COVID-Safe Schooling for Your Feral Child

Due to COVID-19 restrictions and the healthy limits you placed on screen time during quarantine, your children have likely spent several months playing in your suburban back yard, urban parks, or primeval woodlands -- where they may have acquired new habits that are counterproductive in a learning environment.  The following tips will allow for a smooth transition to the more structured environment of online learning or in-person schooling.

-- Remind your daughter that during Zoom meetings, inside voices are required.  Howling is frowned upon, even if it is a full moon.  Make sure she knows how to mute and unmute herself.  

-- Your son may become anxious if humans approach too closely.  Congratulations on instilling excellent pandemic safety training!   However, you may want to instruct him not to scamper up trees, screech, or throw spruce cones at teachers.

-- Wild berries and fresh Alaska salmon are part of a heart-healthy diet for adults and children alike, but excess consumption can lead to hibernation during class.

-- Many schools are offering outdoor sports.  If you have signed up your daughter for fall soccer practice, you may need to warn her not to growl and bare her teeth at teammates.  Save that for her opponents.  Those Laurelwood Lynxes are not to be trusted.

-- Remind your child that school rules prohibit sharpening fingernails and licking between toes during lessons on factoring polynomials.

-- Recess offers stress-relieving physical activities for children unused to long periods of focused attention.  Be aware, however, that the virus can be transmitted via activities such as tag, duck-duck-goose, grooming vermin from other students’ hair, and wrestling for alpha dominance in the pack.

-- If your child has spent his time in the wilds associating with ravens or other corvids – an easy mistake to make, depending on your autocorrect settings – you may find that he has taken to collecting shiny items such as earrings, coins, and Mr. Pumphrey’s gold teeth.  A guidance counselor will be calling you shortly.

-- Most schools are relaxing dress codes for distance education.  Be sure to check your district website for specifications regarding pajamas, spaghetti straps, fur, and feathers.  Antlers are to be discouraged, especially during the rutting season.

-- Good news: the school lunch program will still be offering meals during remote learning!  Vegetarian options are available, but no accommodations can be made for children who consume only raw voles.

-- Be sure to emphasize that although it is perfectly acceptable for your child to decorate her locker with personal items, she should refrain from marking her territory by spraying.

-- If your feral children have been fostered by halibut, trout, or sockeye, you have no cause for concern; fish do not exhale potentially infectious respiratory droplets.  Also, they take well to schools.

The Birds and the Bees

 

[Sample personal ads from those who benefited from a more traditionally-minded health class curriculum during their impressionable youth]

(F seeking M) Do you love snowy winters, long walks, dark starry skies, swimming, and fishing?  Are you hoping for children, and willing to commit to being a dedicated father?  Do you agree that relationships should include long-distance travel and plenty of time apart?  Do you enjoy long nights spent hanging out with the guys and watching the Aurora Australis?  You’re in luck!  Heavy/chubby strongly preferred. Densely feathered underbelly a must. 

(M seeking F)  Are you a connoisseur of the arts? I’d love the opportunity to show you some of my dance moves and sing you my signature song.  I know you’ll love it.  You’re into bright colors, I’m guessing.  Who isn’t?  I mean, not on you, of course.  Only on me.  My colors are very bright.  The brightest.  And did I mention my dance moves?  I want to wow you when I shake my tail.  But I will stop dancing once there are eggs.  Obviously.  I’m great with eggs.

(F seeking M) Looking for that one special guy to share my busy and fulfilling life.  I recently took over the family business from my mom, and I’m looking to settle down and start a large family.  If you enjoy luxurious and spacious apartment living, plenty of female company, hexagonal architecture, and organic locally-sourced honey, you might be my match.  Employment is not necessary.  Getting along with my hard-working sisters is crucial.

(M and M seeking F)  The two of us have been bros for a while, and we agree it’s time to find the right lovely lady to raise twins with.  He’ll piggyback one and I’ll carry the other one, natch -- and you’ll be free to enjoy as much fruit as you need to produce milk for those fast-growing kiddos!  Heck, we can even help you find some tasty arthropods to snack on – all while staying on alert for snakes!  If the thought fluffs your cottontop, just give us a wave with those cute little hands of yours.

(M seeking M)  Are you fond of strolling through fields of wildflowers and lush grass, with occasional adventures to windswept crags and mountaintops?  Are you a vegetarian who is into cuddling up in warm natural wool on cold winter days?  I’m a down-to-earth outdoorsy guy, but I get a haircut once a year, whether I need it or not!  If you, too, are among the 8-10%, then you understand why I’d prefer you to ewe.

(F seeking M)  My hobbies include hunting, napping, rending the limbs from zebras with my massive jaws, more napping, and having sex every twenty minutes for three solid days.  You don’t have to come along for the hunting part.

(F seeking M) There’s no time like the present!  And by the present I mean right now.  Immediately.  As soon as possible. Extra-fluffy tail a plus, but not required.  Must be willing to return to own territory before nightfall without even thinking about touching my collection of spruce cones.  Seeking up to 16 guys for leaping, running, acrobatics, loud chittering, and hot NSA action.

(F or M seeking M or F)  I’m a bonobo.  You’re a bonobo.  Enough said.

All Flags Waving

A couple of months ago, I was informed that at sixth grade graduation, one of my daughters (and one of her male classmates) would be given special awards by the American Legion.  These were purportedly being bestowed upon the children who best embodied the all-American values of honor, service, leadership, scholarship, courage, and patriotism.

Setting aside the pomposity of assuming that an eleven-year-old can embody any of the above values… patriotism?

I don’t use that word much.  My circle of friends – that is, the small and non-representative sample of Americans (and the even smaller and less representative sample of Not Americans) who are willing to hang out with me -- aren’t prone to using that word, either. 

To me, and I suspect to many of my politically self-identified clan, “patriotism” brings to mind the kind of bellowing nationalism that supports bombing places without having any inkling of where they are on a map.  This form of patriotism believes that walls are great (GREAT!) -- and that bigger walls are greater.  It glorifies mindless, flag-waving, my-country-right-or-wrong bravado coupled with my-bald-eagle-is-gonna-crap-on-your-solar-panels aggression. 

Given that this wasn’t exactly the feeling I wanted to conjure when telling my kid about her upcoming honor, I tried to draw upon the Merriam Webster definition, which told me that “patriotism” means “love for or devotion to one's country”. 

Although I’m not certain whether my child is patriotic, she’s not lacking in perception.  At eleven, children already know what social groupings they belong to.  They understand nuance and connotation.  My daughter was thrilled that she was going to be recognized, but she also was not immune to cynicism.  She noted, “Well, I guess at least it’s not too racist, because [the other kid getting the award] is Black.”

Yeah.  She listens to adult conversations.  She knows.  She is sadly aware that We Who Do Not Generally Refer to Ourselves as Patriotic have got a lot of guilt about being Americans.  I won’t argue with that; most of that guilt, born of privilege, violence, discrimination, hatred, greed, has been thoroughly earned by this nation.  It’s high season for agonizing over what it means to be an American. I can’t judge anyone for wallowing, because I’ve been wallowing too.  And I’ve been trying to figure out just how I should represent my country – their country – to my kids.

In order to understand how I feel about America, I have to go back a little bit.  Okay, a lot.

In February, 1997, I was living between the villages of Riversdale and Troja, in rural Jamaica – a place that is almost entirely unlike the reggae-and-beaches Jamaica that the tourism industry wants you to buy into.  I had been there for two years.  During those two years, I’d learned a lot of fascinating things, such as how to open a green coconut with a machete, how to roast a breadfruit, and how to conjugate verbs in a language that doesn’t officially exist.  I’d also, finally, begun to have an inkling about how to own my Americanness – with all the shame, pride, beauty, ugliness, shallowness, and complexity interwoven into that endeavor. 

When I joined the Peace Corps, right after college, my sense of commitment to patriotically serving my nation was slim, at best.  The idea that I could adequately “represent” America seemed laughable.  I considered myself a highly atypical member of the American genre.  American culture?  What was it, even?  I barely watched TV or movies, I’d never seen more than a fleeting few minutes of a football game, and I’d never even eaten a Big Mac, a Whopper, or Kentucky Fried Anything.

I told myself that I didn’t want to join the Peace Corp to be an ambassador of American-ness; I just wanted to help people.  I knew I wanted to step outside the bubble of advantage that I’d floated around in for all of my life.  And, more selfishly, I wanted to have some adventures before I got down to the presumably boring business of figuring out what I really wanted to be when I grew up. 

The Peace Corps, one of the dreams of JFK, was created with lofty ideals.  It was never just about providing free teacher-training or agricultural aid or healthcare services in the developing world.  Indeed, digging irrigation ditches is simple compared to the far more daunting second task of the Peace Corps: Not Being An Asshole.

The official paperwork describes it in different words, but that’s basically it.  That’s your second task.  American volunteers, can you represent our culture in a way that doesn’t totally suck?  Can you take on the challenge of being the only American that an entire community has ever met, and not screw that up?  While you’re at it, can you complete the actual project assigned to you?  It may or may not involve breadfruit.

I can’t overemphasize just how clueless I was, and how unprepared, with my 22 years of sheltered white-girl wisdom, my optimistic outlook, and my brand new degree from Harvard. 

I was sent to a country that exists in literal proximity to the United States, but I’m not sure that made much difference.  All nations of the world, these days, live in figurative proximity to us.  We cast our shadow everywhere.  It’s a big, dense shadow of past slavery and current imperialism.  That’s a lot to try to discuss while sitting on a crumbling concrete wall with a man who does not own shoes, speaks a creole that has never been fully legitimized as a written language, and wants to have a little chat with you about the Middle Passage. 

That conversation on that wall, stretched across two and a half years, was my experience of the second task of the Peace Corps.  It wrung me out and left me to flap in the sunshine like all the laundry I hand-washed in rainwater from my roof: imperfect, fraying at the edges perhaps, but nonetheless cleaner. 

There were days when I tried to describe snow to curious friends who had never felt the mercury drop below 60F.  There were days when children ran gentle fingers up my bare arms, and exclaimed that my skin felt normal, human, despite its peculiar appearance.  There was the point in linguistic and cultural immersion when I could sometimes get the joke.  There were days when the cloud of anger regarding whom I represented felt palpable. 

There was a slow, slow mental sorting of what others might think it meant to be American, what I used to think it meant, and what I actually wanted it to mean.  There was the day when I looked at my own arm among a line of arms, strap-hanging on a densely packed bus, and saw it as freakish and alien in its paleness.  There was the day when an elderly man looked down at me in the bottom of the pit where I was laboring at the village school, and remarked, laughing, that white girls are really good at digging outhouses.  He shared some limeade with me, sweet and sour.

Yeah, that’s the second task.  And then there’s the third task of the Peace Corp: spending the rest of your life talking about it. 

I solemnly promised the federal government that in exchange for sending me off to figure out my American-ness, I’d come back and let everyone else know how all that went for me.  By definition, this has to be done a little at a time, and it has to be done without coming across as a boring, self-aggrandizing git.  Even taking that into account, I’ve been a bit of a slacker.  But if I have failed to explain what I’ve learned to anyone else, I should at least explain it to my own children. 

So, what does patriotism mean to me, anyhow?

Parenting gives me additional perspective that I certainly didn’t have when I set off, starry-eyed, for Jamaica, and still didn’t quite have when I returned, two years older and maybe-or-maybe-not wiser.  What parenting taught me is that it’s possible to think my kids are amazing, to enjoy their quirks and their strengths, and even to feel affectionate about many of their weaknesses, while still being very much aware that they are flawed.  I do not think that they are always right.  I do not think that all their actions are defensible, or that they have nothing to learn, or that they can do no wrong.  I certainly do not think that they are intrinsically superior to other children.

I do not think any of those things about my country, either. 

When viewed through this lens, patriotism feels both obvious and easy to me.  Yes, of course I love my country.  I care about it deeply and passionately, which is why I am so desperate to help it grow in the right directions, and to avoid pitfalls ranging from the relatively petty (crappy mass transit, terrible fast food) to the tragic.  I won’t list the tragic.  You already know. 

So, yes, I’m patriotic.  And, yes, maybe my kids – the one who was honored by the American Legion and the one who wasn’t – are learning to be, and NEED to be patriotic too.  If there’s one thing that I should learn from the American Legion, from the Fourth of July, and from the First, Second, and Third tasks of the Peace Corps, it’s that patriotism is something I need to DO rather than just BE. 

If I’m wringing my hands and protesting that golly gee, I’M not racist/ sexist /xenophobic /homophobic /intolerant /intolerable, then I’m doing it wrong – because of course I’m all those things, or have been, or might be, in one way or another.  The trick is to actively try to be LESS of those things.  I might not get it right, but I can get it less wrong. If I’m rolling up my metaphorical or actual sleeves and actively seeking cures, improvements, protections, and changes – and if I’m teaching my kids to do the same -- then we’re at least making an honest attempt to put patriotism into action. 

I don’t claim to have succeeded at this, or even made much of a dent.  But for today, Independence Day, I’ll first deal with several days’ worth of dirty dishes: curry, pasta, chipotle, quinoa, pancakes – an immigrant pastiche of flavors.  I’ll hang my laundry to flap rainbow-colored in a sunburn-hot breeze.  I’ll take a bike ride with my family, on our two tandems, to a locally-owned sandwich place.  An older guy will sing, with creditable accuracy, “Bicycle Built for Two,” and a smiling young man with Down Syndrome will high-five me.  The kid who is a model of honor, service, leadership, scholarship, courage, and patriotism will decide that it’s the perfect time to attach a stick and a napkin to her shoe in order to sail it across a large puddle, and no one will bat an eye. I will contemplate the ease and acceptance with which I am granted the privilege of moving through my community and my world. 

We’ll do a bit of gardening.  We’ll talk about what it means to be pot-bound – roots turned inward until, even if granted new room for growth and enrichment, none can occur.  The kids are old enough for metaphors. For irony. For truth.

When all that’s done, I’ll finish this essay, write another letter to my Senators, and donate to a couple of charitable organizations that epitomize caring about our future, our fellow humans, the world, and our nation’s place in that world. 

It’s not enough, of course.  I’ll keep looking for more that I can do.  I don’t want to become pot-bound. I don’t want my nation to become pot-bound, either. I want to keep working on the Third Task. I want, ultimately, to try to earn my own patriotism.

Still twinkling

Davis Concert Hall is packed.  Next to me, my two ten-year-olds settle themselves into plush seats.  Lizzy wiggles.  Her legs dangle.  She lets the seat fold her up like a fetus, then unfolds it again.  Molly peruses the program -- thick, shiny, color-printed.  Her brow furrows slightly over the long lists of musicians as she parses the multi-syllabic ethnicities of America.  The house lights dim, and the stage brightens, highlighting a tidy array of black and white, skirts and trousers, gleaming curved wood and resting bows. The seat reserved for the concertmaster – the principal player of the first violin section -- waits, portentous.  The podium is as yet lacking the dash and verve of its black-tailed conductor. 

In the anticipatory hush, a lone figure scuttles out, thoroughly un-conductor-like, from stage left.   There is no way for a tardy performer to cross this expectant and unforgiving expanse unobtrusively, but he tries.  He scoots into his seat, which is tucked away at the back, right of center. 

Nine hundred people giggle at the late violist.

Q: What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?  A: A viola player. 

Giggling at violists is a long and revered orchestral tradition. The instruments themselves are awkwardly large for their shoulder-held position, acoustically too small for the deeper tones they carry, and utterly unfamiliar to the general public.  Those who take up the viola are relegated to reading the obscure alto clef, playing mid-range harmony, and sitting behind the bulky cellos.  As such, they are often suspected of being a pack of underachievers – perhaps failed violinists who snuck into the orchestra for the free cocktails and Brie appetizers.  They are the odd ducks and the orphaned cousins.

Or should I say… we? 

I played the viola from age eight to fourteen – long enough to demonstrate no particular innate talent, but not long enough to gain mastery through brute determination.  As such, I’ve spent three decades assuming that the viola didn’t make much of a dent in either my musical knowledge or the clay of my character.  But is my violist nature something that could ever be obscured by the dust on my battered black instrument case?

Q: Why don't violists play hide and seek?  A: Because no one will look for them.

The stage lights in Davis brighten a bit more, and the concertmaster appears.  He leads the tuning – an effort that seems more ceremonial than indispensable – with flourish and aplomb.  Lizzy leans toward me to whisper: “He sits at the front because he’s the best, right?” 

Lizzy is often anxious about who is the best.  When string lessons were first offered last year at University Park Elementary, Lizzy took up the violin. 

“Yes”, I tell her.  She jiggles her legs some more, nodding.

Lizzy’s twin is more likely to compete with herself than to compete with others.  She is he kind of kid who wants to create a science fair project that no child has ever created before, and select a birthday party theme for which no company has ever dreamed of printing napkins.  She is not jiggling.

At my own elementary school, budding violinists and cellists abounded, and at least three kids were drawn to the impressive upright bass.  But no eight-year-old wanted to be a violist – except for me.  The orchestra teacher seemed perplexed, albeit willing to accommodate my peculiar choice.  Lacking any actual small violas in the school’s limited collection, she restrung a three-quarter-size violin.  The tone was poor, but not as terrible as it would have been if she’d tried to do the same thing with one of the half-size instruments the other kids were playing.  “It’s a good thing you have long arms,” she remarked, assessing my scrawny frame.  It was true; sweaters invariably crawled up my wrists, leaving gaps of pale skin and blue veins.  I was perfectly suited to apelike brachiating on the monkey-bars – and to the viola. 

The conductor takes his stand with satisfying pomp and emotionality.  He, like the principal violinist, receives applause just for existing.

Q: How do you tell when a violist is out of tune?  A: The bow is moving. 

A college friend of mine knew dozens of viola jokes, all of which made himself the butt of his own intensely nerdy humor. I didn’t fully understand the context for this until I met his equally musically talented but much more self-consciously-cool identical twin. The viola can be a state of mind.

I chose the viola for reasons that were obvious, and reasons that were not.  My dad played the cello.  My big sister played the violin, and although I admired her, years of being accidentally called “Sarah” had made me wary.  The viola lacked the high E string of the violin.  Having listened to Sarah’s efforts, I saw that as a plus.  The bass seemed both too unwieldly and too attention-grabbing.  That kind of difference – the class-clown kind of difference -- was merely another kind of sameness.  I was differently different.  I was a seemingly innocuous eight-year-old who occupied a mental island all my own.  I was a violist.

The music swells around us, well balanced.  Lizzy is now avidly watching to see whether any of the violinists mix up their bow strokes.  She is the arbiter of synchronicity. 

Molly has put aside the program and is leaning back in her seat.  I have no idea what she is thinking. 

All through third and fourth grade, my odd instrument set me apart only in that nobody could share my music stand.  My version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” sounded precisely as bad as everybody else’s. We played “Lightly Row” and “Christmas Songs I” and “Israeli Songs” and “Americana”.  We played our fourth fingers painfully flat and our F-naturals erroneously sharp.  We played slurs as staccato and staccato as slurs.  We let our wrists slump, let our bows slip miles from the bridge, and got hopelessly lost on the sixteenth notes.  With the exception of two small virtuosos, Hannah and Atara, we were unequivocally dreadful -- violins, cellos, basses, and lone viola alike.

Q: What is the range of a viola?  A: About thirty feet, if you kick it hard enough.

In fifth grade, though, I found myself with a stand-partner: a boy named Ray with a sweetly unassuming manner.   Ray went to a different elementary school, but he and I ended up sharing a stand for four years.  We were cautiously friends, across the treacherous divide of gender.  My partnership with Ray was not due to any increased interest in the viola among the diminutive local population, but rather the result of an unearned promotion.  The All District Orchestra was primarily comprised of sixth graders.  The precocious young Hannahs and Ataras were invited to join -- and so, it seemed, were Ray and I.  Because, talent or no talent, real orchestras need violas.

Q: How do you get two viola players to play in tune? A: Shoot one of them.

Brahms’s German Requiem is a complex piece of music for an orchestra and choir to tackle in Fairbanks, Alaska.  I will not be surprised if there are a few flubs, a few squawks, a few off-key notes.  I also know that, barring someone outright dropping their instrument, I probably won’t notice.  I never learned to tune my own instrument by ear alone.

If I was out of my league playing with slightly older kids from five different elementary schools, I was even more misplaced the following year when I was tapped to join the elementary section of the Long Island String Festival.  The combined population of Nassau and Suffolk Counties in 1984 was 2.6 million people.  From this population base, the directors of the event were able to pull children of astonishing experience and talent – pigtailed starlets and freckled prodigies with shiny instruments and proudly hovering parents.  They were also able to scrape up a few violists. 

I did my grade-school best to practice the music in advance.  I stared in confusion at different keys.  I tapped my foot to different time signatures, got lost, and started over.   Playing repetitive rest-laced harmony, I wondered what the songs actually sounded like.   

I showed up, quaking slightly, for our single day of rehearsal.  It was easy to identify the violists; we were the awkward little bunch who didn’t recognize a soul – not from private lessons, or recitals, or invitations to entertain foreign dignitaries.  Out grubby instrument cases bore rental codes etched by public elementary schools.

Even when tested among my mediocre peers, I merited only the ninth seat out of eleven.  I knew that this made me, officially, the third-worst musician in the room, but I was glad to be at the back, safely hidden. At the ripe old age of eleven, I was one of the oldest people present, and my long right arm would no doubt flail away on the upbow when I should have been on the down. 

As our conductor led us into the first piece – as, at the wave of her hands, the music poured from beneath the deft little fingers of the doe-eyed people around me – she started crying.  I’m not talking about a slight glint in her eye; these were full-on mascara-smearing tears.  “It’s so beautiful” she wept.  “You’re all so little… and it’s so beautiful!”

This, of course, was totally weird and embarrassing.  For one thing, adults weren’t ever supposed to cry, and for another, who the heck cries because something is lovely?  But even as the tears of the conductor were horrifying, so too were they magical – so magical that I remember them, thirty-three years later, with a strange luminosity.  Perhaps I hadn’t known, prior to the sixth grade, that beauty could be so intense that it could overflow -- but I learned it that day.  I saw artistry running in rivulets down the face of a stranger.  And, although I did not deserve it, I was part of that exquisite joy.  I was part of the music.

At about 80 minutes, his German Requiem is the longest piece of music Brahms ever wrote.  Toward the end of the concert, Lizzy is half asleep in her overlarge seat.  I glance over at Molly.  Her head is not nodding, but she mouths, “How much longer?”  I grin, and indicate that it won’t be long now.  Molly nods, phlegmatic.  Molly can wait.  Molly is not one to demand excessive attention.  Molly is, as of the inception of her orchestral instruction last year, a violist.

Q: Why are viola jokes so short?  A: So violinists can understand them.

Spurred by a properly parental instinct to encourage my kids, I took my viola out of hibernation last year.  I tightened the loose pegs, tuned it up with the crutch of a digital tuner, and sat down to share Molly’s music -- in the alto clef.  I played.  My fingers fumbled, remembered, fumbled again.  As I sawed my way through “Happy Birthday” and “Country Dance” I felt duty falling by the wayside and happiness overtaking me.  Not tear-soaked joy, no – but perhaps the shadow of the memory of it.

Violists don’t get many solos, but they are nonetheless in the thick of things.  The heart of things.  They are the subtle undertones, the harmony, the fabric of the music.  They do not soar, they do not trill, and they do not boom.  You may not have noticed them, but that’s okay.  They are part of the music.