From Word To Word

Every morning that I take my eldest son to Montessori school, two days a week, he gives me a singular farewell.  He first asks, with much gravity, when I will come to pick him up.  Once I have answered this question, he makes me kneel down to his level, and he takes my face between his hands, and he kisses me solemly on the forehead, like some ancient elder imparting a blessing, and each time he does this I am reminded of how blessed I am.  Each time, I am surprised once more at how good it is for my soul that I am made to kneel and receive on my forehead the blessing of his kiss.

It was a cold, cloudy, sleety day today, one of those days that will consent neither to be truly nice nor to be truly horrible, settling for meteorological mediocrity, which is the worst of all weather.

I decided that the day called for nesting. The kids and I made a pact not to leave the house for anything short of an emergency. We made hot chocolate. We brought our blankets down to the livingroom and watched a movie. We made a tent around one of the radiators and read some stories. We nested.

It reminded me of what Gaston Bachelard has to say about nests in The Poetics of Space.  With nests, he says, “we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world; we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence.”  It was just this confidence that we built today in the face of a February day in Canada: the confidence of the nest.

I generally try to make Christmas presents for my kids.  Last year I made them  a set of blocks designed to build castles, and this year I made them wooden shields, with wolves for my eldest, whose middle name means “young wolf”, and hawks for my youngest, whose first name is also the name for a species of small hawk.  They are about two feet by two feet in size and quite heavy, and they came with wooden swords made by the young entrepreneur that I mentioned some time ago, so they would actually be dangerous if I were to let the boys use them as toys, but they are intended instead to hang on the wall as their own personal coats of arms, something that symbolically ties them to our family.

The colours of their shields and the pattern of three animals come from my mother’s Gordon coat of arms, from my father’s Hill coat of arms, and from my wife’s James coat of arms, and the chevron comes from the latter two, so the boys’ personal symbols are integrated into the symbolism of their parents’ families.  Of course, anyone who takes heraldry seriously would be horrified at this kind of unsanctioned alteration of official heraldic devices, but I am less interested in having the shields be authentic than I am in having them be personal and familial.  I want them to be a symbol to my children that, though they are unique and irreplaceable, they are also always a part of a family and a tradition that can give them a place to belong.

This is the gift that I hope they are receiving this Christmas.

So, as I mentioned last month, there will be no Dinner and a Doc this Saturday.  Instead, it had been my plan to send my children off with one relative or another so that I could have my traditional Christmas baking day with my wife.  I was also going to set up the projector this year, so that we could watch movies together as we worked.  I initially proposed an Alfred Hitchcock marathon.  My wife demurred.  She counter-proposed a foodie-movie marathon.  I accepted, and I was intending to post a request for people to recommend their favourite foodie-movies.  Everything was planned.

Unfortunately, life, or the Christmas season rather, has intervened.  It seems that we will be hosting an annual gathering of friends this year, and this Saturday is really the only day that will work for it, and there are no other open Saturdays between now and when the Christmas baking will be needed, so the annual Christmas baking day has become something like an extended Christmas baking week, where we are making this and that whenever we find a few minutes.  It is not exactly what I had planned, or not at all in fact, but it has been something good even so.  It has allowed us to enjoy the baking at a slower pace and over a longer time, and it has also opened opportunities for friends to do some of the baking with us.  I was not tradition perhaps, but it did what the tradition was intended nevertheless.

Of course, this does not mean that those foodie-movies will not get watched someday, so feel free to recommend them anyway.

Also, for those who are wondering, here is the upcoming schedule for Dinner and a Doc:

January 9th – The Price of Sugar by Bill Haney
February 13th – Lost in La Mancha by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe
Match 13th – Man or Aran by Robert Flaherty

My sons have had a disappointing fall for exactly the same reason that everyone else has had such an enjoyable one: there has been no snow. There have been some false alarms, of course, when they woke in the morning to see a skiff of whiteness on the grass, rushed excitedly through their morning routines, and ran into the backyard, only to find that no amount of effort would produce snowmen or even snowballs from the tissue deep snow that was melting around them even as they tried. There was great suffering on those days.

This morning, however, this lovely morning, when most of southern Ontario rose dejectedly to the reality of another winter, when commuters everywhere cursed the first car cleaning and driveway shoveling of the year, my sons were elated. At last there was snow, real snow, snow enough, and packing snow besides, and their was nothing short of jubilation in the house. I could hardly get them to eat breakfast, so worried were they that everything would melt again before the had a chance to pile it, roll it, build it, and throw it, but the wait only served to increase their already heady degree of anticipation.

They built a snowman, or rather, I built a snowman under their very close supervision, and they stuck its head full of sticks and leaves and assorted vegetation. They made snowballs, hundreds of them, and peppered the front wall of our porch, which was made to play the roles, one after the other, but in close succession, of pirates, bad-guy-knights, and Darth Vader. They rolled down the hill until the snow, only a degree or so above melting, had soaked through every layer I had put on them. They were cold and wet and entirely fulfilled.

What is more, they distracted me from the December ritual of marking papers long enough to play with them, and I found that maybe I still like the first snow of the year more than I thought I did, and that maybe I can still find some pleasure in building snowmen and throwing snowballs, even if rolling down the hill is now beyond me. Of course, my recovered sense of joy in the snow might have something to do with the fact that I had no car to clean this morning and that I have still not shoveled the driveway, but it was a joy nevertheless, whatever the reasons.

I woke early this morning to go to the market with my father and my youngest son, three generations of family, and it was colder outside than it has been yet this year, with a strong wind blowing from the north into our faces as we made our way home, and my son began to cyy because of the cold, refusing either to walk or to sit in the wagon, and it was inexpressibly right, somehow, that my father and I took turns pulling the wagon of groceries behind us and carrying my crying son, like a living metaphor of familial care through generations.

I had the opportunity to appear on CFRU’s Family Matters show this morning, talking about fathers who stay at home and who homeschool their children.  Though both of my kids are preschoolers, which probably disqualifies me as a homeschooler in a technical sense, there are few enough homeschooling fathers that just my interest in the idea qualified me to appear on the show.  I am rarely as satisfied with what I say as I am with what I write, and this was the case again this morning, but it was an interesting experience for me, and I do not think that my comments misrepresent me.

Those who are interested in hearing the audio can find it in CFRU’s  Program Archive, but the site does not provide links to individual programs, so you will need to select “Sunday: 2009-11-21″ from the initial list and then “8:00:00 – Family Matters” on the list of the day’s programs.

I try to refrain from sharing sentimental anecdotes about my children since these kinds of stories usually entertain only the parents themselves.  I am about to make an exception to that rule, however, so you may either humour me or find something more interesting to read.

As I was putting my eldest son to bed last night, he asked me, “Dad, can we go in a rocket sometime?”

I told him that not everyone can go up in a rocket, just astronauts.  I also told him that being an astronaut would mean lots of learning and practising and work, but that it would be an exciting job to try.  He was very quiet for a minute, so I asked him, “Would you like to be an astronaut?”

“Yes,” he told me gravely, “and Daddy too, so we can hold hands on the moon.”

I suddenly saw the two of us, hand in hand, standing in the loneliness and the darkness of space, tethered to the barren rock only by the tenuous gravity of the moon, and I could think of no better image to express the love of a father and a son.

I have written previously about the significance of solitude, but recently I have been feeling acutely the lack of this kind of aloneness, and this sense was heightened yesterday as I was reading a blog called Daily Routines, which describes the habits of famous writers and artists.  It struck me forcefully how divergent my preferred routines would be from the ones that I actually live, because of work and family and other obligations.

My inclination would be not to have to see or speak to anyone from when I wake in the morning until early afternoon or even later.  I would prefer to breakfast and lunch alone, and this would be time that I spent doing nothing but thinking, or reading, or writing.  If it was to be spent thinking, I would want to be working at something as well, in the garden or the kitchen usually, but almost anything would do.  If it was to be spent reading or writing, I would want to be working at something more intermittent, something that permitted me merely to surface now and again, like a pot of soup stock or a batch of bread.  In any case, I would need a steady supply of very dark coffee, something to keep a bitterness on the back of my tongue.

Sometime in the afternoon, I would begin to exhaust my focus, and I would want conversation with someone.  Ideally, this person would be comfortable enough with me and my house that we would work together to prepare supper as we talked.  There would not need to be any particular form to this conversation.  Its purpose would be only to sift what I had done that day, to share it with another mind, to have it returned to me in a different form than I first shared it.  This exchange might happen over coffee again, but I would prefer by far that it happen over a red wine that was very dry, something harsh to the palette.  I dislike subtlety in wine.

I would prefer to have supper with several people, five or six at most, and I would want most of them to know one another, so that conversation need not remain long on superficialities.  This meal should linger, enveloping the whole evening, taking into itself the coffee that accompanies the dessert and the scotch that follows it.  In the summer, it should end on the porch with my pipe, in the winter, by the fire with a hot toddy, and I should spend at least an hour longer alone there after everyone else has left.

In practice, however, and probably for the better, my life very seldom resembles this ideal.  From the moment that my youngest son wakes me in the morning, I will likely not have a moment of solitude all day long.  If I accomplish reading or writing or anything at all, it will be in the few grains of time that I glean from the wake of my children, and my work, and my other commitments.  I might find a few minutes of aloneness as I am walking from one place to another or when those in my house are distracted by something else, but I can rarely predict these moments.  I seem only to have discovered them when they are ended.

In most senses, I do not begrudge this lack.  The things that seize my time are things that I value very much, and I am happy to give them their due.  There are moments, however, when I long for nothing else than the space for aloneness, when the difference between my ideal and actual routines seems about to break me.  Most of all, what I want of this solitude is silence, or at least the quietude that is more silent than silence, the quietude of natural sound when it suddenly finds itself in the absence of the human and  artificial.  I want to hear nothing that demands anything of me but grateful inattention, and I sometimes long for nothing more than this quiet and this solitude.

There are times that I feel acutely the lack of something for the simple reason that I am lacking so little else.

I am currently at my Mother’s place on Manitoulin Island.  I have had for dinner a very nice roast beef and several bottles of very nice wine.  I have had a bonfire with my eldest son, where I toasted marshmallows that he smeared all over his gloves.  Now that he is asleep, I am drinking hot, mulled apple cider that has been cut amply with apricot brandy, and I am settling into the silence.

I want my pipe.