"Of so young days brought up with him"

 

Everybody in their jerseys for an Amerks game.

Homeschool chemistry experiments. (We used old picnic silverware, not our nice spoons.)

Cocktails for the grown-ups, mocktail for Felix

Finding flowers on Easter

Hike in Lucien Morin park with Mr. Personality

They lost a camera (which was in a camouflage print) while climbing this log. We found it eventually.

Building the pergola with Grandpa

Everything is up!

They made us breakfast in bed

First family meal on the pergola

Exploring Highland Cemetery

Felix stole someone's phone and took about 

Coffee run to the west side

Our house was just too quiet

Pergola lunch

Pergola school

Everything is just better outdoors

Including the morning americano

Owen's culinary work

It's just another pergola picture, so I'll use this caption to apologize for my hypocrisy in calling out J in a previous blog about leaving her jeans everywhere when I am guilty of leaving empty shoeboxes on the bed EVERY SINGLE time I put on dress shoes to go off to a rehearsal or concert. (She does have a point)

Bluey

Brothers gaming

Final concert of season 12

Reading aloud

"I did repel his letters and denied his access to me"

I haven't had a Facebook or Instagram account in a long time, and I'm slowly pulling away from other forms of the more parasitic modes of engagement with the digital world as well. (J and I just exchanged photos of our most important book or books. Mine were Watership Down, Bridge to Terabithia, Jesus and the Victory of God, and Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman is currently on the brain.)

One way in which I've been picking away at smaller and cleaner digital footprint is taming the sprawling jungle of my email inbox. I decided it would be too massive a task to attempt to sort every email that's been left unsorted in the general in-tray for the past few decades and have taken to just selecting my entire inbox (which holds several hundred messages at a time), releasing the handful of emails that I actually DO need to keep an eye on, and then sending everything that was grabbed to the archive.

This makes my inbox look nice and clean for a few hours, and then my phone downloads the most recent several hundred messages that haven't been archived yet and I do the same thing again. The interesting part about this is the walk down memory lane that it provides. I just checked the inbox again, and it's all the way back to 2020.

There is an invitation to a family zoom call from my Mom--this was April of 2020, and it was the only way we could see each other, a reminder to keep a Duolingo streak going for the 393rd day, and spam, spam, spam. 

Spam from Musicnotes.com, because I ordered a piece of sheet music for a student at one point.

Spam from Amazon, which we've largely succeeded in squeezing down to a bare minimum this year. (That said, we did order a grill cart this morning which J is apparently putting together in our garage right now.)

Spam from Hotels.com

Spam from the RPO

Spam from Shea's Patron Services.

Spam from Lowe's.

It's too much to block all of the spam that comes in, so even though I DO hit unsubscribe from every email that comes with the option I flushed this most recent few months of tacky and lurid advertising down the digital toilet with special pleasure. They thought they had reached me, but I denied them access in the end.

"Doublet all unbraced, No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, Ungartered, and down-gyved to his ankle"

We recently finished our semi-annual clothes swap.

Once a year we take a day (and we do try to get it all done in one day) to swap our winter clothes for our summer clothes, or vice-versa. I scheduled it deliberately for a time when all five of us would be home and braced for the inevitable tears.

Not only do we swap cold weather clothing for warm weather, but this is also the inevitable stepping up point where a child that has been wearing 7 year old clothes moves into the 8 year old bin, and so on and so forth.

This leads to trauma. Several years ago I had to physically restrain Felix from rooting through a packed donation bag for his (3T) Snuggle Monster pajamas, which only came down to his 5 year old belly. James, who suffers from an excess of Peter Pan syndrome, always develops a wilted look as the evidence of the inexorable progress of time piles up around him in the form of teenage-size jeans. 

This year it was Owen who melted down. I'm not even really sure why, because there weren't any specific items that he declared himself to be overly attached to. But he did (against instructions) root through piles of clothing that had already been sorted, offer continuous commentary on what size he thought each item being unpacked from a bin might be, and generally refuse to let parents out of his sight for a moment. He repeatedly called out against our (discreet) packing up of beloved common items that were either too small or too grass-stained for further use into the donate bag or the trash bag. 

He called names, he shouted a lot, and generally made calumnious accusations. He apologized later for being so "worked up." 

Some of that suspicion is justified. We definitely did (finally) bin the Snuggle Monster shirt, as well as several Baltimore Ravens and Philadelphia Eagles items and countless pants that had holes ripped through the knees. 

It was a sweaty and emotionally taxing morning of hauling rubbermaid bins up and down from the basement and unpacking and repacking dresser drawers.

And the work continues once everything is sorted, because this really is the best time of year to carefully fold every item of clothing that we have out into neat stacks that allow the dresser drawers to close tidily and for each child to see every available item when he opens a drawer.

It's also a reset for the adults. Neither J or I use a dresser, so we keep our clothes in long under-bed rubbermaid rectangles. This is extraordinarily space efficient, but it's easy for clothing to get unfolded and to mass itself in heaps when pulling the bins in and out from under the bed. Also, not to name names, but one of the adults who lives in our bedroom has a bad habit of wearing clothing and then resolutely refusing to either put it back in the clean laundry ("it's been worn") or into the dirty laundry hamper ("it isn't so dirty that it needs to be washed yet") and thus piles her jeans and sweaters into the third storage option. (A heap on the floor)

We all needed a reset--and we got it. The boys all have shorts to wear again, their pants reach all the way down to their growing ankles, and we even pitched all the too-small shoes and the single shoes whose partner disappeared somewhere. (There were a surprising number of these.)

J and I purged as well. Our clothing bins are neatly folded and organized, and we are ready for six months of warm weather. I vote, and I think I would have her support, that instead of having winter next year we just continue with shorts and t-shirts weather for another 12 months at least. It would save me a lot of trouble unpacking all the basement clothes. 

"The time is out of joint"

 Quick tips for all brass students performing end of year juries:

--Remember that your jury is a performance. You probably shouldn't come in shorts, flip flops, and a t-shirt. You don't need to wear a tux, but please make at least a little effort to acknowledge that this is a more formal event than the frisbee game you just played.

--Remember that your jury is a performance. You don't get multiple do-overs if you splat something or don't like the way that it sounded. You should start at the top left corner of your music and keep on playing until you get to the bottom right corner. No interruptions in the meantime unless we say so.

--Remember that your jury is a performance. You wouldn't get up on stage after an ensemble concert and explain to the audience why it was that you missed each note that went wrong (and why it wasn't actually your fault) so please don't attempt that to your committee. We're already not thrilled that we're doing jury duty. We'd rather be playing frisbee too.

--There is a fantastic invention that fits in your pocket called a metronome. If you practice with it it will correct any errors of steady rhythm that you might be committing. These errors matter in a jury.

--There is another fantastic invention called a tuner that can do the same for your intonation. 

--It's a bad idea to do very little practicing all semester and then to practice for four hours straight before your jury on any instrument, but it's an especially bad idea on a brass instrument for what should be obvious reasons.

--It would be wise to do the ten seconds of preparation involved in learning how to pronounce your composer's name. You could do this by looking up the phonetic spelling on their Wikipedia page, by doing a Youtube search to listen to other musicians talking about this composer, or (easiest option) listening at any point to how your teacher pronounces the name over the course of the 13 lessons you had this semester.

MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL

--Remember to actually sign up for your jury. If you forget to sign up for your jury you will have to repeat the entire class and won't be able to graduate and will keep on needing to do juries for years and years. 

EDIT

--Also remember to bring your music. Seriously, kids...

"I'll wipe away all trivial, fond records"

 My Mail app takes up over a tenth of my total iPhone storage. I've been working on whittling down what I keep on my phone recently, and I still can't understand why the mail app takes up so much space. I assume it's because I've sent so many large documents to myself over the years and because I don't delete messages as they come in. So I need a way to offload many years of junk into an archive (not stored on my phone) that doesn't permanently delete it. 

There is a LOT of clutter. I've always loved purging and throwing away material possessions, and we will never be in danger of being a pack rat/hoarder home. It helps, in some ways, to not have much space to begin with. You're committed from the outset to living only with the bare essentials.

But with my digital life I can't tell the gold from the dross anymore, at least not without months of sifting and digging. And I value the gold too much to just delete it all at this point. 

Data centers, apparently, account for 1% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, and that number is only supposed to climb. I think that I've become a digital hoarder, and I don't even use a computer or phone terribly much. 

I recently reactivated my Facebook account long enough to retrieve some old family photos that were posted there and only there. It was a delight to see them again and to have (digitally backed up) a record of some of James and Owen's early adventures. That gold does feel like really gold. 

But 15 GB of spammy marketing emails, orchestra memos, and choir reminders is a lot of dross...

"We have done but greenly"

Frog and Toad and the Pergola

by Roy, James, Owen, and Felix Smith

Frog and Toad went on a picnic.

They sat on a log by the pond. Toad unpacked the picnic bag. 

There were two peanut-butter sandwiches, four pickles, two apples, and a jar of milk.

Toad sighed.

"What is the matter, Toad?" asked Frog

"These peanut-butter sandwiches are very plain." said Toad.

"They may be plain, but they are very tasty." said Frog.

Toad said, "I do not like to be plain. I would like to be fancy!"

Frog ate a pickle and nodded.

Toad stood up and said, "I would like to be cultured. I will be a European toad. I will build a pergola and will eat fancy food under it. That will make me a fancy toad."

"How do you build a pergola?" asked Frog.

"I will show you!" said Toad.

Frog and Toad walked to Toad's house and Toad pulled out his tools.

Toad gave Frog a saw, a hammer, and a can of nails.

Toad took a screwdriver, a pencil, and some measuring tape. 

Toad held up a post of wood and told Frog to hammer in another piece at the top.

Frog was very clumsy with the hammer, and he missed the nail. 

"Please hurry, Frog! This wood is very heavy!" said Toad.

Frog hammered the wood together. Toad measured another piece of wood and marked where the screw should go.

Toad held the wood in place while Frog screwed the screw in.

"It is not working, Toad. I think a screw cannot go here."

"No, Frog," answered Toad, "You are just screwing it the wrong way. It is righty tighty, not lefty tighty."

Frog and Toad hammered and measured all afternoon. They stood back and looked at their pergola. They were both hungry from all of their work. Toad put his tools away and Frog went inside to find some food.

Frog and Toad ate dinner under their pergola. They ate two peanut-butter sandwiches, four pickles, two apples, and a jar of milk.

"Frog," said Toad. "I do not feel very fancy. I do not feel like a European toad. The pergola did not work. Drat."

Frog ate a pickle and watched the sun setting while he sat under the pergola.

"Toad," he said. "I do not think that a pergola turns you into a different sort of toad. I do not think that is what a pergola is for."

Toad was quiet. He watched the sun set. A single star started to twinkle overhead.

"I think that you are right, Frog. A pergola does not turn you into a different sort of toad. But it is a nice place to eat a peanut-butter sandwich and some pickles and an apple. And it is a very nice place to be the sort of toad that you already are."

And so Frog and Toad sat under the pergola and watched the stars come out.

"And you, my sinews, grow not instant old, But bear me stiffly up"

I am recovering from an injury currently. It is, as far as I can tell, some kind of ankle sprain or strain.

My unofficial goal for 2025 was to run a full marathon, and I had started extending my mileage in earnest a few weeks ago when the weather started to turn.

I do run outside every day in January and February, but it's often too gross to do more than a couple of miles--and there aren't enough daylight hours to put in 5-8 miles a day safely while running in an icy city.

I was eager to get back to the longer distances. Too eager, apparently. I did a couple of 40 mile weeks without ramping up to them, and now I'm on the couch.

I am astounded by how hard it is to be without a daily run. I have no idea how my Dad has survived without it for the past year. 

I am taking stock, as I look out the window with my ankle elevated, of how fragile our seasons of running have been.

I don't think that I owned a single item of athletic clothing in college, but I would often take ambling jogs around my neighborhood (in jeans, apparently) just for the pleasure of running. I eventually did get some shorts and would often run back and forth to school on warm days in graduate school. I played ultimate frisbee from time to time and reveled in my (unearned and surprising to me) ability to keep going when everyone else's legs were shot.

J and I switched from walking to running the triangle of Westside, Buffalo, and Orchard during our first year of marriage, and then made occasional runs through our neighborhood in Greensboro, but never anything more than a mile or two.

We started training to do a 5K together once we'd moved back to New York, but she hurt her hip and we had to scrap the plan--and then she got pregnant.

It was when James was a baby that running became an every day activity for me. I would take him out in a jogging stroller and we'd do a loop through Pittsford along the canal trail and then back through the Pittsford Plaza. We'd say hello to the Scary Horse, then end at the Pittsford Wegman. (He could get a free cookie.)

It was when Owen arrived that running became an institution for J and me together. We bought a double jogger that felt like a huge financial risk in the moment but turned out to be an everyday investment in one of the sweetest seasons of our marriage. We had several different courses but did about 3 miles every day that the weather was warm enough for several years of being young parents. 

We would talk about what we were reading, catch up on each other's days, and revel in the babies' delight in being outdoors and in our neighborhood. We got to know the pets, shops, and people of Irondequoit. We found a source for more free cookies. 

James moved to a scooter and then to a bicycle once Felix came along, and Owen continued to ride in the stroller long past being too heavy for its suspension just for the pleasure of horsing around with Felix as I pushed them up, down, and around the neighborhood. 

J was a confirmed every-day runner by the time we graduated from the stroller, and we'd acquired a treadmill by then so that she could run indoors and through the winter. We both kept up steadily upping our mileage, year after year, and even though we couldn't run together very often we did parallel training so that we could do two half-marathons together.

It was in the final lead-up to the second half that we ran together that she hurt her hip again, and that was the end of another season of our running. She'll occasionally do a few miles around the neighborhood with me, but it never doesn't cost her, and she's come to grips with being an ex-runner by getting her daily movement in on an elliptical. Thus ended another season.

Running, when I look back at it, feels incredibly fragile and beautiful. I'm not sure I ever appreciated, in the moment that I was in, how lucky I was to get to do it or how quickly the season would end. We ran with the double stroller every day, so it just seemed natural that tomorrow would have another double-stroller-run. Until a tomorrow arrived that didn't have one.

Running is a lot like life in that way. 

I think that my ankle will be okay if I take a week or two off. And when I get to step outside in a green, warm neighborhood and make my legs ache and rejoice at the same time, I won't take it for granted.