Having Two Legs

I teach Rhetoric 2 to sophomores at Logos School here in Moscow, Idaho, and every year around this time, I assign the (now famous) Journal Project. The Journal Project consists of 30 days of journal entries on the same topic. The students are given one day off each week, so we complete the Journal Project over the course of five weeks (writing six days each week). Only this year my students asked me to do the Journal Project with them. So here we go… My topic is my family.

Day 3

My brother is getting married today. Two other brothers have already married, and yet this time I somehow feel even more of the weight of this glory. My closest childhood friend, my sparring partner, my partner in crime, my sidekick is getting married. We sat in car seats next to each other in the old Volkswagen van with the manual transmission stick shooting up out of the floor like some kind of alien appendage. I can remember the smell of those black poly-plastic seats. I remember the raisins and peanuts crammed down into their crevices. I remember the smell of hot against the seats and glass. I remember our sweaty backs.

My brother wore red hair and I went with light, sandy blonde. We both had freckles. Even though I was 18 months older than him, he was always as big as me and at times bigger. We rode bikes together, skateboarded together, built forts and jumps together. We played army, G.I. Joes, stuffed animals, and in the cool evenings of suburban southern California we rounded up neighborhood kids for kick the can as the misty blue dusk spread over the sandy hills. Shorts and t-shirts and farmers tans were the uniforms, and we shared bedrooms until midway through my high school years when I got distracted by the busy-ness of friends and work and sports and eventually I moved away for college.

My brother never was one for words. But he wasn’t a pushover either. He had thoughts and opinions though he was frequently happy to go along with my ideas. I’m pretty sure every once in a while when he wouldn’t go along with my plan I would just punch him a couple of times. He’d turn away a little bit, maybe block the third uppercut, and then go on disagreeing. Maybe he punched back a few times, but I don’t remember. I mostly remember knowing that by the time I was trying to force him into my way of thinking it was already too late. Tiffs never lasted long. Quarter of an hour later, we’d have teamed up on something else in the backyard. I had so many ridiculous ideas and thoughts, I sometimes wonder what it was like to be on the receiving end. I suspect he took his time finding a woman and settling down purely on principle. He let me do the family thing for a dozen years before he figured it wasn’t another one of my hair-brained schemes. Continue Reading…

I teach Rhetoric 2 to sophomores at Logos School here in Moscow, Idaho, and every year around this time, I assign the (now famous) Journal Project. The Journal Project consists of 30 days of journal entries on the same topic. The students are given one day off each week, so we complete the Journal Project over the course of five weeks (writing six days each week). Only this year my students asked me to do the Journal Project with them. So here we go… My topic is my family.

Day 2

My oldest descendant I am told looks a great deal like me. Though I’m fairly sure that he is already bigger than I was at his age, he’s doing the blonde hair/blue eye thing quite proficiently. I’ve also noticed several other qualities we share in common as father and son: The ability to turn everything into an imaginary World War 3 through finely tuned explosive sounds and the deeply held conviction that there is a sleeping Ninja in everyone of us just waiting to be awakened. We also share the trait of cheerful, completely baseless confidence. After his first piano lesson, he announced that he could now play the piano, and his teacher was — in his words, “OK.”

I can remember believing that I was about ready to turn pro on my second-hand Schwinn when I was 7 after a particularly sweet spin around my house in California. And a year or two later, I was pretty sure there were pro scouts in the bushes just waiting to pounce on me and my banana board. Though in retrospect, I’m pretty sure that most of my confidence came through well-timed sound effects.

Come to think of it, my internal sound track and sound maker were probably my greatest assets. If I had used sound effects more on my spelling tests, I probably wouldn’t have driven my mother so crazy. I will need to share this bit of wisdom with my son sometime soon. I will also explain to his teachers that this is an inherited family defect. We can only concentrate when there are explosion noises sputtering out of our mouths along with the beat-box echoes of Ninja punches and kicks. It’s true that the downside to this is spraying the homework with spittle, but, Mrs. Kimmell, some people are just born this way. But you can be sure that I will instruct my son in no uncertain terms to wipe his paper dry before turning it in. We may be slightly disabled, but we are still civilized.

I teach Rhetoric 2 to sophomores at Logos School here in Moscow, Idaho, and every year around this time, I assign the (now famous) Journal Project. The Journal Project consists of 30 days of journal entries on the same topic. The students are given one day off each week, so we complete the Journal Project over the course of five weeks (writing six days each week). Only this year my students asked me to do the Journal Project with them. So here we go… My topic is my family.

Day 1

On second thought, I don’t recommend naming your son after a prophet. At first it may seem like a good idea, going for the Bible name and all, and no doubt the grandmothers will all approve. I once thought that too. And when the child is first born, you chalk it up to coincidence: you know, all the little oddities you notice. But after a while you settle down to bracing yourself for the worst.

Prophets were no ordinary race of men. Take a complete lunatic and mix in two parts fire, three parts brimstone, and add a beard and staff to taste, and you’re pretty much talking about a guy you’d expect to find with a homemade cardboard sign at a major intersection in a big city. Naming your son after one of these fire-breathing witch doctors is just not safe. It’s like sticking paper clips in electrical sockets or playing with matches at a gas station or ice skating on your roof. You just shouldn’t do it. But no one wants to admit that they’ve done this to their child, so you try to ignore it.  Continue Reading…