Saturday, May 9, 2015
You Get a Gold Star
11:41 AM


 Dear Dad,
It’s amazing what a gold star can do to make even the most strenuous, tiring, or boring work worthwhile. Last month I gave my students a Dewey Decimal number each day to go hunt for, and if they could find it and tell me what was there, they got a gold star. Honestly, I wasn’t sure they would buy it, but boy did they. A whole group of fifth graders even came in during recess on their non-library days to earn their stars. In fact, even though we’ve moved on to a new activity in the library, they are still asking me for a number to go hunt for to earn another star.

I totally get it. The past two weeks have been a blur of too many things in too little time. My days have been spent running from one thing to the next to the next. But this week was teacher appreciation week and man, even though I know most of the little notes I received were parent-driven (having sent my own kids off with cards and treats for their teachers), I enjoyed getting my gold stars. I love my job all the time, but this week, despite being in the middle of mid-term madness in the grad school end of my life, was a gold star week. How can you not smile when you get a note that says “I love books! I love reading! I love you!” from a smiling five-year-old? Also, I found out that wearing your hair in mini (messy) victory rolls earns you cool points with middle school boys, mostly because they can't understand how you make your hair do that. Who knew?

And now it’s Friday. And sunny. (And Mother’s Day weekend) And other than the normal child-centered weekend activities that come with parenthood, I am taking the weekend off from that pile of things to do in my head so I can enjoy the sunshine and the city and my family. I heard a great expression today “First I have to contend with the assholes who control my brain.” Well, I’ve told them to can it until Monday. I’ve turned in my papers and answered my emails and shelved all the books that are going to get shelved. I earned my gold star for the week. Now it’s time for the weekend. 


                                                                                                    -Gillian

Having it both ways
11:40 AM

Dear Gillian,

I feel both old and young today. Very tired but very invigorated. It’s one of those days when nothing seems as it appears.

The spring semester ends this week. But while classes are over, I’m faced with a pile of complex final projects. The constant parade of bright students young enough to be my grandkids reminds me of how gray I am – but the mere fact I am around them puts a bounce in my step. Even the weather is contrary – sunbreaks between rain showers.

But I’m happy. The love of my life smiled to me when I awoke. I had breakfast looking out over a rapidly-greening forest viewed from our one-of-a-kind house. I walked onto a gorgeous campus to do the work I love. Tonight I will dine perhaps too heartily and later kick back and read notes from the two no-longer-children who make me proud. I will have sweet dreams. Guaranteed.

            -- Dad
Sunday, April 26, 2015
What Goes Around Comes Around
7:32 PM

Dear Gillian,

The Columbia Earth Day celebration was rained out last week. Seems fitting, in a way.

Rain is the epitome of recycling: Raindrop to stream, stream to ocean, ocean to cloud, cloud back to raindrop. Repeat for a million years or so.

Earth Day is very special to me. I was a freshman in college in 1970 when θ -- the Greek letter theta – began appearing on bumper stickers and posters. Theta on a green field was the new symbol for ecology, which itself was a term that never made it into my textbooks.

By April, I was wearing the symbol myself and part of the organizing team for Earth Day 1 at Shasta College in my hometown, Redding, CA. I have seldom felt so proud as when I carried the giant θ-emblazoned flag as we marched through downtown.

It tell that story to my students now and their eyes roll. Few know what “Earth Day” means – nor do they care. I suppose I should be upset, but I’m strangely pleased. Their ambivalence means that hippie-haired gaggle of protesters in 1970 succeeded. We changed the world.

Earth Day did not arise to promote hemp seed, belly dancing and henna tattoos. It came on the heels of warnings by Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich and others that we might not make it to our dotage unless we started taking care of our world.

In my hometown, the lumber mills burned their waste in huge “teepee burners,” which likely were not as bad noxious clouds from the burning garbage dump. Clear Creek, near my home, was anything but and lined by 20-foot-high rows of gravel left behind by the dredges that plowed the valley for gold nuggets.

The national picture was bleaker. I remember my eyes burned and I hacked up brown gook while visiting Los Angeles. The Potomac in our capital was known as the river you could smell before seeing. Bald eagles were fantasy creatures – on the verge of extinction from the effects of DDT pesticide.

So we marched. Better yet, we voted. And year by year, life not only went on, it got better.

Now my students watch bald eagles glide over the Missouri River, put their cans in city-provided recycling bags and think DDT is a rap group. Blissfully.

And Earth Day? Just a rain delay. The anger was mostly gone, replaced by gardeners, solar panel salesmen and kids with face paint. But you can’t keep a good movement down.

Like a raindrop.

--Dad
7:30 PM

Dear Dad,

So here's the horrible truth, I totally missed Earth Day this year. I know, I know! You marched in the first Earth Day. You taught us about doing right, or as right as you can, by the environment before it was cool. We were composting things and reusing things and recycling things long before there were green and blue bins for that. But hear me out.

I remember being a kid, probably around Briton's age because, like him, I was full of righteous indignation over things, in this particular instance, the fact that Earth Day was just once a year. It should be Earth Day everyday, my twelve-ish year old self wanted to shout at the world. Why should there be just be one day when we worried about what harm we are causing the earth? Why should it be only once a year that we want to fight for the planet we live on? It should be all the time, right?

A part of me wonders if that's why I ended up in Portland. Where, not only is the dream of the nineties alive (both the 1990's and the 1890's, of course) but where it's Earth Day everyday. Where the city gives us wee tiny trash cans and great big recycling and compost bins for curbside collection to encourage (well, force) us to reduce our trash output. Where you can buy recycled paint, recycled clothes, recycled fur teddy bears (it's a thing) recycled art and recycled houses and no one thinks that's odd, ok, the bears are a little odd, but you know what I mean. The trash can in the library is one of the few in the whole of my (Environmental) school so that the middle schoolers bring down weird leftover bits of things that they've taken apart and stripped all the recycled bits off of until they are left with bits and bobs of trash to put in my can. Which is fine because, as payment for the use of my trash can, I make them listen to me tell them about a book they should read, so it's a win-win.

So while I definitely recycled all the paper scraps from my library that day, plus a couple of highlighters, and probably found myself eating something organically grown and sustainably harvested, while I downloaded something rather than printing it and put my food waste in the compost bin instead of the trash. While I walked past kids tossing snack scraps to the school chickens on my way home (because that's how we roll, school chickens), I didn't notice that it was Earth Day, it was just a normal day. And that's not a bad thing. In fact, it means that Earth Day, the Earth Day that was dreamed up all those year ago, it worked. Sure, it's not like this everywhere (although I highly recommend school chickens, because there's nothing like going to the staff room to heat up your lunch to the dulcet tones of hens clucking on the other side of the window), and yes, we still need to use less, recycle more, drive less, bike more, consume less and keep pushing ourselves to do a better job of protecting this planet we are the current stewards of, but it worked, that march you went on 45 year ago. It worked. It got the ball rolling. It started the trend. Not every crazy, hippy dream can say that, can it?

Happy (belated) 45th Earth Day Dad.

 - Gillian
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Oregon to a Missourian
10:49 AM

Dear Gillian,

Spring is just starting to peep out here in the Heartland. The trees are budding and the bulbs are blooming. In a week or two it will be honestly green.

But Missouri is not Oregon. I think the real green every time I glance down at my right hand and see the sparkle of my UO ring. After 14 years as a professor here at the University of Missouri, I’m a loyal Mizzou Tiger. But in my heart, I’ll always be a Duck.

Oregon is a mystery to most Missourians. I asked a few of my students this week what they though of when I said “Oregon” or “Oregonians.” I was met with puzzled looks and a couple of “I can’t even imagine it.”

From here, Oregon is a lifetime away – almost a dream. It’s always been that way for Missourians. The Oregon Trail started here and wound 2,200 miles to some odd place where the trees stayed green all year. The Midwesterners in those covered wagons were not gamblers like California’s ‘49ers. But the Oregon dream was so strong even sensible folk who lived by the Show Me creed packed up for a land they couldn’t comprehend.
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Missouri to an Oregonian
11:36 AM

Dear Dad,

Remember in Eugene when you’d get those rare days in spring where, after dreary skies and an eternity of rain, the sun came blazing out in all it’s summer glory and no one came to class, not even professors because, well, the sun was shining! It’s that kid of day here in Portland. Unfortunately I’m no longer an undergraduate who can just skip a class now and then, and while it is my day off from work, I’m stuck inside studying cataloging, which, by the way, is not the kind of thing you want to do on a beautiful sunny day.


The western half of Oregon, as you know, is blessed (cursed?) with an abundance of rain. I actually don’t mind the rain. I’m not sure if it’s a gene passed down from our English roots or just the fact that I’ve spent more of my life in the rain than out of it that has made it, for the most part, a perfectly pleasant kind of environment to live in. It means that you spend a lot of time indoors or in raincoats, sure, but it also means that it’s green an lush almost all the year round.
Missouri, I know, is not like that. I remember when you first moved there, how you would describe the barren beauty of those months after the leaves fell, when you could see houses you didn’t know were there on hills that had been hidden by a swatch of deciduous trees. Coming from the land of evergreen forests, I didn’t really understand the appeal. Forests were dark and mysterious and hushed, any sounds deadened by the heavy curtain of pine and fur boughs. During our time living in Missouri, and then later all our trips to visit, the scenery has grown on me. It took a while for me to see it, because Oregon’s beauty is very in-your face – sumptuous and grand, but now I understand the feast or famine greenness of your state, the wonder of the world outside transforming from lush green to burn orange to stark brown as the seasons roll by.

Will and I once took Briton on a mountain bike ride, somewhere, I can’t remember where, not far from your house. It was fall and the trees were bursting with bright yellow leaves. The wind picked up, just a little, just enough to send a constant and steady fall of lemon colored leaves, drifting to the ground. Like snow. It went on and on, and we stood under it and just watched. It was, perhaps, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I still think about it. A part of me wishes I’d gotten a picture, but mostly I’m glad I didn’t, because I’m sure a photo wouldn’t have done the moment justice, and I’d rather have that memory in my head than the memory of watching through a viewfinder and a mediocre photo stored on my computer. Last fall, people here marvelled at the autumn colors changing and I kind of though "meh, I've seen better." Oregon does green better than it does red and orange and yellow.

According to my phone, Columbia and Portland will both be in the high 70’s and low 80’s this weekend. So far this year we’ve been consistently warmer than you, but in a few weeks I imagine you’ll outstrip us, heading toward your much hotter summer as Oregon dithers back and forth for a few more months about whether it’s spring or winter or summer, changing it's mind on a daily, if not hourly, basis. But for a brief moment in the year, we’ll both be spring this weekend. I’ll sit outside with my tea and think about you, enjoying your coffee on your deck. You’ll watch your hawk, I’ll fill up the hummingbird feeder, we should both probably do some yard work except, eh, it can wait.

Enjoy spring in Missouri Dad.


-Gillian
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
8:03 PM

Dear Gillian,

It’s hard to imagine two more opposite performers than our children.

Gillian, our oldest, was born with showmanship. Last-minute complication had the nurses excited as they wheeled Cecile into the delivery room. But like the diva she was and is, she simply came out smiling and singing.

Garrett, our son, had less dramatic but arguably more dangerous natal entrance. He was born jaundiced and spent the next several days under bilirubin lights at the hospital while his mother and I worried.

Both of my wonderful children have, through the years, provided endless hours of the joy, laughter and even terror only a parent can experience. I never tired of their very different performing styles.

Our first video of Gillian shows her dressed in a pinafore and belting out “It’s a Hard-Knock Life” from Annie. She and her friend choreographed their act, complete dance steps and hand gestures.

No surprise, then, that she insisted on going to the Oregon Country Faire to have her ninth-month belly painted or that last week she dressed in the 1920s tweeds of Madame Librarian for a festival. She has never stopped delighting her audience – even if that was just good old Dad.

Our first video of Garrett showed a toddler pushing a toy shopping basket through the house with fierce determination. Nothing was going to stop him; nothing was going to break his concentration.

He was destined to become an engineer. He tackles every challenge with focus, energy and forethought.

The easy part of watching your kids perform is liking it. What’s not to like? Children (your own, that is) cannot sing off-key, fumble their lines or trip over props. It’s all part of the Biggest Show on Earth – parenthood.

Not that they can’t give you the cold sweats. When Gillian announced that she planned to become a drama major and that her boyfriend would be an art major, I had nightmares of supporting them for the rest of my life. Thankfully, Gillian changed both major and boyfriend.

Garrett specialized in stomach-gripping physical performance. He took up soccer early, but blossomed when he moved into the goalkeeper’s box. A keeper is the masochist at the end of the field who dives on the ball just as other players are kicking it. That is, when he is not diving into the path of a leather cannonball.

Eventually, Garrett grew out of competitive soccer. So he took up whitewater kayaking. You will never know how long you can hold your breath until you watch your son turn upside-down amid foam-splashed boulders.

But Garrett always rights himself, just as Gillian always gets deserving applause. And both make me so proud that I would gladly give up anything Hollywood can imagine to watch them perform the miracle of life.

Bravo, my children. Bravo.

Dad
To Watch, To Dream, To Love
8:03 PM

On Friday night I sat in a darkened high school auditorium and watched my girl dance under the bright stage lights. I have seen this particular dance at least a hundred times. I sat through the beginning stages of learning it, listened to the ballet teacher stop and start and stop the music again and again to work on this step or that. I helped with costumes and dress rehearsal and yet, it never got old, watching my beginning ballerina, no less serious for her inexperience than a more advanced dancer, sous-sus, plié and relevé her way through the performance.

This is the first chance I've had to be the one watching other than school music class concerts. The first time I was the audience to my own children. It's only in the last few months that both kids have discovered the excitement of preforming, Evelyn with dance, Briton with acting. His play is just a few weeks away (which reminds me, I better get sewing on those saytre costumes he promised my time and sewing machine for). And as much as I loved (and I mean LOVED) being on stage as a teenager and young adult, I have to say I am enjoying this audience thing even more.
Friday, April 3, 2015
4:49 PM

Dear Dad,

Mom is on her way here to Portland right now, as I type this letter. She’ll be here, in fact, by dinner. Or long before dinner, actually, if I don’t get started on it soon.

I know it’s not your favorite thing when she’s away, that you get lonely bumming around the house with only Greta for company. I feel the same way when Will’s gone. Like you, I stay up far too late and get caught up in work when there’s no one there to remind me to stop and call it a night. Last week I reorganized the linen closet when Will had to pull a late night at work to keep myself busy. There may also have been some studying procrastination going in, my current read being the oh, so exciting Understanding MARC Bibliographic, but there was some keep busyness about it too. So I know.

But oh, I love it when she’s here. When either or both of you are here. It seems very strange but, the older I get, the more I want my parents near me. You know me. I did not really go through a rebellious phase, I never felt the desperate need to be far far away from my parents. Rather, I think I was independent, something you both taught me to be, and it was that which led me to roam further and further from home. I’m still independent. But at the same time, I need my mom (and dad, of course).

Perhaps, now that I really think about it, it’s less about need than about want. I want to be around my family. I want to sit on the couch and talk about things we heard on NPR or saw in the neighborhood or about that latest weird Swedish TV show you’ve got me watching. I want to drink innumerable cups of tea and eat too many cookies and stay up late talking, instead of working or studying. Because, while I’ll always be your little girl, I think we are growing toward each other, and instead of father or mother and child, we are friends. And isn’t that a lovely thought.

I wish you were here to enjoy the weekend (although not the weather since it’s typical Oregon spring rain and gloom outside right now) but since you aren’t, I know you’ll forgive me for being happy that she’s here, instead of there, if only for the weekend.






-Gillian
Have fun with Mom, but I get her back
3:55 PM



Dear Gillian,

Oh, to be in Portland right now. Not just to give you a big hug or to tussle with Evie and Briton. But also to be on the receiving end of a knowing glance from your Mom.

I’m not jealous, but I do miss Cecile when she is on the road. The house seems too quiet when the only foot treads are the clicking of Greta’s paws. Watching television alone makes me feel guilty that I’m not doing something worthwhile. I cook for myself, but it is less fun when no one else enjoys the flavors. 

Her company is lucky to have such a talented, considerate and loyal executive who is also willing to fly across the country for it. But we are doubly lucky when work takes her close enough to gather those hugs and kisses in Portland.


And I become a horrible slob.

When Cecile is here, I really try to clean up after myself and do my share of housework. But when there is no one around to please, it is all to easy to say “I’ll pick that up later” or “That pan isn’t that dirty.”

Within a few days, our tidy house looks like a guy’s dorm room.

Before it smells like a dorm room, however, the Ghost of All Nagging Mothers Past visits me – almost always late at night. I crash around snatching up piles of plates, discarded T-shirts and the detritus of temporary bachelorhood. I mutter to myself and swear on a stack of two-day-old newspapers that I’ll be neater next time. But that’s more like wishful thinking than a vow.

Thank goodness we have Hannah come on Fridays to do the real cleaning. Your Mom usually gets back late enough that I can take credit for the sparkling countertops.

Hannah’s vacuum may lack its usual magic this week, though. Mom gets to enjoy finding Easter eggs with the kids, so I will have Saturday and Sunday to resist the mess-making temptation. Focus Clyde, focus.

I really should have this down pat by now. Being apart has been a regular part of our married life. Our jobs take us wherever our expertise is needed, so one of us is traveling every few weeks. It was more traumatic at first because communications were so limited. We had to meter out our expensive long-distance phone calls and tuck notes into suitcases for want of text messaging.

Now we keep in touch throughout the day with little notes that pop up on our iPhones even if we are in meetings. Email takes care of the longer messages. And each evening we call each other before going to bed – or even do a Facetime video conference.

But all the technology in the world cannot replace the one you love. I thank my lucky stars that I can be lonely. Only a heart that is shared can feel emptiness; only hearts reunited can fully understand the power of love.

Give Mom a big hug for me tonight. Watch for that special twinkle in her eyes and the dimples that make you as happy as she is. Make cookies and make memories. And please take care of her.

Her next trip is back to me.

Dad                     



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