kids

Colorful Language

/ J. Thorp / 2 Comments

Blogger’s Note: My friend, children’s author Jacqui Robbins (yes, the Jacqui Robbins, and don’t act so surprised!) posted this little gem, which got me thinking about when my own kids began to notice differences in people.

Let me say up front: racism is a real problem in the world. As a result, we have complex reactions to race — we notice differences between people quite naturally, and then (especially as adults) we sometimes overcompensate for our reactions. We react so strongly at times that we can confuse our children by overthinking it. This is how I remember one early incident.

Several years ago, Jodi and I took the older boys to a high-school basketball game. Brendan and Gabe were preschoolers, and we were seated in the crowded home bleachers. The visiting team was from a nearby city, and had players “of multiple ethnicities” on the floor. All one of the starters on the home team, the Warriors, were white — and when that one minority player hit a nice jump shot early in the game, the crowd cheered wildly.

“Who made a basket?” asked Brendan.

“Number five,” I said. “Do you see him?”

Brendan went down the steps a ways to get a better look at the scrambling players. “You mean the brown one?” he called back.

The crowd around us matched the makeup of the starting five: Mostly white, except one family seated across the aisle from us. Jodi and I glanced at them in sudden embarrassment. They didn’t seem to have heard.

“There he is,” I said, pointing. “Number five!”

Brendan craned his neck, then looked back at me. “The brown one!” he said. “That’s what I said!”

“I wanna see th’ brown one!” yelled Gabe.

“Listen,” I rasped as Jodi glanced across the aisle. “His name is Charlie. You guys can cheer for him by name. Cheer for Charlie.”

They did, and after a while, the family across the aisle noticed and smiled proudly. And I started to think: The boys didn’t mean anything by it; they’re just kids, pointing out the most obvious distinguishing characteristic. I laughed at myself. To think that I was worried about a color…

The cheer squad chanted, “Here we go, Warriors, here we go!”

“Let’s go, Warriors!” I shouted, and Bren repeated, “Let’s go, Warriors!”

“Who is ‘Warriors’?” asked Gabe.

“That’s the team we want to win,” said Bren. “The ones in white.”

The other team was pressing hard. “Let’s go, Warriors!” yelled Brendan.

“Yeah,” said Gabe. “Let’s go, whites!”

Brotherly Love…of Sandwiches

/ J. Thorp / 2 Comments

I’ve blogged before about my second son’s penchant for strange sandwich combinations, as well as my youngest son’s unprompted disdain for his older brother. This morning over breakfast, the two experienced something of a breakthrough in their relationship.

I was seated at the kitchen table, munching a peanut butter toast sandwich. Trevor (our youngest) walked by and saw me. “Dad,” he asked, grinning and staring, “what are you eating?”

“Toast and peanut butter.”

“Oh,” he said. “It looked like a sandwich I made before. It had toast and cinnamon and sugar, and I put cheese on it.”

Gabe popped up like prairie dog: “Did you butter the toast?”

“Yup,” said Trevor.

“Cinnamon toast with cheese?” I said. “That’s different!”

“Cool,” said Gabe, nodding his approval.

Trevor beamed. “Gabe,” he said, “we should like each other more!”

Greetings From the North Pole, Part VII

/ J. Thorp / 2 Comments

Blogger’s Note: Over Christmas 2003, we became annual pen-pals with an elf named Siberius Quill, and he has again delivered this year! Transcriptions of the 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 letters from Quill can be seen here.

Christmas 2009

My dearest Children!

I must say, it has been a Most Eventful Year, both in your home and in ours! Such bustle down below (in Minnesota!), what with the Four of you now all school-age and active, and your parents rushing hither and yon to this and that engagement. Concerts, practices, games, retreats! It’s no wonder the Old Year slipped past so quickly! Does it feel that way even to Young Ones like yourselves? After centuries here in the White North, it all seems but a blink to my eye…

And my! but we have been busy here—about the same time you were enjoying Thanksgiving at the Venjohns, all our best Reindeer came down with Caribou Flu, which is not unlike your swine flu: dreadful wheezing coughs and high fevers and constant fatigue. It passed through the herd quickly, like a rumor of an Early Spring, and we wondered how we would haul the sleigh. Our elfin veterinarian, Dr. Vendy Deervermer, and the rest of the Stable Corps worked double-time to nurse them back to health (and drinking extra cocoa to ward off the flu themselves!), even as our Aeroanimage, Buoyancy Castor, struggled to find a suitable substitute, just in case. Aeroanimagery, you may know or might guess, is the magical art by which Terrestrial (that is, Earthbound) Creatures are made to fly, and old Yancy is the Best in the Business—but with the nearby caribou herds also sick, his Viable Options were limited indeed!

Only two creatures were deemed large and strong enough; the Walruses proved quite “broncy,” as your father’s friend Jinglebob might say, when airborne, and the Polar Bears—suffice it to say that it takes more than Pixie Dust to keep Ursus maritimus aloft. Plus, they eat a Great Deal and won’t touch vegetables—and very Few Homes indeed leave cold cuts or hard sausage, much less raw red meat, for Old Santa’s draft stock!

It was Touch-and-Go to the last! Fortunately, Dr. Vendy concocted a home remedy made from homemade udder balm from a moose dairy in Siberia, cooling Peppermint Paste from our own Candy Kitchens, and traditional Inuit and Eskimo medicines, then boiled in a Tea. The resulting drink, along with the prayers of the Devout Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Winter, seemed to move them to recovery. (That, and the Magnificent Storm predicted by old Flurious and even now snowing over you as sleep and wake—the Reindeer love nothing more that a long pull through snowy skies!)

But enough of Our Problems! You have been Good Children, one and all, again this year—and so what’s a Watcher to do but spy over your shoulder to see what Questions you might have for the Jolly Old Elf, himself, this year? We’ve done just that, so even as Father Christmas munches his cookies and smiles at Your Note, he is able to leave this letter in Timely Reply!

Miss Emma, you’ve asked about Numbers of Toys and the Time It Takes—and I trust Masters Gabriel and Trevor have similar concerns in their own Heads and Hearts. I would urge you to ask Master Brendan to share my Past Letters with you again, in which I explain more about Which Toys are Made and Which Toys are Gathered. But in truth, we still make Many Hundreds of Thousands of toys and order Countless more. We make toys year-round, and indeed deliver them secretly Whenever and Wherever they are needed—much as St. Nicholas of Myra took care of those in need centuries ago.

How long does it take? Why, it takes All the Time We Have, which is No Time at All, when you think about it. What we do isn’t Possible in any amount of time, and yet each year we get Faster! Our official Time-Keeper, Pendulus “Tick” Chronin may actually be the slowest Elf at the Pole— except for his keen eye and quick thumb, which starts and stops the Great Chronometer at the start of each Shift, and each Christmas Eve. The G.C. measures time to the Nanosecond, and we have gotten so Lively and Quick at what we do that Tick may have to be quicker still. Picoseconds! Can you imagine?

And now I read back over What I Have Written, and see that perhaps it will make Little Sense to you. Facts are more Fluid than you might think, Children, and Faith, more Solid that Stone. Believe, and Wonderous Things are Yours to behold!

Travel safe, my young Friends, and a Very Happy Christmas to you all!

Yours (Truly!)

Quill

Autumn Recalls Octobers Past

/ J. Thorp / 2 Comments
Blogger’s Note: This originally ran as a column in Tuesday, October 7, 1997, edition of The Pioneer daily newspaper, Big Rapids, Michigan. This week, the boys have their bows out, and I’m protesting the snow today by blogging about the autumns I miss.

October! and the trees are turning red, gold and topaz. Already cool breezes tug loose the gaudy vestments and scatter them in piles ’round the ankles of tall aspen and unsuspecting maples. The sumac, embarrassed, has blushed deep red — overnight, it seems.

Only the oak maintains its dignity — its greenery turns drab brown and rustles almost the entire winter through. Only after many long nights and cold days, when the first breath of spring tickles the topmost oak leaves, does the stoic tree shake loose its crumpled hood and prepare for new leaves and sunshine.

Used to be this time of year, just about the time my feet had learned the flagstone path to my morning classes and my digestive tract had readjusted to browning lettuce and red meat substitutes, I’d catch October on the wind. A good nose — a nose hunting autumn — could pick it out, somewhere above the stench of diesel exhaust fumes and ginkgo berries. (Ginkgo trees, so I’m told, filter pollutants out of the air and drop them to the ground in these concentrated flesh-colored packets, which, when stepped on, make you wonder who brought the dog and forgot the scoop. Popular with cities; not so much with pedestrians.)

Acorns! The smell must’ve blown in from East Rock, because squirrels in the city ate pizza crust and stale bagels. And the crisp smell of dry leaves tripping over the wind and each other, and I’d be halfway home and in the woods, hunting deer with bow and arrow …

In a city like New Haven, at a school like Yale, where every meal featured a vegetarian entree and people could say things like “turkey bacon” and not stumble over the contradiction, hunting was foreign to many students. The idea of climbing a tree to ambush a deer with a bow, a half-dozen arrows and a skinning knife was both terrible and fascinating … it also earned you a wider path down down a crowded sidewalk.

Even students who enjoyed red meat often found the idea of killing a wild animal appalling.

“How can you kill an animal and then eat it?” the would ask.

“How can you eat an animal and not kill it?” I’d respond, but they do not want to know what comes before the pink foam tray and cellophane.

At Yale it was always death that took the spotlight. It makes sense, I suppose, in a land where guns are used to shoot people and (sometimes) paper targets.

Looking back at past dining hall discussions to Octobers spent hunting, it seems the focus was never death, but the wide variety of life.

I remember piling into Dad’s rusty blue pickup in the wee-hours before dawn, feeling my way up the tree to my stand, and strapping myself in and dozing as the cold seeped through my coveralls. I remember starting when an owl a few short yards away and invisible in the darkness questioned my presence in the tree. I remember the stars fading, the breakfast arguments of ducks in the swamp around me. Somewhere a splash — a beaver slaps its warning on the surface of the water. Then footsteps.

Crunch.

Eyes strain into the grey light. Stumps stop short and stare back; ferns move like deer at the farthest edge of sight.

Crunch.

It’s right behind me, but I don’t dare look.

Crunch. Crunch.

It’s a red squirrel, moving one hop at a time through the dry leaves beneath the tree.

I relax, exhale, and I’m spotted; he chatters the news to the entire section.

I remember sitting in the treetops with chickadees flitting about my hat, thinking back on my beagle, Ranger, and Dad’s old red ‘coon hound, Jack. I remember porcupines and hawks and my kindergarten teacher walking her dog past my tree. I remember watching two bucks square off beneath my tree, and shooting at and cleanly missing both of them. I remember other deer, as well, and I remember, in six years of active bow hunting, never taking one.

In fact, in all my years of hunting, I have taken only one deer, and have fingers enough to count the number of partridge, rabbit and squirrel I’ve harvested. What I’ve brought to the table, instead, are stories and memories of animals quicker and more clever than me. If the the thrill was in the killing, I’d have quit a long time ago. Instead, I’ve at last come home to October’s breezes and the chance to return to the woods. And I can hardly wait.

Always Darkest Before the Dawn

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

We got a letter from Albertville Primary (and his teacher, the mysteriously named “New Hire”) informing us that he will have be in the morning half-day group.

“Trevvy,” said Jodi, “that means you’ll get to ride to school with Brendan and Gabe and Emma!”

Trevor looked concerned and a little sad. “But Mom,” he said. “I like to get up in real morning.”

“What do you mean by real morning?” asked Jodi.

You know,” he said. “Like, when the sun’s already up!”