Heart and Mind and the Highest Praise I've Heard

"Heart and mind, Elise."

Her gaze returned from its most recent target across the street, back to the table where we were all eating supper. "Oh, yeah. Sorry. Forgot." And she was back, at least for the moment.

Two aspects of summer that I love are open windows and kids in the neighborhood playing outdoors. What my children occasionally struggle with, however, is that combination when we're eating supper. Or working in the garden. Or reading. Distractions suddenly swirl, and all of a sudden we've lost them, or at least a part of them, to the sounds of summer. Especially Elise, my 7-year old.

On Father's Day I wanted all of her. We were spending time as a family in the yard: we set up a croquet course, we grilled and ate supper on the patio, and we hit some wiffle balls. It was time to value our family and what we were doing. I told her I wanted her heart and her mind with us.

"Do you know that that means?" I asked her.

"Yeah. It means that you want all of me."

Yes. Yes I do. And I'm glad I had it, for at least a few hours.

Sunday was the first time I've used that term, but I see it becoming useful with a bit more frequency. It worked, and it communicated well exactly what I want from my daughters and their wandering hearts and eyes. For at least a little while, I want their eyes on us. I want their emotions on us. I want their ideas and desires to be shared with us, and I want them aware of the ideas and desires of the rest of the family. I don't just want their presence. I don't just want their eye contact. I want hearts and minds, the rest of the world be damned.

But lest I rush to claim it only as a target for them, I recognize how difficult it is for most of the adults I know to do this, myself included. But how much better would we all be, if we committed hearts and minds to a singular focus for at least a little time?

You can't do this all the time, of course. Or even most of the time. You must have the room to think for yourself, to learn from other sources, to bounce in and out of conversations and contacts both to get work done and to get play done. I've got eight windows open on my laptop right now, at least six of them currently useful. But surely there is space in the day, in the home, where others can claim yours and my heart and mind?

While meeting with someone from our church recently to discuss possible teaching/preaching opportunities, a mutual acquaintance from another part of Iowa came up. My church friend had recently met with him and made a statement in our conversation about him that captured exactly what it is I love about the man: "You know," he began, "That guy is hard to get a hold of, but once you've got him, you've got all of him. Maybe that's why it's so hard to get in touch with him: he's probably busy giving his all to someone else." I can imagine no higher praise than that.

Roy Peter Clark writes in his book Help! for Writers that "an inhibition to cut relates to an inability to select the best material." The extension of this advice beyond writing to life is clear. At times you've got to cut all but the best, otherwise the best will get crowded out. If you can't cut your phone for your friends or family who are with you, then you are giving your all to no one. If your heart is in church but your mind is elsewhere, you're probably neglecting both. When does your spouse have your heart and your mind? When do your kids? Your best friend? God?

If the answer is never, if you're giving them all Facebook-style attention, a quick glance or comment or thumbs up as you scroll through to find something else, then have you really committed to those relationships? Does quality time with them really matter?

The onslaught of attention-seekers in life can be brutal. Money, health, cooking, exercise, Netflix, laundry and that pipe that still leaks occasionally in my basement. Probably also the thousand things that a smart phone does as well. To be able to commit heart and mind requires a decision: nothing else but you matters right now. Nothing. Rather than sacrificial, this becomes freeing. There is nothing else to be done but to value the here and now.

This summer I've turned off the laptop at the breakfast table. When my daughters are eating, whether I am or not, I'm trying harder to give them my heart and my mind. They seem to like that much better than a barrage of comments like, "Just a second, let me finish this email." I still set aside time for email. Time for Facebook and Twitter and news headlines as well. Time to write, like I'm doing right now. But I've tried to carve out pieces of time where they get me, heart and mind. I find I don't miss the laptop.

After all, the neighbor kids will be out soon, and I've got to take what I can get.

The Measure of a Man

I reread the posts I've written over Father's Day weekend over the past 5 years, and a common theme is my gratitude at learning to be a man from the example my father has set. In my quest for mature manhood I often find myself lacking in traditional manly skills. As I've reflected, though, I've seen many ways I do emulate my father's lessons in my life or seek to as I grow as a father. Most of the lessons I've written about can be traced to time together on the farm. The strongest man trait he's modeled most recently, however, has very little to do with sweat or manure or tools or truck rides. 

There are many measures of being a man and a multitude of skills that must be learned. The Art of Manliness blog and Twitter feed are favorites of mine, as they document requisite skills such as handling the transition of a new baby, wrapping your hands for boxing, most effectively and efficiently using a canoe paddle, negotiating for a used car, or wearing a pocket square, to name some of the recent posts. What I have yet to see from their website, though I am fortunate enough to see in real time through the real life man who has raised me, is how to be a son when it's not easy to be a son.

My grandmother, my father's mother, has seen a decline in health over the past several years. This is not news; it is life. This is what happens, and there is nothing unique in the story. But the story is unique for those in it. I have never watched it happen to my grandmother. My father has never watched it happen to his mother. It is an age old universal tale that only becomes true through experience. 

I remember a visit I made with Emily last spring to see Grandma in the hospital after a rather significant bout against illness. We were back in central Iowa for some event, and we took a morning to go see her in the hospital. I was taken aback by the reality I was faced with upon arrival. Keeping her awake during my visit was difficult, as was maintaining a coherent conversation when she was conscious. I fell to simply talking to her while she slept for the final 15 minutes of our visit, telling her about our lives, our plans, our children's activities. There was nothing else to do. When we left, it was unclear to me whether she would even remember that we were there. I walked out of the room and felt smothered by shock, gasping with the picture of decline I had been faced with.

My father faces that weekly. Or the possibility of that. She improves and declines, improves and declines, both mentally and physically. I don't think he's ever sure what he will experience until he gets there. But he's there. Almost every Friday night. He faces that, for his mother, because that's what a man does. 

Art of Manliness website take notice: there needs to be a guidebook on how to be a son. Many stages exist in the mother-to-son relationship, but it is the one in which my father currently finds himself that perhaps requires the most. 

Up until this point, as a son you spend a lifetime being the beneficiary in the relationship. You take. That's your job. She gives. You get advice, food, concern, scolding, support, attention, and love. For both of you, the concern is for you and your well-being; the conversations usually center on you. 

Then life changes, and there is little left to take. You are now asked to give. The relationship flips; the world and the rules and the comforts of familiarity are changed so that your mother is still your mother, but not quite. You now are asked to give: give attention and advice and food and scolding, and perhaps most of all, patience and love. And it's hard. But the hard part is not the giving; after all, you've had a model for that all your life. No, the hard part is seeing your mother in a position where she can't. 

This is the position in which I see my father now. It is squarely in this position that he sits as he drives the 40 minutes of highway on Friday nights, often alone, to offer to give to his mother. He walks into the room knowing it is likely he will listen to her stories, some of which he's already heard, some of which will be repeated inside of the time of the visit. He walks in knowing that she will probably get his name right, but maybe not his kids and grandkids. And he goes just about every week, to give.

I do not love visiting my grandmother. It is too hard of a thing to love. But I value being in her presence. I value the time and energy she's spent on me, value her smile and laugh when she finds them, value the life of raising my father into the kind of father who displays for his son how to love a mother. Every time I visit I not only see and value her, I see him as well.

The measure of a man, I'm finding, is likely not found in the tools he owns, the stuff he fixes, or in what he creates. Or at least it's not only in that. Rather, the heart of a man can be found in what he does on a Friday night, as his mother awaits, offering him nothing but the opportunity to be a good son. And in that, my father measures up mightily.

Thanks for another man lesson, Dad. Happy Father's Day.

A Man's Goodbye

I thought I was free. Free from frustration. Free from emotion. Free to mentally check out. The clock had mercifully if not stubbornly reached 3:30, and I was done. Just done. But it would not be that simple.

On the last day of school, probably the last day of school for any district in the state of Iowa, June 10,  on the last afternoon, in the last officially contracted minutes, we as a staff were relegated to a professional development speaker. It was not that dude's fault. He was doing the job he was hired to do. It was a miserable assignment. And I felt miserable in the experience as well. Three hours of a speech full of philosophy I am diametrically opposed to in a room where the distraction and false energy of snacks and caffeine are not allowed made me ache for the door, for the entrance into the glorious summertime sigh of relief.

Finally, the only salvation to be had was upon us, that which could be delivered only by the big hand on the 6 and the little hand past the 3. No more. The wait was over. The weight was off. The hard part was done. But then it wasn't. Then came the hardest part of my day.

Out the back door, after almost everyone else in the building had left, I ran into my friend putting the last of the artifacts from a decade and a half of teaching into their proper place: his truck. He would not be back. He had stayed one year longer than he needed to; I always knew that this past year was a bonus year for me, one more go round teaching at the same end of the building with my friend before he retired. It was a bonus year of coffee and conversation before the first bell with the kind of man every school district needs.

I once heard a teacher who I've met but never got the pleasure of teaching with described in this way: "He has a way of making whoever he is talking to feel like the most important person in the room." I understand what that means, thanks to my friend.

And this was it. This was the official exit. All the retirement talk and summer talk and next fall talk and reflection and speculation and official retirement cake were past, and it was time to actually walk out the door for the last time. There was no avoiding the fact that here we were, two guys who had not only genuinely enjoyed working together but had also dared to be unflinchingly honest and even admit weakness to each other, both completely understanding the symbolic nature of this moment, the end, when we would both drive off and away and not do what we do together anymore. It was time to say goodbye.

What is the proper way for two men to say goodbye? I have learned how to do many hard things in my life, but this is not one I've figured out. It's always awkward, for it is generally intensely emotional and emotions are not what men do well. What do you do when you know that your time together is over, or at least will never be what it was, and you both mutually want to acknowledge that yes, in fact, this does suck, yes, I will miss the hell out of you, yes I respect you more than almost anyone I know, and yes, I am pretty damn sad? How do you communicate that, without, you know, admitting to feelings and admiration and love? Do you offer any words, knowing that none of them will be adequate and there is a chance of a quiver in your voice? Do you shake hands? Do you hug? Or do you punch them in the arm, deliver a foul stream of invective, and chuckle your separate ways?

We shook hands. Then we hugged. I'm certain I stumbled over some words, imperfect and forgettable thought they were. Then, I think, we both got in our trucks as quickly as we could so as to move on and get distracted and not linger in the moment. At least that's what I did. Because I really didn't want to feel about it anymore. Unfortunately I had to pass his old classroom on the way out. His empty classroom, devoid of any semblance of the giant of a man I walked past every day on my way to every cup of coffee in the staff lounge, coldly and passively awaited its next tenant.

I have faced this a handful of times over the past decade, and it is harder every time. People move. Jobs change. Duty calls. However much this might just be how life works, I still hate the man's goodbye. I dread it.

But I don't hate what the man's goodbye stands for. The man's goodbye is an acknowledgement that there will be a real loss because of the real quality that stood before. It reminds both that there were sacrifices made, candid conversations, life shared, honest vulnerability, and loyalty. The man's goodbye is a reminder of the consequences of putting in the time and trust with anyone: you care, you thrive, and you have something to lose. Risk, once again, equals reward. And while the goodbye is torture, it is merely the final scene in the final chapter of a masterful novel.

I'm not sure that men have an easy time being great at friendship. Men have lots of buddies. Friends are harder. Inside of us there is a need to be powerful, to be supermen, to be better than others and to pee in corners to establish that. We should not need help, for help is for the weak. We do not have problems, we are not scared of anything, and we are certainly in complete control of our homes. I know this is fiercely stereotypical, but here it stands. There is truth in most stereotype.

Friendship requires more than the beer-drinking bravado, the bombastic diatribes, and the posturing. To find two guys willing to get deeper than this, in the same place, at the same time, with the same interests, is often an act of divine intervention. Because of that rarity, I believe, we simply have little experience in properly walking away from it.

So the awkward man's goodbye stands. Though I began this post hoping to find something out, hoping to reach some answer that would ease the clumsiness of the next one, I come to the conclusion that it must be this way. For it is a loss of the valuable and rare, and one never gets used to losing those things.