Slice of Life: Improper Planning Leads to Better Performance

    It's Tuesday, and Tuesdays are for slicing.  Anyone is welcome to join us through Two Writing Teachers, slicing, sharing, and commenting on other slices! 

As Julia and I headed for a much needed shower, we tasked Garth with finding a place for dinner. The requirements? They could take us soon and they could provide us with some substantial nourishment and a cold beer. Maybe even two of them. It had been a long day of driving, cleaning, and moving Julia into an apartment. 

"So where are we going?" I asked as I combed my hair out as quickly as I could. 

Garth showed me the menu, and it looked great. Almost anything would. 

"Is it close?" Julia asked, slipping her feet into her shoes. 

"Five minutes."

In about ten minutes, we pulled into what looked like a cute Italian restaurant. There were tables outside, and it was cool enough to enjoy an outdoor meal. As I surveyed the group of four sitting near the door, I wished I had a fork. They had way more food than they could possibly eat, and it all looked divine. Then I noticed the four open bottles of wine and the coolers that accompanied them. Uh oh. 

"Is this BYOB?" I asked the waitress. 

She nodded.

"So you don't serve anything?" I said, my vision of a cold IPA dissipating. 

We did a quick search of any establishment nearby that might sell beer or wine, and nothing was too close. 

"You'll be fine, Mom," Julia said. 

"True," I said. Who needs a beer after a hard day of moving into an apartment with the previous tenant's stuff still all there. Not me. 

"Let me see what we have in the cooler," the hostess, who was one of the cutest people ever, said. "Sometimes you get lucky."

I wasn't sure what she meant, and I settled into my healthier option of water with lemon. A few minutes later, she came back to the table with three mostly finished bottles of wine, and proudly poured me a glass of chardonnay. "It's on the house," she said, "since we don't have a liquor license."

Dinner was great, my half a glass of wine was perfect, water was healthier, and the bill was a lot less than anticipated! All was good, and the next morning I was much readier to go than I might have otherwise been. 

Slice of Life: I have SO much gratitude for strangers!

    It's Tuesday, and Tuesdays are for slicing.  Anyone is welcome to join us through Two Writing Teachers, slicing, sharing, and commenting on other slices! 

In many ways, this slice is gong to read as a affirmation in the goodness of people in the world. I know there are lots of stories that would contradict this, but my daughter Clare has had back to back weekends of testing the goodness of humanity and coming out way in the green. 

Last weekend, she went hiking in northern Maine with her sister and friends. Because everyone except Clare was headed back to Boston and Clare had to get to Manhattan, I offered to subsidize a one-way plane ticket from Portland to LaGuardia. What a great idea it seemed like until the fog rolled in an hour before take off time. Clare settled into the Celtics game at the airport bar, making friends with other people who were watching their flights get delayed and then canceled, and we went through a variety of options to get her back to Hell's Kitchen. Each option fell apart for various reasons. In the end, Chris and Mary, her new friends with a daughter in college in Maine, rented a car. Since they were headed for Tribeca, they dropped Clare off at her apartment after a 5 1/2 hour ride together. I loved that Chris had Clare send me a picture of his driver's license. Is this in case you disappear? I texted. Precisely, Clare responded. Clare now has two more members of her fan club who live across town from her, and they have a card of gratitude and a gift on the way to them. 

This past weekend, Clare tapped into the kindness of strangers once again. In the excitement of going out with her friends, she left her phone on the NYC train. The phone with her license, credit cards, and debit card all in it. She called me in a panic, apologetic and teary. Don't cry for something that can't cry for you, my husband and I repeated to her, working hard to calm her down and convince her that even if she didn't get the phone back, it was all replaceable. We put a stop on all the cards and plotted how we'd get her a new license. We figured that the Apple or AT and T stores in the city would be happy to cash in on a kid who needed a new phone the next morning, and we'd see how much it would cost. 

(Have you noticed that no one thought to call the phone????)

In the morning, my friend suggested looking at Find My iPhone. Duh. Of course, we should do that! The phone was in Long Island and seemed to be staying in one place. I put it in lost mode, and was prompted to enter a phone number to call if found. Guess what? My phone rang within a couple of minutes. Hello?!?!  said a man's voice. He told about finding the phone and waiting for someone to call it. He was so happy to finally know he'd get it to the owner. One of Clare's friends lives not far from where Otto was working and she picked up the phone, sent it to the city with her roommate, and Clare's phone and credit cards were back in her hands in time to get dinner. 

I'd like Clare to take a weekend or two off of counting on strangers for rides and returns, but her experiences have restored any lagging faith in humanity. How incredibly grateful I am to a few people I will probably never meet. Maybe this post will inspire anyone who reads it to keep the kindness chain going, as it really saved a girl I love! 

Slice of Life: Adding skills to a foundation of Swiss cheese

    It's Tuesday, and Tuesdays are for slicing.  Anyone is welcome to join us through Two Writing Teachers, slicing, sharing, and commenting on other slices! 

My youngest daughter Cecily is home, having completed her freshmen year of college, and she is on the teacher prep highway. Until her camp counselor work begins, she is working as a sub in the schools, and she made me chuckle today when I came home. 

"I had to support kids in math today," she said when I walked in. 

My silence kept her going. The truth was I is I'm fascinated to watch Cecily become a math teacher, assuming that she heads toward elementary education. Math has always challenged her, and she's had a lot of experience with tutoring, alternative strategies, and filling in the Swiss cheese-like gaps of her math understandings. 

"The kids were all working on adding fractions with unlike denominators," she continued. 

I'm not sure when Cecily mastered fraction addition that involves renaming them, but I'm sure it was not in elementary school. 

I winced, and I stayed silent, knowing that she had more to say. 

"I don't understand how they can teach these kids how to add fractions with unlike denominators when they don't understand how to convert them from mixed numbers to improper fractions," she said. 

I nodded. I'm pretty sure that my older daughter who works for a dermatologist would have told me to unwrinkle my forehead or I'd need more Botox. 

"They're teaching kids skills they aren't ready for. That's what happened to me, and it took forever to understand it because I kept trying to learn new things when I didn't have the things I needed to learn them figured out..." Cecily was on a roll. 

Amazing what my daughter who is just shy of 20 understands about learning and foundational skills... Who knows if she will stay the course for teaching, but I think she'd be a really good one. 

Slice of Life: A (sort-of) validating email

   It's Tuesday, and Tuesdays are for slicing.  Anyone is welcome to join us through Two Writing Teachers, slicing, sharing, and commenting on other slices! 

For those of you who missed last week's post, it's been a long week of living through Covid. Headache? Yes. Sore throat? Yes. Lethargy? Big time. And the brain fog? I've had SO much time and I've gotten SO little done. 

What was so for me, and for others I've talked to, is that I don't believe it, or I don't want to believe it. Yes, last Tuesday morning, I felt like the cold that had been brewing since Tuesday night was getting worse, not better. And when the person I'd had dinner with on Friday night texted that she'd tested positive after the SAME TIMING, I still was in denial that a second line would show up. (It did.)

The true validation happened when this email showed up in my mailbox from the restaurant where we'd been. 

None of us were happy to get this email, but there are so many mysteries about Covid and where people have gotten it that it almost felt like a resolution; since three out of the four of us having dinner came down with it at the same time, I don't think we were the super-spreaders. That being said, it does make me wonder about how to stay safe and what is and isn't okay to do! Moral of the story for me: Stick with eating outside. 

Slice of Life- The Weekend Was Great...

   It's Tuesday, and Tuesdays are for slicing.  Anyone is welcome to join us through Two Writing Teachers, slicing, sharing, and commenting on other slices! 

What a great dinner out with friends on Friday night. And a great day on Saturday catching a friend's track meet after spending time with my mom as she recuperates from her hip surgery. 

And a nice day on Sunday playing a round of golf and picking up some basil and parsley to plant before an afternoon excursion with two of my girls. 

Maybe a developing cough should have worried me more late Sunday afternoon...

And now I'm ready for some binging recommendations and have no excuse for not slicing since I'm stuck at home for several days having experienced the dreaded double line. 

Writing will be on the agenda! Open to other suggestions! 

Slice of Life- Appreciating language and music

  It's Tuesday, and Tuesdays are for slicing.  Anyone is welcome to join us through Two Writing Teachers, slicing, sharing, and commenting on other slices! 

For the last eleven Aprils, I am struck by how difficult it is to change from slicing every day to slicing every week. Even right now, at this moment, as I am on the keyboard on Tuesday morning with the luxury of time because of vacation, something that I did every day -- every day--  challenges me to get going. Once a day felt so much easier than once a week. I could go on with maybes and possibilities, but I'd love to hear if others experience this phenomenon. Maybe it belies the importance of daily writing workshop... In any case--

Alice, Camila, and I had finished an arm workout, and we were deciding what/IF to do anything else. I was visiting Alice at her home in DC, a visit we'd both looked forward to for a while since I had not been able to come to her husband's memorial service. Her daughter, Camila has been working from home since her knee surgery a few weeks ago. Camila was up for anything since her body was craving exercise, but Alice was iffier. 

"I've been trying to take some of the classes in Spanish," I said, and Camila was instantly intrigued. She wanted to know what dialect. 

"I can barely keep up with the subtitles and recognize the 3-2-1," I said. "I have no idea."

Camila wanted to know, and we pulled up Camila Ramón on my Peloton classes. (Camila, my friend, LOVED the instructor's name!)

Once the music got going, Alice, who was in the adjoining kitchen, came right back in. 

"What is this?" she asked. Alice grew up in Chile, and Spanish is one of several languages she knows. She had no problem pinpointing the country in South America through the instructor's dialect, and she tried to explain the nuances to us. 

Alice didn't take another workout class, but she danced and sang along in the adjoining room. Watching her, Camila (my friend) and I had much less trouble pressing through the repetitions, even though it was our second class. 

"Now this is good music," she said several times. 

Writing and reliving this moment reminds me of the importance of language and music for bridging gaps and creating joy. 

Slice of Life: Somersaults for a how-to lesson

 It's Tuesday, and Tuesdays are for slicing.  Anyone is welcome to join us through Two Writing Teachers, slicing, sharing, and commenting on other slices! 

"You're doing an observation?" I asked as the principal walked into the kindergarten classroom where I've been coaching and working with the teacher and students. "Now? In writing?"

I knew that she'd been trying to get in for an observation for a while, but she'd been aiming at word study, and not writing. 

"Is that okay?" she asked. 

"Sure," I said, thinking about Susan Kennedy's analogy of a duck she wrote about in one of her March slices. I was working hard to look calm and collected on the surface, but my brain was spinning fast.

The teacher had a lesson to teach. I had planned it and written the demonstration text. We were in the beginning phase of a How-to unit. I knew we'd talked about her leading the lesson, but I'd given her the piece before the weekend. What was it about? I was working hard to remember. 

"What do you want my role to be?" I asked. "I've been coaching in here hard. Sort of co-teaching."

"Can she do this herself?"

"She should be all set," I said. 

"Then let's see," she said. 

The teacher called students to the rug and headed my way with the demonstration text that was still the one I'd written which is when I remembered why she'd been so ready to be the leading teacher as opposed to the back-up: the how-to involved teaching someone (who would be me) to do a somersault, with the teaching point around what steps were missing or needed to be clarified. Great. 

I took out my hair clip and handed my glasses to the para in the room to await my instructions. Warning: If you ever write instructions for yourself to do a somersault, make sure you remove those accessories! Also, I had not written to tuck my head, another key step in doing a safe somersault. 

And as one of the adults pointed out after the lesson and my demonstrated somersaults in the middle of the circle, you probably want to consider who gets the backside view of you before you push off with your feet because, well.. yeah, they get quite a view...