Robert's Rules Book Three in North of the Tension Line series

Crazy morning, but here is your gratuitous dog photo

/ J. F. Riordan / 26 Comments

Ten eighth-grade boys for a birthday party today. In two cars. One rental. Trip to airport. Escape Room, Sloppy Joes, taco dip, bags of candy, bags of chips, the token veggie tray, and custom cupcakes. I have no time for thoughts.

I did, however, receive a plush purple hooded blanket last night, with the words “World Greatest Grandma” emblazoned across the back like a prize fighter.

And I have penciled in my mini nervous breakdown for tomorrow. I may be wearing my new blanket.

And now for your gratuitous dog photo.

Eli’s in bed with Dad, but Auggie remains on duty.

No One Told Me There Would Be Math

/ J. F. Riordan / 31 Comments

I had a busy night planned. It involved cleaning out a cupboard where mice had been and sanitizing and rescuing the framed family pictures that had been stored there when I repainted the stairway a year ago last November. I was planning to hang the pictures—about a dozen or so—in the repainted hall. I wanted to tackle this disgusting job so I wouldn’t be ashamed in front of my cleaning lady. (It was, in actual fact, another clever procrastination technique in my novel-writing avoidance scheme. But I digress.)

Instead, as I was elbow deep in sanitizing wipes and thinking words that would have shocked my mother, my husband called my grandson from upstairs—and me—to come into the kitchen. My husband has a mischievous sense of humor, and is fond of calling me on the phone from upstairs, or summoning me from various tasks to show me something entertaining. I was not amused. “I am in the middle of something,” I said, forgoing the opportunity to explain the precise substance I was in the middle of.

“This,” he said, “is serious.” He then read aloud an email from our grandson’s math teacher.

Only yesterday we were celebrating an excellent report card. But something had gone awry in the past four days since grades were closed, and we were exhorted to ensure that tomorrow’s test did not reflect yesterday’s quiz.

My husband, whose confidence in me is sometimes misplaced, assured my grandson. “Grandma is great at math. She will be able to help you.” Some of you may recall a note from a few days ago in which I explained my loathing of accounting. Which is math.

I need to say that it has been…some time… since I did basic algebra, and when I saw the graphing equations and the formula for slope ( y=mx +b) I was a bit shaken. The required physics course I took in college was affectionately referred to as “Physics for Poets”. There was no math. Opera singers don’t use much algebra, either.

So we turned on the lights in the dining room. “Get pencils and paper” I told my grandson. He brought two sheets. “That’s not enough.” There was no way I was wasting my precious writing notebooks for this.

And so, we began—both somewhat irritable—to review the past two weeks of eighth grade math. He was gleeful when I made a mistake, and sullen when I was right and teacher-y. And that gave me insight into how to help. So, I told him I couldn’t remember how to do it—which was sometimes true—and he had the fun of explaining to ignorant me just where I had gone wrong. Sometimes I genuinely was wrong, and sometimes I had to be right to explain where he had gone wrong. Old Person Sidebar: Why don’t they teach kids multiplication tables anymore?

But I have to admit, even if he dramatized how much he hated it (“Why do I have to do math? I’ll never use it.”) I was positively joyful that I could access the algebra file drawers in my brain.

Later, I told my husband the kid had better never take Calculus because I wouldn’t be able to help him. We giggled.

After two hours, we had gone as far as we could in one evening, and when my grandson came back downstairs in his yellow pajamas, he had hot chocolate, and I had two whiskeys.

I feel I earned them.

***

And now your gratuitous dog photo.

A friendly battle over Pink Pig, who was revealed under the leaves yesterday.

For Jean

/ J. F. Riordan / 2 Comments

Fall is late this year. It is already mid-October, but for the first time the woods have a tinge of gold, just beginning, and the sunlight’s yellow is intensified when it shines through the trees. These are the kinds of days I count as finite in my life. All our days are finite, of course, but some seem to belong in a category as different as a gemstone to a handsome pebble.

Life hasn’t seemed, really, to have returned to normal for us. The contagion levels are still high where we live, so although we have tentatively dined outdoors a few times—and enjoyed it thoroughly—the cold weather will end that small bit of normality. The world feels smaller.

In pre-COVID times, I would go now to the Island. It is one of the places where the golden light of fall permeates everything. The long, empty roads mean I can walk for miles without seeing a car, and the dogs, who return to me instantly when I call, can run off-leash. We wander through golden lanes, and my brain, usually obsessedly plotting and exhausted by the extraction of writing, is distracted by the resonating vibrancy of the color. I remember these walks repeatedly, and return to them in my dreams, and in my books. They are, I think, how I would spend eternity, if I could.

But we are mistaken if the wet days, the bleak and dreary ones, are not treasured, too. My dogs, who love to swim, but hate the rain, nevertheless run joyfully through wet weeds and brush, shaking themselves with vigor when they come in, smelling of mud. Dogs have a capacity for appreciation that my ideal self would try to emulate, but I am not a dog, and can’t seem to achieve their purity of mind. 

My joy ebbs and flows with the seasons. I have never fully understood spring, with its mud, its dirty snowpiles, its cold rains, and its disappointed hopes. For me, joy comes when fall it is at its peak, and even still later, with the stark, purple cold of winter. Once the leaves and crops are stripped away the sculptural shapes of the trees and the shape of the earth is revealed, and the light pours down, undiffused. The world seems a brighter, clearer, purer place. That cold  clarity purifies me.

In our mortality, I wonder whether there is, too, a clarity that comes as we can, at last, see the end. There is no need for the extraneous, just the focus of comfort, where we can; of love, if we are blessed with it; and the firm hope that when the seasons pass, the essence of what we are will always be.