Airport

From February 2011.  Chris is still above the Arctic Circle in Norway, now with a fiancee, Maria Reithe. So more than a decade longer than he originally thought, and no indication he will return to America for more than a visit.  He keeps both passports.  We see him every couple of years, plus Facetime.

******** 

When you drop off a son at the international departures terminal, and he's been talking about being based in Norway and Romania for 3-4 years - even though you know this is the son whose plans tend to change more rapidly - you can't help but watch as he goes through the last screening in view and think "Is this the last time I shall ever look at him?"

Perhaps it gets more difficult as it repeats, or maybe I'm just more easily moved to tears as I grow older, but this was harder than sending him off to the Marines, even though statistically, that was far more dangerous.

Two From Ben

He'll be home from Houston Christmas Night, and finally able to sleep after filmmaking, but Ben has been able to post a few interesting things during the making of the film for Christmas Eve.

"I was trying to create the sound effect of a mug smashing for "Unexpected", but it turned out to be harder than I thought. The end result seemed funny. But then, I'm pretty tired."

I have been having trouble keeping the embed. Perhaps twitvid takes it down. If so, you can go to their site for the video here.
 
In (assumedly) unrelated news, A species of miniature dragon has been discovered. Well, little "dracos" have been known about for awhile, but this one does seem different and definitely cool.

Romanian Carol

The title means "The most beautiful piece of the concert of Christmas carols."

No, I don't know what the carol is or what it means. Sorry. No Romanians here to tell me.

I'll ask one to tell me.

Nome Storm

When you live on the Bering Strait, you already expect weather to be bad.  When the weather advisories say a life-threatening storm of epic magnitude, you have to figure that's pretty intense.

So when your boy is in that, you worry.

Driving Lesson

And so here I am again, for the fifth time, teaching a 15.5 year old boy how to drive. Over the years I have learned to say "correct" instead of "right," even in everyday discourse. Many statements that are precise to other drivers, such as "take your next right," are ambiguous to non-drivers, who wonder if you mean any break in the curbing, only paved areas, only marked roads, or what? A friend who had an in-garage accident with his son figured out - much too late - that "Stop!" to a driver means stop the car, but to your son, who you have yelled at for years, it means Freeze. Stop whatever you are doing right now.

Which is sometimes not what you want him to do as a driver.

Tonight I was reminded that cut the wheel; cut it hard is ambiguous to a non-driver. No damage, no emergency, just a caution flag for me.

Driving a standard is always an adventure, because understanding the concepts only takes you so far. Your foot and leg muscles have to develop memory through repetition to get the feel for it, and there just isn't any substitute.

It's a good time to remember James Thurber's grandfather, in Chapter 9 of My Life and Hard Times.

India

For those not connected to Tracy on FB, you may not know Ben heads for India tomorrow. The Woodlands United Methodist Church has a mission team going to India, and they have asked Ben to do the film for them. That's about all we know - the trip isn't even on the church's website.

We'll hear when he comes back, as he is coming to NH after.

Education Credentials

Via Maggie's.

George Leef comments on In The Basement Of The Ivory Tower. I don't know the book, so I'm not linking or recommending (though it sounds promising).

We have constructed a situation in which an ambitious young person must acquire an expensive and often useless degree in order to have any credibility in applying for many jobs. I absorbed the view, from reading and from family, that college was only indirectly about preparing for work - it was about becoming a complete person, a man of many parts, thoroughly grounded in Western Intellectual Tradition. One got into the most prestigious college that would accept you, studied what you wished within a narrow range of approved majors that reflected the Canon, and Western Civilisation rewarded you with employment suitable to your station at the other end. One Christmas, when college sweatshirts were fashionable for boys, a flock of them were given to our boys and their cousins: Stanford, Duke, Yale, William & Mary, Dartmouth. The message was clear.

We only gradually abandoned this; our older sons still showed a great deal of this approach themselves, though they were already breaking that mold by the time they left. The two Romanians went even farther afield, but there was still much of the old system put upon them. We still owe tens of thousands on that, too. I hope there is some clarity by the time Kyle is choosing.

Youth Baseball

Kyle is playing Babe Ruth League this year, leading to me discussing youth baseball at work. One woman complained bitterly about her son's experience. He has ADHD, she said, yet they put him in the outfield - the notorious right field - where it was hard for him to pay attention. She thought this was irresponsible of the coaches, not to put her boy in the spot where he could do best.

I hope my face did not show the amazement I felt. Lady, they put kids where it works best for the team, so they have the best chance of winning. That's one of the lessons, that the world doesn't revolve around you and everyone does what they can to help the group effort. But I did immediately see her point as well. She sent her son to baseball so that it would work out for him and his development, not so that Joe's Storm Doors could win. The team is ultimately of no importance, the individual remains.

At first pass, this is certainly an age-related discussion. What is appropriate for six-year-olds and fifteen-year-olds is quite different. The younger the child, the more it makes sense to try them in a variety of situations, to experience different facets. It does seem just wrong to play your one dominant kid in such a way that no one else gets to do much. But having your teenage son play short because there's more going on there and he won't fade out so much doesn't seem like it is educating him into the world of adults, where the common goal has a value of its own.

Plus, as I learned in baseball more than any sport, there are kids who don't look as if they are paying attention who nonetheless are. Taken to extremes, however, no one is ever going to believe you. (I wonder whether, if my second son could see videos of himself playing second at age fourteen, he would agree that any reasonable observer would conclude that the blond kid was absolutely not ready for the play, and finally understand his coach's and father's ire - or whether he would see entire justification instead, noting with full accuracy that as the pitcher let go of the ball, he was always in position and facing the batter. Both are true - which would he see, now that he is 27 and works with youth groups a lot?)

"At Least You're Not Black"

Chris has had the odd experience, while seeking employment in Norway, of having a few prospective employers smile and say "At least you're not black." I don't know if it's something Norwegians deeply mean or just an old saying they haven't bothered to clean up, rather in the manner that Americans used to say "free, white, and 21" when I was young.

But for a boy just out of the Marine Corps, it rings pretty oddly on the ears. What if I was* black? he asked me, Would it make a difference to them? I think probably yes. Scandinavian countries are homogeneous, and no European countries have much good record in accepting other races, or hell, even other tribes of the same race. The Flemish and Walloons still can't get along, for pity's sake, and the Saxons and the Celts just barely until quite recently.

And don't even get me started on the Roma.

Yeah, if you've got a gypsy-disliking Romanian wondering if you are too racist, that pretty much answers the question right there. Americans are the least-racist people (there are other anglospheric countries in the discussion), and it pays to remember that. We are accomplishing, however slowly and badly, what other nations do not even attempt.

*No, the Romanians are not the children I would have even bothered to teach to say "if I were." It is examples such as this that solidified my move from prescriptivist to descriptivist in language. Chris and J-A learned English from native speakers of their generation, primarily. That is standard English, even if I find it sloppy. It is fine to insist on conventions in conventional situations, such as speeches, papers, formal events. But other prescriptive changes describe social, even snobbish distinctions. Not that I don't use them anyway, of course, because that's who I am. Yet it is not who they are.

Testimony

Retriever has a post about her ambivalence listening to testimony at a churchwomens event she dragged herself to out of duty.

"Testimony Sunday" is a catchphrase in our family, based on an experience we had while church-shopping when Jonathan was almost 8 and Ben almost 4. We visited an independent Baptist congregation that friends attended, and happened to come on Testimony Sunday, a three-hour marathon. Interesting how various people see this variously. My wife liked it at first, though began to weary of it as we crossed the 100-minute mark. The friends we were honoring with the visit to their church were mortified: Sue Byrd swore she could see the steam escaping from my ears. Benjamin was initially fine - the Sunday School teachers had released the children, with some annoyance at having been left holding the bag, thank you very much, after 90 minutes, and while most of them were antsy, Ben had found a pile of books and was lying comfortably in the aisle, oblivious to those stepping over him. But at 3.9 years, he wasn't reading at a high level, and exhausted everything in his range and several outside it, in the next hour. At two-and-a-half hours, women were coming up to the microphone for second helpings of testimony giving, and I was growing homicidal.

Jonathan thought this was the coolest church service ever. Having only been to Lutheran services to that point, the idea of church where people would get up and cry and talk about their alcoholic parents and being beaten, going to school in awful clothes, having only bread and milk for food for a week - or alternatively, having husbands that went off for "affairs," - we had covered in our Ten Commandments teaching that "adultery" was stealing someone else's husband or wife, and I think he dimly grasped that something like this was up - and the police coming to your house or being teased at school... well my goodness, this is the most interesting church we have ever been in, Dad. Can we come back next week?

He didn't know from Baptists yet, that next week was going to be lots of scripture memorization and a few choruses of singing "Trust and Obey." Anyway, at Retriever's event

The speaker continued describing how at 15 she had become suicidal and been sent away to some teen center. And then I tuned partially out. Wondering "What are you leaving out?"

Yeah, exactly. Your terrible, neglectful Mom that you are kicking up and down the narthex in this testimony - what's her side of this?

It's not accidental that testimonies grew up as a major part of the church culture on the frontier and in the black church, where people were mobile and there wasn't going to be a lot of fact-checking. Christians of my age may remember what happened to Mike Warnke, who had the misfortune to straddle the old fundamentalist culture where people took you at face value and expected the same, versus the new evangelicalism where earnest young college students delighted in doing research about Christian topics.

Ben's List

Ben has his list of top 100 books in his life. Done with rollicking commentary, and inspiring to those who have always been readers. Plenty of comments from those who know him and knew him when. It may also be an enchantment to younger reading addicts to get A) a flavor of what a life of books can make of you and B) some new ideas of what to pick up.

Update: Here's an odd thought. One can't see such a list without wondering about a personal list. But a parent, or a parent who read out loud a great deal - or this parent who read out loud a great deal, anyway - can no longer make an individual list. I loved Watership Down (that's why I read it to the boys. Duh.) but I don't know as it would have made my all-time list. Certainly not in the top 30, anyway. But because it became an event for Ben (and lost in that shuffle was that it was quite important to Jonathan as well, which I why I jumped it so early on Ben. It was slated for a year or so later, but it just worked, somehow, against my prediction) it became part of the fabric of our family's culture, and thus rises on my list. Tracy and I would likely have put the Susan Cooper books, and some other Arthurian material on our lists. But they didn't read out loud very well, pointing up weaknesses we might not otherwise have seen, and they drifted downward in thought and eventually seeped out the bottom.

There are books important to me that are nowhere close to Ben's list, of course: acres of Lewis, Nine Nations of North America, Albion's Seed, many plays, especially by Tom Stoppard - dozens of things really. But my fiction list, and certainly my children's fiction list, simply has no meaning without reference to the two older boys.

We built a family culture, not one imposed by parents on children, but gradually including them in the making. I have entire confidence where they will take it next - more than where I might take it next, actually.

That Hideous Strength

I last read the book over 30 years ago, I think. There may have been another reading early on in there, and I have read excerpts and references to the book.

I find it is a very different book at 57 than at 25. When I first read it I saw much of myself in Mark Studdock (and my new wife in Jane Studdock). What I had remembered of the book included a great deal of the temptations he faced, and his weakness of character he showed in facing them. What I took away from this was "Don't be that guy. And you could, you know." On this reading, I more often think how much I want to warn the young man. I don't see myself at all, nor my wife in Jane. Perhaps the lessons took.

Or some of the lessons, anyway. I see parts of myself in some of the other characters now, including some of the most unattractive. Not so very much - I seem to have found other faults instead - but some things that were not visible in me as a young man, not even in my secret heart, have evidence now.


A word of warning on the reading. I see flaws in the construction of the story that I did not see at first. Most probably, I was so taken with identification with Mark and Jane, and anxious to read any new twist on Merlin, that I was able to disregard weaknesses. The descriptions of the temptations and development of Mark and Jane are believably timed, subtle, and ring true. To be like the conflicts and ambiguities of real life they should unfold slowly, and they do. The other characters, especially the fellows of Bracton and the staff of the N.I.C.E, are likewise plausible and recognisable. I now know some people like them, as I did not when I was in my twenties. But the events surrounding them do not read so believably. It is not that the events could not happen - though of course it is a modern fairy tale and the events are supposed to be sharply drawn, with good and evil unmasked - but that they seem to happen without sufficient set up and cause. Catastrophes have little buildup, and feel inserted for the sake of the plot rather than flowing naturally from previous events.

Lewis seems to have sensed this himself, as he uses literary devices to extend the impression of time at several points. And it is certainly true that events in real life do often seem to descend without cause upon us, showing their origins only in retrospect. We plod along daily with life changing little, then one Tuesday it all upends overnight. However, authors are not allowed to tell stories that way, even if that is more like real life. It jars.

It's an odd contrast, with the internal events of the main characters handled so deftly and precisely, while the exterior events seem at times to fall off a passing vegetable wagon. They add up in the end, and hang together in retrospect, but while they are occurring they take one out of the book a bit.

Longitude

Son #3 is at 165 degrees west longitude, nearly on the Arctic Circle. Son #4 is at 18 degrees east longitude, nearly on the Arctic Circle. If you look at the habitable places up there, there aren't many. And two places directly across the North Pole from each other are fewer still.

This is the first time in the history of the world that Romanian brothers are on direct opposite sides of the Arctic Circle.* I feel pretty confident of that. Some Romanian newspaper or magazine would likely be interested in the story.

*If you want to count Catalin, who is their brother though not our son, I waive the point. Yes. True.

Where Have The Good Women Gone?

Among the links at Instapundit discussing Kay S Hymowitz's book Manning Up; How The Women's Movement Has Turned Men Into Boys and her WSJ article this weekend "Where Have All The Good Men Gone?" was one to The Art of Manliness site, a personal favorite of mine. An excellent short take on the topic.

The topic of boys becoming men, and whether particular individuals are on schedule, has occupied much of my thought these past 30+ years, especially the last 10 (and the next 5, I'll bet), and I have shared the worrying concern that the grim statistics reveal. Yet might I mention that because of the boys and their friends, I have also had a fair bit of exposure to young women, and their behavior is uh, not uniformly encouraging either. Apparently it is impolite to mention this.

Also, any reading of history suggests that young men and young women have always presented much the same difficulty. There is a narrative, much beloved of sentimentalists and conservatives - I'm not implying any particular correlation there; it might be negative - that in the Good Old Days young people knew that life was hard and grew up quickly, taking responsibility for repairing the pigs or darning the buckboard or whatever, so that papa and mama would be able to work 30 hours a day at the vegetable mines and make some money.

This is certainly true in comparison to the present day, for if there is anything we know about history, it is that people mostly starved, were exploited, and died young. Working hard was not a matter of good character, but mere survival. But most of the stories today of folks remembering their own childhood and the stories of their parent's are subject to selective bias. People who became successful enough to write for a national audience, remembering themselves and their circle, portray a society of industrious, responsible young people - not like you slacking whippersnappers today, dammit.

But the historical record is also full of bastardy and abandonment, murder, robbery - all those things mentioned in the folk songs, actually.

Well, I do social histories on people as part of my job and have been doing so for thirty years. A psychiatric facility is very much a restricted sample of another sort, but not so much as you'd think. There have been 18,000 separate individuals admitted to our facility over that time, and we get a fair bit of information about their families as well. So perhaps 5% of the population have something of themselves in our records - which is part of why confidentiality is such a big deal to us. That 5% is certainly slanted toward those homes your mother wouldn't let you visit, which had forgotten until I just reminded you, but we also know a fair bit about the dark underside of some of the prominent attorneys, physicians, college professors, business owners, and other respectable people. And I don't just mean that they happened to have a child or a spouse who hit a bad patch in the genetic lottery and have some sad condition. The full display of incest, violence, addiction, and criminality of even the elite runs through our histories.

From those data bases, let me assure you that youthful irresponsibility, in more than a Disney sense of stealing muskmelons or putting glue on Miss McDonald's chair, is not confined to the present age. Nor is it confined to young men. Women may have some different pathologies - perhaps, sadly, complementary pathologies - but they can be just as damaging.


I sometimes point out that the most economical explanation of societal change since the 1950's is that teenagers had discretionary income for the first time in history. Most pathologies could be at least theoretically explained by that - even the sexual ones. And we note that the few individuals in history who also had discretionary income as teenagers acted just about as irresponsibly as anyone we've got now. When I consider the lives of my grandfathers, I doubt I could endure it. Yet clearly, I could have. There is nothing they had genetically that I don't have. The need brings such responsibilities forth.

Which suggests the lack of need suppresses them as less necessary, but they are there if the need arises.

Vacation

I am theoretically on vacation this week, though it hardly seems so. When you buy a house, the house owns you, not you the house. There comes a stage where a house begins to haunt you, demanding some of your attention in each waking moment. This week has been one son sick (though back to school today); catching up with another, just out of the Marines and with plans that sounded worrisome, but just might work out - I have gone from thinking them 10% possible to better than 50% possible (heck, the first parts look way better than that); covering errors in a cathedral ceiling whose grooved planks are separating; organising the work bench and tools for the first time in decades - lots of unidentifiable bits of plastic or metal that are clearly meant to do something very efficiently, but Lord knows what; weeding through the camping equipment, much of it incomplete and all of it twenty years old or more; taking an inventory of emergency preparedness and finding that throwing dry or canned foods into a bag and putting away some containers of water isn't really the thing.

My vague idea of a day trip alone, going here or there, is long since abandoned. Younger men may fantasize any number of superpowers it would be fun to have. Invisibility has always sounded like the best one to me, and this week even more.

Not much reading or computer. I have little idea what is happening in the world and find I don't much mind. Even my usual fond hope of drinking a little too much hasn't panned out, as I learned last fall it's not as much fun as I remembered - and I still have to be a good example anyway.

Mission Trips

We required that every son go on a mission trip before graduating high school. It is a cliche to say that those who go get more out of it than those who are theoretically being ministered to.

Here's an overlooked example that will appeal to parents.

Suburban children often grow up more fussy about their food. Children often have difficulty with the concept of foods mixing together, as in a sauce, or even touching each other. Further, items such as onions, mushrooms, and all manner of vegetables may be meticulously picked out of dinners. That is, when the dinner is not rejected entirely. All children do this, suburban children are worse.

Foreign missions in high school have a salutary effect on this. When Concord Christian visited a Jamaican orphanage, made heroic efforts to eat everything put in front of them, and still saw the orphans leap for the inedible parts tossed in the garbage, it made an impression.

The two Romanian sons, who spent much of their early childhood eating lard spread on bread augmented by whatever fruit they could steal, needed no curative in this regard. When they came to America they developed preferences and even things they would rather not eat, but when the chips were down, could deal with anything. Ultimately, they could say "Dude, it's food. Eat it." Chris even went off on his lunch table in high school always complaining about the food at one point. A sternish lecture on what food reality really was. When Chris sent MRE's from the Marines to his brother, in fact, John-Adrian never figured out the part about how the heating pack was included. Ate the meal anyway, though he confessed he didn't like it much.

Ben, by far our pickiest eater, found Jamaica and a summer working in Romania quite curative. Which worked out well, since he moved to Texas. Kyle...well, let's not pick on Kyle yet. His background was fast food or frozen prepared foods heated up, so he's still adjusting to the idea of food that people actually cook.

But Jonathan's mission trip was to a drug rehab in Chicago. It worked out well, as he met someone he admired from Asbury, where he, his wife, and Ben eventually went. But Chicago food doesn't stretch the suburban palate much. His toddler daughter was over for dinner tonight, identifying the spinach as "grass," and turning up her nose at Swedish meatballs. And he, foul parent, is not providing a good example.

We should have sent him on two trips.

This is the good stuff from Romania, BTW. Really.

Vinete, an eggplant salad (Vee-neyteh)


Mitetei, a tiny sausage. (Mee-tets)



Sarmale and mamaliga



Mamaliga, egg, sour cream, God-knows-what.

New Church

We are attending the church we used to go to years ago. They burned the mortgage today, and there was much discussion of what transpired 20 years ago. The children's story was about a boy of six who had drawn a picture of what the new church should look like, with Mrs. Tibbetts stressing to the little ones how their contributions were important and how they were a part of the church.

The artist turned out to be our son Ben, now 27. We had entirely forgotten this story. Tracy had passed on the drawing to the building committee, the head of which kept it, bringing it forth this week. We were certain that the story could not be quite as advertised, but on examining the documents, it was clearly Ben's work.



The church looks just like this, BTW - though we went with a truer shade than the burnt orange on the upper left. An expressionist sort of building, very avant garde. So you see, children, adults do listen to you and take you seriously.

10-4 Lists

Ben hadn't posted for awhile, but now has his lists up.

Best Albums. At least I had heard of 4 of the 10 bands.* The reviews were originally tweeted, so are less than 140 characters each. The limitation does impose a certain discipline of getting a lot said quickly and vividly.

Likely Oscar Nominations. Ben's predictions are good by any normal-person standard every year, which doesn't stop him from kicking himself when the results are announced. That boy doesn't want to be merely good, but newsworthy in his predictions.

NBA All-Stars. He seeks comments, but who does he think is going to wade in and disagree with him? I'll find something.

*I don't listen to music much anymore, preferring silence, sports talk, or educational listening, in that order. I would probably be happier if I listened to more music and books on tape.

Boys In School

I know, I know, TED is so SWPL, but I do like it.

Bethany, who used to comment here as bsking and is personally known to some of you, sent this on today. This is particularly sporting of her, as she was a math/science girl who was on the receiving end of some gender stereotyping in school.

So, another feminist mother of boys, I'm guessing. Though to be fair, these ideas are starting to get out into wider educational culture, and are there for anyone who just looks at the numbers. But it is worth noting, there are still large sectors of the academy where these are very unpopular ideas, and a lot of energy put into declaring that A) it just isn't so, B) okay it is, but it's the boys' own fault, or C) if we pay any attention to this, we'll stop helping girls. The speaker may seem only a bit emphatic to you, but my reading of the subtler cues tells me she has toned it down greatly for her audience. I'll bet if you got a coupla drinks into her you'd get an earful. Good on her.

My observations:

1. What I've been saying for years

2. It has been this way for decades - read Tom Sawyer and Little House On The Prairie if you don't think so - though it may indeed be worse now, for reasons she touches on.

3. Her demurrers that yes, girls are still discriminated against fall into the pattern I described often in the past (one example): examples of how the wider culture discriminates against women, not how classrooms do that. (Larger school culture - student elections, popularity, awards - are closer to the norms of the wider culture. But not classrooms.)

4. And deriving from that, my noting that this is thus unfair to women later on, as they move from a culture where the rules are stacked in their favor to one where they aren't. The rug is pulled. Of course, we've already screwed over a lot of boys by that time, so it's not like this is something that evens out.

5. Those video education games can be done. My brother does something like that for Sky-Skan, which designs and installs those planetarium shows. But schools think of things like that as extras, that you might bring in a few times a year for fun. The idea of having screens and controllers as the foundation of your system is not quite conceivable to them.

6. Somebody's going to run a school like this - likely online - and change the world. If a guy has to give orders to his character in French to level up, he'll learn French. Videogame French, not Montaigne, but French. He won't like fake games where you have to label the parts of a cell to open a door, but he'll soak up what keeps cells nourished and alive if his character needs that knowledge to eat, or grow specialised poisons.

Spinal Tap

I just saw "This Is Spinal Tap" at my son's house. For the first time.

I don't get out much.