I wrote this last Wednesday at a place where I had no internet access. Now it's Sunday night, and I'm posting it.

For the Sake of Writing Things

There’s a degree to which the master plan has backfired. Did I want time to read and write this summer? Yeah. Did I want four hours a day to read? That, my friends, is a challenge to anyone’s reading stamina. I’ve also had writing time, but I’m finding it difficult to be both a consistent reader and a consistent writer. And the evening demands of dinner, clean-up and laundry have been increased by the need to water all the flower and plant beds. Is it possible I lamented the rains of May and June?

So I’ve finished Part I of The Idiot, and I’ve been looking for some poems to read. And as I was thinking about poems I’d like to revisit, I thought of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Afternoon on a Hill” – I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! Maybe it’s “shall.” No matter. The point is that I’ve gotten the sense that Edna St. Vincent Millay’s biography is as essential to her writing as her poetry. I don’t think that’s true, but that’s an initial impression. And when I look at the pages I’ve dog-eared of The Idiot, they relate pretty directly to Dostoevsky’s biography. For whatever reason, his thoughts about life and death, what it means to live and die, are more pleasing to me because of Dostoevsky’s imminent execution and last-second reprieve. I suppose this gives his arguments about capital punishment a little something something that I haven’t come across before.

Coming back to the summer plan backfiring, I should get at the “to a degree” part, because there have been unintended consequences, good ones, that I would gladly exchange for the time I might have spent trying to effect an air of intellectualism. Foremost among these is the significant decrease in Kate’s fits. Perhaps she is being told “yes” more often, but I don’t thik that’s exactly it, given that we have not had ice cream every day. I think the bigger issue is that she’s hanging around older people and being accepted, and that she’s learning to live with not being first all the time.

Now I usually like to keep the trivia of family life out of this blog, but the generalization that has struck me is that a lot of kids are really nice. I can’t get over how patient and kind the 12 and 13 year-old girls at the pool have been to both Emma and Kate. Not that I should want to get over such a thing. At the same time, the high school and college-age lifeguards have been genuinely, authentically and really really nice. Again, it’s not that I’m surprised, but that I’m so happy to see the effect everyone this summer has had on my girls.

The broader point is that I haven’t had to work hard at all at believing in the goodness of people, especially young people. As a teacher, this deepens my sense of the essential humanity of the kids I teach. Many of them are giving joy to younger children this summer, or trying to perfect swimming strokes, diving contortions and other important skills that define themselves. What should a teacher do but try to help these kids achieve what they want to achieve, or to help them want to achieve things they don’t yet know they value. At the same time, a rejection of the things I value – literature, writing – is not a rejection of valuing itself. My job is to communicate the essential human value so they can embrace it when circumstance allows them.

How nice it is to sit in a beach chair in the parking lot of the pool at 9:30 in the morning, a breeze blowing, the screen obscured by light pollution, the sounds of kids making swim meet signs in the midground. Moments like these, man, moments like these.