Summer Bribes

When I joined my DNA with my husband's, there were many unanswered questions. Would my recessive blonde genes triumph over his green eyes and dark hair?  Would our kids inherit his more mathematical and logical mind?  Would his laid back attitude trump my more tightly wired list-making one?  No matter. Those were all things we had little or no control over.

But I did feel certain of one thing:  our kids would be avid readers.

When I think back to my childhood, and the one my husband describes, we both loved to disappear into a world of books.  Reading took us to new places, requiring only imagination to color in the lines or draw the landscape.  

I fell just a little bit more in love with Bob when he first described his boyhood self to me as a kid “buried in a book.”  That’s when I knew, among other things, that he was the man for me.  Naturally, we would create a little cache of eager beaver readers.  Forget nature—that part was all about nurture, right?

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Oh, hang on a tick, no one in my household is illiterate, no one is using rope for a belt or wears cardboard shoes.  All four of my kids have a decent grasp on current events.  But much to my great sorrow, they don’t read for pleasure.  So if you are one of the lucky people whose progeny devour books like Halloween fun-size candy bars, you can stop reading now.   We need not feel the sting of your smugness.

I got through July and I put my foot down. Summer was half over! The tide had to turn.  I announced to my 13 year olds that they would read or lose their allowance.  Read beyond their summer reading assignments and, well, there would be a new article of clothing in it for them.

Admitting this two-pronged “punitive plus bribery” approach to making my kids read, feels a little like standing up in an AA meeting and announcing that I’m an alcoholic.

But I figure, if I out myself, maybe some of the rest of you won’t be so hard on yourselves.  You’ll abandon the unproductive search for where you failed, after years of modeling solid recreational reading habits, countless bedtime stories and dedicated visits to your public library. It’s a jungle out there in the world of modern childhood— the concept of reading for fun today feels more like being the Victorian bathing costume in the Miss America Bikini Contest--- its just not as sexy as its technologically entertaining competitors.

Bribing kids to read?  Horrors, say the ghosts of child librarians past.  I wasn’t beneath using Skittles as a reward for potty training.  Is this really any different?  Isn’t regular reading as essential as proper pooping if you’re going to thrive in this world? 

As an author I have the pleasure of knowing and working with some wonderful people in the book business. So I canvassed a few industry folks and came up with a stack of current YA books.  I’m no dummy.  I’m not going to try to force-feed Jane Austen right now.  I chose the Harry Potter-style lane. Every crack addict knows you need to begin with a gateway drug.

“All Our Pretty Songs” by Sarah McCarry was first up, a new YA summer entry that got great reviews.  My girls looked over the cover, their summer freckles furrowing as they read the flap; Cool Hand Lukes, those two, careful not to display too much overt enthusiasm.  An eyebrow raised in interest.  The lure and hook snagged in the fish’s mouth.  Success, I thought to myself, displaying my poker face.

I gathered titles like “Social Code,” “Fan Girl” and “Prep School Confidential.”  These books also had wonderful cover art to sweeten the offering, a short skirt here, a mysterious kissy face there.  Hah! Take that you addictive TV series, you seductively shot  “Gossip Girl” and fake blood strewn “Vampire Diaries” episodes! Yes, yes, shame on me.  I do permit them to watch these shows, but I’m what you call an “almost-everything-in-moderation” kind of mother.  Current pop culture has its own important place in adolescence. 

 

The books arrived.  And so they read.

Here we are now, in the early days of August.  Just before lights out, the three of us tuck in, we open our books, stretch out our legs on the bed, the moths beat against the screens in the hushed dark outside. There’s a bullfrog or two, singing baritone with all this recent rain.  OK, OK, so I over-dramatized the scene a little, it does feel sorta triumphant.  And it’s blissfully quiet inside, no vampire victims are screaming on TV, no Park Avenue prepsters are tossing their highlighted manes and huffing away on their Tory Burches.

There is only the flickering of the theater of our minds.  Only the sound of we three drawing breath.  We are reading.  Pure happiness.

Perhaps we will work our way to iconic titles like “The Wind in the Willows,” (although that window has probably passed) “Little Women,”  “The Hobbit” or any of the endless classics that could enrich their sponge-like minds.  Or not.  Is it important that my girls have read Thackeray or can recite sonnets of William Wordsworth or stanzas from William Shakespeare?  Or do we march on now, in the full glare of the information age, with a morphing view of what it means to be well read and well educated?  Quotes and poems and answers lie but a keystroke or two away now on Google.  Do studying Latin and Greek make one especially erudite?  Or obsolete?  What is the future of the “great books” and how will that definition change through the generations?  Who is writing the great books of our time?

Sigh.  All these questions!  I just don’t know.  What I do know is that my girls are reading.  They are marinating in the pure pleasure of delving into a real, live, paper paged book.  And yes, they will redeem their promised reward.  Fair is fair.  A deal is a deal.  They’ll pick a cute top or a skirt at Target as we head out of the mountains after Labor Day and begin to brace for the return of school, chauffeuring and schedules.

 

But here is the thing that gives me hope.  It’s the reminder that all of that foundation laying, all of that work we did as parents in the reading department, lurks somewhere inside like the herpes virus, just waiting to flare up.

 

My 19 year old asked me for book recommendations this summer—she actually asked ME!  And please do NOT tell her I’m writing this.  Aware that I could scare her off by lending her my more literary faves, I quickly pulled down choices like Tina Fey’s “Bossypants” and “Gone Girl.”  I slipped in “The Light Between Oceans,” and that clever Sloan Crosleys “I Was Told There’d Be Cake.”  Finally, I thought I’d dazzle her with Mindy Kaling’s “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?” just to prove my cool factor is intact.  I must have smiled all the way to bed that night.

 

So take hope ye mother’s of children connected to their cell phones and computers.  Don’t despair you parents of instagrammers and Facebook friends.  I share this as a tale of courage that somewhere, around the bend, you might just witness the payback, all those years after the initial investment.

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WHAT MY MOTHER IN LAW TAUGHT ME

These are some of the things I know to be true about my mother-in law:

• She believed without a doubt that her four sons were perfect.  And even if they weren’t, she never said otherwise in public.    

• She taught me to set up the coffee maker in the evening so all you had to do was push a button in the morning.

• The definition of a 1950’s era lady, she wore her Revlon Moonrise Pink lipstick at all times.  Like most of us, she was never fully satisfied with her hairdo.  

 

• Her signature saying, “It only takes a minute,” applied as equally to doing four loads of laundry or whipping up a steak dinner, as it did to driving from Detroit to New York to visit her grandchildren. 

• It was her personal philosophy to never say a bad word publically about other people. 

• Homemade chocolate chip cookies were her calling card.  They had verifiable magic powers to change the course of an illness, heal a broken heart, brighten up a new home, refresh a friendship, thank people, wish a Merry Christmas or just simply say “hi.”  To know Frannie Woodruff was to have eaten one of her ultra thin and crispy chocolate chips, the secret of which she liberally shared -- extra butter and cake flour.

• She was an early convert to “transition” glasses, which meant her Jackie-O size  lenses were usually a shade of dark purple, even when indoors.  Although her sons teased her, I now realize it was a clever way to have “eyes in the back of her head."

• No matter what she ordered at a restaurant (usually Fettuccine Alfredo), when it came, 90% of the time, before she even tasted it, she remarked that she should have ordered what we did.

• I’ve tried to imagine all the places she went in the pairs of white and black formal gloves that she gave to my daughters for dress-up, including one elegant opera length kid leather pair smelling faintly of smoke.

• She knew bank tellers, grocery clerks, pharmacists, hairdressers, T.J. Maxx employees and just about everyone else by their first names.

• Raising four boys in the 70’s who played every sport imaginable, she inexplicably cooked only one package of frozen corn at dinner, causing them to develop a lifelong habit of eating too fast.

• She knew the names of every one of our neighbors in all of the cities we ever lived and kept up with some of them—adding them to her Christmas card list-- long after we’d moved.

• She worshipped butter, whole milk, and cream sauces.  Her sister Lynnie bought a framed poster of a stick of butter and Frannie coveted it so much that she dragged Lynn to every Homegoods store in the greater Detroit metro area looking for its duplicate.  In the end—they agreed to share it.

• She could not have told you what NPR stood for and did not listen to it.

• She danced the Charleston like she had rubber bands for legs and enthusiastically taught my children how.

• She was an avid reader of mass-market fiction.  We both shared a secret love of Sidney Sheldon.

• Bob and I moved to nine places in 25 years of marriage (seven were domestic) and she was physically there for all seven.   In each house she would unfailing set up the kitchen (my version of plunging toilets after an intestinal virus) and unpack boxes with me from dawn until long after the kids went to bed.  I always gave up first.

• She was such an enthusiastic and regular patron of TJ Maxx and Marshalls that on her 70^th birthday, her local store had a nametag made for her.

• She never spent a second worrying that she needed to fulfill herself, find her passion or broaden her horizons, and she could not have accurately defined the word “feminist.”  She was 100% happy being a wife, mother and the “World’s Best Grandma,” although she never would have worn the T-shirt out of the house.

• Never once in my presence was she able to work the TV controller, program the VCR or operate the cable box.  She did, however, have a grasp on the volume button.

• She set a gold standard, real life example of the word “devotion.”  Watching her move through the world, I learned many important things that go into the secret sauce of being a wife, mother and good girlfriend --  not just in the placid times, but when the going gets choppy.

• She taught me you could drive a car with your left leg up on the console, a coffee cup balanced on the dashboard and the seat belt alarm circumvented by clever buckling.

• She was the oldest sister of three girls (like me) and two brothers.  Watching her interact with her siblings was my preview for how that bond would further strengthen, long after the kids are grown and flown.

• The famous story of Frannie -- one Pappagallo shoe on the flank of their black lab as she extruded a long stream of black plastic garbage bag out of the dog’s butt (he had escaped and eaten a neighbor’s garbage AND the bag)  -- became an iconic metaphor in our house for some event, issue or what-have-you that just won’t end.

• Her cornflower blue eyes and signature dark “Dawson” brows and lashes were passed on to her lucky, lucky boys. (Why is it always the boys who get this gene?)

• She was fortunate enough to die exactly the way she would have wanted -- in her own home, in her own bed, surrounded by her devoted husband and her beloved boys, and the repeated assurances (not that she needed them) that she was the most loved, most wonderful Mom in the world.  And she was.

Rest in Peace Frances Dawson Woodruff – 1933 --- 2013

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The War Bike

There’s a butterfly scar on my left knee that I refer to as my war injury.  It’s the legacy of a spectacular crash into a metal telephone pole support, while riding what my sisters and I fondly called “The War Bike.” 

 

The War Bike had been my mother’s childhood transportation in the years following World War II.  The wobbly, ox-blood frame had big, fat tires (not the chic beach bike tires of today) and an ungainly basket on the handlebars.  Think of bobby-socked British school children riding along a country road in the 40’s. My legs were just a touch too short to sit down comfortably, so I spent a lot of time standing up and pumping the pedals.  Riding it felt a little like piloting an ocean liner. 

 

It’s amazing that the bike survived all those years in my grandparent’s garage to make it to our little center hall colonial in Delmar, New York.  Objects today have a half-life of a nanosecond.  We throw something out with a dent or a scrape.  People were much thriftier back then; they repurposed things, recycled and re-used.  


Photo by Shane Henderson.
Riding the War Bike somehow connected me to a glorious past as I studied American history in school; one with freedom fighting revolutionary battles, brave Clara Bartons, the storming of Normandy beaches and concentration camp liberations.  War heroes were our country’s legacy.  They became leaders and achieved greatness back at home during peacetime.  In the 1960s of my childhood, we viewed ourselves as a country on a giant uptick, the defender of liberty, the right side of the cold war, a legacy of the Greatest Generation, of Ike and Kennedy and champions of world-wide liberty.  The War Bike stood for all of that, in some weird, inchoate way. 

 

In the waning years of the War Bike’s utility and our childhood fixation with it, another war was rearing its head; and older brothers were sent from our neighborhood to Vietnam when their draft numbers came up. That war came into our living rooms on TV and in “Life” magazine images; the weary GIs in bandages, naked children running from the burning village.  It was a very different conflict than the sweeping global wars that had preceded it and citizens protested, loudly questioning its purpose.  That criticism began to rip at the seams of America. 

 

When the young men and women came back from Vietnam, our nation marginalized their service.  We muted their experience.  It had been a divisive war, with no clear sense of victory. It simply wound down, with a heart-breaking black and white death toll.  

 

With Vietnam, there had been no national pulling together, no Victory Gardens or gas rationing, no Pearl Harbor attack to rally around.  And in its wake, we somehow skipped the welcome home.  Serving your country, enlisting in the military, had gone out out of vogue.  Veterans learned to pack their uniforms away, avert their eyes and shush up if questions arose.  You talked about it only in the right company, or not at all. We let down a generation of young people who returned.  We let down their families, their wives and mothers, their siblings and children, all of whom got a front row seat to bear witness to the ugliness of untreated internal wounds.  The psychological damage.  We didn’t know how to fix what we couldn’t see.  It was more comfortable for our nation to ignore their damage, their scars and their service.


Photo by SrA Christina Brownlow.
I don’t recall what finally happened to the War Bike.  It was eclipsed one birthday by a bright orange ten-speed with ram’s horn handlebars.  After that my mother’s bike was forgotten; an unfitting, embarrassing relic for a pre-teen girl. 

 

But dredging up those memories of my old self on the War Bike leads me to wonder how my own children view the concept of war.  What is their perception of serving their country?  How will they judge the present day conflicts with the benefit of hindsight and history?  And how, in the long run, will they treat those who have come home requiring a lifetime of assistance?  

 

With an all-volunteer military today, our children don’t have to ask themselves if they are willing to lay down their lives on foreign soil in service to their country.  And when I personally ponder the question, I must admit it is a sobering sacrifice.  As a mother, I’d have to think long and hard about that.


This Memorial Day, as we honor those who have given their lives, their limbs and their mental health and well-being when their nation asked them to go, let’s all take a moment to reflect on the real meaning of this holiday.   Regardless of your politics, our veterans and their families deserve our nation’s respect and gratitude.  We owe them the best chance to re-take the stage of their lives when they return home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Take a moment of silence on Monday to remember them, and to remind your children and neighbors just what that means.  And then do something.  Take action.  It’s the best part of what it means to be an American.  Give time, give dollars, learn more, discover what families have served in your town, investigate what organizations are helping vets at the grassroots level. Volunteer.  Give back.  It doesn’t take a huge investment to show a veteran that their sacrifices count.


Photo taken by Stefan Radtke at Stand Up For Heroes, 2012, Remind.org. 

One place to start is www.bobwoodrufffoundation.org.

 

                                                

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