Today was a day of tables. I had lunch with the children's piano teacher -- a brilliant musician, an attentive neighbor, an intelligent woman, a warm friend -- and we discussed how children learn and how people have this great capacity to create when they are inspired. Inspiration doesn't just mean rainbows and unicorns -- she spoke of interviewing Peter Goldmark in the 1970's -- an incredible inventor responsible for lp records ("Imagine," she said with sparkling eyes over her soup, "being able to listen to an entire symphony without having to change the record!"), as well as a million other things... If I have the story right, he shared during the interview of being in the war and contributing to the invasion of Normandy by helping light decoy boats so the Germans would think that the British were coming from a different direction. He was "inspired" to be creative. We give so much lip-service to "thinking outside the box" in our current generation, yet it seems to me that the generation that is often put-down as being myopic and not liberated was in fact better at not being pigeon-holed or "specialized" into tiny little... well... boxes.
Last day of public school kids being free, so The Girl went to a play-date where the mom covered their dinner table with craft items and the girlies made a stage and a ton of critters and characters out of corks. The beginning of a play was written; there was a lot of giggling.
In the late afternoon we met up with some friends that are like city cousins, and they played like screeching wild animals in the gym of our church. Eventually we went out and hunted/gathered dinner and with the torn velvet curtains opened, and the lights dimmed we all sat around a folding table up on the stage. The stage was littered with scattered papers and extra furniture pieces and other random odds and ends that find their way onto rarely-used stages and while we might have looked like a crackpot tableau vivant we were comfortable being.
By 7pm the teenagers of our church began showing up. Originally we had an enormous activity planned (a cool murder mystery game), but with the current needs in the city we decided to change it last minute into a service project. It was surprisingly hard to find something that 12-17-year olds would be allowed to do. The thing we kept finding as we researched was that most everybody wants to help, they just don't know how. So yesterday we sent the word out to our congregation to start asking neighbors and friends for items needed for hygiene kits -- soap, toothbrushes, etc. -- and we would collect them, collate them into large Ziplock bags, and take them to a shelter in Hell's Kitchen that had posted a need for toiletries.
While some people worried that we wouldn't be able to pull off something so last minute (that's the thing that sucks about emergencies... they're last minute...), other people just got to cracking and not only went shopping and/or raided their storage, but did creative things like the lady who sent an internal email out to her enormous apartment building -- she showed up at the church with an entire black garbage bag of items. People want to help. Our youth lined up along long tables and sorted the items into piles and bagged them.
When I decided to do this blog I promised myself that I would be honest, and so here is a confession: I wish I had had my kids help more with the service project. So often I pigeon-hole my life: this is my life as a teacher; this is my life as a mom; this is my life as a youth-leader at church. I wish that today I had gone around with my kids to the neighbors asking if they wanted to donate hygiene items, or asked the kids if they wanted to use their saved money to go to the store and buy some toiletries. I wish tonight while they were waiting for The Dad to show up and take them home I would have incorporated them more in the activity. They did help sort the items, and at one point they helped open the Ziplocks and pass them down the assembly line, but as more teenagers started coming in and I was trying to figure out the chaos, my instinct was to shoo my kids towards some folding chairs and have them stay "out of the way." My lesson learned today is to better meld my worlds -- stop thinking of things in specific boxes. Tables are about bounty and creativity and friendship, boxes not so much.
