What is a saying?
and other inquiries from an annoying parent
I’m not sponsored by Evenflo car seats, though I would happily consider it given the several hours of imaginative play these boxes brought our family.
The kids have been playing inside of empty carseat boxes for 4 hours. These two giant houses in the middle of our living room, each with enough parquet footprint to host a small child for a day.
They hot-glue gunned smaller boxes from the recycling to serve as mailboxes. To look at the way they run glue lines, you’d think one of their parents was a welder...
I cut out doors and windows with the Olfa knife that used to be my mentor’s. Tools that got cast a half century ago still travel across generations. Tools are like tarot cards - It feels more special when you inherit them vs. buying them. Maybe this is what one would call woo-woo or grandiose, but there’s something poetic about tools & tradecraft.
But just like everybody else, I still find myself scratching my head in the aisles of a big box store on a weekend, sleep deprived enough to get suckered into buying stuff I probably don’t need.
The kids catch a case of cabin fever, busting out of their box houses and starting to fight on the couch.
“That’s NOT how the saying goes!!”
the older one chides her little brother.
“What’s a saying?” I say,
because I’m annoying like that.
“Mama! You KNOW what a saying is!
A saaaaay-ying!” She bites back,
drawing out the “a” in saying,
as if that will somehow invoke
my understanding.
<shit now she’s mad>
”Just give me an example!”
I try to playfully steer
before we go off the rails.
”You KNOW - like
‘do to others like
you want them do to you’”
She tells me.
“What are some other sayings?”
I ask, hoping to gather a few.
“Liar liar pants on fire,
show your butt to Canadian Tire,”
Annoying younger brother joins the chat.
This lil rhyme has been making the playground rounds for a while now.
“That’s NOT a saying!”
Older sibling yells.
“Well it kind of is...
if a bunch of people are saying it.”
I respond. Because I’m annoying like that.
“Measure twice, cut once!”
my Shweetie shouts from the kitchen.
It’s a Family Day Monday on a balmy 36 degree Fahrenheit day in Southern Canada. One kid gets sent off on a playdate down the road and the other starts button-mashing his way through the Bluey game on a PS4 controller while I sit beside him and try to clacky clacky on the keys of my 11 year old MacbookAir so I can keep up with my weekly Substack ritual.
An old rotary phone sits atop a stack of books that followed me home from the library this week - Empire of AI by Karen Hao; Caketopia by Sheri Wilson; All About Cake by Christina Tosi; Women, Fire and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff; The Knowing by Tanya Talaga; Stitch by Stitch by Deborah Moebes
There’s this E.O. Wilson quote that keeps bubbling up. Somethin like -
The problem with humanity is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.
I’m sure y’all get why that quote hits deep these days. I can’t stop thinkin bout how today’s 18 year olds are carrying around in their pockets these LLM-based synthetic companions - masters of mimicry and devoid of meaning. I’m wanting to talk to them about this stuff.
But teenagers have long intimidated me. If you’ll allow me a humble brag - I SLAY when it comes to the 6-and-under crowd. But teenagers?! Oof...They seem like a wholly different species.
A few years back I got the chance to host a season of arts programming out of a local Toronto Public Library branch. I watched as a library-keeper would herd the loud cursing teenagers away from the little kids’ play section.
Afterwards she tells me “They keep coming back to this section because not that long ago, this was the place that was meant for them.”
Somehow that observation gutted me. These big loud stinky bumbling teenagers - suddenly they seemed so much younger, their tiny baby child faces coming into focus - these windows into who they’ve always been. It seemed like only yesterday they were small.
Teenagers live in the boundary layer between childhood and adulthood. There is this fire in their attunement to their world and to each other. I still don’t know how to talk to teenagers, but by golly I’m gonna get better at it because we’re gonna need each other.
They need to talk to real humans. They need to feel the friction of pushing back on an idea until it molds and evolves and circles back and dissolves. They need to be challenged though we may seem annoying and we need them to challenge us, though we may be annoyed.
I’m remembering when the babies were inside my womb, they built their strength by pushing against me. I remember thinking, that in some ways, this would probably never change
So I will continue to try and stand strong and let myself be pushed. I will make playcraft of the seemingly impossible. I will scatter seedlings of ideas and take note of what sprouts. I will rest enough to let my mind wander into curiosity and hope; and hope that it catches on like a contagion.
I read the kids bedtime stories and wonder whether words like “scamper” and “scurry” will fully fade from my attention as I cross the boundary into not being needed for bedtime stories anymore. I try to leave my phone in the other room and practice anchoring my attention as we trace the pages with our fingers and circle back to our favorite parts and curate inspiration for our dream meetup once sleep falls.
My kiddo is reading Sometimes I Feel like a Fox. She gets to the part about sometimes feeling like a Raven and something about being both secretkeeper and messenger. And even though we’ve read this book together for a few years now, this line hits me deep in a new way.
Sometimes I feel like a messenger and a secretkeeper. And here I find myself, in a moment so mundane I almost missed it. But there’s an undercurrent of knowing that it’s drifting away. A love letter from my future self, pulling me in, to remember these moments...
Will I remember sitting with my 7 year old as she reads me her favorite book from when she was 3? Will I still call to mind words like like scamper and scurry even when I’m not reading bedtime stories?
I keep thinking about social music and when will be the last time that two people ever sit down together to play Heart & Soul. Before music was commercialized, when it wasn’t about peak performance, it was just about playing together. It was about breaking the silence in unison and casting the core of our attention towards something other than laboring for wage-thiefs.
It gives me hope that there are people getting together every week to play social music. There are people going to dances and joining walking groups. There are playspace townhalls showing up in underutilized food courts of malls. There’s all sorts of third spaces waiting for us out there, but to gather a response, we must first call out.
I’m kicking off the week listening to Nora Brown’s album “Sidetrack My Engine”. I add a few tracks to a playlist on a music streaming service that I hate but how else does one make collaborative playlists for pals on their birthdays?
The album ends and the algo-rhythm makes an annoyingly good selection as a Carsie Blanton track starts to play while I make promises to make more money so I can by more vinyl and splurge on craft supplies for emergent foodcourt fairgrounds where people play boardgames and help each other with their hand sewing.
The kids are back together on the couch fighting again, playing a Ninja Turtle streetfighter style game on the PS4. They’re starting to get over-stimmed and cranky. It’s time to divert our attention towards something else. Maybe we can stencil designs onto these box houses and recall more sayings together.
I make promises to close my laptop and shut down for the night while I check the mail in my electronic inbox for the hundredth time today. There’s a newsletter waiting from me from Miss Carsie Blanton herself and I think I’ll let her words carry us to the end today.
In the meantime,
Keep Calm and Scamper On
~braeden
Organizing is unglamorous. It’s founded on relationships, careful analysis, and long-term memory; not on thrilling moments and outrage. Like the quiet seeds and shoots beneath the February snow, it’s a living thing: small, slow, and full of secret power.
— Carsie Blanton
[if you like John Prine, you might like this tribute song she wrote when Covid stole him from us.]