Routine.

Fiona mentioned to me yesterday that there’s a new girl in her class.

“Is she nice?” seemed like a good question to ask my 3.5 year old daughter.
A simpler form of “Does she play well with others?”, if you will.

Because that would probably be what registers and is important at that age, right?
You want the other kids to be nice to you- kind, you want the other kids to play well with you.
At this point in my daughter’s life, she’s probably not looking much past these basics.

It would be a simple verbal transaction.

I ask “Is she nice?”
Fiona answers “Yes.” Or “She took my pink crayon” in lieu of “No”.


Or so I thought.

“She doesn’t have the routine down yet.” was her vaguely critical reply.
“But she’s nice.”

Alarming visions flashed through my head as I waited for the light to turn green on our way home from her school.
Brief flashes of The Shawshank Redemption… various boarding school movies… “What we have here is a failure to communicate”……. Flew through my brain, all in an instant.

“Doesn’t have the routine down yet?” from my 3 year old?
WTF???

“Ummm… Do YOU have the routine down?”

“Yes!” was her prompt and matter-of-fact reply.

“What IS the routine?”

(Please don’t let it be that they’re making athletic shoes in a sweat shop atmosphere, please don’t let it be that they’re making athletic shoes in a sweat shop…)

“Doing things you don’t want to do, because the teachers tell you to.”

My relief that her pre-school is apparently NOT treating their students as cheap labor, quickly morphed into something less upbeat.

She’s already figuring out what a large chunk of her life is going to be all about. 14+ more years of school, and then college, hopefully grad school if she wants it.

And jobs. There’s little chance that she’ll go through life without having to work jobs to make ends meet.

Thanks for making me think about this sweetheart, after just leaving a particularly difficult day at the office behind. No, really. Keep up the good work...

That IS, and will continue to be the routine, for most of your life, darlin’.

That’s why we all embrace what’s OUTSIDE of the routine, with such vigor.

Fishing weekends, family getaways, live music, dinner with friends, the odd night out….
playtime.

Never, EVER take playtime for granted, darlin'.
Because the rest… Is routine.

That moment, between sleep and waking....

You know that moment.
The brief time when you're no longer asleep, but you're not yet awake.
When your dreamworld and the real world briefly overlap, until you fully orient yourself to the reality of your morning.

Odd things populate that moment.

For me, it's usually sounds.

A siren might be my daughter, crying.
Or vice versa.
My neighbor wheeling his trash can to the curb early on a Monday morning, might be the sound of a far off train, or perhaps thunder.

Rain is radio static, radio static is rain...

But only for a moment, that moment that's populated by odd things.

I've never been a real deep sleeper, but have become even less of one, since my daughter was born. It got a bit worse, when she became mobile; as she regularly would pad into our room in the middle of the night. It got so I'd be listening for footsteps in my sleep.

This morning... well. Let me tell you about this morning.

I've had the place to myself the last few days, while Wendy and Fiona visited Wendy's mom. I woke up well before the alarm clock, convinced myself that I was awake for the day, and promptly fell back asleep.

We've a large dog, and wood floors. Not even realizing that I had fallen back to sleep, I heard the sound of footsteps entering my room, and opened my eyes.

Odd things populate that moment between sleep and awake....

This morning, it was an extremely tall...something.

I opened my eyes to a fleeting vision of an extremely tall woman, in a white wrap, staring down at me.

"Gah!" I shout aloud and incoherently in that moment.

The giantess disappeared, replaced by the reality of shadows and a white bath towel draped over the bedroom door.
Eventually, my heart stopped racing.
I thought about the giantess, and... was kinda sad she had disappeared so quickly.
I would have liked to have had a better look at her.

Was it really just a towel and a trick of the light?
Or was it something else?

I would have preferred the answer to be "something else", be it an apparition, or proof, perhaps, that someone DOES watch over you.


But in the time it took me to register what I saw, and holler aloud, it was over, and I'm left only with a vague longing for more,and the reminder that:

Odd things populate that moment, that moment when sleep and awake overlap.

Things I don’t want to ever hear myself saying to my daughter - Thoughts on “character building”.

Growing up, I built a LOT of character.

Bucket Loads.
Newspaper delivery bags full.
250,000 snow shovels worth.

Because, you see, every menial task, every roll-up-the-sleeves chore… built character.

Why do I have to hold the wedge against the log while my brother tries to hit it with the blunt side of an ax?
Why do I have to clean out the garage? I don’t use it for anything, except keeping my bike out of the rain.

Because “It builds character”.

“It builds character” was usually accompanied by laughter.

I was too young to understand the concept of “character”, when I first started building it.
I wasn’t sure WHAT it was, but if I got it by, say…picking up wagons full of walnuts, I was pretty sure I didn’t want it.

We never went to the beach to build character, we just went to the beach.
I never played “Asteroids” at my buddy Rick’s house, to build character.
I never rode my bike to the park with my fishing pole, to build character.

“Can I go to the city pool with Allen and his mom?”
“Sure, it’ll build character.”

Nope, “character” never entered into these discussions.

So, following this logic, one’s character is defined by….unpleasantness.

That doesn’t sound very promising.

I’d like to think that the music I played, the friends I’ve made, the camping, the fishing, the acts of love, both emotional and physical…. Had way more to do with my character, than, say… organizing my dad’s random tool room detrius.

To that, mix in professional experiences, fatherhood, college and many wonderful random adventures.

These things HAVE to be responsible for my “character”, don’t they?

Jesus, I hope so.

And I hope the same for my daughter, which is why she’ll never hear “Because it builds character” from me, when she wonders why she has to help shovel the driveway, weed the garden, and clean the basement.

Oh, she’s gonna do all of those things, but she won’t ever be led to think it’s what defines who she is.