Category Archives: Memories

About Jerkury, The Undiscovered Planet

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(With kids back to school this week, here’s a throwback to our homeschooling days with our three little spacemen.)

            This week in our house, we’re discovering the final frontier. No, I’m not talking about the dust-bunny village under my bed or the dark recesses of the furnace room, although both are rather scary places. The kids have been learning all about outer space and not just because we are threatening to send them there.

            This expedition was kicked off by a simple bedroom renovation. Maybe we were being doting parents or maybe we didn’t know what we were really getting into (most assuredly the latter), but a couple of months ago we decided to create a spaceship themed room for the three boys. With a little manipulation, we were able to steer the brothers in this direction and even make them think it was their idea, since their suggestion of a castle bedroom with full-sized knight in shining armor daunted me just a little more than stenciling a few portholes and planets on the freshly painted walls.

            And so, after a few days of studying the sun, stars and so on, I find I’m learning a lot more than I bargained for. After all, can there be a larger subject than the cosmos? Most of the speculation of how stars are “born” and black holes could be used to travel through time is where science fiction found its origin. No wonder George Lucas and Gene Roddenberry made so much money plumbing the subject that has no limit.

            Children don’t have the same difficulty with entertaining such notions as do skeptical adults. Their minds as wide as the universe itself, they dispute nothing and marvel at everything: that Venus is hotter than Mercury which is closer to the Sun; that Jupiter is 1400 times larger than the Earth (more impressive if demonstrated with appropriately sized paper circles) and that dogs and people have rocketed into oblivion on their own volition. (Well, maybe the dogs had to be convinced.)

            While reading about the characteristics of the Milky Way’s family, the boys entertained themselves by yelling “stupider than Jupiter” and then collapsing into mad giggles. I was thinking that the phrase was very apt for anyone who would volunteer to leave the nice safe atmosphere of Earth to live in a spaceship where you had to sleep seat-belted to your bed. (If there’s a time I appreciate gravity, it’s when I sleep.) But all giggles aside, the gray matter in the boys’ heads soaks all this stuff up, if maybe not the correct names for everything. At one point, Tim tried to tell to me that the largest planet was named Jerkury. I suspected that although this planet was yet undiscovered by Earthlings, it probably had sent more than a few “ambassadors” here and presented a good explanation as to where grouchy people really come from.

            Much to my surprise, I found myself one evening when my husband was away curled up in bed with the oversized Dorling Kindersley Guide to Space and smaller but just as interesting Everything You Wanted to Know about Johannes Kepler But Were Afraid to Ask. I was riveted to the bed (without a seatbelt) and the subject matter. Earlier that day while the boys were testing the theory of gravity by dropping dangerously heavy objects from the tops of chairs and spinning pails of water over their head to imitate centrifugal force, I was my most captive audience as I read aloud the story of Galileo and wept as he succumbed to the Inquisition by refuting his theories about the Earth revolving around the Sun instead of the then popular vice versa.

            While I wonder to myself how I could forget (or never have learned) such interesting stuff, my sudden fascination with the subject at hand is very comforting. After all, the idea of trying to teach your children everything is overwhelming. At any rate, what they don’t learn when they’re young, they can still look up when they’re 35.

About Miss Kitty

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[Amanda Blake a.k.a. Miss Kitty]

When I was a wee young lass, a show that was regularly on one of the two channels that we got through our television aerial (this is pre-WIFI and pre-cable and pre-satellite dish, all you babies out there) was Gunsmoke. Set in Dodge City, Kansas during the settlement of the American West, Gunsmoke was a western drama series that had been around forever. I remember no real plot lines, but I do remember Marshall Matt Dillon and his deputy Festus and, for some strange reason, the sound of their voices: the deep tenor of Marshall Dillon and the squeaky drawl of Festus.

Oh and, of course, I remember Miss Kitty.

In my memory much of the action took place in the local saloon, where Miss Kitty served up refreshments and, ahem, “entertained” the patrons. I had been to Edmonton’s Klondike Days in the seventies: girls that dressed like Miss Kitty were good can-can dancers and they looked mighty fine in a bustle. End of story. I was five.

I was, however, in my five-year-old cognizance, aware of the urst (unresolved sexual tension) that existed between Marshall Dillon and Kitty. Except it wasn’t called that back then – all I really remember is that they seemed to like each other, but they never kissed on screen. Wikipedia says that “Kitty is just someone Matt has to visit every once in a while”.

Like every other self-respecting five-year-old girl, I just saw the romance in it. I adored Miss Kitty for the television-star that she was: glamorous and feminine and entrepreneurial. (Hey! She was part-owner of the saloon!) But business owner aside, I saw Miss Kitty as a girl. And when I was five, in my pre-women’s-liberation mindset, there were just certain things that you did not do to girls.

Namely, shoot them. It would seem that in the course of a long-running television series that featured gunslingers in the American West that every single cast member had to get shot at least once. But I don’t think anyone important ever died. I’m sure back then, as they do now, they just write in some superfluous character (for one show and one show only!) that will take the fatal bullet that saves the rest of the top billing cast. (“Who is that guy? Oh, wait, they’re gonna go ambush the Mob in an abandoned factory. Never mind.”)

The thing was, though, I didn’t know about movie magic when I was five. I thought that if someone got shot on the show, they really got shot. Like, with a real gun and real bullets. Doctors were standing by to perform life-saving surgery and it usually worked. This was just a part of the gig, apparently, and that was why actors got paid the big bucks.

And, apparently, one day Miss Kitty drew the short straw.

But she survived! Whew!

Okay, I’m older (than five) now and I know that this is not how it works (anymore. I mean, maybe it did work like that back then?) I did have some nightmares. I mean, they shot Miss Kitty, ergo NO ONE is safe.

I must have got over it at some point. Blood and guts didn’t bother me – maybe that’s why I opted for a stint (one year and one year only!) in nursing school. I also didn’t mind needles – my whole class practiced saline hip shots on me – less fun than Jell-O shots, but I was a martyr for the cause.

Fast forward to now: I still don’t mind needles (go donate blood, y’all) but I am starting to lose my stomach for shoot-em-up shows that pass for entertainment. The other night Rick and I unknowingly picked out such a flick for a Sunday evening. I was interested in the plot so we watched till the end, but seriously? These people were enjoying killing each other. Ain’t no doctor that could fix that, if it was real.

I’m still a little naive, like five-year-old Bonnie, but I’m also adamant in believing that Real People Out There are Mostly Nice. Real People don’t shoot girls OR boys for fun.

Maybe what I need to do is get back to the sweet and romantic stories. Maybe that’s why some people that I love as they get older have fallen in love with those predictable-and-maybe-a-little-badly-acted Hallmark movies that I make fun of. Maybe this is my future. Maybe this is what getting older is about: deciding what nonsense I’m gonna put up with.

I’m gonna vote for Nice, for Kind, for Sweet, even for a little Naive. I know what Miss Kitty’s profession was now, but like all good stories, Gunsmoke knew that they didn’t have to tell you everything in order to spin a good yarn. And they didn’t shoot everyone in the same episode, so there’s that, too.

And I mean, let’s be real: that would have been too stressful for the surgeon on call.

About a Change in the Weather

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(True to summer in Alberta, there certainly has been A LOT of weather lately. Here’s another throwback to the what the weather was like in my yard twenty years ago…)

Some days it seems like my children go through more emotional ups and downs than a Richard Simmons infomercial. Often the grouchy quotient is elevated by a bad cold and/or not enough sleep. But sometimes, in young families, I find we’re still all just trying to get used to each other.

Throw another kid into the mix and things can really get messy. My children love to have friends over. The best thing is when a family with about the same number of kids comes over and mine pair off with theirs. But the other day, just one friend came over and this particular day, it emphasized the battle lines. 

It all started out innocently enough. Gil, my oldest son, had the great idea of playing baseball. Of course, Mom had to dampen that idea by nixing the use of the real baseball bats since I wasn’t able to supervise at the time. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something about three and five-year-olds swinging a Louisville Slugger with reckless abandon that I have a problem with.

So, they settled on just playing catch. Gil doled out the ball gloves and, true to form of the oldest child, began to give everyone orders of where to stand, how to hold their glove, who throws to who, and so on. As I looked up from vacuuming out the van, I first noticed Simon, the three-year-old standing about one hundred feet away from Tim, to whom he was supposed to throw the ball. So, I did what no mother is supposed to do. I interfered. All I did was make the suggestion to Gil that maybe there was no possible way that Simon ever in a million years could throw that far. Simon apparently had more faith in his big brother’s direction and proceeded to run the first ninety feet towards Tim before he hurled the ball at him with all his might. He still came short three feet.

Everything went downhill from there as the three younger players suddenly lost all interest in “organized” sports. Gil declared mutiny and informed the younger tribe that he was running away from home. At first, they weren’t too concerned since kids are used to each other’s dramatics.

But then Gil crossed the fence and Tim got mighty upset with this turn of events. Perhaps it was genuine concern for his big brother’s welfare or maybe he was worried about losing a good Nintendo partner, but he felt the acute need to report Gil’s departure to me at the top of his lungs. I yelled out to Gil to remember that he couldn’t cross the fence that bordered the back of our property and he replied that he merely intended to stay out in the bush forever. Much to Timmy’s dismay, I returned to removing an entire sandbox from my van.

After ten minutes of Tim keeping a not-so-silent vigil at the barbwire fence, Gil suddenly decided that forever was a long time if he had to listen to his brother whine for him to please, please, please come back. He stepped out of no-man’s land and to Timmy’s relief, agreed not to play baseball but to ride bikes instead.

With the incentive of the younger friend’s ability to ride his brand-new two-wheeler, Gil that day learned how to ride a training-wheel-free bike, after a few good pushes from his mom. The boy who convinced himself he could never learn to ride a bike was all sunshine and laughter, a sharp contrast to the gloomy boy he left behind in the bush. And I just marveled at how quickly the weather could change in my yard.

About Weddings

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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/regina-couple-pandemic-wedding-plans-1.5579744

Weddings are looking a lot different this year, aren’t they?

We have two friends who are planning their weddings for the same date in August, one here in Vermilion, Alberta and one in Regina, Saskatchewan. It has been interesting to hear about the moment-by-moment changes that have been made since we went into COVID lockdown in March. The anticipated numbers of attendees first plummeted, then rose back up a little. Dresses have been held up from being shipped from the U.S.A. And the venues have been changed. All in all, it seems like some things have gotten a little simpler.

As my eldest son Gil has relayed to me via the numerous twenty-somethings he knows that planned their weddings for this year, in the end, all that really matters is the getting married part. If the fluff and the gifts and the mega-decoration and all your millions of friends in attendance are what you REALLY want out of a wedding, well then maybe you need to postpone it to next year. (Or, never. Just sayin.)

Well, okay. Just because I’m not huge Party Girl now, doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the fact that I had a pretty big wedding myself some (gasp!) twenty-eight years ago. In a lot of ways, growing up in the middle of the Borscht belt, in the town I affectionately nicknamed The Ukrainian Wedding Capital of Canada, my wedding was pre-planned. I knew where I would get married (the little RC church in Derwent), where the reception would be (the Derwent and District Recreation Centre), who would be invited (all my friends, all manner of relatives both shirt-tale and front-collar and the twenty people my non-Ukrainian fiance’s family got to invite) and what we would eat. (Hello! Ukrainian food!)

We grew up going to weddings so we knew exactly what to expect. We learned how to dance at weddings, got drunk for the first time at a wedding and got our first kiss there – and second, third and fourth if there were a lot of groomsmen or bridesmaids in the reception line. In a close-knit community like Derwent, back in the day, not inviting all the neighbors to your child’s wedding was… well, it was just not done.

Case in point: this year, as the quarantine had just begun, my mother’s birthday fell on March 22. She would have been 92 this year and I try to do something each year to commemorate the day. Since it was #stayhome, I decided to go through the box of wedding invitations that had come from her house. And then, because it’s me, I decided to “organize” them by date.

These are the stats. From the 1950s, my mom had saved 15 invitations. From the sixties, there were 62. From the eighties, 85, and the nineties, there were 38, one of which was mine.

Oh, and the seventies? From the seventies, my mom had ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN WEDDING INVITATIONS. I mean seriously, I had to go take a nap afterwards. Simon took pictures of the stacks and posted them on Instagram because: 1) He’s a Gen Z; 2) He had never seen a wedding invitation before – him of the age of internet invites; and 3) He (rightfully) couldn’t believe Baba had been invited to well over 300 weddings in her life.

All told, even though I had lived through that golden age of weddings, it was hard for me to wrap my head around. Sure, Mom and Dad didn’t go to every wedding they were invited to – sometimes two (or even, three) weddings fell on the same date. But I do remember when I was growing up that a summer weekend without a wedding to attend seemed a little, well, boring. And if an invitation specified “No Children, Please”, we were horrified to be deprived of a meal equivalent to “eating out”, of stacking up plastic drink cups as high as we could make them and of tooling all around Main Street Derwent with a crowd of other kids, pretending we were the Lords of Flatbush.

The marriage is the most important thing. But there’s a whole lot of other fun stuff that can make a wedding memorable. And right now, COVID-19 is making the weddings super memorable as intentions and guest lists get more concentrated. Going through with happy plans in the middle of a pandemic is always going to be something to remember.

You won’t beat my Mom’s record for wedding invitations this year, or this decade, because it’s just not a thing anymore. But the main thing? It’s still the main thing.

About Gardening

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It’s only late June but already my vegetable garden is promising to be amazing. NOT.

Sigh.

One of the things I’ve come to realize over the last few years is that while I love me some fresh garden veggies – tender peas still in the pod, green beans that have never been frozen, carrots with dirt still on them – I’m not as enthusiastic about all that has to go into growing those things myself.

The trouble is this: vegetables, like babies, refuse to be independent. Gardens need to be weeded, watered, fertilized – and not by the neighbor’s cat. If it doesn’t rain regularly, my garden is in trou-ble. And I tend to wait until the weeds are large enough not to mistake them for fledgling zucchini plants that I sowed too late and too deep. But you never know. Hope spring eternal that old seeds will birth future zucchini cakes.

It’s not really the once-a-week kind of commitment that I tend to make it. My inner monologue goes something like this:

“Oh hey, Self, let’s go look at the garden.” This necessitates I don my flip flops and traipse out the backdoor as my raised boxes are hidden from easy window surveillance. The garden doesn’t make any noise, either, demanding constant inspection like the neighbors jackhammering their sidewalk. (What are they doing with that shed in the backyard, anyways?)

And then. “Oh, sh*t! Half the cucumbers plants died? And shrivelled into dental floss? What? How? Ohhhh, I suuuuuuckkk at this.” There is no sign of any zucchini plants performing a Lazarus. The beans are looking sketchy, despite the fact that I double-sowed them. And only half the sunflowers are on their way to not making it through the summer. Thankfully, every single tomato plant, of which I planted way too many are stretching to the sky and enjoying the hot southern side of the house. Maybe they like the privacy.

It’s not like I don’t know how this should go. I was birthed by a Gardener Extraordinaire. Mom’s gardens weren’t just the means for her to feed her family and teach us to love All The Green and Growing Things – they were also her canvas. She created fantastical flower beds full of all the old favorites – petunias, geraniums, delphiniums, sweet peas, snap dragons, bleeding hearts and tiger lilies (to name only a few). But Mom also did magical things with her vegetable gardens. One garden spot was never enough and, in each spot, you would find repeats of everything she planted in different configurations: rows parallel and perpendicular, bunches, square plots, volunteer dill everywhere and all of it hedged in with cotoneasters, lilac bushes and raspberry canes.

A visit to Mom’s house in the summer always ended in the garden, but sometimes began there, too, if she was prowling around it like a grown-up Mary Lennox in her Secret Garden when we arrived. She would be ready for a break and we’d go to the cool of the house for an instant coffee or better yet, her vegetable soup if we made it in time for lunch (which was 11:30 not noon.) Summer visits sometimes meant helping Mom with some weeding or picking 5-gallon-pails of beans or peas or ice-cream pails laced and tied to your waist with old nylons for a hands-free raspberry-picking experience. And bonus, you got to take your winnings home – you were doing her a favor.

When it was nearly time to go home, we’d go dig up some new potatoes, some onions, some carrots and wash them in the big tub under the outdoor tap and Mom would send us home with the pail of artfully arranged wet and gorgeous veggies. Supper was easy that night, which was a good thing because I would have a lot of shelling and blanching of peas and beans to do. Once, when touring my boys through, Mom pulled up an onion and Simon asked what it was. His Baba laughed and said, “It’s an onion. Do you want a bite?” And so, Simon did take a bite – it looked that good.

During Mom’s last summer, when she had moved to Vermilion, I was able to pop in on her quite often. Despite cancer, despite feeling crappy most of the time, in between the many naps she had to take each day – I would find her in the yard, watering the plants, picking some weeds, pulling up some carrots, cutting some flowers to take indoors. Her garden never flagged, not for one moment. She knew what it took.

I know what it takes, too, but I’m not there. Thankfully, there are people around me who still let me stroll through their canvases and inhale that mysteriously fragrant combination of dirt, rain and leaf that I grew up with. Sometimes they send me home with a zucchini or two. But I’m okay, I have my own tomatoes.

I don’t have to be a great gardener to appreciate the magic that takes place in garden plots every year or to remember the riches of my mother’s garden. And bonus: my husband says he needs a new hobby. Maybe he’ll take up gardening.

About Clarence the TV Dog

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There are some books that were a part of my childhood that I just cannot shake. Perhaps it was because I read it a zillion (and a half) times or maybe it was because the name Clarence, for a dog, is kinda memorable. Especially because – spoiler alert! – Clarence turns out to be a girl, delivering a litter of puppies at the end of the book. At any rate, the story I most remember from this particular book – which, alas, I no longer own – isn’t about the dog or the TV or even about his (er, her) adoptive family which included tweens Brian and Sis.

No, the most memorable story (for me) had to do with a certain less-than-favorite spinster aunt who injected herself into the family for an extended visit. (And in all honesty, I’m not sure if this chapter is from this book or the end-of-your-seat sequel: Clarence Goes to Town.)

Aunt Spinster was a fifties stereotype of the unmarried, unattractive, unmarriageable woman: a bossy, angular know-it-all – at least, this was the kind of nemesis character that populated children’s books. And most definitely she did not approve of Clarence. Dogs, and children, were to be seen and not heard. Dogs should not watch television or act like humans. And most definitely, dogs (or children) should not mess with skunks.

Except Clarence does mess with a skunk. And you know what sort of havoc and misery that can cause.

Up until the skunk debacle, Brian and Sis have been harangued by their Aunt – not only is she always telling them what to do or what to think, she tells them how to do it or how to think it. Her accomplice in her mean knowledge is a mysterious Everything Book – some sort of mystical encyclopedia that Aunt S carries with her everywhere and consults constantly and religiously. The proper temperature to cook chicken? The capital city of Eritrea? The etymology of the word etymology? All of this seemed to be at her fingertips with a flip through her Everything Book. Sort of like Pre-Google.

For Brian and Sis, harangued to an inch of their lives, their collaborative solution seems like it would be obvious: Find the Book. Destroy the Book. But no, the siblings just want to get their hands on it so that they can get their own copy of said book and start beating their aunt at her game, looking up the answers and ringing in before she does. I’ll take ‘Famous Know-It-Alls and Their Comeuppance’ for $2000.00, Alex.

When they finally do manage to send their aunt on some urgent mission sans book, they page through only to find out that it’s not a book: it’s a scrapbook, a compendium of curiosities cobbled from newspapers and copied from books.

Oh, how I wanted a book like that.

Maybe that’s what sent me down the scrapbook-making quest I have been on since I was a tween myself. Partly a thirst for wanting to know All The Things and partly a love for pasting things into books, I have been creating my own Everything Books for years. Sometimes I call them Art Journals or Junk Journals or Just Journals with Extra Bits of Goodness Stuck Inside Them, but all of them are basically my attempt to save everything, know everything (at least the stuff I want to know) and remember everything.

This blog, I have realized has become a new kind of Art/Junk/Everything Journal for me. And bonus, it’s highly searchable, with a flick of my fingertips just as Aunt S would do when I want to look up something that I want to remember.

Of course, Bossy Aunt Saves the Day, consulting her book and instructing the kids in how to bathe Clarence in tomato juice to rid him of his/her skunky odor. And they decide (as she’s packing up to leave) that maybe she and her book have some value after all.

About Hard Lessons

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Welcome once more to Throwback Thursday.

Recently I’ve been re-reading the newspaper columns I wrote about twenty years (!) ago, seeing if there are any new/old story ideas I can use. I’m so happy I recorded so many things my boys said and did when they were little. Sometimes they make me a little sad and nostalgic, but most of the time they make me LOL.

This story turns out a little dark, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself laughing with a hand over your mouth because it shouldn’t be funny. But it is. Enjoy.

            There’s a huge advantage of living out of town that few people mention: the frequency with which one is able to study dead animals.  Most wild animals just don’t sit still long enough for you to take a good look at one. Porcupine or badger sightings occur so few and far between that if it wasn’t for the occasional lump of dead animal on the side of the road, my kids would never know how big one of those suckers really is.

            Sometimes, however, it isn’t the wild animals that bite the dust, but a more domestic critter right from our own yard. If someone ever calls our place a farm, I usually correct them, saying we don’t really have any animals besides the occasional borrowed horse and of course, our herd of wild cats. When we moved out here, the previous owners left four cats behind and these cats have made it their mission to propagate their species in an exponential fashion. Unfortunately, we almost never find the kittens when they are born. Once they were old enough however, these wild kitties had no trouble clamoring for their share around the supper dish.

            The latest addition to our feline family was a pair of peaches-and-cream kittens, one of which was smooth and silky, the other very fuzzy, looking like he was badly in need of a hairbrush. The kids appropriately named the fuzzy one Messy and his sibling, Jessie. These kitties didn’t start making themselves known until they were old enough to run off from the kitty dish with a whole chicken leg in their mouth, but we were persistent and eventually could catch them and pet them if we really felt like getting all scratched up. Then the snow came and the temperature dropped and the kitties suddenly disappeared. We suspected the worst.

            A couple of days ago, at least part of the mystery was solved. The boys were outside when suddenly I was summoned at top of someone’s lungs to come to the door. Simon and Gil were by the garage, crouched down, examining something on the ground. An agitated Tim was at the door, saying (and I quote), “Mom, there’s something wrong with one of the kitties! I think its head fell off!” As happens only too often, the kitten had met its maker when it sought some heat from a warm engine. I expressed my sympathies and something possessed me to ask, “Can you tell which one it was?” To which Gil replied, “Yeah. It was Messy.” No kidding.

            There were no nightmares that night about decapitated cats or even tears over a lost kitten. Instead the boys were just wistful that the kitties wouldn’t be around anymore. I don’t want my kids to be hardened to the whole experience of life and death, but I don’t want to shelter them from it either. Maybe these are some of the best lessons our little acreage will ever teach us. 

About School Lunches

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As I try to carve out a writing life, I’ve begun to follow a lot of prompts. Not prompts as in my stomach growling to remind me to have lunch (purely, hypothetical – I never forget to eat lunch) or as in a notification from my phone telling me to stop surfing Google working and get up from my desk and move around. I’m talking about journaling prompts – the kind you can find in lists on Pinterest or that comprise whole books. They can be reasonable (‘Write about your first diary. What did it look like? When did you get it? Why?) and sometimes inane (Imagine you are an elven maiden. What color is your dragon and where are you going on vacation?)

There’s a couple of tremendous things about following such prompts – even the vacationing-and-dragoning-elven-maiden ones. First of all, they are an excellent practice in faith for a writer. I have found time and again, as I follow said prompts, that I am surprised at what comes out on the page. What I write is almost always further than I can think. Meaning that if only I have the faith enough to sit down and write, I will take myself to a place, an adventure, an idea-mine that I couldn’t conceive fully just in my brain-space. Now that I’ve sort of learned that (I still resist inanity sometimes), I am more excited than ever to sit down at my desk and just write. It’s a great way to learn who you are deep down and to find out your capacity. (And what color is your dragon.)

Secondly, prompts can be especially helpful to dig up old memories. Many times, I have heard someone say – I just don’t remember anything from when I was a kid! Open-ended questions like ‘Tell me what it was like to be seven years old’ will only cue blinking eyes – and a blank page.

Without a structure or a spark, it’s hard to remember something in such a specific time. And who cares, anyways? This is not a court deposition and (hopefully) you didn’t murder anyone. Instead, prompts work best in a general way. In my very favorite book about writing – Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird – the author tells her class (and her readers) to think very small. She asks them to write about school lunches.

When I ask my boys what they remember about school lunches, they remind me of pots of pasta and sauce and cheese, tortilla pizzas made in the toaster oven or “snack-y” lunches with crackers and cheese and veggies – because we homeschooled them and they got a (almost always) homemade lunch everyday and ate it while they finished up their math homework. Or while discussing what color their dragons were.

School lunches do not conjure up warm and fuzzy feelings for me. School lunches may have been on the Top Ten List of Why I Wanted to Homeschool My Children in the first place.

So here for your entertainment is my take on What I Remember about School Lunches.

When I think back to school lunches, the first thing that comes to mind is the smell, the weird closed-in, lukewarm-food, old-lunchbox smell that inhabited my lunchbox whether there was food in it or not. When I squeeze my eyes shut, I remember a purple lunchbox with some past-cool or never-was-cool character on the front. Sometimes my mom used MacTac to cover up the picture, to try and “new-it-up” if it was a hand-me-down from one of my siblings. I don’t know who I wanted on my lunchbox instead, maybe Barbie or more honestly, the Muppets, but I never got them.

I probably had a lunchbox all through elementary school. We didn’t have lockers on the ground floor in Derwent school, so our lunchboxes would line the shelf above the coat hooks, our boots on the slanted shelf below them. The noon hour bell would semi-release us – we were free to go fetch our lunchboxes, but had to remain at our desks, eating our baloney sandwiches and pretending that eating with our enemies was normal, hiding any offensive item (like soup in a thermos) from public view and openly consuming chocolate bars and bags of potato chips to advertise that our mothers did indeed love us.

My favorite sandwich would have been a hot dog ensconced in white homemade bread that was slathered lightly with margarine and mustard, the whole thing wrapped, then twisted up, in wax paper. Baloney was a close second, the flatter version of a hot dog that it was.

There was always fruit. An apple, usually, which I never ate and never felt bad about leaving in my lunchbox for mom to shake her head about when I brought it home. She probably left it in the lunchbox, hopefully, unrealistically, for the next day. A banana, if not too bruised, was welcome. Sometimes there were plums, three of them, when in season, and I would eat those, especially happy if they were slightly green. Sometimes there was an orange, the Christmas, easy-peel kind, the kind we called by a politically incorrect name at the time. I would happily consume these, unless, alas, mom had mistakenly fallen for buying oranges with seeds. If I ingested the seed, unaware, I would reject the entire orange as soon as the seed hit my mouth, and it found the recesses of the garbage can outside in the school yard where we were allowed to finish our lunch once the first 15 minutes of the noon hour went by.

By the time I got to junior high, my mom capitulated to packing my lunch in brown paper lunch bags, with the unspoken stipulation that I was to return them for re-use until they were un-useable, unspoken because, well, Mom. While I hadn’t graduated to packing my own lunch (or ever did, even in high school), I started to like what mom packed for me a bit more, or she figured it out a bit better. Tomato sandwiches with mayo and salt and pepper, though soggy, were acceptable. So was Cheez Whiz. More sophisticated things arrived in the bags as I got older: granola bars and sometimes doled-out plastic bags of potato chips which hopefully would not be reduced to crumbs before I got to them at noon.

Okay. Your turn. What do you remember about school lunches?

About What I Learned While Homeschooling

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Along with all the other inherent stresses imbued in a global pandemic, parents right now are finding themselves thrust into a scenario they never wished upon themselves or their children – schooling their kids at home. It’s not for the feint of heart, taking responsibility for the education of your kids, but then neither is parenting. Having kids is probably not what you ever thought it was gonna be: it’s way harder and way better.

About twenty years ago, Rick and I made the decision that we would willingly take on schooling our kids at home. There was no virus threatening our safety, just three little boys testing our sanity. It’s actually a little amusing to me right now that the government is telling parents they need to do this, because it wasn’t always a sanctioned choice. I never was a vigilante-homeschooling mom, insisting that everyone should do it. But I did always maintain that it was an option, like public school or private school were other schooling choices out there. And for us, at the time, it was the right one.

That’s the way you have to look at parenting in retrospect, whether giving grace to yourself or your parents: you do your best with what you know at the time.

I admit that I’m relieved that my kids are graduated and responsible for whatever the heck they want to learn now. And COVID-19, with all it’s social distancing challenges, has really put parents schooling their children at home to the test: no playgrounds at “recess”, no fraternizing in the hallways except with your enemies (oops, I mean siblings), no sports, no clubs, not a lot of anything to let off steam except screens and backyards.

It was a different time and a different place, but for what it’s worth, here’s what I learned while homeschooling my boys – with the perspective of being past it all.

One of the best things I heard at a homeschooling conference once was that educating your kids was like creating a hammock for them. You need to make sure they have the basics to support them – through the next level, through regular life – but there’s always gonna be a lot of holes. If kids only get the basics – like the original trifecta of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic, that’s a pretty good hammock. It will hold up. And there’s no way you can ever fill all the holes anyways.

Secondly, what you “routinize” is what your kids will get used to and what they will also do, for better or for worse. Whether it’s schooling at home or working remotely, you get more done if you stick to a routine. Plus, more beds get made, teeth get brushed, fish get fed and books get read. It takes a lot of muscle to build a habit but then after awhile, it just becomes the new normal.

Thirdly, you can’t predict what your kids will remember. While I went off the deep end teaching my boys lots of history and reading them great stories, they don’t remember a lot of the specifics. Frankly, neither do I. It’s pretty scattershot, really. But we did give them learning “hooks”, meaning that if they encounter an idea or some history or a person that we learned about in school, they have a place to hang that knowledge and build upon it. You can’t always remember stuff from first encounters. And now that they are in their twenties with their own Google machines in their hands all the time, they can look it up. (So can I.)

Fourthly, they will remember what was fun and unusual, and mostly, that’s the stuff that families are made of, not school. There were lots of things my boys do remember because we enjoyed them: nature hikes, reading all the Harry Potter books as a family, theatre performances, road trips, music lessons (well, maybe not the lessons, but the knowing how to play afterwards), holiday traditions, sleepovers at Gramma’s house, backyard hockey rinks and road hockey in the summer, crazy youth group events, house renovations. (Oh, wait, maybe that last one was just fun for Rick and me.) And if you think about it, what you remember about school when you were a kid was probably less about what you learned and more about what you did and who you did it with and especially if you had fun.

I’m willing to bet that the COVID-19 classes of 2020 won’t remember a heck a lot of what they learned “in school” this year. Which is not to say that it’s a futile exercise: schoolwork teaches your kids how to learn and it builds their repertoire and frankly, it just keeps them a little busy. But it’s pretty much a guarantee that they will remember all the weirdness, and hopefully a little bit of the wonderfulness, that a quarantine can offer. I mean, you’re in it now: might as well make lemonade out of them lemons. And while you’re at it, your kids can learn math and experiment with taste buds and have (lemonade) drinking contests and then they can wash the damn dishes. Which is also a good skill they probably won’t learn in regular school.

Home, after all, is where they first learned to walk and talk and cut their own hair somehow with child-safe scissors. Maybe they can cut yours now until we get our hair salons back. It could be fun. Just sayin.

About Running

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Just in time for spring and peek-a-boo sandals, my toenails are about to fall off.

Not all of them. Just two. And those would be the ones on my “pointer toes” – the abnormally tall next-to-big-toes. You know, the weird looking toes. Come to think of it, toes in general are weird looking. They’re all different from each other, thoughtfully fashioned to each have their own piggy personality.

So back to my imminent toenail departure. At the very beginning of COVID-19, just before that last memorable snowstorm swooped in, we went for our obligatory daily walk. (And by daily, I mean, four times a week if we’re not too lazy or…ahem, busy.) It was a beautiful March Sunday afternoon and we took the long way around town. We were probably a couple of miles in before I started to question the error of my footwear choice. The garage was still in a state of disarray from moving and rather than upend that Jenga tower, I had opted for a crappy pair of convenient old loafers with which to plow through the puddles.

Cue the blisters and the repeated battering of my extra-long toes. The result a couple of days later, besides the impressive sore-toe-ness, was that my two toenails had turned a royal shade of purple. And now a month later, they are loosening and threatening their exodus. Jeez.

I have heard about marathon runners losing toenails after their big race and for some reason I thought that they just peeled off along with their socks immediately after they had crossed the finish line. Duh. This makes more sense: they hurt like the dickens and they color up pretty and a month later, they take their leave.

So basically, I’m in the same boat as a marathon runner. Except I’m about 22 miles short. And I didn’t run.

I am the best of walkers, sometimes I’m even a tremendous hiker. I love pumping up and down the hills in the Provincial Park out my back door – at a reasonable pace. But running – I suck at running. I have no gumption for it at all.

Nowadays, I blame my knees, having inherited my mother’s arthritic joints. However, my mom never let a creaky knee or elbow keep her from jogging to the chicken coop or running up from the basement with a quart jar of pickles tucked under her arm, like a Heisman winner. And so, I take a page from her book and insist I will not give in either. I will jog a little on the treadmill now and then. I will do squats and lunges and take this kind of medicine to keep me strong and limber (because I don’t have chickens and I don’t make pickles.)

We’ve all heard of people who lace up and discover a whole new kind of freedom when they start to run. (Watch Brittany Runs a Marathon for a great example of this.) I listen to (and watch) these stories with envy. Because that has never been me.

Way back when I was in grade nine, I had some fancy ideas about becoming a runner. Running would keep me fit and maybe slim me down, but best of all, I could call myself: A Runner. It went totally against my nerdy, bookish persona and just like every junior-high-schooler, I desperately wanted to be something different from Who I Was. And so, when the Annual-All-Schools-in-the-County-Track-and-Field Day came along, I signed up. For the Long-Distance Event. (Oy-yoy-yoy. I’m pretty sure that’s what was in the thought bubble above my Mom’s head when I confessed this to her.)

Let me be clear: I went to a very small school. There were about fifteen of us in grade nine. And only one other girl from my school had signed up for my Event. Additionally, there was no training – not in gym class, not after school, not even a hint of a suggestion that: perhaps to avoid humiliation, one should practice a little for this Event.

Well, not that I remember.

I took it upon myself one lovely day in May to lace up my knock-off Converse runners (ahem: NOT a RUNNING shoe) and try running around my town. And if you know how big Derwent is, that’s not really saying that much. But I got about a block away from home and I was winded. Whew! I decided that that was probably good enough for one day and I walked back home. With good intentions, I thought I would go out the next day and “train” some more.

Well. Time flies when you’re in high school and I woke up one day and Surprise! It was Track and Field Day. Thankfully, my mom had sewed me a cute outfit, so I wasn’t going to look like a complete idiot. And I was sure that on that day, I would somehow be able to complete the race by sheer fortitude, a quality that I had never displayed in gym class before.

When the time came for my Event, I lined up with all the other two entrants in my race. The fake gun went off and I ran. The other girl from my school was pretty much in the same boat as me and when we saw our competition pull ahead, we unanimously decided not to deprive her of victory. So, about a block in, we both dropped out.

This is not the end of the story. Apparently, I did moderately better than my home-town compadre and for this mere effort – like the milliseconds between Olympian medalists – I was awarded a Second-Place Blue Ribbon.

Pretty great, huh? (And this was before participation medals.)

There is no moral in this story – well, not one that I want to explore, anyways. There are a couple of points however: I never was a runner and unless I get me some new knees – AND SOME FORTITUDE – I never will be one.

And: I may not be a runner, but I AM a (second-place) winner. I have the blue ribbon to prove it.