rebeccakuder

A Suzuki parent’s lament (and occasional triumph)

These cuties make violin practice fun! (Sometimes.)
These cuties make violin practice fun! (Sometimes.)

I’m not a musician.  I played oboe for a brief time (a few weeks?) in middle school, but gave up because it was too hard.  I love music, I sang in musicals throughout school, but I cannot read music.  As a Suzuki parent, this is a challenge.

My daughter, who is now five and a half, showed an early passion for violin, with specific interest in western swing.  Her grandmother had studied violin at Juliard, and played in the Houston Symphony.  So we encouraged the child, and began Suzuki lessons when she was four.  (Complicating factor: she had severely injured her left hand in an accident when she was three and a half, so from the start, she has been playing violin left-handed.)

The Suzuki method, taught in its strictest form, would have required me as home practice teacher to learn violin alongside my daughter.  Because I’m not doing that, we have another challenge in learning, and in getting her to practice.

Early on, I talked to a friend (who is also a wonderful violin player) about this issue of getting the child to practice.  It seemed like I should teach my daughter about the importance of having a practice, having any practice.  My friend advised that if my daughter loves violin, I should consider not putting that baggage onto playing violin.  She assured me that people do learn even if they don’t practice every day, and that when a person wants to learn a particular piece, for instance, s/he will work at it and want to practice.  Sagely advice.  I felt so liberated!

Meanwhile, we do need to do some amount of practice.  Here are some things that have helped:

  • Following my daughter’s teacher at lessons, we use plastic eggs in a  basket, each egg containing one task.  This adds a sense of play, and it also makes my daughter feel she’s in control–she’s choosing what to do rather than my telling her.  (She and I often collaborate on extra things to put in the eggs.  She wanted an empty egg, so I added one.  And when I realized she wanted more freedom, in another egg, I wrote on a slip of paper, “violin thing–your choice”  so she really does have a sense of being able to do what she wants while we practice.  This has yielded some wonderful improvisation.)
  • Again, at the teacher’s suggestion, we use a set of Russian nesting dolls to count repetitions of a piece.  We unpack the dolls, put them in a row, and then she closes a doll each time she does the thing, until they are all packed into one.

These are some things that have NOT helped:

  • Bossing her around;
  • Begging;
  • Getting really frustrated and walking away.

We don’t do charts and incentives, unless you count the classic vegetables before desert, “we need to practice before we go to the playground” sort of thing.  I’ve never wholeheartedly tried charts and incentives in general in our house, in part because philosophically, we want her to experience intrinsic (vs. extrinsic) motivation.  I don’t want her to practice for the sake of pleasing me, or getting money or a prize.  I want her to practice because she wants to do it, because it matters to her, because she loves playing violin.  I want her to have the joy of doing something  for the love of it.  Or for herself!  Short term, this means I don’t have as many ways to convince her to practice.  Which can be really frustrating.  (Sometimes I want to give up, but I don’t want her to give up, so I have to model not giving up.  Kind of like a lot of things in life, actually.)

Recently, we were at a group lesson, and it was my daughter’s turn to play her solo piece.  She was feeling put on the spot, and wasn’t comfortable enough to play the piece her teacher was asking for.  She began to cry, and we had to leave the room.  (We’d gotten a ride from a friend, so we had to wait until the end of the lesson, which was probably a good thing.  I might otherwise have left.)  As I sat, wanting to comfort my daughter, she said very clearly that the problem was that I hadn’t been making enough time to practice.  (She was right.  It was summer, our schedule had been irregular, and we had not been practicing enough.)  I felt ashamed, too ashamed even to explain to the friendly parents in the other room.  But as I thought about it, I realized that my anxiety was about my being judged, about being seen as an imperfect Suzuki parent.  Whose business is that?  Who cares?  After the lesson was over, I explained to the adults that my daughter said I had not been making enough time to practice, and she was right.  I am not Catholic, but I imagine that’s what confession feels like.  It felt good to tell the truth.  And then I recommitted to practicing regularly.  Even when I remind her of what she said, my daughter often does not want to practice, but then, she’s a kid.  There are so many other things she wants to do.  I can’t blame her.

Music should be fun.  And lately, when I let go of trying to steer it too much, it has been.

rebeccakuder

Catching up on literary citizenship: Edric’s The London Satyr

(And I felt so racy, reading a book with this delicious cover.)
(And I felt so racy, reading a book with this delicious cover.)

I’ve long been meaning to post about some fabulous and intriguing books I’ve read recently.  First in line is Robert Edric’s The London Satyr.

From the cover:

1891.  London is simmering in the oppressive summer heat, the air thick with sexual repression. But a wave of morality is about to rock the capital  as the puritans of the London Vigilance Committee seek out perversion and aberrant behaviour in all its forms.

Charles Webster, an impoverished photographer working at the Lyceum Theatre, has been sucked into a shadowy demi-monde which exists beneath the surface of civilized society. It is a world of pornographers and prostitutes, orchestrated by master manipulator Marlow, for whom Webster illicitly provides theatrical costumes for pornographic shoots.

But knowledge of this enterprise has somehow reached the Lyceum’s upright theatre manager, Bram Stoker, who suspects Webster’s involvement. As the net tightens around Marlow and his cohorts and public outrage sweeps the city, a member of the aristocracy is accused of killing a child prostitute…

After reading his PS Publishing novella, The Mermaids, in 2012 I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Edric.  (Part 1 of the inteview is posted here.  I intend to transcribe the rest of it as time allows.)  The London Satyr was very different but no less pleasing to read than The Mermaids.  The plot layers within The London Satyr allowed me to get lost in the corners of its streets and backstage world, but this novel can’t and won’t be boiled down to that.  Edric’s prose–his sentences–are little gifts in themselves.  As Webster walks through this perilous situation, I felt I was walking with him through London, always considering things, interpreting glances and shadows, always on guard, falling into more and more danger alongside him.  Thrilling, to say the least.

In his sentences, Edric does beautiful and hypnotic things with repetition.  One of the currents within this novel is Webster’s grief over his seven-year-old daughter Caroline, who, many years before the story is set, had died.  Without spoiling anything (because I do hope you will read the novel) I’ll say there’s a passage near the end of the novel which keeps haunting me, so I am indulging in the pleasure of typing it:

“When Caroline had been alive, she had often waited for me at the corner of the street, a few doors from our own, looking out for me as I climbed the gentle slope.  And upon seeing me, seeing me wave to her and then crouch down and hold out my arms to her, she would run towards me at a gaterhing pace, stopped only by her collision into me, whereupon, having steadied myself, I would rise and lift her into the air and spin her, holding her against my chest and over my shoulder until all of her sudden energy and momentum was lost, absorbed into my body and then passing in a tremor through me into the solid ground beneath us.  I would feel this happen, feel her small and fragile body and all its vital forces absorbed into my own.

There were days when I had set off home already looking forward to this meeting, always disappointed when something kept her from the corner.  She would hang laughing uncontrollably over my shoulder and then babble her day’s news into my ear.  News of the things she had done, the people she had seen, what she had eaten, what she had worn, what her mother had said to her, what her sister had said, what she had said to them.  A whole day in those few spinning seconds.

…

And later, these stories would resume at bedtime, when I would sit with her as she fell asleep.  Sometimes, I would go on spinning these tales long after her eyes had closed, lowering my voice to a whisper for the simple pleasure of sitting with my child and watching her sleep, secure in the knowledge that she was happy and well and safe, and secure too in my own fierce conviction of the endless future and what it held for us both.

For a year after her death, I could not turn that corner except with the hopeless expectation of seeing her there again, running towards me with her arms out.  And when she did not come, when that one small miracle did not occur, I could not help but also feel the sudden blade of sadness which pierced me again and again, and nor could I stop the tears which filled my eyes as I continued home to that cold and lifeless house.”

It’s when I read passages like this that I know something in my bones: reading makes us more human.

rebeccakuder

Layers of organization, and life

651px-Cissa_hypoleucor_concolor_qtl1
This kind of magpie

Organizing my readings for fall classes, I picked a file folder from the stack I reuse at home.  “Credit card info” was scratched out, and over it, written, in turquoise ink, “Tom Waits.”  That’s what it did last time.

Some questions.

How was my life ever that simple?  (And is it wrong to have a file folder entitled “Tom Waits”?)

(And what on earth did I file in that folder?  Why can’t I remember?)

(To quote Joan Didion, “What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?”)

rebeccakuder

“…don’t forget you’re alive.”

Joe Strummer. Nice hat.
Joe Strummer. Nice hat.

Last night, I  watched “The Future is Unwritten,” a documentary about the life of Joe Strummer.  I didn’t know much about Strummer beyond his music, and it was quite illuminating.  One thing that sticks with me was when he said:

“I don’t have any message except: Don’t forget you’re alive.”

(And all day, the words from Jon Langford’s “Oh No, Hank!” –from Nashville Radio–have been also going through my head: “He’s somewhere out there, happy and alive.”  It adds texture that the corn is actually as high as an elephant’s eye at the moment in my Ohio.)

From both legendary musical sources: Good message.  It strikes me that Strummer (and maybe punk rock, and Langford too, while we’re at it, who’s still somewhere out there, possibly happy and actually alive) is/was about nothing less than, essentially, reclaiming humanity.

rebeccakuder

Breast-shaped Lunchbox

I recall my childhood lunchbox. I think I had a Holly Hobbie one, and maybe a Peanuts one.
I seem to recall from my childhood Holly Hobbie, and maybe Peanuts…

Packing school lunch is on my mind again.  Much less angst this year, in part because my daughter’s taste in food has recently expanded to include much more variety–even salad!  Things mixed together!  Maybe making lunches will be easier this year.  Here’s what I wrote on the topic last fall, from much shakier ground.  Enjoy!

**

Breast-shaped lunchbox

(September 11, 2012)

My four-and-three-quarters year old only child needed a lunchbox.  She had been in half-day Nursery school the previous year, but after I got full-time work, my husband and I decided to enroll her for full days.  She was fine with this plan, excited.  (After the first year’s welcome picnic, she had said about her school, “I want to live here.”)  But for several days after we had made the full-time decision, I felt trapped and agitated, grieving the loss of the era when she wouldn’t be in school all day.  When I mentioned this to friends at the swimming pool, they recognized themselves in me: the anxiety more about mother than child, about my hesitation to let go.

When our daughter was a baby, our decisions about how to care for her were based on the desire to build a strong foundation of attachment.  This included breastfeeding, wearing her continually in soft wraps, and co-sleeping (though sleeping was never guaranteed).  After building this foundation, our intention is to encourage her independence, let her risk, and fall, and find her way.

So with full days approaching, it was time to find a lunchbox.  My preference was something environmentally friendly, BPA-free (if plastic), easy for her to use, and easy for us to clean.  Cute enough that she would be excited about it, but not emblazoned with some over-merchandized character.  Goodbye Kitty: no billboard on my baby’s lunchbox.  This increasingly mythic lunchbox would be an adventure.  The container itself would reveal a culinary wonderland, encouraging my daughter to finish every morsel from each charmed and airtight compartment.  Lunch would be a treasure hunt, and she would find delectable whole food gold and pearls.  I got on the Internet.

A system!  Yes, a system, with snap-on lids and stackability, a perfect feat of modern hipster design that would keep yogurt from spilling and keep fruit fresh and gorgeous.  Controlled and tidy!  No mere lunchbox, but a sculpture, a work of art, something beautiful to cradle the nutrition within.  I would figure out how to make the magic food later.

I posted a Social Media status plea for advice.  Friends responded with links; I moved through screen after screen of rainbow-hued vessels.  The photographs made everything look smart, sassy, and simple.

I know this quest is a luxury.  We have food to nourish our healthy child; we have a healthy child to send to school.  Still, the iconic notion of LUNCHBOX so overwhelmed me that I did what I often do: procrastinate.  I enjoyed the dregs of summer, went to the beach, and swam in the ocean with my family and friends, who told me to relax, and that every child leaves most lunch food uneaten.

A couple nights before the start of school, as my anxiety about my daughter being away from me for the bulk of her food day crested, remnants of Hurricane Isaac were approaching Ohio in the form of potential rain–desperately needed during our drought.  (Yes, please, it’s dry up here, I thought, though I hoped storms would not disturb our sleep.)  At bedtime, I talked with my daughter about the rain, which I’d accidentally referred to as “storms.”  I got the Peters Atlas Of The World to show her how far Ohio is from Louisiana.  As she paged through the color-coded thematic maps, with data about religions, illiteracy, and adults-to-children ratios, I explained that each map is a picture of the world.

“The whole world?” she asked.

“Yup,” I said.

On the map of the United States, I showed her the two-day, twelve-hour drive we’d taken from Ohio to the beach in North Carolina, represented in about one centimeter on the map.  I saw her seeing how big the world is.  I saw her world about to get bigger with the start of full days at school.

The next day, slightly frenzied, I bought a BPA-free sandwich box with a built-in ice pack, so whatever we sent with her would not spoil.  Now I see the wisdom in the bento box–smallish sections for each snack-sized food.  (I know my child is a grazer, and sensible enough to eat something rather than pass out on the playground.  In the days of her early meals, she would toddle past the table as my husband or I held out a spoon.  She would take a bite.  We referred to this as street food.)

I talked to another writer, a sagely parent of older kids.  I mentioned that my child, my infant, had begun full day Nursery school.

“Is this the first time she’s had lunch at school?” he asked.

“You hit it!” I said, and explained my dilemma.  “So I’m writing an essay about it,” I said.

On the first day of school, my daughter ate one bite of her sandwich, and a few grapes.  As usual, she ate the school snacks (crackers, chips, and fruit, but never the cheese, because it’s not our cheese).  She had a walnut-sized piece of what our family calls “sticky food”: a homemade granola bar, made from tahini and other healthy stuff.

On the second day, she told me she ate a few bites of her fritter (an egg and cheese pancake with cinnamon, paprika, and turmeric, which has been a staple throughout her solid food-eating life) but when I unwrapped the foil, I saw no missing bites.

On the third day, I sent less food.  She ate no green beans, but she ate grapes, and half of the one fritter I had cut into small pieces.

In the dark night, I realized that the child from my body, who still breastfeeds (ritual, nostalgia for the days when breasts yielded meals) was starting to experience the expanse of that map-centimeter’s journey, how the map is really so much smaller than the world.  She would be thrilled with a Hello Kitty lunchbox.  But from the center of my body came the urge to pack the whole of my nurturing into her lunchbox.  That lunchbox would have to be bigger than the world.  But even a breast-shaped lunchbox could not contain the complex, flawed, sometimes rejected and ignored nutrition of my love.

As my body navigates this maternal threshold, the things I am not doing become as important as the things I am doing.  Inaction becomes action.  I remind my body it doesn’t have to dash from work to make eleven-thirty pickup time.  I know that I will miss big moments, maybe her first crossing of monkey bars.  There is heartbreak.  I cannot cook her lunch every day anymore, making sure everything on the plate is crisp; I cannot nag her, midday, to sit and eat.

The loss of control feels like a full force gale.  Wanting her to soar and not wanting to let go, the mind battles the body, and usually wins, knowing that for her to grow and thrive, she needs me to let go.

Maybe today she will eat more.

rebeccakuder

Wishing the bubble were sturdier

Yellow Springs, a long time ago.
Yellow Springs, a long time ago.

(Caution: tired writer.  Mixed metaphors ahead…)

I grew up in a small town.  Though we had our quirks and craziness, and we were not immune to death and grief, the town felt safe when I was a kid.  It has felt safe to raise a kid here, too, and I am grateful to live in a true community, where people see each other, pay attention, and in the ways we can, take care of each other.  Having moved within walking distance to town, this summer, I was looking forward to echoing my own childhood: biking with my kid, hot afternoons at the swimming pool, soft serve ice cream, fun.  This sense of safety in my own town (yes, “my,” because I have a sense of investment and ownership in this place) is a cozy blanket I’ve enjoyed, and taken for granted, most of my life.

But since June, my security has been rocked by several situations that leave me feeling vulnerable.  I think back to the moment of Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood; I think back to the moment when people began locking their doors.

Earlier this year, there was a rash of burglaries that had many in Yellow Springs feeling vulnerable.  That situation ended in the arrest of a troubled man who grew up here.  Add the accumulation of things that is making me feel vulnerable this summer:

1. On June 12, someone sprayed undiluted herbicide on the grass at the pool, opening a controversy in our small town that is still going on;

2. On June 27, reportedly, someone with a gun was seen near the outdoor education center at Glen Helen where my daughter had been a camper earlier in the summer, which turned out to be a hoax reported by a camp counselor, who was then put on administrative leave;

3. On July 11, a local man attempted suicide, which resulted in a police search and brief lockdown of my workplace during the Antioch Writers’ Workshop;

4. Last week, another local man, allegedly pissed off about the potential for a farm lab at Antioch College, threatened to shoot the members of the Village Council and was arrested (sorry, I couldn’t find a link to this story);

5. Last night, there was a shoot-out resulting in a man dying, less than a block from a house where I used to live.

Notice: four of five of these summer situations involve guns, or the idea of guns.  Big deal, right?  This might not sound like much to people who live in larger cities, or dangerous parts of the world.  For a town with population under 4,000 people, however, these are big, and rattling.  I know people live (and even thrive) in war zones. But this summer’s accumulation of trauma in the village, the pile of things that shake our sense of safety, is palpable.  It takes brute effort not to pass my worry and fear to my five-year-old daughter.  (Oh, and, nothing to do with guns, but two  difficult events this summer: 1. Camille Willis, Yellow Springs resident and mother of my dear childhood friends–and a second mother to me–died very suddenly during the second week of June.  No gun involved, but the loss is central in wobbling my feeling of home, and safety.  2. Jimmy Chesire, beloved T-Ball coach, had a serious head injury.  Luckily, he is healing well, and so there’s some bright spot in that fact.)

When I think about where to focus efforts for controlling the proliferation of guns, I don’t even know where to start.  I know we also need deeper support for people who are afraid, for people who are in (mental, spiritual, emotional, physical) pain.  I know it’s more complicated than “guns kill people” but I also know that if it weren’t so damn easy to get guns, guns would kill fewer people.

I’ve been brewing a blog post about this soup of summer grief.  Today, after the latest event, I am sad and ragged.  Sad and ragged for all the people who’ve been hurt and affected by these situations.  I wish the bubble were sturdier.

rebeccakuder

Wishing for Wishbone Russian dressing

mmmm, childhood!
mmmm, childhood!

The other day, for some reason I remembered Wishbone Russian dressing, which was my favorite when I was a child.  Trying to recreate it, it occurred to me to use my friend Meui’s heavenly smoked paprika.  What resulted is not quite Wishbone Russian, but much better in some ways, and I’m still experimenting.

I used a regular teaspoon, not a teaspoon measure.  And you can make extra–it keeps well in the refrigerator.

(All measurements approximate.)
1 spoonful of smoked paprika from Pepper Forrest Spice Company
1/2 spoonful of honey
3 spoonfuls of rice vinegar
6 spoonfuls of olive oil
salt (to taste)
freshly ground black pepper (to taste)
With a fork, mix smoked paprika and honey and rice vinegar.  Add olive oil slowly, whirring with a fork until it emulsifies.  Add salt and pepper. Drizzle over salad greens and toss.

 (To go for the Wishbone Russian flavor, I keep thinking it might benefit from celery seed, which I do not have in my spice cupboard.  Or maybe I’ll use lemon juice instead of vinegar.  Or maybe add some fresh tomato juice.  Next time!)
rebeccakuder

A found poem (for Jim Krusoe)

Here’s a found poem, found in that I found this written in my Antioch Writers’ Workshop notebook from July 12, 2010 for my graduate school mentor, the novelist Jim Krusoe.  I wrote this almost-poem in a morning class three years ago, before I learned more about how people write poetry, but today something about it seems quaint, and worth reiterating, so I am posting it.  Bad poetry, admittedly, but its DNA is true.

Editing (for Jim Krusoe)

You said,
“Start here,”
lopping several pages
from the front of my story
like a severed limb
I had muscled
and exercised,
polished, toned.

The thing
(the now-partial body, I thought)
stood there.
I thought I saw blood–
not a Monty Python spurt,
but a trickle.

But I was wrong.
There was no blood.
It was a good cut, the right cut;
the story stood stronger
without those pages.

You were kind
and you were right.

rebeccakuder

No noose, please

tom-waits
Tom Waits hanging out with a cat!

Today I have a headache, so I’m indulging in a short, cranky post.  (I know my five true blog fans have missed me!  Mama’s back!)

Today I heard spoken two expressions that, if I never hear them again, I will never miss.  Both were uttered on my local NPR station, one in a national report, another by a local personality.  To wit:

1) “(Just about anything)…comes into play.”  As in, “That’s when the –whatever idea,  trend, or phenomenon, which has nothing to do with a ball or birdie or other piece of sports equipment– comes into play.”  I don’t mind sports metaphors per se, but this one is more tired than I am.  I never need to hear it again; and

2) “To hang.” This was used thusly: “Hang with your friends…”  Call me old school (another once-cool, now-tired label, surely!) but I’d prefer to “hang out” with my friends.  I don’t want to simply hang with my friends or my enemies–I would rather not hang at all.  I am tired, but I am not so tired that I don’t have the energy to add the short “out” at the end of “hang.”  Otherwise, all I can think of is a noose/coming into play, which even on this headachey day has little enough appeal as to be nonexistent.