There is a prologue of sorts to this post. You can read it here.
If in the month’s ahead this image disappears you’ll be able to find another one just like it by googling “yin and yang.” It represents a superior way of thinking about the world than Christianity’s borrowed use of opposites from Persian religions. I ran across the symbol in high school when reading about Taoism an ancient Chinese religio/philosophyy. The sign is composed of two fish like blob’s confined in the circle apparently circling each other through eternity perhaps. Each blog is a different color, opposites perhaps suggesting that Persio/Christian way of looking at things. But the yin and the yang which to represent a host of opposites each carry inside them an eyelike seed of the opposite fish within it. As I recall the philosophy it suggests that in human nature each apparent opposite characteristic has a seed of its antithesis within in it. Heartlessness would carry within it a bit of compassion and vice versa. Wild abandon would carry within it a speck of sobriety and vice versa. The list would be endless. Every saint would carry a bit of Satan within and even a Hitler would carry a bit of humanity. This has always struck me as a much more sophisticated and useful way to look at the world.
This post is very personal and I’ll keep it vague. It involves two of the people I love most in the world and if I were to write everything down that a moment’s indigestion woke me to think about I would be invading too far into their privacy. As a writer I’m pretty dangerous. None of us can be trusted to keep our fingers stilled and my attitude is all attitude. No one enjoys total privacy and indeed I have written about both my children previously for publication. Here’s an earlier instance with my daughter and here’s one with my son.
Like Claudia neither of them make it a practice to read my scribbling. I suspect, like Claudia, they know that they make occasional appearances in my commentary and greet that knowledge with at least mild chagrin. They have never complained to me even though intrusion isn’t fair but it is a cross they have to bear like the real “Christoper Robin” when the kids at his boarding school found out he was the son of Winnie the Pooh’s author. The same is true of anyone who makes a public comment about me or my politics. Fair warning readers!
The indigestion is what woke me up. My pride in my kids is what kept me up and prompted me to get dressed and sneak down to the lobby to write.
Its not easy having an oddball Dad who marches to the beat of a different drummer let alone so outlandishly. Fifteen elections! Geez, Harry, get a job!
After my first campaign victory (stop me if I’ve said this before) in a succession of four attempts my daughter was asked at my victory party what it felt like to have her Dad elected to the school board. She evoked many laughs when she said, “At least I don’t have to go to school with a paper bag over my head.” Ha Ha. Yeah. I’m not an easy Dad to suffer.
And Keely is my extrovert child. She joined everything and her Mother and I drove her from one activity to another at her choice for ten years before she went off into the unknown of a college across the state. My Son told me in no uncertain terms that I was never to visit his class again after I visited every class in Chester Park Elementary wearing a ninja turtle mask to hype the school’s first school carnival in memory. He was in first grade. Perhaps its no wonder that he had no use for the school system his Dad got elected to Board for the last often painful years of his attendance. His drummer and mine march to different beats.
As I drove to St. Louis with his sweet partner who is even more shy I had a lovely conversation and confirmed my son’s very smart nature. He’s found a treasure very different from him and I’m reasonably sure they will enrich each other in their swim in the eternal circle.
I haven’t even shared any of our four hours of conversation with Claudia so I sure as hell won’t share them hear on the blog but I did tell her one anecdote about my daughter, Robb’s older sister.
I began by noting that in grade school my sense of insecurity was so profound that I had resolved that I would have no other choice but to commit suicide should I ever lose my swim trunks when diving to avoid the humiliation. That was my eye of introversion in a body yearning for extroversion. I gave a couple more examples of my fear of being humiliated to further contrast my awe at Keely’s fearlessness extroversion.
The episode took place when she was a student at Woodland Middle School and she was just beginning to entertain the thought of singing. There was to be a student talent contest and she and her friend decided to perform a duet. Keely would sing and her friend Jenny would accompany her on the violin. This would be something to see and I wasn’t going to miss it.
It was an unruly audience. Unlike my memories of such gatherings both as a student and as a teacher it was oddly poorly attended by teachers. Only a few stood up their backs to the walls. It was probably no longer to force their attendance to monitor the students. I said “unruly” didn’t I? Its funny how from a crowd of a thousand poorly monitored kids around the age of 13 in a vast hall a hundred rude and mean-spirited kids will emerge the eye spots of kids who are generally good when supervised. One friend’s daughter was damn near booed off the stage while she played the piano. The principal, once my principal, stood alone along side the hall when my daughter and friend took their turn.
I was a kid who put ants in spider’s webs and ant lion’s pits. I can watch a disaster with a scientist’s detached eyes. I’m not sure if I was more a School Board member or a father as I watched my daughter lace the Roman throng with their thumbs itching to point down. I think I was mostly the father and one who had vowed to kill himself if ever he was caught with his swim trunks down. I was anxious for my daughter.
And then she sang. She was fourteen. She had a fourteen year old violinist as an accompaniest. It was not just a brave performance. It was indifferent to the causticity of the audience. However, inexperience my daughter she never missed a beat. All I could do was think about the time I had stopped during an oral book report in a quiet 9th grade English class unable to take another breath. My daughter was amazing.
And so is my son her polar opposite or apropos this post – opposite in the Tao circle.
Even the western world is big enough to accommodate more than Christian dualism. The very American saying, “it takes all kinds” applies here. My two kids make me very happy whether I’m digging in the dirt to help one plant her garden or climbing stairs on a hot humid day to help her younger brother get started on a doctorate degree eleven years after he quitting highschool with no apparent intention to look into another classroom ever again.
I could spend an equal amount of time harping on who it was that got us detoured so that we nearly got locked out of a new apartment when we arrived in town an hour and a half late and just barely reached the office where the apartment key was being held. I could. But that party has a very nice partner which is where this post will end.
