When we walked into the party– one of the first real summertime kickoffs– a neighborhood extravaganza, complete with meat cooked underground, a fire pit, kids running wild, climbing on trucks and dirt piles, some clutching bags of contraband chips (I even saw two brothers splitting a can of soda)— when we walked in, worried we were “late” (as if such a thing applies, as if this kind of miraculous chaotic friendstival has a tight format) — when we did, one of the first people I saw was my three-doors-down-neighbor. About my age, sometimes a fan of the band, an architect. I don’t know her well. I have been a bit in awe of her because a) she is beautiful, an b) she is a damn architect! (An architect, Jerry!)

I was feeling kind of lonerish. A good, dear friend of ours was having a party that weekend– and I do mean, the whole weekend. The invitation was for:

Saturday evening, woodfired pizzas 5 PM til whenever, bring sides, toppings, instruments, whatnot. Then the lamb would get put into the pit at midnight to roast until Sunday afternoon. Sunday morning, breakfast at 10. Then floating the river from noon til whenever, then the unpitting of the lamb and festivities Sunday evening, bring sides, etc.

I mean, that’s quite the invitation.

Saturday was errands and then river time so Josh could crawfish-gather for the party.

Saturday night, our plan was I would take Alden home when he needed to go, and Josh would stay til the wee hours.

I was more or less ready to go at 10-ish, when Alden was REALLY ready to go– and that was fine, but I will say that I was kinda not up for party #2 on Sunday.

Floating was — well, floating is always fun, but Josh and I were kinda crosswise, and I just felt ready for some home time down time, even, maybe, alone time?

I was really leaning toward not going. Skipping it. Laying low. I was tired of feeling required. Feeling resentful about anyone asking me to do anything— make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich/attend a meeting Tuesday evening/ play a gig next weekend/come to the party tonight.

I don’t remember how exactly– what jedi mind trick Josh used to get me to go. He must have told me there’d be jamming, because that is the surest way to get me to go. (It’s what got me to the barbecue where Josh and I kinda met… but that’s another story.)

So we biked over to the party, me with my fiddle along for the ride, feeling half-grumpy, but feeling silly about it as I greeted friends and neighbors I really DON’T see often enough.

And Bob was there. Bob the accordion player, who I had seen playing music a few times at the Farmers’ Market, and I’d heard him playing with a swing group on a local radio show a couple of times. He was sitting to the side, softly (for an accordion) playing tunes. And I had been wanting to play with him, so I headed over and just asked if he’d mind if I played a few tunes with him.

That, right there, is a very challenging, tender, complicated moment in music… when someone asks to play with you… You don’t know them. Are they any good? Will you and they share a common language? Are they a nice person? Do they know how to be sensitive, to listen, to lead a song, to communicate? You don’t know any of that… To Bob, I was just some gal with a fiddle.

But I realized soon that Bob has the heart of a teacher (and was one, in fact, before he retired.) He said sure, and off we went. The first few tunes were a bit tentative as we kind of found out what the other could do… and as we went on we played trickier tunes, traded solos more, shared and passed lines back and forth, sang a bit, and generally had an amazing time. It was one of those nights. I have no idea how long we played. Two, three, four hours? Josh and Alden left on bikes at some point, and Bob and I kept playing into the dark. A young girl with a blues voice joined us for a while and her boyfriend played a little guitar, but for me, the magic was between me and Bob and my fiddle and his accordion.

This all was last summer. I’ve seen Bob once since then  — he was onstage at a local brewery playing with a new band– we exchanged enthusiastic smiles, but, well, he was onstage and we didn’t chat. My bet is that we’ll play together again one of these days.

When I lay in bed that night after the party, with the sounds of the music still swirling my ears, I thought about the friends who had said, after we stopped, “I just wanted to listen to you guys all night!” “That was so perfect!”– things like that. I thought about that… and I thought about the fact that the hours of playing had felt to me like a magic carpet ride. Maybe that’s it, I thought to myself, before I went to sleep. What if the thing I need to do is the thing that feels… easy. Beyond easy.

I almost didn’t go. I resisted and grumped about all the things I had to do and then I went, and it was like flying.

Long. Hard. Easy.

It was a PSA.

A radio ad about bullying.

About how YOUR child might be a bystander who wants to DO something and so, we must empower them to DO something.

And the best thing they can do, is “go tell a caring adult.”

And “you can BE that caring adult. You can BE the person they can come to.”

And I thought, Sweet.

But… that caring adult is supposed to do, what, exactly?

I mean, I am a caring adult and I am still kinda weirded out when two twelve year old kids with swaggers and cockeyed ball caps walk by the house. I leap into “get offa my lawn” mode pretty quick (witness my massive overreaction to the harrassing, by said twelve-year-olds of our chickens, two summers ago)

This, despite my  yearning for the kind of neighborhood where I know those kids’ parents because I guilt-trip them into buying girl scout cookies or something.

Crabby old lady alert, red alert:

I think we supposed grownups are wussies these days when it comes to helping children.

We want to insulate them, keep ‘em in a safe perimeter — because I think, in some ways, WE are freaked out about what lies outside that perimeter. Warranted, or, mostly, not.

These days, we “adults” are (rightly) leery of claiming authority based on simply being bigger and older.

Amen. Being bigger and older doesn’t necessarily confer authority on a person, certainly no right to throw one’s weight around.

So we reject the notion that:  ”I big, you small, I say, you obey” — and what seems to happen is a lot of grownups seem to feel like there is no other way to insist on certain behavior. Heck, “insisting” even sounds kinda pushy, no?

But if it isn’t “my way or the highway”— what do I do? I mean…. if I can’t just Insist because I am the Adult…. and if I really do doubt my own authority (’cause if it’s not based on my “bigger older-ness, what IS it based on??)

My authority is based on my experience. BUT that really only matters if my experience includes the things I am talking about! If I say that it isn’t OK to dominate others or to throw my weight around, I have to LIVE that way for it to mean squat, and carry the authority that comes from experience.

I believe this:

* It is essential that adults help children learn to be engaged members of their communities, from smallest (family, playgroup) to largest (world).

* Adults have experience and skills that children do not, yet.

* Instead of the adult as enforcer, power-broker, and rule-maker, the adult is the storehouse of experience. “Well, when I have tried X, it sometimes goes like this.”

Oh—- scary. This means we must actually put our actions where our hopes for our children are.

If our children are to believe us when we tell them it’s right to “just tell them you don’t like it when xyz” — guess what? We need to DO that. We need to tell someone when their actions hurt us, bother us.

“Hey, cubicle-mate, it bothers me when you have personal conversations on your cell-phone.”

Does that seem hard to do? It would feel really challenging on some levels for me. Yet I expect a child to be able to say, “I didn’t like it when you…..(fill in the blank.).”

Or if that situation feels just fine, what if we raise the stakes?

“Hey, husband, it makes me crabby to face a sinkful of dishes after a 12-hour work day.”

Or, “Hey, friend, it bothers me when you show up late. I feel unimportant.”

Doing this takes guts and integrity. Often, we ignore, minimize, and/or talk to others about our hurt, rather than address it directly.

Yet we ask it of children all the time.

The stakes on the playground are often excruciatingly high. Children are not able, a lot of the time, to take a broader view of a painful situation in which they feel trapped. That’s true at times for the bully AND the bullied.

We want to break that cycle. I am afraid that we (collectively) don’t know how. And in fact, we can’t break it for THEM without being committed to breaking it in and for ourselves, first.

Blogging is funny.

I have a lotta “drafts”, you know? Things I started writing and… didn’t post.

Some of them were started WAY too late at night— needed a daytime revisit (or several) before public viewing.

Some were started with a certain point in mind, but after I had typed and flailed and banged for ten minutes or so, they had veered down unexpected alleyways. Opened into prairies of emotional territory I was unprepared to manage. In a blog post.

And so, they sit. These stunted stubs of blog posts.

And I thought, maybe, I would ask YOU. Here are five titles of posts that are at least 1/2 way to “ok, throw it out there” stage.

What, if anything, grabs you?

1. We Don’t Know How

2. I Got You Babe

3. One

4. The Tiny Baby

5. Hydroplane

This is one of my favorite places on planet Earth.

I told Alden that, today, as we poked along.
He said, “What about Iceland?”

I said, “Well, I have never been there. Iceland seems like a very special amazing place, but I’ve never been there. It can’t be your favorite if you’ve never been there. And I’ve been here….

many times.”

But, I realized, I have not been here since before Alden was born.

Until then, I had come several times a year, for 13 years, ever since the first summer I moved to Montana.

In fact, that first summer, 1994, (or maybe the next? Funny, now, not to know…) I hiked the 12.6 miles from the trailhead to the lake and back… 25 miles….in a day.

Mostly, my hikes in Blodgett have had one of two stopping points.
Sometimes, the “falls” a series of wide rocky ledges and flat spaces where people sometimes camp, about 5 – 6 miles up the trail.

But usually, the “pack bridge”, a wooden bridge about 3.5 miles up the canyon, making a 7 mile round trip, and an awesome day. The Wilderness Boundary is right by there, and that’s always kind of a cool thing, too.

Here I am at the pack bridge, circa 1998?

This was a hike with my brother Tom. I was so happy to share this spot with him, a NYC-dweller at the time, and for many years thereafter.

I hope he and I head up that way together again someday.

Blodgett is about an hour from home, and so I haven’t taken Alden there. (Until today.)

But he’s old enough and a good enough hiker that I knew it’d be worth the drive. I pretended I didn’t care if we made it to the bridge. I mean, 7 miles round trip would be a BIG day for the dude.
We took our time.

Built fairy houses.

Climbed good-lookin’ rocks.

Ate snacks, etc.

Alden took some pictures too. (He has his own camera now, a V-tech kid digital camera. He really likes it and I gotta say, the pictures are pretty cool. Why it has to have freaking games on it., I dunno, but, he likes it.)

Alden’s shots:

I felt so nostalgic and multilayered today as we went along.

My heart sang every time Alden said, Whoa… looking at the enormous rock faces across the canyon. Because THAT is how I feel every time.

And when we stopped, about a half mile below the pack bridge, Alden eating an oats-and-honey granola bar and sniffling, teary, that he wished there was a shortcut and we didn’t have to walk. back. the. whole. way. we. just. came……… I knew we were done.

(It’s hard to get a sense of the scale, here…. Look at the photo and know that the trees are BIG trees and the creek down below is about 15 ft wide, and maybe that helps?)

And, it was a pretty damn nice place to stop, really.

Oh, my dear, amazing Blodgett.

It will NOT be another five years before I visit.

A walk, a walk. It’s always a walk.

It’s a walk I crave, when I’m prickly, crabby, hemmed in, confused, irritable.

It’s a walk I need when I’m bursting at the seams from sunshine! after so long! and warm afternoons! after many, many, cold mornings!

I need to just go, and some days I convince Alden to come along. He ALWAYS protests these days, and I sometimes ignore him, because I KNOW that within 25 yards of the trailhead he’s running, noticing, stooping to scoop up Perfect Mud or Collecting Rocks, or he’s checking on the many, many landmarks on which we’ve come to depend, and via which we watch the seasons go-round. Is there water at the stepping stones yet? Has there been new graffiti on the Giant Rock? Are there ducks, off the point of the stony-island-that-sometimes-disappears?

But this day, Sunday, I didn’t try hard to convince him.

He had played his first soccer game (in the snow) and although I knew he wasn’t THAT tired, he was, a bit. And he wanted to hang out at home. And so, fine.

I went. Me, the dogs, and an hour or so.

It was snowing, HARD, when I got going.

And I noticed something.

The snow was wet-ish, BIG flakes, and I noticed clumps, in the bushes, in the trees, even in the grass. Clusters of snowflakes.

I took a closer look.

And realized what I was seeing.

Spiderwebs.

In the warmth of the previous week, ambitious spiders had gotten busy.

They had hatched? Awoken? And set straight to work, spinning away, in hopes of catching the first earliest hatches of tasty flies to respond to the warm afternoons and longer days.

Would the spiders survive the snow?  I had no idea.

I had never seen this exact (phenomenon? Sounds too much like I know if it IS a phenomenon!). I was just really, really struck by it. And really, really glad (again!– always) that I went for a walk.

I was really anxious about tonight’s class, and I know why, now, more than I did before it started.

I had four hours.

That’s a long time to be in a class, for sure. It’s especially a long time if, like just about all of my students, you worked a full day already with children. And then either managed their own household’s (with one, two, three kids of their own) plans for dinner and bedtime– or drove an hour to get to class — or brought their newborn with them– people in class did all of those things. Others brought dinner because they came straight from work. Others tried not to worry about the homework they have for their OTHER classes after they get home. They did all those things. THEIR job is actually the harder one.

My job? Teach the most important pieces of what I know about Communication Development in Preschool in 4 hours.

I mean, seriously? Communication. What do we do with children that ISN’T about communication?

I know this is my bias– I’m a dang communicator– I want to listen and dangy do I want to talk talk talk.

But I want to talk about language acquisition. (Do you KNOW that babies can distinguish between their mother’s native language and a second language she speaks, at BIRTH? And they babble every sound humans make until 6-8 months, after which they ONLY babble sounds they hear in their environments? And that deaf babies babble just like that too?)

And I want to talk about functional writing in the preschool environment and why it is TOTALLY different to write your name because you’re “signing in” than for “practice” at 10:00 Lesson Time.

And I want to talk about why books that make your heart sing are WAY more important to share with children than books that isolate one particular concept in phonemioc awareness. Kinda. Except when A child needs EXACTLY that one particular book. But mostly, read books that make you CARE and make you eager to TALK about that book after.

And I want to talk about authenticity, about talking with children like people. Which DOESN’T mean you aren’t the teacher, but it DOES mean that you are responsible, not that you are all-powerful. And I want to talk about “listening” not being the same thing as “obeying” and that mixing up our language in regard to those two behaviors is creating all kinds of mess.

And I want to talk about the heart. I asked tonight about a phrase I use often with children– listen with your eyes, ears, and heart. “What does that mean,” I asked, “to listen with your heart?”

One teacher (this was her only comment all night) said, “to let them in.”

YES, yes, yes. To Let Them In.

Let them IN. I was thrilled by the simplicity of the answer.

To listen with your heart is not to assume you know the outcome– it’s not surrender, or blind obedience. It’s willingness to seek to understand. It’s agreeing to understand first, then decide. It’s striving to listen with an open mind and a loving heart.

Four hours or four years. The class had a pretty continual and lively give and take all evening, and did at least touch most of the topics above.

But, if a student or two remembers and wrestles with ”eyes ears and heart”  for a while I will be really thankful to have pushed through the anxiety tonight and tried to communicate.