R.L.S. Hoff's Blog, page 13

I don’t quite relate to Coco Franks’s quest to be popular, but I totally get what it’s like to have your parents tell you you’re moving away from the life you know, and your feelings about it don’t matter.

Of course, my parents never moved me anywhere quite so remote or primitive. We always (always!) had running water.

I never before realized how lucky I was.

This is a fun book, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I cringe every time Coco makes more trouble for herself, but in my heart, I get it. Sometimes life is grossly unfair and lashing out feels like the only way to get people to pay attention to what you’re feeling. Even if the only person that hurts is yourself.

Link to the book here, if you’re interested: https://smile.amazon.com/Muddy-Puddles-Charlie-Franks-novel-ebook/dp/B00HOCA7D2/

It’s the time of the year when we all turn at least halfway nocturnal. We’re close enough to the mountains here that the mornings are reasonably pleasant, but by noon, it’s sticky, and by mid-afternoon, nobody wants to move.

It’s hard to sleep much before midnight–and sometimes even after that.

We like to think of ourselves as more mind than body, but when late afternoon finds us all snapping at each other over very minor things, I remember that we’re more connected to the material than we think we are.

And cool nights are a blessing.

Jacinta and Miss learn a lot from each other in this sweet and sometimes sad foray into the life of a young woman and her “amiga.” At the beginning, neither one understands much about the others’ world, and that lack of knowledge leads to sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking problems.

This was a good story (though I got somewhat annoyed at the highlighted vocabulary words–and I believe I would have been even more annoyed by them when I was the target age for this story–I was very touchy when I felt people were talking down to me back then).

Despite that, I found this story enlightening. Reading it as an adult, I’m reminded that in life, good intentions are often not enough. Fools rush in…

Way too often, I’m a fool.

K is into art, dance, and acting. B is already an accomplished programmer. J gardens and builds things with wood (and sometimes plays around with electricity). They’re all good at what they do and getting better–but they don’t, on the whole, tend to collaborate or even appreciate the others’ skills. I guess I didn’t collaborate much with my siblings when I was their age either.

But I find myself wondering if there’s a project we could do together–one that would use all their skills. Because some of the best times I’ve had with others are those times I’ve worked together to create something. Plays and course outlines–or just supper.

Maybe we should take turns with projects–working on things that will highlight each person’s skills? Does pursuing individual dreams and growing individual gifts have to come at the cost of community?

Hmm. Parenting teens is hard. But not always in the ways I expected.

Chapter One

Sam Greeley never intended to fall in love with the greenhouses. He knew they were a dead-end work detail, never meant for kids like him who had high enough mod scores, even in ninth form, to qualify for university scholarships.

In fact, when he’d first been assigned the detention that sent him up to the food-growing zones, he’d meant to protest it. He hadn’t been part of the singing, dancing group of students who had blocked the corridor, making everyone late to class. He’d tried to scoot past, and that was when the teachers zoomed in, assigning detentions to everyone in the immediate vicinity.

Sam was going after Mr. Lewis to explain when Eleanor Mackey grabbed his left arm and turned it, so she could view the armband screen on his forearm. “Sam, you have detention, too? Thank goodness. Last time they sent us to the greenhouses, I was stuck doing some horrible, dirty, mindless task without even any intelligent conversation to break up the monotony.”

Wilson Cartier strolled up and draped his arm over Eleanor’s shoulders. “I thought you were with me repairing superwheat supports the last time you wound up in a greenhouse detention.”

Eleanor shrugged out from underneath his arm and winked at Sam. “See what I mean?” Then she picked her school tablet up off the corridor floor and sauntered toward her next class, her blond hair swinging in loose waves long enough to violate ship code. But who would report the captain’s daughter for something like that?

“What a tease, huh?” Wilson said, bumping Sam’s arm. “But, hey, I know you weren’t part of this mess. If you want me to vouch for you to Mr. Lewis or Ms. O’Day, we can probably get you out of detention.”

Sam stared at Wilson’s nearly new uniform and tried to figure out what the GenM heir was up to. Wilson and his cronies never talked to Sam. They certainly didn’t do him favors. “That’s OK. I was in the hallway when I should have been in class, and the greenhouses always need more hands, right? It won’t hurt me any.”

Wilson shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. The greenhouses can be plenty dangerous. Especially for guys who can’t keep their eyes off other guys’ girls.”

“Other guys’ girls?”

“What, you think I don’t see the way you look at Eleanor?”

Who did the idiot think he was fooling? “Eleanor doesn’t have a boyfriend. She’s certainly not yours.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong. Eleanor may not realize it yet, but she’s definitely mine.” Wilson slapped Sam on the back in a way that probably looked friendly to the cameras but that felt anything but. Then Wilson ambled down the hallway toward the gym.

Sam scowled after him.

Cretin.

But the guy often understood people better than Sam did. If Wilson thought Sam was a threat, did that mean Eleanor liked him? An unfamiliar swooping sensation swept through his gut, and the corner of his mouth quirked upward.

Eleanor Mackey might like him.

He hummed the song his classmates had been performing as he made his way to Calculus.

____________________________

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Like all my favorite stories, Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give introduced me to a whole new world. Except, however foreign it feels to me, Starr’s world exists–in places I can drive to–even if they’re hard for me to see, given that I’m a white girl. My world might as well be a different planet from the one Starr grows up in. When she was twelve, her father gave her a lecture on how to survive a traffic stop. When I was twelve, my dad gave me the “ice-cream talk.” (Honey, you’re getting to an age when boys are going to start saying they love you, and you need to understand that for most of them, when they say, “I love you,” they mean it–but in the same way they mean “I love ice cream.” When they mean it for real, they’ll ask you to marry them.)

It was a good talk, and it served me well, but then, I didn’t need the other one. Up until a few years ago, I rarely encountered the police, and when I did, they were always respectful and helpful. (In the past few years, I have encountered the police rather more, and they’re still always respectful and helpful.) Like many people, I’m nervous around police officers–afraid I’ll get in trouble (Was I speeding? I didn’t think I was.) But I’ve never been afraid for my life. And growing up, I didn’t even know that in America, there were people who were afraid for their lives when they encountered police officers. The way the history was taught at my school, I imagined racism pretty much ended with Martin Luther King Jr. I only really knew one African American growing up. (My piano teacher–and I don’t recall ever talking to him about anything other than piano.)

When I went to the University of Toledo for school, though, and met classmates who lived in Detroit and were routinely pulled over on their commute home for “driving while black,” I could hardly believe it. I felt my country had betrayed me. How could we pretend everything was good, everything was right, when this kind of thing still went on?

I was outraged.

I still am. Because, as The Hate U Give has reminded me, nothing has improved in the intervening twenty-odd years. White America is still denying there’s a problem while non-white America gets bullied by the police and the courts (and sometimes by banks, housing administrations, “welfare” organizations, school systems…) There is an entire world, just beyond my doorstep, and if I don’t know about it, maybe it’s because I’m willfully ignorant.

And the church–oh the church. My white Christian brothers and sisters, I know some of you are saying you refuse to feel guilty about what our forefathers have done, and I agree that God doesn’t hold people accountable for the sins of their parents. Slavery is not our sin. But not even acknowledging there’s a problem while police harass and kill members of our community–people made in the image of God–that is sin. Not acknowledging there’s a problem when whole generations of African American young men go to prison and die–that is sin. It’s sin. You may not feel guilty. I may not feel guilty. But we are. And if we want to stop being guilty, we need to stop ignoring the problem and start repenting. And, just to be clear, when I say repenting, I’m not just saying we should feel bad that this is going on (though I’m not sure how we can avoid feeling bad that this is going on.) I’m saying we need to start actively working for change–in our churches, in our schools, in our communities, in our country. God is not pleased with us when we ignore oppression.

But, back to the story. I think that after the world-building, the thing I liked best was the characterization–Starr, and her friends, friends both from school and from her neighborhood. I liked getting to know Khalil especially–as more than just a drug dealer. I don’t think I’d realized before how often the media (and thus the rest of us) describe a person who may have engaged in criminal activity by that criminality alone, as if the criminal behavior is their entire identity. Khalil and Starr are pulled over on a (probably bogus) traffic stop, and then Khalil is shot when he leans toward the car window to ask Starr if she’s OK. Despite being unarmed and having no contraband in his car, Khalil is called a suspected drug-dealer in the news, as if that somehow makes him responsible for his own death. Though Khalil was, in fact, dealing drugs, Starr remembers him in much more fullness. She remembers their time growing up together, their days joking around when they worked together in her father’s shop, the way he took care of his grandma (who was battling cancer) and younger brother, the way he still loved his mother even though she was an addict. Even if it was true that he sold drugs (and he had no record, so what business did the papers have reporting such a thing?), it was irrelevant to his death. And even if it had been relevant to his death, it was by no means all he was.

Of course, this is a story. It didn’t really happen. Except it has happened. Again, and again, and again.

I love it when a book manages to teach me something without me feeling like I’m being preached at.

The bane of summer–at least for the kids. Me, I’m plenty busy. I have the garden, and work of varying kinds, and, of course, the kids are home.

But J, B, & K all seem to be plagued by boredom.

Not that they want to do chores.

Or take any classes.

Or read any books.

I’m not sure exactly what they’re hoping for, but I am reminded of “Today is Very Boring” by Jack Prelutsky.

And that always makes me laugh.

Since late February, J has been asking if it’s time to plant vegetables and flowers yet. He wants watermelon and pumpkins and cucumbers and tomatoes and maybe some corn and beans.

The first year J was with us, he didn’t understand when I tried to explain about frost dates and Colorado sometimes getting snowstorms at the end of May (we’ve had at least one after Memorial Day in the past five years.)

He planted things early, and they died young.

This year, though, he listened, and looked at the instructions on the package, and agreed to wait.

And now, it’s time. It will be fun to get all those seeds in the ground.

Such a good book–and if I found myself a bit disappointed in the end, it’s only because the rest of the book was so astonishingly intense. For hours, I lived in the mind of Sara Louise Bradshaw, a girl growing up in the shadow of her beautiful and talented twin–feeling tall, awkward and unloved, but also working hard to shift her own and her family’s fortune.

When she works it all out, coming to terms with herself and her family and growing up rapidly in the last couple of chapters, the new attitudes feel too sudden, and it’s hard to believe that Sara Louise no longer feels the envy and insecurity that have plagued her throughout the book. She comes into her own–but it’s not at all clear to me how she manages it.

Nevertheless, for the setting alone I would read this book again. The little crab-fishing community on an island that’s being reclaimed by the sea is both beautiful and harsh, and I’m nearly seduced into wishing I’d grown up in a tiny town on a salt marsh.

Ridiculous, seeing how I don’t really like salt water, or beaches, or being out in the sun much…

Sara Louise herself is also a character I’d love to spend time with again, and her story reminds me that life’s greatest dramas happen at home.

Like I said, such a good book.

My apologies for not posting in a very long time.

It has been a strange spring for us, as it has been for everyone. Completely unprecedented–except not so much in our case.

Some of you may not know, or remember, but my husband and I were in Taiyuan during the SARS epidemic, so this is our second spring of shutdowns, mostly staying at home waiting for a strange new disease to pass, and wondering if are seeing the beginning of the end of the world.

The world managed to keep that genie in the bottle, of course, and after a few months of lockdown, we were able to continue on with fairly normal lives.

This is different, of course. There’s better technology for continuing some semblance of our normal lives (we have online jobs, online school, online church, online critique group). Some things haven’t translated well to online. All our kids miss their school friends. K missed out on playing Ariel in her school’s performance of The Little Mermaid. She also finds some online classes far less than satisfying. (Choir and ballet are the hardest for her to adjust to in the new format.) And she’s heartbroken that she never got to say goodbye to all her friends that will be heading to different high schools than hers next year. B missed the big honors fair that his school does in the spring–and the chance to show off the programming board game he made. J has missed the second half of his lessons with a genuine driving instructor (rather than his parents).

There have been some good things, of course–Times spent together playing cards, baking, gardening, and walking the dog. We’ve enjoyed fairly good health. We still have work. We’ve been in touch with extended family.

These last couple of months have been hard for us, as they have been hard for many, but we have much to be thankful for.

And, as I keep reminding myself, this too will pass.