someone else, or where people feel belittled or neglected. We all like each other. We are indeed fortunate.

My mom is a healthy 93. She walks, she does the crossword every day, she takes care of her own finances. She's a cheerful person, but she has been doing some reflecting back on her life, and so lately she has been sort of apologizing for not being such a good mother when we were growing up. Of course, she has nothing to apologize for - she and my dad raised three children who are all well educated, doing interesting things, and who have raised their own children. However, she feels her unusual upbringing gave her no examples of how families work or how mothers were supposed to act.

My mother's father died when she was two, leaving her mother to figure out how to support the two of them. My mom lived for several years on her grandparents' farm in western Minnesota, until she was old enough to start school. Meanwhile her mother was learning to be a seamstress and working for a tailor in Minneapolis. She and her mother moved to "town" so she could attend the local school and her mother went to work. They moved quite often - my grandmother was very handy and usually improved their apartment, at which point the landlord decided to raise the rent. By this time the Depression had begun. Like so many others, they were very poor. I asked her once what kind of things they ate. She told me their relatives on the farm would send in vegetables and other things, and they often ate pickled pigs feet and other inexpensive foods. In spite of these obstacles, my grandmother managed to send my mother to college, setting an example for the rest of the family. My mom became a teacher and worked until she married my dad.

So that's the background that my mom thinks was a detriment to being a good mom.

When I remember growing up, I remember feeling safe and loved. My parents set the expectation that we would all go to college, without pressure to get all As as we went through elementary and high school. They set an example of thriftiness without deprivation. They gave us lots of freedom to try things and make choices. We knew that life involved hard work and you had to earn things. We had what I remember to be a lot of free time, especially in the summer. Sometimes we were bored, and we had to figure out what to do about it ourselves. It was a good childhood; I have no complaints.

Not bad for a mom who was winging it!

(Though really, aren't we all winging it as parents?)

Looking for recommendations for biographies

I have been so impressed since I joined this writing community in March with the generosity of the members. I have gotten so many supportive, kind, and helpful comments on my posts. So today I'm asking for your help in recommending some books for my 4th grade class.

I'm searching for excellent biographies for upper elementary readers. I would like to use this type of book for use as both mentor texts and for research. One of the writing projects our 4th graders do each year is a research report on a subject related to the American Revolution. Many of the children choose to do a biography. Over the years I have read more biographies of people of that era, both children's and adult's, and I realize that many of the biographies for younger readers are not as engagingly written or, often, even completely accurate or complete.

When I read the post on Two Writing Teachers a couple of weeks ago about the presentation by Ralph Fletcher on teaching authentic nonfiction writing, I realized that this is the type of biography I have been looking for. The kind of nonfiction book that David McCullough writes, for example, but for young readers.

In our research project, we have the students read at least two sources for their topic. One is an
"easy" book, below grade level - a picture book if we can find one. I like the books by David Adler, the series with titles, "A Picture Book of...." This gives the young researcher a quick overview of the entire topic. The second book is generally a short chapter book, which provides more details, and also gives us a chance to teach the importance of more than one source. It's always interesting when students find discrepancies and need to decide how to handle that.

So I am looking for excellent biographies for young readers, about any person not just those from the American Revolution. I'm hoping some of you will be able to give me some suggestions! Thank you for your help!