ON WHAT MAKES A GOOD AXE, GETTING GOOFIER, AND THE OCCUPATION UNIT AT PRESCHOOL
Friday March 19 2021
Dear Sarah,
1. I started my letter to you last night — I was even so bold as to start it with the sentence I feel it’s been ages since I started my letter on a Thursday night.
2. Then I got distracted by an eight-year-old New York Times article about the comedy writer Jack Handey, and my evening dissolved into an hour of reviewing his best jokes, and videos of Toonces the Driving Cat.
2a. If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason. — Jack Handey
3. I fell asleep into a strange night in which I thought two television shows had combined into something powerful and meaningful, with the united venture somehow dictating rules to me for how I was supposed to sleep? It isn’t fully formed as an idea here because it certainly didn’t make any sense in the night!
4. Today I went to a lunch-and-learn with Julia Kalthoff through North House Folk School about what makes a good axe or a bad axe, and her journey to becoming a maker of axes herself.
5. I am eating chocolate truffles and drinking sparkling rose as I write this.
6. I had cavatappi with a spicy sausage ragu for dinner, and it was delicious, and in my excitement I bit my lip while eating.
7. This afternoon I felt like I had hit a wall, felt tired and irritable, and realized once again that I had not eaten enough — I had had a skimpy lunch while I kept plugging away at the computer. So I had some cheese and crackers and then came back to myself. Still felt tired but much less irritable.
8. You and I moved our Monday chat to Thursdays but for some reason the Monday chat was still showing on my calendar, so I deleted it today, but then I ended up deleting all the occurrences, including the ones that had taken place in the past, and I felt a little bit sad looking back through my calendar and knowing I had accidentally erased all our past Monday chats. They’ve already happened — the chats themselves certainly did not disappear — but I missed seeing them there in my archive!
9. I laughed a lot over this past week. M and I are not sure if we are somehow getting weirder and goofier after all this pandemic time together, or if things are actually getting funnier, or what.
10. This week we watched an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Skin of Evil,” in which an alien race has managed to process all the evil out of themselves and has then left it alone on a planet as a sort of murderous oil slick that can take a humanoid form. At one point while the Skin of Evil was speaking, I had a sense of familiarity, and said to M, “I don’t think my dad is evil, exactly, but the Skin of Evil just really sounded like him for a moment there,” and M said, “I was just thinking the exact same thing.” We laughed and laughed.
10a. I need to rewatch “Skin of Evil” to understand what it was about that moment that reminded us both of my father — it was some oddity of the cadence of his voice, I think.
11. M and I have been on a winter run schedule for the past few months, often running in the late morning or over lunch, in order to tackle the slippery sidewalks and streets in the daylight instead of the dark. This has meant that we’re not seeing our usual morning buddies, but this past week we’ve been leaning back into early morning runs, and guess what! We saw our morning ladies again. We were all very pleased!
12. I texted you this last week but I’ll state it for the record: I was very flattered to be named quite possibly the world’s best houseguest by Bill in your letter of last week! This is an honor I didn’t even know one could achieve and I was delighted!
13. I am still steeping over your sometimes all-or-nothing attitude, particularly in regards to completing tasks, and I think I am willing and able to complete tasks for others in a timely fashion but rarely do I turn that sort of discipline upon myself and my own tasks, hobbies, acquisitions. In one light this could seem like I’m endlessly shorting myself — partly true — and in another light it is pleasing to have some things that I simply do not do in a timely fashion, even if it’s myself I may be disadvantaging. This is worth a bit more critique as well as a balancing effort — of course my own plans should take priority some of the time — but for now it stands!
14. This week’s letter is not something I have completed in a timely fashion and for that I apologize, as I am now disadvantaging you who completed your letter in such a timely fashion yesterday! Next week I’ll try again at building a better habit, so that the week after that I can get you my letter to post sooner rather than later!
15. Happy weekend, my friend, and I will talk with you soon!
Until then,
Eva
March 18, 2021
Dear Eva,
I have been feeling mildly jubilant ever since our leisurely chat at happy hour today. So thank you! Sometimes (always?), a conversation with a dear friend is just what the doctor ordered, even when it feels like maybe a nap is what you need. The burst of good vibes has lasted me all the way to 10 pm, when I am sitting down to write my letter on a Thursday. Boom!
Tonight I reread your letter from last week and chuckled once again at your ill-fated fish fry experience. The Catholic Church is, indeed, no restaurant. Happy to hear you filled your bellies with burritos for Second Dinner that night. And again tonight, no? An inspiring burrito habit up there in MSP! We seem to have gotten away from burritos here in our Iowa life; our children’s recurring plea for tacos or nachos drowning out the memory of burrito night. As I write this, I am now fondly remembering Nick’s Crispy Tacos in San Francisco, where Bill and I used to get delicious shrimp or vegetarian burritos on the regular. This is giving me hunger pangs. There may yet be a popcorn interlude during this letter-writing.
In the past few weeks, in various podcasts I have stumbled upon two different poets who described the delightful ways in which poems were weaved into their lives as parents and as children. Spoken word poet Sarah Kay said her parents put a short poem in her lunch every single school day of her childhood. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye said she started a practice of waking her teenage son in the morning to the sound of her reading poems aloud. These two anecdotes planted seeds in my mind—how might I adopt similar means of expanding Simon and Jonah’s sense of what is possible with words in these formative years? I am sure you will remember the conversation with my father that I described in these letters, where he earnestly grappled with the meaning and purpose of poetry—If you have something you want to say, why not just say it clearly in a way that people can understand? There is a way in which literalism constricts the range of experiences available to us in our lifetimes. Right now, my kids spend huge chunks of the day in reality bubbles constructed entirely in their imaginations, sometimes solo and sometimes together. Somehow, it feels like poetry might help cement that magic, so instead of seeing that pretend play as child-like as they age, they will recognize that they were just entering another dimension of the human experience available to all of us if we dare. Or at least this is my hope! I better get to rounding up poems for lunchboxes and human alarm clocks straight away.
-- popcorn interlude --
Lately, Jonah has been in a different kind of reality bubble, the sort that is the product of someone else’s imagination—a book. Well, a series of books to be more precise. He has been devouring these books like they are kernels of buttery popcorn (I’m staying on theme). We have learned the hard way that we have to go in and physically remove the book from his bedroom at some point as the evening wears on after the kids are supposed to be sleeping. I can’t trust my hands and eyes, he has warned us. It is fun to have him falling in love with reading, and fun to know that his first official sneakiness is manifesting as post-bedtime reading with a flashlight. It is hard to get mad at that! And to some extent, I am finding myself slightly envious of his rapture for these novels. I cannot think of the last time I was so consumed by a book. Perhaps I just need to read more fiction.
Simon, on the other hand, is having very early angst about his professional future. The other night at bedtime he suddenly became pensive and I asked what was wrong: I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, he said. Me either, I replied. But mom, you are already a grown up!! They did an occupation unit at preschool recently, and my mom told me that he hemmed and hawed about his assigned task of drawing a picture of something he might like to be when he grows up. Finally, he put crayon to paper and the result was nothing less than… a king! When he handed it to one of the teachers, he reassured her/himself, Drawing this doesn't mean that I have to be this when I grow up. I am glad to hear he is keeping his options open. So am I.
It is now after 11 PM, and I am running out of steam and jubilance and starting to think about the lure of sleep. Tomorrow is a Friday that will feel like a Friday, and I am looking forward!
Best wishes for the weekend! Do you have your garden fully planned? The time is almost upon us! I can’t wait for a bounty of flowers and vegetables.
Until next week,
Yours,
Sarah