While the Iron is Hot

        Jonathan was sitting across the table, asking me a series of questions about a scene from "The Hobbit" film. He wanted to know why the dwarves were chanting and singing about breaking Bilbo's plates and forks? I told him, they were only teasing Bilbo for being so very concerned about them mistreating his things.
        "What does 'mistreating' them mean?" asked he, desiring clarification.
        "It means, the dwarves were being careless, with the dishes." This apparently did not quite do the trick, so Jonathan pressed again, "But what does 'careless' mean?"
        "Ah, it means they were not handling the dishes as though they were delicate and important."
He didn't miss a beat. "Sometimes I sound not so smart."
        And I didn't miss a beat, either: this is a drum that must be played both soundly and smartly. "You are a VERY smart boy! Do you know how I know that?" He lit up a little bit, and took the cue, "No, how?"
        "Because you ask questions! Any person who had no idea that he ought to know things, would never ask any questions. And YOU ask lots of questions, so you're on the right track, sweetie."

        And I think, that is so much more substantive than telling him he's smart for singing the alphabet or counting to thirty. I am glad and satisfied that he can do these things, but a chimpanzee or a parrot can be taught to say his lessons. I want my child to think, reason, discern, discriminate, cogitate and ponder. Before he can attempt any of these, he must inquire, and he must know that it is allowed, to ask.

Of Time and Topography

Tonight I have been paging through my highschool yearbooks, rediscovering people and perspectives for twenty-five years out of sight, and largely out of mind. The catalyst to my Memory Lane stroll was the reunion picnic with classmates, in my tiny hometown where my school days began.

After that much time, we do see many changes in one another. We have all been spending the prime years of our lifetimes in marrying, establishing livelihoods, raising children. As we trade catch-up news, we find ourselves in topographically-similar places on the landscape of life, no matter the windings and turnings we have taken to get there.
Actually, thanks to the world of instant communication we now inhabit, and which was quite futuristic to our school days, some of us have been able to connect before now, if only via internet. So with some folks one could almost pick up where we'd left off. But with others, there is too big a gap to fill in, and reuniting is more like meeting for the first time. This also struck me as I visited with classmates I'd known by sight but not really known, back in the day. So I came home and dug out the old yearbooks, to start over and connect the who we were, with the who we have become.

We pause in the black-and-white pages in our various trendy fashions and hairstyles, with our goofy antics in the hallways and moments between classes, captured pursuing our youthful interests in clubs, sports and extra-curricular academic activities. We were the most inseparable, the class clowns, the most studious, or the most artistic. We were the most likely to succeed, had the best smile, measured the shortest, or wore the most hats on student committees. When we left our alma mater, it was with "senior" words of "wisdom" beneath our portraits, and "forever" sentiments fondly and meaningfully and sincerely inscribed in the margins. As I looked into my yearbook during graduation week, I saw the brain, the clown, the teacher's pet, the bad boy, the girl who got pregnant, the artist, prom queen, the boy who broke hearts, the flirt(s), the cheater, the snob, the quiet ones, the loud ones, the ones I'd never gotten to know but should have, and some I thought I'd never lose. There were some I'd remember as bullies, and others as saints. We all had our identities and destinies, in our own eyes and each others'.

Then, before we knew it, twenty-five years passed. And I noticed, that the time has erased many of those identifying things and brought in other factors we never could have foreseen, with the result that we can connect, regardless of the old, artificial boundaries of clique or stratum. I think we have all seen enough of humanity since our school days, to appreciate that those really were good days, and the people who shared them are a type of bedrock to settle back onto. It goes deeper than just having a chance to reminisce: we can still recognize each other by looks for the most part, but we are looking at each other now after a long period of levelling and equalizing which is life, and remembering how we all started off from the same place.

I have been reading through all the sappy things we used to write in our yearbooks at the end of each school year. It brought tears to my eyes: over and over I was told I had talent, that I was special, that I had helped so much with this or that subject. ....I had no idea. Somehow, the words didn't carry as much weight for me, as they do now. Somehow, hindsight is longsight and clearer: I read a signed note, see the youngster, and superimpose the adult in my mind, and the tempering of time has dissolved all the more anxious parts of teen-age society, and mellowed the memories into wiser and gentler ones, erasing the bitter and leaving the sweet.