Mr. T leaves crazy little play tableaus all over the house. Constantly. He immerses himself in an imaginary landscape and lingers there, and then eventually moves to another room, another game before I’ve noticed what’s happened.

There are Zoob creations on the couch. Zoob creations beside The Beatles.

The other day when I sat in my writing chair and tried to put my feet on the footrest, I discovered this:

There’s a Crazy Bone parade on top of the piano.

Not to mention the constant explosion of pens and pencils across the kitchen table. Sometimes he uses them as art supplies. Sometimes they’re yet more characters in his games.

Does he clean up one “mess” before starting another? Why, of course not!

This drives Chris absolutely crazy. He’s one of those rare husbands who is neater than his wife. (Which is wonderful in many ways–the man knows how to wield a vacuum–but it can also make me feel like I’m a slob. Which I don’t think I am. Usually.)

I understand the need to help Mr. T take responsibility and learn to clean up after himself. But I’m a sucker for creative messes. The “I’m still playing with that” excuse works on me every time. Because he really does flit back and forth between his games. I’m always willing to let an imaginary world live on a little longer, at the risk of a cluttered living room. 

I don’t do well with enforcing the old rule: You have to clean up one mess before you start another. 

Plus, I’m home with Mr. T all day. I appreciate the fact that I have a kid who is able to entertain himself for hours–even if it means that I can’t walk through the upstairs hallway. 

So I struggle with knowing when to insist on clean-up, and when to let the clutter lie. Yes, I want Mr. T to learn to clean up after himself. Yes, I want a neat house. Yes, I want to keep my husband sane.

But I also understand that when your kid snaps together a bunch of Zoobs and forms something he calls A Galaxy of Wonder, it’s, well, wondrous.

The older two didn’t want to go. And there were a few meltdowns along the way. But it’s hard to ignore the magic of pines and a pristine lake beneath a mountain that almost doesn’t look real; family games by lantern-light with oldies on the radio; hot dinners from a dutch oven set in the coals; and comics or a new novel devoured in a hammock.

Those older two even admitted it: they had fun.

There has been a lot of new folks poking around this blog lately; I hope this post doesn’t make you run for the hills! It’s part of a little project I’ve undertaken, a year-long attempt to read twelve essayists in depth, and to study their styles. You can read more about the project here.

I’m late at posting this entry, but it’s meant more time with E.B. White, so I’m not complaining. He’s absolutely charmed me.

random notes:

In his introduction to White in The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate writes: “In 1925 he joined the staff of The New Yorker, and he maintained a lifelong association with that magazine. The persona that he created in his essays and “Talk of the Town” pieces–a friendly, gentlemanly family man, curious about nature and city life, undidactic, modest, civic-minded, mildly nostalgic and elegiac–set the tone for the periodical. At times White’s persona threatens to become irksomely bland in its genial self-effacement, but his intelligence and humor save the day.”

And in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2008, Adam Gopnik has more to say about that self-effacement: “The language of littleness and self-deprecation rises even from masters like Max Beerbohm and E.B. White, who practice competetive self-disparagement the way novelists practice competitive self-praise. I’m but a wee thing with a wee craft, the essayist says. Look to the novelists for largess.”

Well, yes. White seems to feel a bit sheepish about placing himself at the center of his writings, so he does like any polite person and puts himself in his place. Here’s what I came to realize about him: if I could play that game in which I choose three people from history to invite to dinner, E.B. White might very well be on my list. I’d pull in some bigger, flashier characters too, but I’d want White around. Because he wouldn’t monopolize the conversation, or draw attention to himself. He would compliment the home-grown tomatoes I served, and would ask how I was faring as a first-year beekeeper. Yet something tells me that by the end of the night, White would be the one charming the table with his humor, his wit, and his stories. And I’ll bet he’d even send a hand-written thank-you note.

Let’s see if I can convince you of White’s potential as a dinner guest. And master essayist.

a few lines to love:

He starts off his essay, “Death of a Pig” like this:

“I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting.”

Already you get a sense of his voice. The polite formality, the subtle humor.

“I discovered, though, that once having given a pig an enema there is no turning back, no chance of resuming one of life’s more stereotypical roles. The pig’s lot and mine were inextricably bound now, as though the rubber tube were the silver cord. From then until the time of his death I held the pig steadily in the bowl of my mind; the task of trying to deliver him from his misery became a strong obsession.”

As I’ve said before, how can you not love a man who cares so much for pigs?

“There had been talk of getting a “sensible” dog this time, and my wife and I had gone over the list of sensible dogs, and had even ventured once or twice into the company of sensible dogs. A friend had a litter of Labradors, and there were other opportunities. But after a period of uncertainty and waste motion my wife suddenly exclaimed one evening, “Oh, let’s just get a dachshund!’ She had had a glass of wine, and I could see the truth was coming out.”

Love that last line.

From “Good-Bye to Forty-Eighth Street”:

“On one of the mornings of the disposal, a man from a second-hand bookstore visited us, bought several hundred books, and told us of the death of his brother, the word “cancer” exploding in the living room like a time bomb detonated by his grief. Even after he had departed with his heavy load, there seemed to be almost as many books as before, and twice as much sorrow.”

Beautiful description of the effects of grief.

The first lines of  ”Once More to the Lake”:

“One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond’s Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was place in the world like that lake in Maine.”

I like the chatty quality of this opening, and the details.

Here’s an example of the self-deprecating quality that Lopate and Gopnik write about:

“It has been ambitious and plucky of me to attempt to describe what is indescribable, and I have failed, as I knew I would. But I have discharged my duty to my society: and besides, a writer, like an acrobat, must occasionally try a stunt that is too much for him.”

Of course, if you read the essay–”The Ring of Time”–it’s clear that White did not fail in his duty, but we’ll indulge him his humility. It’s part of his persona.

From the wonderful essay, “Here is New York”:

     “There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and aceepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter–the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last–the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is the third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.”

I fell for this quote and highlighted it in my book, but later when I searched for it on the internet so I didn’t have to retype it myself, I saw that it was cited widely. Yet those citers almost always cut out the section about the specific settlers. How could they leave out the Corn Belt boy with “a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart”? That’s my favorite part!

And look at this paragraph which appears toward the end of the same essay.  It’s quite eerie considering 9/11, and considering that it was written in 1949.

“The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.”

Can you believe that one? Talk about insight.

The following quotes are for Susan, who wrote in a comment, “Will you reread Elements of Style and note every time E.B. violates his commandments to good effect? I am out of love with him as a theorist of style but I love his writing.” For those of you who don’t know, White revised and added to The Elements of Style, which was a small writing handbook that one of his college professors had written. He wrote an essay on that professor, Will Strunk, and it does explain a few things. (And entertain as well.) In the introduction to the essay, White writes, 

“I discovered that for all my fine talk, I was no match for the parts of speech–was in fact, over my depth and in trouble. Not only that, I felt uneasy at posing as an expert on rhetoric, when the truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty and seldom with any exact notion of what is taking place under the hood.”

And within the essay, there’s this:

“The professor devotes a special paragraph to the vile expression “the fact that”, a phrase that causes him to quiver with revulsion. The expression, he says, should be “revised out of every sentence in which it occurs.” But a shadow of gloom seems to hang over the page, and you feel that he knows how hopeless his cause is. I suppose I have written “the fact that” a thousand times in the heat of composition, revised it out maybe five hundred times in the cool aftermath. To be batting only .500 this late in the season, to fail half the time to connect with this fat pitch, saddens me, for it seems a betrayal of the man who showed me how to swing at it and made the swinging seem worth while.”

Can you forgive him, Susan?

I appreciate White’s talents at ending his essays. I highlighted many final paragraphs, but I’ll share just one:

“With so much that is disturbing our lives and clouding our future, beginning right here in my own little principality… and extending outward to our unhappy land and our plundered planet, it is hard to foretell what is going to happen. I know one thing that has happened: the willow by the brook has slipped into her yellow dress, lending, along with the faded pink of the snow fences, a spot of color to the vast gray-and-white world. I know, too, that on some not too distant night, somewhere in pond or ditch or low place, a frog will awake, raise his voice in praise, and be joined by others. I will feel a whole lot better when I hear the frogs.”

Beautiful all round, but it’s the plainspokenness of the last line that gets me, following the more poetic ones. Quintessential E.B. White.

the plan for august:

I’ve been reading Pico Iyer. Very different voice from White. I’ve stumbled across a few of his writings lately, here and here, and am intrigued. The fact that he writes so often about traveling seems fitting for August. One last fling before fall.

When I tell this to my other, non-blogging friends, they nod their heads politely but with a definite air of disbelief. Meeting people I’ve encountered on the internet? How desperate can I be?

But meeting like-minded folks in person isn’t always easy. If you go into any given crowd and do like Anne of Green Gables, searching for a kindred spirit, it’s a crapshoot. Will there be someone kindred in that particular crowd? And if there is, will you recognize him or her, and will you start up just the right conversation that will make you know you were right? Maybe.

But with blogs your crowd is as big as the world. And you can lurk around in that crowd, eavesdropping on people and getting to know them slowly. If a blogger turns out to be not quite your type, you just quietly quit showing up. On the other hand, it’s easy to find people who share your interests. First I might lurk around on homeschooling blogs, and those lead me to homeschoolers who like to knit, and those lead me to homeschoolers who like to knit and also like to take photos, and those lead me to homeschoolers who like to knit and take photos and plant kitchen gardens…

Kindred spirits!

So last week Tara of tara.mama.wendy and I finally met up with our boys at Adventure Playground in Berkeley.

Magical place, magical afternoon. We had so much fun talking that I sat in the sun without sunscreen, and that’s saying something. We talked about homeschooling and about photography and about little boys who like to play with guns. Tara was as sunny as her Flickr photos and I felt like I’d known her for years.

This weekend I headed over to the HSC homeschool conference. I’ve gone to this conference for years, but this was the first time in a long time that most of my homeschooling buddies weren’t there. Their kids are graduating from homeschooling; they’re moving on. My own H wasn’t there–he’s not a homeschooler any more. There was just a tiny handful of us from our support group and on Friday night I was sad. But Saturday morning there was an email from Molly of A Foothill Home Companion. She was coming down for the day. Could we meet up?

Why, yes we could! We could even share a pizza and a couple of beers as the sun went down. I felt pretty lucky to be able to chat with Molly. Anyone who reads her blog knows how vibrant and creative and generous she is. In person, even more so–plus, I got to hear her laugh. It completely turned around the conference for me, made it something new.

Wish I’d taken a picture.

As we talked, Lulu came off and on, and sat by my side. After we saw Molly off, Lulu walked with me back to our hotel room. “She seems like someone you’d like,” she said.

Smart girl.

*my desk these days*

The workshop is called Nurturing Young Writers. I’ll be speaking for an hour-and-a half. Yikes. I’m sure my family can sympathize with anyone who has to listen to me ramble on for an hour-and-a-half.

Well. I do plan to open up the workshop in the last part, and have the group brainstorm writing ideas and audiences for their kids.

Anyway, getting ready for this workshop has been good for me. It’s forced me to look at my thoughts on how kids learn to write, to organize and outline them. And the exciting part? There are some ideas here that I haven’t seen elsewhere. That might even be original.

Everyone should have a brilliant friend, and I have a few. One of the shiniest is my old college friend Emily, who designs websites for writers. On Sunday we trawled the farmer’s market, following her adorable and likewise quite brilliant three-year-old and letting her eat too much ice cream so we could talk. I described my book idea to her, and she had some very interesting thoughts about how I might share portions of the book as I write it. To see how it goes, and, as they say in the industry, to create buzz. (I don’t really like that phrase–unless I think of it in terms of bees: working together, singing in a low hum.)

Which made me think of you, my faithful blog readers. If I were to share some ideas about writing with kids, I wonder if there are any that might be of particular interest to you. These are a few topics I’ll be exploring in my workshop:

• Transcribing kids’ writing–how it can be a powerful tool for helping kids develop their voices as writers, and how we can use it for years, until kids develop fluency at writing.
• How the main goals of a writing education should be helping our kids develop their writing voices, and helping them enjoy writing. And how to let kids lead their educations as writers.
• How the mechanics of writing–spelling, grammar, penmanship–should be of far less importance than developing a young writer’s voice. And how those mechanics can fall into place naturally through transcribing kids’ writing, and helping them enjoy writing.
• How creating a literate environment in your home can have a major impact on kids as writers. How kids can explore the craft of writing through casual, spontaneous conversations about the books you read together, and the films you watch.
• How to help kids find genres and styles of writing that interest them. How to make writing topics of any personal interest. How allowing kids to select their topics is much more powerful than assigning them.
• The importance of audience in motivating kids to write. And how to find audiences for homeschooled writers.

So, what do you think? Are there any topics here that hold some interest for you? I’d love your feedback.