There Goes My Life

I dropped the kids off with the grandparents today. It's the first time they've gone away on their own. Usually if both my wife and I have to be out of town or something, then one of the grandparents comes to South Dakota to stay at our house. In any event, as I was driving home--like that scene from the movie Better Off Dead, Kenny Chesney's "There Goes My Life" came on the radio. (Those unfamilar with the song can at least take a look at the lyrics here.) While the song is about a young man who became a dad as a teenager, and I didn't become a dad until my 30s--and under much different circumstances, I suspect it is a song that resonates with most fathers of little girls (of all ages). At least, I hope it would on some level.

I'll admit to being a guy who tears up at some odd things. For instance, Bill Murray's Scrooged makes me well up every time. Chesney's song hits me in a similar fashion, especially on days when I've just started driving north while the kids are riding south. It was a bittersweet three or four minutes.

Those minutes did, however, revive my memory of a web-based writing project that crossed my brain a while back. One that I've considered using as sort of a special-topics-creative-writing-over-Interim course. Given the impact that music has on our lives, the way songs can function almost as bookmarks allowing us to flip back to particular emotional places in our past, I have this notion of a web site called "The Synoptic Jukebox."

The interface to the site would function like one of those old countertop jukeboxes, where you flip the pages to see the various songs available. When readers select a particular title, they would be met with a collection of writings connected in some way with the song. The writings wouldn't be about the songs--at least not directly--but about those emotional places that we associate with various songs. Hall and Oates's "Sara Smile," for example, might connect with an account of a high school dance where some goofy young teen (to remain nameless) requested the song in order to orchestrate the perfect moment to ask a certain Sara to dance. But, perhaps the DJ at this dance, who said he'd be glad to play the song, never got around to doing so, and the goofy young teen--waiting for the perfect moment--never asked the girl to dance. That's just one hypothetical example.

The intersections of music and experience seem such fertile ground that the site could grow rapidly, and given a sufficient number of voices, could become quite fascinating. Regional difference. Generational difference. Etc.

gad

Llamas, Tigers, and Ducks

My wife is out of town for a week, so the kids and I went to the zoo this morning. It was probably the single most impressive visit I've ever made to any zoo. The tigers (a mother and two "teen-age"? cubs) were frisky. Wrestling. Pouncing on one another. Chasing. Even, at times, standing up on their hind legs swatting at one another like sparring partners. In the truest sense of the word, it was quite awesome.

Of course, when we got home (after a trip through McDonald's), I asked my kids about their favorite things at the zoo. My son (3) informed me he didn't have one. My daughter (5) rattled off the following list:

• the mama duck with chicks that ran across the rhino's pen.
  
• feeding the ducks and swans.
  
• the duck that half bit her finger while she was feeding it.
  

No tigers. No bears. Not even the llama-like creatures getting it on while all the parents snickered nervously and the children asked "Why is he making that noise?"

My daughter, the more conversant of the two kids, then asked me about my favorite thing, at which time I reminded them about the tigers. Her reply was, "Oh, yeah."

The conversation got me thinking about the extent to which learning is often serendipitous. My kids may never see tigers playing so actively at any other point in their lives, and chances are they won't remember this moving sight. Had the event occurred five years from now, the impact may have been different. Similarly, I've heard folks say of any number of novels, "You have to be at a certain point in your life to really enjoy it." While I suspect that line is often used as some combination of excuse and encouragement, I also suspect that there can be some truth in it.

The point I guess, is this: The feeling I had today with my children was not entirely unlike the feeling I sometimes get with my first-year composition courses. Some of the students are "ready." The events in their lives have brought them to a place where they are receptive to and appreciative of the discoveries and the challenges and the rewards of writing. Others--even while academically and intellectually prepared--see the course as a hoop to jump through. (Perhaps because we've framed it that way?) Certainly, I was in these same shoes as an undergraduate. In such instances, I find myself wishing for something along the lines of a "ghost of Christmas future," some way to provide a bit of perspective that hasn't yet been generated in the course of one's life to date.

gad

Jayber Crow: The Second Time

My Interim course concluded by reading Jayber Crow, a novel by Wendell Berry. It's my second time through the book, and different things jumped out at me this time around. Here's the passage that has continued to linger:

My mistake was not in asking the questions that so plagued my mind back there at Pigeonville, for how could I have helped it? I can't help it yet; the questions are with me yet. My mistake was ignoring the verses that say God loves the world.

But now (by a kind of generosity, it seemed) the world had so beaten me about the head, and so favored me with god and beautiful things, that I was able to see. "God loves Port William as it is," I thought. "Why else should He want it to be better than it is? (250-51)

All of us have heard folks talk about how being a parent opens up a new understanding of God's love. In my four years of fatherhood, I've sensed this to be true. Felt it to be true. Berry has helped me to understand how it is true. Our society is one that tends to equate love with an uncomplicated acceptance. The key word there is "uncomplicated." Love includes acceptance. There is no question that I will accept my kids in any situation. I can't help but to do so. But that acceptance is complicated. There's more to it. It is because of my love for my kids that I want them to "be better." That desire for betterment doesn't negate acceptance. The two are intimately tied to one another. The presence of one to the exclusion of the other is necessarily a diluted love that more poorly reflects God's love for us.