Childhood and The Zone

Two weeks ago, my son had his first serious opportunity to play the guitar.  After years of standing in front of me and beating on my strings, he has had his turn to embrace an instrument of his own and find his way through the deep roads of the fretboard, the strings, bridge and pick.  There is much ahead in his journey to even determine if he wants to play the guitar but for now he has one of his own to lean over or hug as it rests on his right thigh.

Chords remain a work in progress.  The fingers and the spatial arrangement have not visited each other frequently enough for him to feel adept at putting together a chord and his hands still have a bit of growing to do before we get into a discussion of bar chords or the challenge of reaching the furthest strings.  For the time being he has beaten on his guitar along with everyone else, a contribution of vibe or passion to the more structured strumming and chord progressions the rest of us follow.  While we were proceeding through Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" his head was tilted back, his eyes were closed and his pick-hand was well over his head - a tribute to Pete Townshend before he even discovered the man's technique of idiosyncrasies.  He seemed to be in complete rapture and lost in the moment.  As I beamed at him, his eyes opened and he dissolved into a state of self-consciousness.

"What?", he asked, his rapture dissolved and chased by a newly discovered timidity.

I assured him that all was well and did my best to assure him that -- as far as I was concerned -- that moment of lost bliss was just what the guitar was about.  Since that moment, however, I have wondered about what it would take to introduce him to the concept of the zone or peak performance. I recall my own efforts to get into the zone when I was learning to ride the bicycle. My first was a gleaming green with a long banana seat and high handlebars like you'd associate with a chopper. There were no training wheels in the effort.  This was strictly old school and the effort to find my balance was a lengthy one.  History would probably say that the learning was briefer than I recall but I rode up and down a stretch of yard that ran next to the house, wobbling along until I completely fell over until, bang, I had it.  For some reason I fell upon the word "Cordoba" (after the Chrysler) and ran that word through my head repeatedly until gravity pulled me off the bike and dislodged my mantra.  I would resume again and again, the word stuck in my head until I was balanced and able to bring myself to a controlled stop rather than a fall.  I do not recall if I did a full lap of the yard or if I just felt that I, after going all of 10 metres without falling over, just assumed I had the bike thing all sorted out.  It was, however, a stretch where I was in the zone as I tried to master the bike.

The guitar was much later for me and while self-taught, there was a bit more self-critique and a lot more inner dialogue than I would have had if I started as early as my son.  At this point, he is not too concerned about precision or proficiency - he just wants to bang on the guitar and enjoy the social aspects of sitting amongst "the men" to indulge in the time they share.

I want to find a way to make him familiar with that peak experience.  Regular experience of it will provide him with the compass to his passions and his purpose.  It will also clarify his definition of himself and the things he does well or may be meant to do.  It does not have to come from playing the guitar or music.  I just want him to be familiar with it and have the conversation with him about what it is, how he got there and what it might mean.  I suspect that it will wait, but in the meantime, I'll file moments like this one to tell him about these experiences and ask him to reflect on how he felt during those moments.

Coaching

For Calgarians, soccer season is an eight week interval between the last icy gasp of winter and the start of summer holidays. This year, rather than subjecting us to the discomforts of standing against a brisk wind making us wish we had another layer of down, a blast of snow seized the first week of my son's U6 season outright rather than leaving any questions about how cold it might get before it was determined that the kids were better off with their normal, sedentary evening routines.

For week two, we congregated at the local community centre where nets are aligned in pairs across the soccer field and went through the routine of scanning the team app that we signed up for to determine who else was on our children's team and who the coach was. My son knew that he was on the same team as one of his closest friends from daycare and further to that I knew that among his teammates was the five-year-old most likely to do a 10-metre knee slide across the field with his shirt pulled over his head and beckon the crowd's complete adoration. I'm not kidding - it is the kind of thing that sticks in your head. Last year, this kid was the only one wearing cleats, and he showed up every week in an authentic Real Madrid kit complete with Ronaldo's or somebody's name and number. 

I scanned the roster on my phone and found the name of a "non-player" and as the queries about who was coaching mounted, a lean sixties-ish guy with a silver beard acknowledged his name and added that he thought he had made it clear that he said he wasn't available this year. Fortunately enough, he decided to come out to watch his grandson play and he would pitch in.  He turned to me and asked, "You know anything about soccer?"

"I've kicked a ball." I didn't bother to add that the last time I kicked a ball, about ten days earlier, my efforts redefined the word "errant" and left me humbly chasing my shot up the road to throw the ball back over the fence it sailed over. I played organized soccer up until I was 15 and I had played pick-up off and on. As for coaching, I knew that I would have to take turn at some point but I thought I oiled wait another year or so. I was going to definitely miss one week and that was enough for me to rationalize putting it off another year. I was not sure if I could muster the extroversion to elicit the excitement among the kids to play or get the focus for drills that I would expect myself to aim for despite it still being the time of, "Same team, same team!" and "When's snack time?"

I was ready to coach and pitch, though feeling a bit of stage fright about trying to drill them on things for the half hour of practice that preceded a loosely officiated game. Twelve hours after the fact, it has just dawned on me that .I could start them off with some stretching and that vaguely remembered game with the numbers or something. I don't even like stretching.

Instead of taking the pressure role of leading the kids in their early paces, I seized the opportunity to lay out the cones that separated the field into units for each of the four teams. I grew hesitant with each step as I acknowledged that nobody else was laying out cones for any of the other teams. A voice in my head chided me for not jumping in and taking the lead even though the current volunteer as coach was not too reluctant to accept the task that was thrust upon him.

"You go in net with these guys. Okay?"

I immediately started to wonder about how competitive I was going to be and with each save I wondered if I was going to hear the hue and cry of parents who would complain the game wasn't fair and that I ought to let the kids-only opposition score enough to keep it fair. I was a hockey goalie growing up and those same instincts took over quite quickly. Still, I made a point of letting a goal in early to put the other team ahead before knuckling down and stopping shots aggressively. I thought I was getting a sense of how our team was doing, but they did not score as much as I had thought. There was one little pocket rocket, with plastic shin pads the glimmered with a metallic blue sheen, who had pretty good speed and a good sense of footwork with the ball and he got some decent breakaways on me and scored a few. On a separate occasion, I pulled Gabriel aside to point out a crestfallen opponent who was taken aback by a push Gabriel delivered. As the ball hit the twine behind me, the coach gently chided, "You! Penalty for parenting."

Snack time followed and I was off the hook and managed to escape the wrath of parents who thought I was playing too hard or too well. Instead, the little pocket rocket came up to me and said, "I score three goals on you." He was cute and I liked the way he played, so I gave him a fist bump instead of replying, "Two. You scored TWO, kid." With that, I was off the hook for this week, but I suspect it will be time to dust off a stretching exercise and a few games to get them enjoying some drills.

Adding Each Thread

      My apologies for opening with a mind-blower but, I fear being wrong about love.
It is not a matter of misjudging the entire element (love) and its power. I trust it and recall frequently the occasions when my French-speaking grandmother, in halting English, would gather our attention to assert word with the reminder that it is above all things and that it will be an answer, a solution and your bedrock as well.

     With my grandmother as a reference the nuances or calibrations of love's expression dog me and leave doubts. There are my insistent doubts about my over-protective impulses. Even though my son, signalled to me, with a head-long dive off the sofa when he was barely able to hold himself in a seated position, that there would be a trip to the emergency room to set a broken bone in my future. Despite that, I still let a vigilant, perhaps paranoid, bark slip whenever he is straying into probably minor risks. The vigilance does not express that love as well as other ways available, at least not in the immediate term.  Beyond that there are, again, the nuances of the long-term consequences of that preemptive attention. It is probably better to let him get into trouble and learn his lessons the hard way - as long as they aren't hard lessons.
     Apart from the vigilance, I have come to realize not to presume adequacy in expressing myself to my son. There may be self-imposed limits that are hard-wired into me without my recognition. Conscious of the largesse that has come his way as the only child, grandchild, and nephew, I am wary of gifts and want to ensure that he truly appreciates what he receives as an expression of a friend's or relative's fondness for him and the value they give to the time they spend with him. Yesterday, a dear, older friend whom Gabriel and I regularly lunch with on Saturdays gave a smallish package in a large yellow envelope and was advised that it was something for him to share with his parents rather than open immediately.  On the way home, I thought it was best to modify Gabriel's expectations so I told him that the gift was our friend's way of expressing his affection and his appreciation for the time we spent together. When we arrived home, Gabriel asked if he could remove the package from my bag and open it.  Rather than being the keepsake or heirloom that I feared might turn Gabriel off or need some time to earn its value in his eyes, I turned out to be a package of four large chocolate chip cookies. Right in G's wheelhouse.
   Despite my amusement and relief that the gift was something tangible for a five-year-old, I am remain conscious of the value of our time together and prefer to give him that and share a variety of experiences with him that broaden the connections between us. One aspect of my fear about being wrong about love is the assumption that one connection or association would be enough for us. Whether it is the bedtime reading, the station-to-station sprints that are a part of our journeys, the drowsy chats about music as consciousness gives way (finally) to sleep, the work we do together or more, I still wonder what the next thing will be to connect us and create another link in the bond between us. I believe that relying on only one or a handful or the tried and true amongst those connections makes too much of an assumption about the adequacy of a connection. I do not want to presume one of those connections is a high tensile connection and learn much, much later that it was gossamer thin and inadequate for the task of preparing Gabriel for the rest of his life and assuring him that I have his back.
     The sheer abandon with which he delivers hugs and kisses and "I love you's" to those around him, me included, is reassuring but I do not want to settle for the possibility of creating a single tether between us, when a web can connect us and reassure me of a link to him as time passes and the bonds of certain books, for instance, are outgrown. The thing I am conscious of as he grows is the need to express my love of him and my value of him in a manner that grows and evolves as he matures and finds new ways to express his desires, his feelings and himself in a range of ways that are as articulate and varied as he needs.

As Memory Begins

I have been conscious of the curtain on my past prior to age five, a stage of my life that is murky and staged among the relics of fading Kodachrome images and even black and whites, the most vivid being of me bathing in a tin washtub at my grandparents' in Quebec.  Even the first year of school in 1972, at age 5 1/2, is vague, but the period around the start has long marked the distinction between remembered and unknown.  There are vague memories - one of toddling lost in an airport or train station - but that among others may be from the realm of dreams rather than remembered experience.

With Gabriel now at that cusp - where memories he will be retained into adulthood - I have become more conscious that the time we spend together is actually getting stored away in his thoughts to leave more lasting memories. These current moments are not going to be buried in his subconscious to lay dormant to well up during his dreams and leaving ineffable traces on his consciousness.

At this point I can confidently say that he will know me for the sprints that we have from point to point and that he always wins when we are walking somewhere.  He will know, by rote, my paranoia about traffic at intersections and through parking lots and my insistence that we hold hands. (I have no idea when I will relent and trust him to walk alertly at my side.)

These clear memories are taking root as our bond becomes more tangible and a point of reference for him throughout his growth in the years ahead. If he takes up running more seriously, he will definitely remember my coaching moments about not looking back when he runs, and instead to listen for the clamour of gaining footsteps and heavy breathing to know if a competitive threat the approaches, or to watch for looming shadows if the light and route affords him that.

Last night, the recall was being wired with several sprints on the sidewalks to the train station and then from our stop onto home and I was filled with this contentment that I was not just getting him home but making memories as well.

When we got home Gabriel may have been picking up on my reflection as well.  He wandered into the office that was his bedroom after he was born and mused about it being his room.  I played the role of docent and told him where his crib used to be, though I forgot to tell him where he was rocked every night.  I did disclose to him, however, the occasion when I proudly hoisted him high out of his crib and rattled his head off the spinning ceiling fan.  I still remember the look of shock and shattered trust as the startling pain impacted him repeatedly and it was good to have that moment to fill in the past a bit and let him know that Dad is humbly fallible.  (I might have even given some context to one of those subconscious memories that are lurking about.)

The comforting realization is that apart from the routines that are familiar to him, there will be more likelihood that one-off events will now stick with him without repetition.

Dad Still Has Work To Do... and a Chance

Monday mornings. Need I say more? For all the times that I might get a chuckle on this blog from a moment or an anecdote about Gabriel's personality, growing pains, experiences or various rates of progress, it is time for me to be transparent and fess up as well.

I had to leave home early for a meeting and Gabriel asked me if I could build some Lego. It was 6:30 am and maybe it was on me for scheduling a meeting so early but when Gabriel gave an exasperated sigh, I rose to the bait. I cited the attitude in the sigh, fed up with his early wake-ups and his refusal to do much constructive (eat breakfast or get dressed) when he did.

I immediately regretted and chided myself for not letting him get past his sigh and accept the disappointment of me not being available to spend the morning with him.  That may not have been possible but it would have been a lot better for me to let the sigh go and see if he could work his way past it.  Instead I showed him a lousy way of dealing with disappointment and instead of having the patience to show him a calm to model, I blew it.  It is going to take me that many more calms and detached occasions to absorb his frustrations and see him through to the other side and his own calm and perspective about his emotions and how to manage them.

You never know when the big moments are, but it is easy to acknowledge that patterns or constellations that snowball.  There is this sense of frustration and failure and when he rolls his eyes or empties his lungs with that sigh of exasperation, I have this anxiety that it is all slipping away -- that these moments are going to be the highlights he looks back upon most often; these will be the occasions that he struggles to unpack because he needs to work that much harder to make sense of them and find a positive sense of himself despite the other moments. I worry that he will look to define himself or find satisfaction in possessions and objects rather than strong relationships and good deeds. I worry that my efforts will set the stage for a tumultuous adolescence and more battles, little communication and sending Gabriel on a quest for a more tolerable male adult to hang out with.

Easy to blow it or blow it out of proportion, I just have to figure out which I'm doing.  Not that it would be impossible for me to do both at the same time or to create a vicious circle between those two things.  When I'm not bouncing back and forth between making a mess of things or panicking about screwing up the job, I'm trying to overload a moment with a maxim or life lesson. [sigh]

Today was an up and down day. Gabriel was tricky to get into gear and out the door in time for the commute to music class but once he was out the door, he fully committed to the word, "Boogie," and stayed in gear as we powered up the hill from our place to the train station. The bonding over our Saturday morning island between the train and the bus brought the day or the week back to the state that I would love for it to be at.  As I write this, I dread the occasion when Gabriel turns that routine down at, you know, that age. I tell myself that it will happen, more in an effort to brace myself for the possibility than a specific case of pessimism.  (I will cop to a broader, more general case of pessimism.)

The rest of the morning unfolded relatively well. Music class ended with him in a state of lethargy or restlessness and I'm trying to determine if it is boredom with a class that is going too slowly. Two days earlier, my wife and I were puzzling over what to do about music classes for Gabe, who at 18 months surprised me by identifying different arrangements and orchestrations of the same song, but now has lost interest in his Kodaly classes. An hour later, he was arranging coins on Nadine's iPad cover and telling us what notes the coins were.

Okay.

He has expressed boredom with the other part of the Saturday routine, pizza with friends of mine that he has been dragged to since the bucket phase, and I was content to set that aside for the day and get on top of a few chores that I had on the to-do list.  He was good with that and when the urge to get to the loo prompted a detour, we found ourselves sitting down for burgers for lunch. I was conscious of the battles I was losing -- his preference for condiments over the meal and his sudden unfounded affinity for salt on everything -- when an elderly man say next to us.  He indulged in Gabriel for a moment but settled in for his lunch and a brief reading of Jeremiah from his well-worn and post-itted (is that a word?) Bible.  After he finished reading he packed to go and stood between the tables to tell me how I was doing.

Basically, he said he had worked with a lot of parents who didn't know what they were doing and kids who were lost because of their parenting and added that Gabriel and I were great together. To be frank, I cowered at the compliment and wanted to defer it in every way possible.  I write this not in an effort to get a few more variations on, "No, no you're fine," but to give an insight into the discomfort I felt at such a compliment at the end of the week I've had. I turned to Gabriel to more or less tell him he didn't have to agree with that and he gave me a confident nod and a thumbs up. He is incredibly generous and far more forgiving than I am. Hopefully, he'll give me a better chance at this than I give myself.

Preludes to The Talk

"You're the one that's telling him."

"Yeah, yeah."

Each time that exchange occurs with my wife, I shrug it off, confident that it will be a while yet and that I'll stick with the basics, be as honest as possible and give him the age-appropriate information he needs without building up some myths about storks or such. Whenever the talk comes to mind, I recall the children's book on the topic I received, highlighted by a successful sperm dressed in a tuxedo and top hat and a vague cartoonish illustration of man and woman in bed under a blanket the keep me in the dark.  I wonder if the top hat takes the questions of speed and motility off the table in favour of fusing the presentability or chivalry of the man with the one in a million odds that the successful sperm overcomes but those are the challenges for a writer of children's non-fiction.  (I still might want to track down that book, though.)

There have been regular signs that The Talk is growing nigh.  There was an expression of his desire to marry his cousin that needed to be addressed and then there are discoveries that leave my son in wonder at the changes that are already occurring in his body.  The reality is that there will probably be a series of smaller talks rather than a Joycean information dump with long meandering thoughts stringing out across my consciousness as I tiptoe through the pubescent minefield and deke around my discomforts and facts with the incompetence and transparent bluster of a press secretary.

Two nights ago, however, my son slipped away from the table and returned with his Star Wars book, one that features long accounts of the original trilogy of movies.  He plopped the book on the table and asked us, "Do you know what my favorite part of Star Wars is?"

We shrugged in helplessness at the myriad answers that we could choose from and then he pointed his finger at the book, "Princess Leia's costume."

I never took to Princess Leia.  The whole buns on the side of the head thing lost me in 1977 and by the time the slave costume came to be in 1983 I had moved on.  For my son, however, after a steady diet of anthropomorphic trucks, OCD animals, empathic sheep, mischievous dinosaurs and talking trains -- to mention a few of the characters he has encountered in film and book -- Leia has been an oasis of femininity.  The appeal of the slave outfit to a five-year-old, though, raises a red flag or nine.

"She doesn't want to be wearing that."

"Why?"

"She's Jabba's slave."

"What's a slave?"

(Thankfully, there's no dog collar on her in his book.)

"A slave is forced to do something they don't want to.  If she doesn't do what Jabba wants, he would throw her in the pit with the... with the monster."

"The Rancor."

"Yes." (He does know more about Star Wars than me.  And he knows that he does.)

I continue, "She's not dressed like that because she wants to be.  You have to ask if she wants to be dressed that way."

The questions stopped at that point and there could have been a lot more I could say about how to treat women or regard them but that will have to be for a day that seems to be coming a lot sooner than I had anticipated.  I did not go on a long harangue on the treatment of women and the need to look beyond the exposed skin, and hopefully I can keep that one in my back pocket for a lot longer. My realization is that there will not be one talk that will tidy up the topic and let me walking away clapping the chalkdust from my hands. It will be an ongoing dialogue that will never close or end.

For Small Work or Small Workers?

One of the things I enjoy about condominium living is the low upkeep.  No lawn mowing, no raking leaves or any of the yard work that I am quite content to steer my time away from.  At the same time, though, there is a whole raft of responsibilities and chores that The Lad manages to avoid as well.  He is starting to get more attentive about putting his dishes in the sink and dishwasher as required but the bigger chores seem to have been evaded so far.

Fortunately, he has no reluctance to help and if there is lifting to be done or work at his grandparents he is prompt to pitch in.  Today was a rare occasion when he had some work to do outside. After a decent-sized dump of snow, our parking stall required some attention before the end of the day and I started digging up the snow in the stall.  The one next to ours was vacant as well, so I took on the extra space and set about pushing the powder aside and blasting at the icier pack that was at the edges of the stall and threatened to leave our car and a distinct slant when it finally parked.  I took a break from that for a moment to assure a neighbour that the shovel I was using was the common one and beat a path so she could get her tiny Toyota Echo out of its stall and into the cookie dough of Calgary's streets.

When my wife came home at the end of the day with the Gabriel waving enthusiastically from the back seat, I knew I would have an assistant even though most of my work was done (and about to be covered by the parked car.)  Gabriel was eager to get some shovelling in and headed inside to get the smaller common shovel, which is, oddly enough, just his size.  He threw himself into his work on the vacant neighbouring stall as we cleared that out and with gas to burn after that, I turned our attention to the stall that the Echo had vacated a few moments earlier.  As dusk approached and fell, the clear skies brought a brilliance to the occasion that made the work and day feel much warmer than they were.  As we continued, I asked him to check with other people in the parking lot if they needed the shovels or needed some shovelling done, conscious of hogging the tools of ignorance to ourselves while other residents fought their way out.

We were good and free to carry on with our work.  There was even a moment when Gabriel enthusiastically shouted out, "Teamwork," with as deep a voice as a five-year-old can muster.  As darkness fell, he was undaunted and was eager to keep digging away wherever we could even though we had four stalls done at this point of the evening.  After a while, he complained that he had a pain in his back and I suggested that it was muscles that he was not accustomed to using.  He accepted my explanation despite a precocious skepticism about much that I say and continued on.  The offer of supper did not even ease his efforts.  He had a full head of steam and was in no mood to stop.

In the end, I hope there is a sense of connection with the people that he shovelled stalls for, even if the work goes unnoticed.  He spoke about the exercise he was getting, but I hoped that my message about helping the neighbours slipped past his skepticism as easily as the suggestion about the pain in his back being a sign of good work.  I'll wait and see.  In the meantime, I'm left to wonder if it is a coincidence that the second shovel is just his size.