What a fine day. Productive and rewarding in several senses, but not in all of them. One can’t be productive in every sense. We weren’t designed for that. How else would we have developed imagination, hope, and ambition? How else would we have ever learned to fly, go to space, develop life saving vaccines, study the planet and what we’re doing to it? If we could do everything all at once, how would we have internalized concepts like dreams, lists, and ways to judge our neighbors against our efforts? Someone had to have the idea of emulating the birds, and s/he and their ilk were scorned for generations, until one day it wasn’t a flight of fancy, it was a flight. And you couldn’t do that or go to space or any of our other marvels, really, without the ability to create and pursue lists. We’re talking about human pursuit here! You can’t pursue everything at once. The neighbors would stare and talk.
I hope not too many people are doing that around here, because we’ve given them something to judge of late. There’s a lot of weeding to be done, but it’s been so deliriously hot. The temperatures settled into the low 90s today, however, and I went outside in the morning and pulled things out of the ground for a while.
My first job was a summertime thing working for one of my teachers. She was a horticulturist, and she had a summer side hustle landscaping one of the big houses on the mountain. The husband was a surgeon. A plastic surgeon, I think. Or a heart surgeon. Something that set him up well enough to marry a woman who descended from old money. (People knew the family name.) It was a gorgeous house, made to look ancient by the stone work that didn’t come from our red clay hills. It had a commanding view of the city in the valley below, the city her family had left a few generations before. The city where her family name was on one of the skyscrapers downtown, which you could see standing at their sink, or at their pool, or in any part of the house that looked to the northwest. They had a Rolls Royce Phantom 2 in the garage, giant oil paintings of themselves in the foyer that was, itself, bigger than any house I’d ever seen. And they had landscaping needs that meant after we’d worked our way across the whole of the yard it was time to go back to the other side and start again. I was in the 8th grade and it was incredibly hot and that job taught me a lot, namely that I didn’t want to do that kind of work. My teacher also taught me about Tracy Chapman that summer. Everyone knew Fast Car, but she talked about that debut album and the followup, Crossroads and how somehow that had inspired her to go into the Peace Corps. That didn’t make sense at the time, but I guess I can see it now.
Anyway, I was thinking about that today, pulling weeds in my own flowerbeds, stuffing lawn bags and sweating and listening to Tracy Chapman. I was also hoping none of the neighbors would walk by, notice me doing all that and giving me the nod of disapproval.
“About time he got around to that.”
“The last owners would have never.”
“No they would not.”
Yeah, well, they had kids and I’m guessing the children got sent out to do their share of the work. Or they hired someone. We’ve done that. It’s been … spotty. Sometimes great. Sometimes aggressive. Sometimes questionable.
Anyway, one man did walk by and, even across the yard, you could hear that he was on the phone. I paused to listen, wondering if he’d say “He’s actually doing it. I know. I know! No really, he is!”
I didn’t get it all today. I don’t know that I can, or want to get it all. Pretty much the entire Tracy Chapman catalog is great, much of it peerless, but it would need to be much larger for me to get of this weeding finished. Plus, there’s other work to be done. But there are things on the southern side of the house that I didn’t want to get choked out by undesirables, so I did that for a while, until it was time to come in and cool off. Because while it was only 88 degrees, I still managed to do a credible sweat test this morning. But two hours, noon, 88 degrees, and three comically large bags of now dead green things are ready to be disposed of. The bulk of the work on the south side of the house is done. I could still probably pull weeds for another hour there, plus a good 20 minute weed-eating session. But enough is enough.
Also, we had afternoon plans.
A while back we met a man at a conference who runs this development program for kids where soccer is the entryway, but they’re ultimately working to create scenarios where preschool through high school kids and beyond can build healthy bodies and minds. They have an indoor park, outdoor fields and people show up for the soccer, but find a full slate of programming and services for their community. It sounds amazing and so today we went to see the operation.
There was some high school pick-up soccer underway on their indoor pitch. No one invited me to play, thank goodness. We saw the rest of their facilities, which are lovely and growing. It’s not a community center, it’s more than that. We talked with the people that run the place for about 90 minutes. They’re six years in and still growing and doing some great work. It’s not just sport. Sport gets kids in the door, but then there is programming that helps the children learn about things like nutrition, interpersonal skills, money management, confidence building, and so on. They aren’t trying to build soccer players, the goal is to help kids in ways that matter on a real and human level. It’s quite charming, they’re very passionate about it, and it’s easy to see why.
Sport, as we talk about in classes a lot, means a lot more than just what happens on the field. In one class I teach a section on the real values of youth sport — fair play, collaboration, health, socialization, discipline, rules, respect, etc… — and that’s what this organization is after, too. What’s really interesting, to me, when I talk about those life lessons with other people that played youth sports, even college students who aren’t that far removed from it themselves, they quickly see how it helped them. We don’t always realize it at the time, but it is apparent in retrospective. It is obvious the value we can offer people. It is a mystery there aren’t more deliberate programs just like that.
And when you compare that to the infamous travel ball experience … no contest.
Stuff on the site I’d like to do, since I mentioned it … There are two or three of the old running projects I’d like to return to, and I will. I have to wrap up the local markers project. Easy enough, and that’s the one I combine with bike rides anyway. When the weather turns. I want to return to the happy habit of scanning photos from old books. It’s time intensive, and that’s the problem, but ultimately it entertains me and makes this place look, determined to follow ancient thing.
Another thing I’d like to do more is diving into old newspaper clippings. It’s a great way to learn about a place, or remember about a place. But it seems odd to do that about places where I no longer live. And the place where I do live doesn’t have a wealth of digitized newsprint online. This could devolve into a “where do you belong?” paragraph, but this is Wednesday and while all of my projects on the site ideally would have a day of the week, roughly, the old existential issue is not a Wednesday item. (Wednesdays are for markers, if you’ll recall, and they will be so once again.
These projects one need only invest the time and I say the thing I always say to myself, “After so and so … then you can do that.” And that never changes, but it at least has the added advantage of being frustrating.
Tomorrow, back to the classwork. If I can bend my fingers to the keyboard.
