Metaphors are the Darndest Things (Part Two)

“So life in this family is a crumpled piece of paper, is it?” I repeated slowly—a guerrilla tactic I use in both teaching and parenting when I need  a bit of time to strategize a response. 

"Our life is this crumpled piece of paper,"said Miss S.  "Nothing is smooth."

“Yes,” she replied, sniffling.   “Everything is rough.”

 

Ahh.  I finally began to put the pieces together. 



This wasn’t actually about the gas we pass, or our family being nice — though often I think we could work on that too, especially with each other — it was about the ebb and flow of our life, which was rather more like a cyclone than a nice, regulated tide.



I began to see the situation through my daughter’s eyes. Samantha’s house is clean, stately, and beautiful...ours is a "diamond in the rough," as my husband stated wryly to the city assessor.  There are holes in every bedroom door, which we’ve band-aided with Easter Bunny stickers until the point at which we renovate.  We have mostly grown accustomed to its idiosyncrasies — the shower rod that comes crashing down on one of us in the middle of a shower or a soak, the laminate floor in the kitchen that curls up at the seams in a wry smile . . . the cantankerous autocrat of a dishwasher that decides when it wants to run.    Even the toilet in the master bath, with its particular shade of dull violet and uneven seat, is starting to grow on us. 

For Samantha school comes easy  . . . she’s reading at a 6^th grade level, and is a serious, careful, thorough, studious person — even in 2^nd grade.   Miss S, on the other hand, tends toward the theatrical on nights like this, when doing homework together doesn’t even begin until nearly 7.   After we eat, look over her folder, get things organized, a great many of her assignments are faced rather than just done.  And with a whole host of emotions, I might add.  Most of them Oscar worthy.   

And yet . . . our lives are harried in ways that she sees.  I do feel bad for her when she’s the only kid to not have dress down clothes on dress down day because I didn’t see it on the calendar, or when she is late for the second bell because of all the running around her dad and I didn’t get done the night before.  9 times out of 10, she doesn’t have the requisite note that will enables her to be released for Brownie field trips, and the whole trip is held up because the leaders (including Samantha’s mom) are trying to track me down.  I’m also the only mother in the whole school who didn’t go over the non-bullying contract with my child . . . and I wrote a book on bullying.

She has never complained.  Yet the little things that we overlook, the stop gaps we are forced to take, because we don’t have time or make time, add up. 

Poor Samantha, to be held in such high esteem.  It could have been any friend who created the necessary counterpoint to our chaotic life, actually.  But Miss S is starting to make it.  And her metaphor about our lives as a crumpled piece of paper made me understand how she feels in ways that I’m not quite sure she herself could articulate . . . yet.

Part one    Part three

Metaphors are the Darndest Things. They Frame Reality. (Part One)

The college semester began yesterday.  Absolutely exhausted after the long ride home from Beloit, I walked into the warmth and busyness of the kitchen where surprisingly, delightfully, everyone was gathered.  At the table our host daughter Sina was helping Miss S. to learn her weekly spelling words, and Padster drove his matchbox cars over cucumber slices while deciding whether to eat them. Bal stood over the range adding spices to the rasam, which by the rich garlicky smell of it, seemed to be in the final stages of preparation.   

No matter how ideal, the imitation
of life is a tad more horrifying than . . .

“Mom!” everyone cried in greeting. 

I’ll admit that I had had a rather uncanny feeling I had seen this scene in The Stepford Wives, but I let it slide off my shoulders.  What good is it to look a gift horse in the mouth?  After asking Sina about her semester exams and giving greetings and kisses to all, I excused myself to take a hot shower.  

When I reemerged, the world was normal again.  From the door of the bathroom I could hear one kid whining with hunger, one parent speaking sternly, one kid crying. 

Ahh. Home.  I thought. 

From Sona’s room Sina was speaking softly.  “It’s okay Sons.  I know you’re disappointed in having gotten 8 words wrong, but you’ll get better.   I feel the same way in APP— I struggle all the time.  I know you’ll do well by the time of the test.“ 

I smiled, touched by her tenderness.    As she reemerged in the hallway, I gave her a hug.  “Thanks, sweetie.”

“No problem,” she said with a knowing smile.

As I went into Miss S.’s room, she sat hunched over at the edge of the bed, crying softly.  

“What’s going on, chica?” I asked cheerfully.

“I didn’t know a lot of my words!” she sobbed. 

“Hey, that happens . . . and it occasionally should.”

“Huh?”   

“Of course!  What is school for if we don’t struggle a bit and have to extend beyond what comes easy to us? Besides, could you imagine what it would be like to get everything right all of the time?  How boring!”

“I don’t know,” she replied, with an air of resignation, holding back tears.

“Is there something else going on?”

The dam broke loose.  “It’s just that. . . It’s just that . . .    I wish we had a nice family!”  Tears flowed in a torrent.  

The game was a-foot.  

...the silly and creepy realities
of a life lived  unscripted.

“A nice family?”  I asked as a point of clarification, thinking about the Cleavers or, for that matter the weird simulacra I had just witnessed in the kitchen. 

“Yeah!  Like Samantha’s family!”  Tears flowed like the Niagara.

I smiled, thinking of her friend Samantha’s family. They are indeed quite friendly, polite and personable people.  But I couldn’t quite understand what made them seem that much nicer than us that it became an occasion for tears. 

“Honey, what do you mean by nice?” I pressed on.    

“I mean they don’t talk about farting at the table and laugh at disgusting jokes, okay?” she blurted out.   “They’re nice.”   She grabbed a piece of crumpled paper.  “Our family is this crumpled piece of paper . . . life should be smoother.”  

God help me for being a language freak.  Despite the seriousness of her sentiment I found myself smiling with delight at the metaphor.    

Part Two  Part Three

Exploring the Story Within Music

The spring before Miss S. turned three, Luther Vandross’s last great song, “Dance with my Father,” hit the airways.  We heard its introductory bars on every station, in restaurants, stores and office buildings for months . . . and then we would hurriedly change the station or excuse ourselves, as she would, without fail, begin to cry hysterically at the sound of the song. 

My husband and I were really amused by this.  For years she had wailed at the roar of the vacuum cleaner and burst into tears at the piercing shriek of a pressure cooker, but what was it about the swoon of an R and B pop song that left her inconsolable?  Sure, it was a sad song — poignant really, given that the silken voiced Vandross would unexpectedly die so quickly after its release.  But Sona surely didn’t understand the story wove throughout the song . . . and besides, she started to freak out the moment the first bars could be heard on the piano, not when the singer began to sing. 



Listening to music together and imagining  
what stories we hear it telling is a great activity
to build an appreciation of the language arts.



Her sensitivity to it continued for two years, and after Vandross’s death in 2005, I entertained the thought that in her toddlerhood she had somehow preternaturally sensed the singer’s fate, like the fabled bean-sidhe spirits of Irish myth, who would howl wildly to warn their hearers of an upcoming death. But by the time he died, I was more committed to the belief that S. was simply hearing more than just notes—she was listening to the story in the music.

 I figured this out one day when, as we were listening to Puccini’s aria “O Mio Babbino Caro”, she asked me “Mom, what is she singing about?”  

My curiosity about  how she would answer the question was piqued, and I simply turned the question back to her. “What do you imagine she is singing about?”

“I think she is sad because she misses someone she loves.  He’s far away.” she said thoughtfully.

“And who is she telling this to? What is she saying?” I prompted.

She was quiet for a moment.  “She’s talking to herself in her room, saying, ‘I miss you’ and crying.”

“What time of day is it?  What time of day does it seem to be?”

“Nighttime,” she replied. “The moon is out.”

I didn’t bother telling her the “real” back-story (the aria is actually being sung by a character named Lauretta to her father, expressing her fearful plea to be allowed to marry the boy she loves).  The particulars don’t really matter.  .  . Miss S. grasped the longing and the fear expressed in the long, swooning measures at the beginning of the song, a fear which is increasingly at risk of falling into hysteria toward the end of the song, as the prima donna reaches an almost unnaturally high pitch.

If one way of approaching poetry appreciation is by learning about the lyric qualities of language through rhyme games, another way is to actually is to explore the narrative qualities of music.  How do the different components of a musical score create character, develop mood, or imitate landscape — in short, to compose the elements of a story?

   

It's fun to explore this together.  Needless to say, it isn’t necessary to start this sort of enterprise with operatic arias if they’re not your thing.   Listen to Mussgorsky’s "Night on Bald Mountain" together and draw a picture of the story taking place.  Who's there in your child's imagination?  What is taking place?  Describe your own imagination of where the characters, be they human or not, are, and what they are involved in.  Ask kids for details about the setting--what time of day it is, what color the landscape is, what smells are in the air.  They may think you're nuts (as my daughter does half the time) but then they may just love it (as my daughter does the other half of the time)!

After drawing it out and talking about the story you heard in the music, watch that gothic scene in Disney’s Fantasia that 'interprets' the song and compare notes with how you and your children had imagined it. 



Exploring how the Peter and The Wolf
story is told through language and music
helps children explore both forms
of expression.



Or read a version of Peter and the Wolf together, and then listen to a segment of Prokofiev’s score.  Explore what instruments are used to represent each animal in the music.   Following from this, parents can help children explore what instruments they would use to represent the sounds of various creatures (snake/maraca, bee/kazoo, mouse/high octave piano keys, elephant or other large mammal, low octave piano keys, subtly shaking tinfoil/wind through a tree . . . etc.)

Hearing the story in the music informs one’s ability to hear the music in the story.  This is actually a critical skill for poets and other lyrical writers, who often, as Virginia Woolf once wrote of her own experience, must ‘hear’ the lines in their mind before they even realize its time to pick up the pen.

A Seussical at Home

Last night, after a day spent outside playing hard and absently sucking on her mittens all the while, Miss S. entered the house with bright eyes, flushed cheeks, and hands the tincture of beet root. 

“Mom,” she said, partly as a question, partly as a confessional, holding out her hands. I saw that they were red, but not frostbitten.  “Go take a shower,” I told her. “That will warm you up.”

A little while later, she reemerged downstairs in layers of warm polar fleece—her pink polka-dotted footie pajamas, red penguin robe, and a pink skiing hat with ballet slippers on it, which she reclaimed as a ‘sleeping cap’ after having Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Night Before Christmas” read to her at school.  “I’m done!” she exclaimed.

I looked up at her from where I stood, preparing dinner. “Did you moisturize your skin after your shower?”

“No. . . I forgot.”

I shook my head slightly.  “Your skin needs to be taken care of honey, especially during the dry winter.  You should be moisturizing it twice a day.” 

“So you’re saying that I need lotion,” S. said with emphasis, slightly exasperated at the way in which I seemed to be talking around things.  

I smiled at her knowingly, having decided to bring it down a notch.  “Twice a day would be the potion. . . at the very least, that’s my notion.”

After a brief, thoughtful pause, the great Miss S. flashed a confident smile and stepped up to the plate. “Oh yes, I see.  It stops erosion!”

I laughed explosively at my own surprise.  “That’s right!  I suppose it does!  Now get yourself in motion and go take care of the skin you’re in.”



It was the summer of her third birthday when we began playing this game.  One afternoon, after a day of tinkering in and around the garden, we sat on the stoop by our side door drinking lemonade.  As we luxuriated in the sun, we somehow began carrying on our first Seussical style conversation in rhyme. 



To prime a child's mind for rhyme play,
reading Dr. Seuss beginner books
together is very helpful!



“The cat sat on the mat.” S. declared wryly. 

“Oh, yes, but so did the rat.”  I replied. 

She giggled. “The mailman is very fat.”

“Drat! This book is flat!”  I tossed back.

At first our rhyming game went on like this, consisting primarily of an exchange of simple descriptive declarations and questions.  Each of us in turn would come up with a statement with a new word in the rhyme sequence, until we’d exhausted them all.[1] 

As she got older, we continued to flex our rhyming muscles, but with an important difference: the rhyming became incorporated into a string of narratively related sequences such as this one: “Grandma has a beautiful dog.”; “It seems to be chasing a hopping frog.”; “Is the frog sitting on a log?”; “I’m not sure . . . I can’t see it through the fog.”

At the age of seven, S. is able to rhyme her way in and out of an everyday conversation such as the one we had last night.  She does it with the ease of Sam-I-am, or any of the many alliteratively-minded Dr. Seuss characters we love.  We still favor an end-term rhyme scheme, and haven’t really touched on any other forms of metrical rhythm such as internal rhyme, but that will come.  The exchanges are always fantastically silly and delightfully fun for both of us . . . a little ritual that we alone share.

On equal footing in terms of value, conversations like these are building her vocabulary, helping her to discern the meanings of words through the context of their use, and helping her identify phonetic elements, the last of which will make her a stronger reader and speller in the long run.   And additionally, she is cultivating an appreciation for the expressive qualities of language, for the ways in which it serves as a tool of lyric appreciation.

[1] For kids who are less interested in just having a playful conversation than physical play, a parent might use the rhyming in conjunction with throwing or rolling a ball back and forth, or tossing a frisbee.  I suspect with my 2 year old, who can’t sit still for five seconds, induction in our rhyme game might take this form!

---

Re-reading "The Highwayman," Riding, Riding . . .



When I was young, days spent with my grandparents were filled with delights.  We usually started with a late breakfast at Rick’s Diner, where I always had to battle the impulse to dip my spoon into the scoop of soft salted cream butter that sat in the middle of the table, sweating a little, like a tantalizing scoop of French Vanilla ice cream.  The day that followed would unravel around some adventure — watching Grandpa build an engine in the garage, dusting Mrs. Macaroon and the dollhouse that sat in the bay-window, or helping my Grandma make apple crisp.  In the afternoon, we’d make the occasional trip to Woolworths for a sundae, or to the Seven Mile Fair, where we once found a whole package of crew socks for a dollar and celebrated our find . . . only to discover when we got home that the socks had no toes or heels.  We’d been had in a terrible way, but could only laugh with pleasure at what a good story it was! 



Page from the Childcraft version of the poem. 



After a busy day, Grandma baked one of her savory casseroles, and we ate it by the spoonful, scraping the sides of our plates with buttered Roman Meal bread while Grandma gently led the conversation.  When all the dishes were cleared and the dishwasher had began to hum comfortingly, I would go to the bookshelf in their den, pick out a volume of the faded Childcraft Encyclopedias that they’d bought for their children in the sixties, and we’d settle in on the couch to read. 

I would almost unfailingly pick out the poetry volume, which was so loved, it practically opened itself to the poem it knew I wanted to read.   When I found it, my grandmother began:

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
 The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
 The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
 And the highwayman came riding—
                      Riding—riding—
 The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

“The Highwayman” was written by young poet Alfred Noyes in 1906 as he was holed up in a small cottage in Surrey for a weekend.  He would recount later that the first lines came to him in the sound of the wind, wallowing like a wounded animal as it blew across the moor.  It could have been just another disastrous weekend holiday.   Instead, Noyes allowed himself to be moved by the poetry of the weather. 

As Gram read the poem, I would follow along, looking at the drawings depicting the dandy bandit and his love, the dark haired Bess.  Carried along by both image and text, we journeyed into the lives of these violently passionate people: the Highwayman, Bess, and the jealous stableman who sets the tragedy in motion by notifying the British Red Coats of the lovers' intrigues.

Years later, I read the poem and am somewhat  bemused.  Like Noyes himself, I now read the poem with probably too much critical distance.  As a mother of two children, I wonder how on God’s green earth a tale of a tragic love affair ending in a suicide, murder and a haunting could make it into an encyclopedia of children’s literature.  As a Ph.D. in literature with a particular passion for the Modernists, I cringe at the neo-Romantic aesthetic at work in the poem, “the crust of dead English,” so to speak, that Ezra Pound revolted against in his early modernist treatises.  . . . And yet, as a poet, I am mesmerized by the near-perfect meter. 

I still feel the strong cadence of this poem's rhythm within my body as I recall the lines, even though I haven’t had it read to me for years.  As with any good narrative poem, the meter is not merely accidental — it evokes the drama within the poem — the winsome sound of the blustery wind, the loud clop of approaching hooves.   But rather than imprinting on my mind like a Lady Gaga song, the rhythm is visceral, creating body memory.  I feel Bess’s anticipation of her love, I feel the Highwayman’s anticipation of his, I feel the banishing force of wind as it gives chase to the night within the gloam.    

In reading me that poem again, and again, and again, my grandmother fostered within me a love for the lyric quality of language.  I have, in a sense, been  listening for “The Highwayman” all my life. . . even if, as I just discovered, I have never read the poem I once loved to my children.   I think I will tonight. 

Like Noyes's tragic poem, there are poems and stories of such high oral quality that they deserve to be read out loud.  Or chanted, breathed, sang, danced to, or beat out in rhythms.  Before children can learn how to deconstruct lyric devices such as rhythm, they should feel it and appreciate its capacity to tell narrative.   Fostering lyric appreciation in kids doesn't require more than bringing a little poetry into your daily reading routine, and thinking outside the box when you read it with your kids out-loud.

                                                                                     

In the next few blog entries, I’ll discuss the ways in which I have tried to foster lyric appreciation in my children.  Hopefully they are activities you find both fun and useful!