I've been re-reading Ann Lamott's book Bird by Bird the last few days. And I want to write. That's primarily why I picked the book up - out of of hope that it would kick-start me into a more regular pattern of writing. I've found little to write about over the past six months - the only blog posts I've been motivated to write have been about my father, my mother, a basketball season, and my writing failures. All worthy topics. And all prominent in my mind. But I think that's a lie in some ways - it's not all I've found to write about. There have been bits here and there that I always intended to get down but never did, bits that are either lost forever or that will mercifully poke their heads out on a random day yet to be determined. I just couldn't make myself get those words down.
This has been a summer about reclaiming who I am and who I want to be. I don't know if failure is the right word for who I've been over the last several months, but disappointment probably hits close to the mark. Or dissatisfaction. There have been victories; don't get me wrong. I've enjoyed the good. I've had fantastic evenings with my wife, commenting on the complexities of Tim Riggins' character complexities on our weekly Thursday night Friday Night Lights dates, one episode (and gin and tonic) at a time. I lived a great basketball season with my friend. I think the classroom is going well. Friendships are strong. But I cannot help shaking the feeling that I am not who I want to be. Too many late nights in front of the television. Too much fatigue, mostly created by late nights in front of the television. No regular prayer life. No regular reading life. And no regular writing life. I could never make myself do them, daily, those things that I know I most wanted to do. I could do them for a day or two. Maybe one a week for a string of weeks, or a standout week of 3 or 4 times. But the success would lull me into a well-earned day off, which turned into three, which turned into 3 or 4 or 7 straight days of bad eating and empty living in the spare minutes when I could have had so much more.
This was going to be a week of writing, for instance. Finally. I had been waiting for the summer to start up again, to really start up, to just get down words, a few at a time, each day until I found something worth saying. And summer came, and every day got filled. With what, I don't know. Trips to the post office. Dishes. A most maddening war against the cell phone industry that I was ill-equipped to fight. Books. A sermon. Hikes. Naps. Lots of naps. Notes I was supposed to write weeks ago. There was always something else. But this week - this was the week. This was the week that my kids were at church camp all day long, and I was merely at home, just me, no guilt at all for ducking out into my office and doing whatever it is I wanted to do, which is to write words like these. I will write every day, I told myself. I will read my precious Ann Lamott and her quips about the writing life, and I will think, and I will get something down.
But today is Wednesday. I have not written every day. Honestly, it's taken a Herculean effort to write today, these words. I wanted to do so many other things first. Take notes, for instance, on the Ann Lamott pages I've read already, and jot down a list of things I could write about from those pages. I had to shut the book in shame, getting out of my comfortable recliner, all warm from my nap, and sit down and get the keys moving. And I think back and wonder, where did my week go? Where did all that writing time go? It's been a worthy week in many ways. I got stuff done. Vacation planning, for instance. We leave for the Black Hills in a week and a half, and I had been "too busy" to do research and logistics. Not so, now. I can tell you train times and parking fees at National Monuments and give you 5 different options for horseback riding. I've kept a relatively clean house for my lovely wife, who doesn't have the luxury of a season job providing summer hours at home. I've hiked the beloved lab. I've taken extensive notes over 1 and 2 Timothy. I've prayed, another activity I've been desperate to do. And I fired the final cannon shot in my cellular provider war (I hope), a shot more to make noise than to do any real damage, a shot signaling a cease-fire where we'll drunkenly flip a coin and blindly draw up new territory lines in the part-time peace treaty.
All of this to say, that even when I'm not wasting time, it's still hard to find time to do what I want to do. But not impossible. It's not impossible today, and it won't be impossible in the middle of January when I'm coaching 3 games a week and teaching all day and holding on to the waking moments I share with my wife and daughters. It simply comes down to a decision. Today I write. Today I do what I say is important to me. Today I act on behalf of who I want to be.
Tomorrow is another thing entirely. I fear tomorrow. I fear not making it to the screen, and not making it into my prayer journal, not stringing two days together so that I can make it three. But I cannot handle tomorrow. Just today. And today I wrote honest words.
This is hard, of course. And I don't mean writing. It is hard to do anything that makes us who we want to be. It is hard to make time, to make yourself act, to decide that the idea is only real if the action makes it so. A line I remember reading from Bird by Bird while I was distracting myself from not writing was this: "The evidence is in, and the verdict is you." Or something like that. I want to go look and make sure I've got it right, word for word, but I know if I do I won't make it back to this screen for a good twenty minutes. But the idea seems appropriate. We are the verdict of the evidence we've lived. You are not who you want to be without doing the things you say you do. Some of the things you say you are, or want to be, are hard. If you're lucky. For me that is prayer and reading and writing. And it will always be hard. But today, for a short half an hour, I did it. And these words are the verdict.
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Saturday, June 17, 2017
Summers are for Fathering
We live a very seasonal life here in the Dykstra household. The life of a teacher always will be, particularly a teacher who coaches a little as well. There are ebbs and flows to our seasons; but for my daughters and I, the summer is ours.
Summer is for fathering. I do not ignore my responsibilities or excuse away the other seasons; however, I know that the summer is prime time. Our time to eat breakfast together on the patio. Our time to play in the yard. Our time to grill and bike and swim and hike and read every day in the recliner right after lunch in a pile that I hope never gets too sweaty or too crowded to change locations. It is summer when we will talk about everything and nothing, when I challenge them to grow, and when they challenge me to slow down.
Summer has always been the season of fathering in my life. While my father is not a teacher, I was a student, and the place for a boy out of school in the summer months, whether he is a young boy or a boy old enough to think he is no longer a boy, is on a farm. I never really thought about it until discussing my opportunities with my girls in the summer, but I know now that so much of my time with Dad was from the summer months when timed slowed down and we were suddenly together for most hours every week.
A lot of summer was for work. I know that at first my "work" was tagging along and serving essential management duties, but eventually I was taught (and told) to get my hands dirty. Dad bought me a couple of bottle calves to take care of one summer, a precursor to eventually being charged with upwards of 30-40 young calves at a time. There was work we did together, and work I simply got pointed to. We shoveled our share of manure together. I walked beans a time or two. We baled hay on many a July afternoon, the equitable distribution of labor involving me on the rack stacking, Dad curating my language with every baler breakdown. Eventually summer was for factory work as well, as I worked with Dad on the midnight to 8 AM shift the summer before college. Farm work is where I wanted to prove my worth, and factory work is where I wanted to prove my manhood.
I worked, and Dad worked harder, but summer was also for play. On some summer days there was enough margin to randomly shoot the BB gun together, competitively mocking each other's accuracy. We took aim at sparrows, tin cans, burned out light bulbs, glass pop bottles, fence posts - whatever was handy. There were evenings of wiffle ball in the backyard. There were church softball games that I tagged along to, playing catch with Dad in between men and learning how to talk the game, and compete, and that Dutch Reformed blood runs the hottest, and that even sometimes pastors say shit under their breath after a bad at bat. And there was the annual end of summer trip to Adventureland, where there were no responsibilities, just play, and Dad daring to do what none of us could - the vomit-inducing Silly Silo that makes me dizzy just writing about it.
Summer was for setting an example. I learned by watching, never aware at the time that I was learning. The summers were not centered around keeping me entertained, they were scheduled based on what needed to be done. So I learned how to ride in the truck, sometimes talking, sometimes not, always with the volume up for "The Rest of the Story." I learned how to patiently wait for a cattle tank to fill with water without needing to be entertained. I learned how to talk to men, hard-working blue collar men, the kind who weld and run hardware stores and farm on neighboring land, and I learned it's important to be willing to have the time, to slow down, to shoot the breeze and listen to gossip and stories and rumors and weather reports with these men rather than demand a service and then move on. I learned how to raise a single index finger on the steering wheel to greet oncoming traffic.
Summer was for shared meals, primarily lunch. Most days that was on the farm, with grandma cooking. But some days, lucky days, days I never saw coming, were diner days in town. It was the Maid-Rite for years, later the Mustang Diner, and I knew the magic of summer when the truck pulled in there. We shared the paper as we waited, taking turns between the comics and the sports page. I don't remember anything in particular happening there. Just a man and his son, and sometimes that man's father as well, taking in the local flavor (both in calories and conversation). But I knew it was a good day, a day of significant value, to get to be there.
And sometimes summer was as simple as a surprise bottle of pop from the gas station, swilled down with great satisfaction and strangely a feeling of importance and maturity, particularly if it were after a remarkably sweaty, dirty day in the sun.
And so here it is, another summer, the season of fathering, and I fondly remember being fathered well through many summers of my own. And I am grateful, knowing that being a child in summer under my father's fathering prepared me for these most important summers of my life that I live now.
Summer is for fathering. I do not ignore my responsibilities or excuse away the other seasons; however, I know that the summer is prime time. Our time to eat breakfast together on the patio. Our time to play in the yard. Our time to grill and bike and swim and hike and read every day in the recliner right after lunch in a pile that I hope never gets too sweaty or too crowded to change locations. It is summer when we will talk about everything and nothing, when I challenge them to grow, and when they challenge me to slow down.
Summer has always been the season of fathering in my life. While my father is not a teacher, I was a student, and the place for a boy out of school in the summer months, whether he is a young boy or a boy old enough to think he is no longer a boy, is on a farm. I never really thought about it until discussing my opportunities with my girls in the summer, but I know now that so much of my time with Dad was from the summer months when timed slowed down and we were suddenly together for most hours every week.
A lot of summer was for work. I know that at first my "work" was tagging along and serving essential management duties, but eventually I was taught (and told) to get my hands dirty. Dad bought me a couple of bottle calves to take care of one summer, a precursor to eventually being charged with upwards of 30-40 young calves at a time. There was work we did together, and work I simply got pointed to. We shoveled our share of manure together. I walked beans a time or two. We baled hay on many a July afternoon, the equitable distribution of labor involving me on the rack stacking, Dad curating my language with every baler breakdown. Eventually summer was for factory work as well, as I worked with Dad on the midnight to 8 AM shift the summer before college. Farm work is where I wanted to prove my worth, and factory work is where I wanted to prove my manhood.
I worked, and Dad worked harder, but summer was also for play. On some summer days there was enough margin to randomly shoot the BB gun together, competitively mocking each other's accuracy. We took aim at sparrows, tin cans, burned out light bulbs, glass pop bottles, fence posts - whatever was handy. There were evenings of wiffle ball in the backyard. There were church softball games that I tagged along to, playing catch with Dad in between men and learning how to talk the game, and compete, and that Dutch Reformed blood runs the hottest, and that even sometimes pastors say shit under their breath after a bad at bat. And there was the annual end of summer trip to Adventureland, where there were no responsibilities, just play, and Dad daring to do what none of us could - the vomit-inducing Silly Silo that makes me dizzy just writing about it.
Summer was for setting an example. I learned by watching, never aware at the time that I was learning. The summers were not centered around keeping me entertained, they were scheduled based on what needed to be done. So I learned how to ride in the truck, sometimes talking, sometimes not, always with the volume up for "The Rest of the Story." I learned how to patiently wait for a cattle tank to fill with water without needing to be entertained. I learned how to talk to men, hard-working blue collar men, the kind who weld and run hardware stores and farm on neighboring land, and I learned it's important to be willing to have the time, to slow down, to shoot the breeze and listen to gossip and stories and rumors and weather reports with these men rather than demand a service and then move on. I learned how to raise a single index finger on the steering wheel to greet oncoming traffic.
Summer was for shared meals, primarily lunch. Most days that was on the farm, with grandma cooking. But some days, lucky days, days I never saw coming, were diner days in town. It was the Maid-Rite for years, later the Mustang Diner, and I knew the magic of summer when the truck pulled in there. We shared the paper as we waited, taking turns between the comics and the sports page. I don't remember anything in particular happening there. Just a man and his son, and sometimes that man's father as well, taking in the local flavor (both in calories and conversation). But I knew it was a good day, a day of significant value, to get to be there.
And sometimes summer was as simple as a surprise bottle of pop from the gas station, swilled down with great satisfaction and strangely a feeling of importance and maturity, particularly if it were after a remarkably sweaty, dirty day in the sun.
And so here it is, another summer, the season of fathering, and I fondly remember being fathered well through many summers of my own. And I am grateful, knowing that being a child in summer under my father's fathering prepared me for these most important summers of my life that I live now.
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