Saturday, October 31, 2009

Peace Begins With You

I was lucky enough this week to experience one of those special moments that makes you walk away wondering how that just happened. I was sitting on a stool strumming my guitar as my class packed up to go home. As they finished packing up they came to the floor in front of me to see what we would do with the last five minutes of our day.
"We don't know that song Mr. H," Patton said, looking up at me.
I explained to him that this was because I was just messing around. Playing random chords.
"I've been thinking we should write another song," I said. "Maybe one about how we are thinking about making a difference in our community and trying to promote peace."
I started strumming a new chord combination (Bm - G)and out of nowhere Atira sang out "We all work together."
"Holy cow, Atira! That was awesome," I said. "That fits perfectly. Let's all sing that together."
"We all work together," we sang.
Suddenly someone else (was it Roman?)sang out "We help one another."
"Holy Cow! Another perfect line," I said.
Within seconds yet another person sang out "To make the world much better." I couldn't believe it. In just a few minutes they had written the chorus for a song of peace and social action.
I went home and played around with their three lines and changed them a bit to make them sound "better." I brought this back in to them the next day and sang it for them and they all stared at me like I had a second head.
"Mr. Hass, I like it better our way," Reese said. A chorus of Yeahs filled the room. I looked at my revisions and then back at their original lines and realized that they were absolutely right. Their version was much better.
Over the next two days we continued with our social action projects. The final fifteen minutes of each day was spent with me sitting on my stool playing our chords over and over again in a constant loop and humming the melody for the song. The kids worked at their tables to write words, lines, and verses for the song. As they finished each one they brought it up to me and we sang it together. It many cases it fit beautifully. In other cases they needed to add or delete a few syllables and went back to their tables to work it out.
What I wound up with was twenty-two pages of writing to patch together into a song. I took it all home and worked hard to make take these pieces and make them a whole. Harper and Muluken took turns singing each draft with me to see if it worked. Finally, I was able to use common lines from many of the kids' writing (thankfully there was some overlap!) to put together our first verse. I took this back in to the kids the next day and asked them, after hearing and singing that first verse, to write yet more lines for me. They were so excited to write more. I told them they needed to save some of these verses and make their own songs. There was SO much songwriting going on!
Again, I took their writing home and worked to patch it together to finish the song. The result was a song with 23 different lines. Thirteen of these lines came directly from the kids - with no changes. Three of them were lines that I slightly altered to make fit. And, finally, there were seven lines that I wrote to help the flow of the song. I'm very proud of how I was able to honor their words and their work because, honestly, the ideas they came up with were just spectacular. My only regret is that there are a lot of lines I had to leave out to avoid a song that would rival a full-length Grateful Dead jam in length.
And here is the final result. I only wish you could all hear it!

Peace Begins With You
By Mr. H’s Second Grade Classroom
October 2009

Peace begins with you
It’s in the little things, the little things you do
It isn’t hard to do
Follow your heart it will help you through – so you may know

Just what to do
And that it doesn’t matter who is who
And you watch what you say
Because it hurts so many people – in so many

W - - - - a - - - - a- - - - a - - - -ays

(chorus) We all work together
We all work together
We help one another
To make the world much better

And all this could be
Become something of a reality – you could go
To a nursing home
Offer up your friendship and a song
Collect money in a jar
Donate dog biscuits, they are full of carbs – that is the

W - - - - a - - - - a- - - - a - - - -ay

(chorus) We all work together
We all work together
We help one another
To make the world much better

We are singing this song of peace
Knowing it is up to you and me
We can all be free
We just have to learn – learn to

Agree ---- e ---- e ---- e ----e

(chorus) We all work together
We all work together
We help one another
To make the world much better
To make the world much better
We can love each other
To make the world much better

Childish Adult (Dad)

Monday, October 12, 2009

H T T T O T R M

On October 11, 2009. We HTTTOTR [Hiked To The Top of Table Rock Mountain] It was a very long hike. It took about 2 hours to hike 3.2 miles up the mountain. Table Rock is the first mountain I ever hiked that I can remember hiking. I was the one that kept on guessing wrong every time we weren't close to the top. Most of the time we weren't close until one time we where very close, It went all up hill all the suden and then we knew we were close to the tip top of the mountain.



The top of the mountain was solid rock. There was about a 3 centimeter stream running along the blackish, brownish, tan rock. When we got to the top we ate our lunches. We gazed out over the site of the smaller and the higher mountains we saw around us. It was a longer way down the hill if you went a different way than you came. So we went the way we came so we could climb up the rocks that we had climbed on the way up.


POSTED BY

HARPER Adultish Child

P.S. I can prove I went up if my dad knew how to get pictures from his phone to his computer!

Saturday, October 10, 2009

The Lost Season

To say that I grew up a baseball fan would be an understatement. In St. Louis, baseball skirts the outer rim of religion. Cardinal baseball embodies not only the heart and soul of the city but the hearts and souls of many of the people who live there as well. Baseball in St. Louis provides a significant piece of the city's identity - who they are.

I learned to love baseball the same way many children do - from my father. He was a lifetime fan who could sit and tell endless stories about Bob Gibson, Mike Shannon, Ted Simmons, Curt Flood,and many others. He attended games at old Sportsman Park and was there for the very first game ever played at the new (now old) Busch Stadium. He would recount magical games or seasons from the glory years of the 60's with remarkable attention to detail. It meant a lot to him - Cardinal baseball - and I admired him for it.

Growing up, he and I watched or listened to hundreds of games together as I began to grow my own list of names that would forever be a part of me - Tommy Herr, Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee, Bruce Sutter, Terry Pendleton, John Tudor and on and on. I would live and die with the team. To watch them fall would make me feel as though I, too, had lost. It would depress me. But to watch them win would mean an emotional high that those who have never truly loved a team could never comprehend.

Not too long after I became a teenager our lives were forever changed. My father suffered a number of physical and medical crises that you would never wish upon even your worst enemy. Left unable to walk or leave the house for weeks at a time, he lost much of what he loved and enjoyed most - running, bowling, church, work. From my perspective, all he had left was his family and baseball.

It's hard to grow up healthy and able-bodied in the presence of someone who has lost so much. You feel a sense of guilt(I believe it's called survivor's guilt). This I know, it is very real. Over the years I avoided sharing stories about cycling or running or any of these things for fear of depressing him or making him feel jealous (concerns that years later I was able to see as ridiculous). It was around this time that we started to find that we didn't have that much to talk about. He didn't have any new experiences to share (outside of his sickness) and I felt uncomfortable sharing my own. So all that we had left was that which we started with - baseball. Suddenly baseball took on a whole new importance because it provided us a common thread. Something we could still talk about and share.

It's a wonderful bond - baseball. That is, until it is the only one you have. For those last few years we had together we talked a lot of baseball. A lot of baseball when we should have been talking about other things. More important things. I think over time I came to mistrust and perhaps even resent that baseball bond. I saw it as something that, while it seems on the surface to pull them together, keeps fathers and sons apart.

When Tricia was pregnant with Harper I was constantly asked, "What do you want, a boy or a girl?"

"Oh, it doesn't really matter to me," I would say. But secretly I wanted a girl and sure enough we had one.

A few years later when Tricia became pregnant again everyone would say,"I bet you're hoping for a boy this time!"

"Oh, it doesn't really matter to me," I would say. But, again, I was secretly hoping for a girl. I was afraid of having a boy. I was afraid that the day might come when the only thing we would have to talk about was baseball. I imagined that maybe fathers and daughters could do more than this.

The Cardinals lost tonight. Projected as favorites to reach the World Series, they somehow managed to be swept out of the first round by the Los Angeles Dodgers. Though something as inconsequential as a lost baseball season no longer means the world to me, I was sad to see their season end. While I was watching them struggle to string together hits and record key outs, all four of my kids were upstairs watching Free Willy - oblivious to the game or its significance to the city I still love. And now it has hit me that I was wrong to blame the game.

My father and I had so much more than baseball. I know that now because as the years move past I remember more and more of the small things we shared and I become more aware of the countless things I learned from him. But, with that, I don't deny that baseball was a very important bond between us. One that I could never truly regret. In all honesty, if I could somehow see him one more time I think I'd choose to go to one last baseball game together and just sit - and talk.

This season is lost and now is time to look ahead to the potential of the new season that lies ahead. Perhaps this time we can all share it together.

Childish Adult (Dad)

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Looking Ahead to Better See the Present

This morning I read a friend's blog and he was writing about how we, as adults, sometimes fail to recognize the wonder and significance of everyday moments because we become entangled by our own worries and responsibilities. His point was that children rarely suffer from this. They are more than able to become genuinely excited over the smallest of things.

I connected with this because I spent much of this past summer reflecting on parenthood and my all-too-frequent inability to enjoy every moment. I worried that I spend too much time worrying about the kids (trying to guide them into becoming compassionate adults) or wishing away time ("I'll be glad when they're out of diapers", etc) to stop and just enjoy the wonderful times we have together. Why can't I stop and exclaim, as Tim quoted in his blog, that "Today is the best day of my life!"?

Thinking ahead to a time when the kids are grown and gone, I wrote a poem last June about how I might regret this and wish I could return to these days to talk about silly things at dinner or hear the sound of infectious giggles during a tickling attack. Even though the poem is purely in draft form (it's been sitting unfinished for months now just waiting for the right time to finish and revise) I'm going to go ahead and share it because although the craft is sloppy the theme is dead on.



The Vision is This

Me
sitting at the breakfast table
overlooking a flawless green backyard
landscaped with flowers, bushes, and trees
Large stones, carefully placed, conceal the lasting injuries
of a play set from years ago

I sit inside
surrounded by walls and tables
filled over the years
with photographs
Birthday parties, summer vacations
Proms, graduations
Weddings

Absent now
is the sound of jubilant feet
barreling down the stairs,
squeezing through the front door -
screams of delight heading out
to find a new day’s adventure

I get up to look
at all the photographs
and I see faces sculpted into say cheese smiles
I’m reminded now
of the big events that serve as markers
along the timeline of our lives
But what I want most are the details
that have long gone silent

The house is growing dark
and there are chores to be done
Yet, I stand looking at each photograph
searching for the small moments
I thought I would always remember -
but that I soon forgot

The dinner conversations,
the things that made us giggle
uncontrollably
just before bedtime,
the weight of a tiny hand
in mine

But the photographs are empty
They show only
what is at the surface;
Unable to conjure up that
which is most missed


Childish Adult (Dad)