Trev

The Second Third, Week 29: Expressive Reading

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment

Tonight was six-year-old Trevor’s night to lead us in prayer. He opened with an Old Testament reading from our Children’s Bible and did an admirable job: it was chock full of Hebrew names and ancient places and Biblical expressions like “The LORD’s anger was kindled against them.” He navigated it all with remarkable patience and skill, his concentration was absolute — and he almost didn’t sound like himself, since (when he reads his own books) he is quite expressive. With less difficult books, already he is mastering the skill of reading just ahead of his voice with his eyes to pick up on the cues in the text: Is there a question ahead? An exclamation? Is the character frustrated? Scared? Excited?

I, too, struggle to read expressively, mostly because until recently, it had been a long time since I’ve done so — years, in fact, since I’ve read aloud even a classic Dr. Seuss.

Then this spring I picked up The Little Prince, which I had never read before, and decided on a whim to read it to our brood, a bit to a time, after supper. It went over well with all four Thorplets, but although I had the notion of providing voices to the handful of wonderful characters who populate the book, I found it impossible, primarily because much of the time I was to emotionally, uh…engaged…to do so.

Next I tried an old favorite, Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, figuring a familiar tale might be suited to a more dramatic telling — but although I recalled the story and the characters, I quickly found the structure, style, and syntax of LeGuin’s sentences to require a great deal of concentration. At times, I had to back up and start sentences over!

I find that the more I read to the kids, the more I enjoy it. We finished the LeGuin’s book last week and will no doubt return to Earthsea again soon — but in the interim, I’ve resurrected a ghost of my own childhood, outdoor humorist Patrick F. McManus’s The Grasshopper Trap. For years growing up, every time a new McManus book came out (or a new edition of Outdoor Life magazine arrived), Mom or Dad, Jill or I, would read after supper. The first story in the book, “The Skunk Ladder,” is a classic, and the kids were quickly in stitches and begging for another. I remember these characters, too — Crazy Eddie Muldoon, Retch Sweeney, the old woodsman Rancid Crabtree, Pat’s sister the Troll — and tonight, after dinner, I began to have a little fun with voices. It was great fun, and good practice, too: in my Second Third, I intend to read aloud more often, to the older kids, to the new baby, and God willing, the grandkids. I need to hone my skills if I’ve ever going to tackle something like, of I dunno…The Hobbit?

The Second Third, Week 27: New Growth on the Family Tree

/ J. Thorp / 6 Comments

Blogger’s Note: In my last Second Third post, I dug into the roots of my family tree. Today, let’s examine the newest blossom – and how we got to this point!

When Jodi and I first got together, she wanted six children, just like the family in which she grew up. I, on the other hand, knew I wanted children, but thought one or two would suffice. I had learned in my anthropology classes that large families were irresponsible — that our planet could not support humanity’s continued exponential growth, and that America’s resource-intensive consumer culture would drain the Earth even more quickly that other, faster-growing nations.

So I told Jodi, “We’ll see.” I knew that, over time, things would change. And they have. Earlier this week my bride and I announced the best thing to happen to our December since Christmas: the anticipated arrival of a fifth Thorplet.

The kids are ecstatic. Trevor longs to be a big brother; Emma has wanted to roll the dice on a little sister for years; Gabe adores all babies (and has verbally agreed with Emma that “we could use another girl around here,” which, given his history of rabid anti-sisterism, demands the question, “Use her for what?”); and Bren – our eldest, who wants his own room and has complained that our house is too small – has been grinning for days now. He knows just enough, I think, that this new addition is equal parts miracle, mystery, and science project to him.

* * * * *

My evolution into a father of five (six, when you count Jude, whom we lost last fall) began early on, with the way in which Jodi’s quiet faith drew me like a magnet. There is a peace about my bride that, I recognize now, is not of this world. Most of the time she is unworried, unflappable, confident that the world is unfolding as it should, despite appearances to the contrary. She led me slowly, steadily, to conversion – first, back to the Catholic Church, then to a previously inconceivable closeness with God, then to the gradual realization that marriage and sexuality are meant to be more than the “sum of our parts.”

On top of this spiritual conversion came four important, practical realizations. First, although we had planned to wait until we were more “financially secure” to start having children, we became pregnant with Brendan only about six months into our marriage – demonstrating that A) there is only one fail-safe way to not get pregnant and B) you’ll never be more or less ready than you are right now. Second, we realized that once you have your first, you might as well have more if you want ’em – you’ve got the baby gear, the mindset, and (when you’re young) the energy, plus the sooner you bring them into the house, the sooner you get them out! (For the past several years I’ve taken great pleasure in reminding my friends who waited to have kids that I’ll have all four of mine graduated before I’m 50. C’est la vie, I guess…) So we forged ahead – and Gabriel was born.

Now, I realized right out the gate that I loved being a dad. So when Gabe was born – at the point at which pre-child/Ivy-grad me would’ve said, “That’s it; no more – it’s the responsible thing to do.” – my heart was whispering girl-baby, girl-baby, girl-baby.

I struggled against this urge for awhile and came to a few other practical conclusions. First, although I have concerns about the wider world, our decision to bring another child into it – a child who would be well loved and well supported – would have little bearing on the allocation of resources in the world, but had the potential to sow peace and charity in a world in sore need of both. (For the record, we discussed adoption, as we have many times since, but felt our own limited resources could do more good raising our own children here in our own community.) Second, the more I thought about the social pressures in this country (and regulations in others) to limit families, the more I saw them as questionable means to a questionable end: a society in which freedoms were relinquished and families were engineered (and parenting outsourced) for the “good of the state.” Finally, I began to notice an inverse relationship between family size and per capita resource consumption in the families around us – put simply, most of the childless and only-child families I knew spent more, used more, wasted more, and still wanted more, than the bigger families I knew. Hand-me-downs, left-overs, gardens, and shared bedrooms conserve resources, too!

As if in affirmation of our choice, we were promptly blessed with Emma Rose. Shortly thereafter, we moved to Minnesota. We talked about a fourth child, but faced two challenges, one financial (the cost of daycare for four kids in or around the Twin Cities) and one psychological (the fact that most of our first friends and colleagues here thought it was ludicrous to have three kids, much less four). Fortunately, we had unwittingly settled in a veritable hotbed of Catholicism and big families—so when we had Trevor, we found that we also had support. Ultimately the families we met through St. Michael Catholic Church – and our tremendous priests brought us to an even greater understanding of what a blessing each and every child is: if you believe in God – if you believe that the world is unfolding as it should, despite appearances to the contrary – a new life here, there, or anywhere, is a gift meant to serve a Greater Good.

* * * * *

I remember once, early in our relationship, using the phrase risk of a baby. I was aghast as soon as I heard my own words…but it’s typical of the world today. In Genesis, God tells Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful,” but today, that original blessing is often regarded as a burden that we must sterilize in the act, or “fix” permanently. It reminds me of Christ on his way to the cross, speaking to the mourning women:

“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves and for your children, for indeed, the days are coming when people will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed.’” – Luke 23:28

So here we sit, in our Second Third of life, with number five on the way. No more thoughts of “a whole new life together” when we’re 50, but that’s okay – the life we have is pretty spectacular. And the good news is that it gets easier. Think about it: your first child is revolutionary; it completely changes everything you’ve known before. Number two is big – 100% increase over number one; double the trouble, etc. Number three? That’s only a 50% increase over what you have already; the biggest problem (if they’re small) is you only have two hands, so one parent can’t restrain them all at once. After that, number four’s a piece of cake.

And now, with a six-year gap between the baby and our youngest, the first four can raise number five. Y’know, folks in the Twin Cities this might be called ostentatious, unsustainable, even irresponsible – but in St. Michael and Albertville, it’s a comfortable starter family!

The Second Third, Week 24: Less TV Is Good TV

/ J. Thorp / 2 Comments

Fraggarackincarklefargis…

Remember when your parents told you TV would rot your brain? I think perhaps the most compelling evidence of the truth of this statement is what passes for TV today. Those who are passionate enough about television to choose to make it their career were likely exposed to it as children, and the fact that their brains were affected negatively is evidenced by what they produce.

For example: until I rented a Looney Tunes DVD, my kids didn’t know TV cartoons were meant to be laugh-out-loud funny. Everything they had seen up to that point either A) taught them Important Life Lessons and Thinking Skills, B) counteracted A with brainless humor and bodily functions, or C) was primarily meant to sell collectible cards and toys. Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck, and the Roadrunner were comic revelations (not to mention the music)! They laughed until they fell from the futon, laughed until tears fell from their eyes, laughed until they hurt and begged between great gasping breaths for more.*

Then we sent the DVD back, and they returned to Blue’s Clues, Dragon Tales, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Sponge-Bob.

Earlier in our marriage, Jodi and I watched a handful of shows regularly. Most were sitcoms: Seinfeld and Friends, the short-lived Sports Night, Mad About You, Everybody Loves Raymond. We were hooked on Alias for a few years, and I used to love This Week (with Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, and George Will) each Sunday morning, just to get the juices flowing.

I remember the Seinfeld finale: how the joke was on us; how it drove home that we had spent countless hours over the past countless years watching four awful people behaving like selfish children and hurting those around them. The friends on Friends were also whiny and self-centered, and Raymond made a career out of the miseries of married life. Don’t get me wrong: I laughed at these shows — but sometimes afterward I wondered why.

Today my bride and I watch two sitcoms: The Office and Community. We used to watch 30 Rock, but found the humor less and less to our liking. Community is now in the same tailspin for me. It’s still funny at times, but some of the jokes are beginning to clog my filters. Like 30 Rock this year, next year I suspect I won’t miss missing it. The Office edges into that territory from time to time, then redeems itself…we may stick with that one.

So this spring we found another show. They hooked our whole family with a free burrito at Chipotle. (Good bait.) We watched America’s Next Great Restaurant on NBC, a reality show in which people with ideas for a restaurant competed for the chance to partner with four chef/restauranteur/investors to open a new chain of restaurants in NYC, LA, and (yes!) Minneapolis. Aside from about 43-too-many jokes about the Joey’s original name for his meatball shop (Saucy Balls, which ultimately became Brooklyn Meatball Company after the 43-too-many jokes), the show was clean, the food was good, the winner had a great story: his father rescued him from a bad spot with his mother when he was little, and the soul food recipes that helped him win were his Dad’s. The winner was the favorite of all of us except Trevor (he was Trevor’s second pick); a great cheer went up in the Thorp house when he won; and Emma has asked that her belated birthday dinner be at the new Soul Daddy in Mall of America.

And now it’s over. We enjoy a few other shows that we watch online or on demand — History Channel’s American Pickers and Top Shot and Travel Channel’s Man v. Food, in particular. They are fun, interesting, educational…but they insist (in the case of Pickers and MvF) to edge toward adult humor at least once an episode, or (in the case of Top Shot), machismo and obscenities (bleeped and unbleeped). I used to watch Nature on PBS as a kid, which was narrated with a sense of wonder and mystery; the recent LIFE series on Discovery Channel (with Oprah narrating) seemed to relish describing the mating habits of the creatures they filmed as though both the subjects and audience were lusty teenagers.

I want a TV show in which I never have to say, “Okay, gang — what that guy just said? Never say that.” Or, “Yeah, you don’t need to worry about what she meant just yet.” Or, “Sorry, Trevvy, if he was your favorite character; nice people don’t act like that.”

Yeah, I know. I’m getting older, and older-fashioned. The good news is, in my Second Third, we watch way less TV than we used to. And I don’t miss it.

Now get off my lawn.

Book Break: Three Little Books

/ J. Thorp / 1 Comment
I’m playing catch-up on a few recently completed books, lest you think (aside from The Brothers Karamazov) I haven’t been reading in the past year. All of them are “little” books in one sense or another, but none are insubstantial; in fact, all three have Catholic or spiritual underpinnings and overtones. I shall write about them in the order that I completed them, though the last one I began reading even before Dostoevsky.

Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism by Douglas Brinkley & Julie Fenster is a short biography of the founder of the Knights of Columbus and an intriguing glimpse into the struggles of American Catholics in the nineteenth century. Fr. McGivney, like many priests of his day, died young, but nevertheless transformed the communities of which he was a part, and ultimately re-envisioned the role of Catholic men in America. The authors admit he left few personal papers or other items behind, and at times, it felt as though the material on Fr. McGivney was a bit thinner than the book. I was particularly struck by several points, however:

  • Fr. McGivney’s gifts as a parish priest, and his ideas behind the Knights of Columbus, first manifested themselves at St. Mary’s Catholic Church on Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven, Conn. Interestingly (to me, at least), when I was at Yale, this was a church I walked by on a daily basis, and when I met my bride and began (occasionally) to attend mass, it was at St. Mary’s. As a result, the book was full of names and places I knew and could envision from my college days.
  • Catholics in America were subject to discrimination; however, New Haven’s sophisticated liberal leanings made the community quite tolerant of its Catholic immigrants. On the other hand, when I was at Yale, the community’s sophisticated liberal leanings caused the students to look sideways at the priests and parishioners at St. Mary’s.
  • Fr. McGivney’s desire to start the KCs stemmed from the problems he saw in his Irish Catholic community, including poor widows, fatherless children, and men who wanted something more than their workaday lives, but were seeking it in the bottle and secret societies that separated them from their faith and their families. As they say, the more things change…
The book was a quick read, and especially for Yale Catholics and my KC brothers, I recommend it.
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Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince is a grown-up fable masquerading as a children’s book. It’s a book I’ve seen often and have often wanted to read based on the whimsical illustrations alone, but until I recently heard an interview about the book on the local Catholic radio station, I’m embarrassed to say I knew almost nothing about the book or the author. I found a like-new, soft-cover, second-hand copy at The Sixth Chamber in St. Paul, brought it home, and did something I certainly haven’t done since Trevvy learned to read for himself: I began to read to the kids after dinner.

It’s neither overtly Catholic nor overtly religious. It is beautiful. I won’t tell you a thing about the story; I knew very little, and I found my voice choking with emotion throughout as I discovered my kids, and especially myself, in the characters in the story.* I will say only that it is worth reading and worth sharing. Everyone, from six-year-old Trevor to Jodi and I, loved the book. Gabe says it may be his new favorite. Our teenager said, “Will you pick another book, Dad? I really like this!”

If you want just a taste, my good friend Fr. Tyler wrote about The Little Prince, as well, on his Prairie Father blog. The excerpt he used is one of my favorites, too. Read this book!
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Finally, the other night at Adoration I finished Introduction to a Devout Life, a Catholic spiritual classic written in the early 17th century by St. Francis de Sales. The copy I have is a pocket-sized hardcover; an undated old printing of an old translation, I suspect. The book is available for free in its entirety on several web sites; CatholiCity.com describes it this way:

Introduction to the Devout Life is the most popular Catholic “self-help” book of all time. First published in the early 17th century, it has proven its value as a daily spiritual guide and helpful reference for living an authentic Christian life. Written specifically for laymen, it began as letters from Saint Francis to a married woman who was seeking holiness amidst the distractions of her life of wealth and status. It contains treasures of wisdom for every reader, from eager beginner to lifelong Christian.

I came late to the Church and was confirmed as a young husband and father and an aspiring writer.** I picked St. Francis de Sales as my confirmation saint, primarily because he is the patron saint of writers. I read a bit about him and learned that he had a privileged education and upbringing, and he was looking for signs all the time…so it took him awhile to come to the decision to serve God. (That seemed appropriate.) Once he became a priest, he went into fairly hostile areas to convert people, and often used his writings to do so. These details, plus the fact that Francis is a family name on my father’s side, seemed like good reasons at the time. (I never even considered any of the numerous St. Jameses.)

It wasn’t until years later that I realized St. Francis de Sales was a doctor of the church and decided I should probably read my patron’s writings. I searched for a copy of the book and wound up with two (one in English, and one in French, which I don’t read or speak. I’ve been reading it a bit to a time each Monday night in the Adoration Chapel ever since. The sentences are often intricate, but the saint’s voice and genuine joy in serving God shines through. The book provides step-by-step guidance for increasing devotion and holiness in your life, and the saint’s suggestions, while intimidating taken in their entirety, are individually small, practical, and still relevant today. And every so often something strikes you as so profound that you incorporate it immediately into your prayer life. It is a challenge to anyone living in this world, but I suspect it rewards repeat readings.
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* Of course, I am an emotional guy…
** I’m still all of these things except young.