When Abraham Lincoln was in his late thirties, he revisited his childhood home, and wrote a poem about it. Though the American Civil War and his own early death were still years into his future, the poem he wrote in 1846 feels like a fitting backdrop for many of the Civil War photos I came across while making this video.
The song is also on my Soundcloud page, where you can download it for free: https://soundcloud.com/julia-tindall-bloom/my-childhood-home-i-see-again
I’ve been having fun taking public domain poems and setting them to music recently. Here’s a little spring fever piece by Robert Frost, very roughly recorded by yours truly. May you very soon find the brown beneath the white, wherever you live in the northern hemisphere anyway!
[I wrote this after a school-morning parenting moment with my preteen daughter earlier this year. Sometimes I am just as amused at my words in moments like these as I am at my daughter’s!]
You absolutely adore your teacher, and he fiercely cares for his students. One day when I am volunteering in the lunch room you walk in and sit down, and you are crying. Your teacher confides in me that he doesn’t get it why you cry sometimes and can’t say why.
I get it. You know why, but it’s not a talking kind of thing. You and I sat on the couch this morning and tried using words to unravel the problem, but it only wound tighter, tightening along with your shoulders, along with my tone of voice.
Using words, we outlined the problem something like this:
You need to make your lunch so you’re ready for school.
I can’t. My life is so hard. I’m lonely. I hate it here. I want ramen noodles. Please buy me ramen noodles. We don’t have anything I can make for lunch.
I just went shopping yesterday. We have plenty of food.
No we don’t.
Yes we do.
No we don’t.
How have I failed so miserably as a parent? We need to leave this country. You need to see how most people live. You have clean water and more than enough food and a safe place to live every day. You get to go to school every day, and have few other responsibilities in life. How can I show this to you?
You hate me. I make you feel like you’re a bad parent. I need to leave. I’ll move somewhere else. You don’t want me.
Words, which I love, often fail me in my parenting efforts. So I close my arms around you, my dear miserable child, and close my mouth. Your shoulders relax, my throat loosens, and eventually, you are in the kitchen making your lunch and singing.
I am lying beside him in the dark
he is touching my arm in his sleep
my mind lies fretfully, spinning visions round
my heart – locked in my chest and forced to watch:
………..him, old, forgetful, needing me to help him through the day
………..in ways I haven’t helped anyone since our babies.
This is coming
mind whispers to heart
brace yourself.
This after a summer Sunday spent with the children
………..she the preteen, filling out her jeans
………..dancing to pop music in the kitchen
………..he burning the last layers of baby fat
………..making jokes that make me laugh.
They are leaving
mind whispers to heart
brace yourself.
And I.Me.Myself
delicately
mind attempts in soothing tones to comfort heart:
I (including you – so we – who make me, myself) am dying,
but I will help you (so we, so me) brace my self.
Then heart
like a mother past ruffling
smiles a sunrise
touches the arm of mind
intones her lullaby:
I will not brace.
I will breathe
like I did yesterday
this morning
and a moment ago.
I (including you – so we – who make me, myself)
am living,
and I will help you (so we, so me)
embrace my life.
Now sleep.
Morning will come
As (you know and I believe)
It always does.
Lots of things can inspire people to push to a new level.
You can see someone else do something amazing, and start to wonder what you may be capable of. For example, watching the Olympics. Or this guy. Or the last moments of last night’s Super Bowl!
You might have a drill sergeant or a coach or teacher or boss who yells and punishes and demeans you to draw those hidden reserves of strength from you. It works for some people, some of the time.
Or, as I poignantly discovered yesterday, love might do it. Love and joy and a bit of parental pride too.
This kid, if he were your kid, might inspire you to do something you didn’t think you could. Maybe you have one like him. Or maybe you love someone else as fiercely as I love this kid, and then you might also know what I’m talking about.
In this photo, my son is a few years younger, but he’s doing the same thing he’s been doing every day, almost since he first balanced on those two legs. He’s running. Back and forth, lap after lap after lap. Muttering and shouting to himself, jumping, waving arms now and then, the star of the story in his head, pounding out the joyful rhythm of life coursing through his veins.
On Saturday, Silas toured the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, and the athletes and stories he encountered inspired him to start his own training. On Sunday, he announced that he would run around the block 20 times. Nathan went with him, and used his phone’s Strava app to track it.
Ten laps around the block, and Nathan was done. They had gone 2.5 miles at an average pace of 9:38 per mile. But Silas wanted more! He had said 20 and he meant to do it. So I said I’d go.
Six and a half years ago, I decided it was time to get back in shape, and so I started running. My first accomplishment was running one mile without stopping. Over the years, I pushed until I was regularly going on ten-mile runs, and my average pace peaked at (or dove to?) around 9:30 per mile (which is nothing special, but for recreational running, respectable enough).
Then we moved to Colorado, where the air is thinner, which makes running harder – and since we’ve moved here, I’ve never run further than six miles at a time, or at a pace much less than 10 minutes per mile. Lately, I’ve been averaging closer to 11-minute miles, and hardly running more than two miles at a time.
Which, of course, is fine. Even great, relatively speaking. And I’ve been content with that.
But then, yesterday, Silas wanted someone to run ten more laps around the block with him, and as he had already worn out his dad (who, to be clear, is in great shape but just not much of a runner), it appeared to be my turn.
Knowing that just two days before I had eked out two 11-minute miles, and that Silas had just rocked two-plus miles at a pace of more than a minute per mile less than that, I wondered how this might go. But, he had just run two miles, and I was coming in fresh, so maybe these next ten laps would go a bit slower.
I brought my phone so we could track our pace on my Strava app. Since Silas didn’t have a good way to carry it securely while he ran, he emphasized that I needed to keep up with him so he could get an accurate reading of his pace.
I said I would.
And we were off.
The kid showed no signs of slowing down.
“Pace yourself, now, Silas! Remember you’ve got to keep running for ten laps! And you’ve already done ten so you may be tired.”
“I know, Mom. I’m fine!”
“Great!” But I wasn’t so sure about myself. Legs felt fine. It was the lungs that protested. I concentrated on breathing, and keeping up with Silas.
We counted the laps as we passed our house. “One!” I panted.
“Nine more to go!” Silas joyfully shouted.
Help! my mind screamed.
We made it to four.
“Only six more now!” piped the happy little athlete.
Six more! But we hadn’t even run six yet. We had run four, and we were going fast, and I was breathing hard. When we had actually gotten to six, we would still have four more – as much as we had just run – still to run! How was I going to manage?
“Are you getting tired, Mom?” Silas asked as we turned a corner and I began to breathe especially hard.
“Not really, just having a little trouble breathing! How are you doing?”
“Great!” chirruped the cherub.
“Awesome!” cheered the panting mother.
We ran, and counted, and ran, and talked a bit.
And then, somehow, we were at nine. One left! I could do anything now!
And we did. We sprinted for the finish, and I stopped the app and insisted we walk just a bit to cool down, and when those ten laps were complete, my phone told me we had just run 2.5 miles at an average pace of 8:54 per minute.
Even in the flatlands, even on short runs, I rarely saw the number 8 for a minute-marker in my average pace.
My boy had just run five miles in a little over 45 minutes, on a whim, in the mile-high Colorado atmosphere.
And, probably more remarkably, he pushed his mother to shave two minutes off her average pace – not with inspiring platitudes, not with barks or insults – but with something much more powerful.
He did it by tapping into the love I have for him, and sharing his absolute joy of running with me.
This morning, still basking in the glow of yesterday’s achievement, I went out on my own and ran an 8-minute mile, and another 10-minute one to finish out a daily run.
I didn’t know I could do that, not before yesterday, not before I ran with Silas.
Who knows how serious Silas will be about continuing his “training”? I hope we can keep it up together for a while at least.
But whatever the case, and far beyond the realm of running, I learned something deeply important yesterday – that if you want to break through to a new level in anything, or help someone else do so, love and joy might just be the ultimate motivators.
Julia Bloom 