By now you have probably heard of “failure to launch,” applied to adult children who have finished college and are now living in the basement of their parents’ houses, content to be housed, clothed and fed by their parents. For the last 36 hours we had the chance to observe the same phenomenon in the last of the three robin babies. The other two had flown away without our notice. However, this last one sat forlornly at the edge of the nest, hoping against hope that food would come her way. It had always worked before, so why wasn’t it working now? Meanwhile the adult robins were nowhere to be seen, though their persistent encouraging tweets came in a constant stream from across the yard. They were in a stand off, the adults refusing to came over, the baby refusing to leave the nest. Some time between 10 and 11 this morning the baby finally conceded and flew off.

The time one of our dogs had puppies, the process seemed a little more gradual. The mother did stop nursing, but she spent time jumping down off the couch onto the unsuspecting pups. Since she was a terrier, I figured she was teaching the babies how to pounce on prey. Eventually they caught on and pounced on her and each other. Satisfied that they were ready to leave home, she didn’t fuss when each was adopted.

Theodore Roethke has a line of poetry, “I learn by going where I have to go.” I guess that is the way for robins. They have to learn to fly by flying. No flight lessons for them. They have to launch themselves or go hungry. Flying looks much less daunting on an empty stomach!

The other odd addition to our reading instruction in the 7th grade was a box of color coded sheets with short readings printed on them. They resembled the picture shown above, though ours were for a higher grade level than the illustration. You took a sheet from the box, read it, answered the questions, graded yourself, wrote down your score and went on to the next sheet. The idea was to gradually improve your reading comprehension.

Sadly, the selections were as dull as those early Dick and Jane stories I had endured in 1st grade. I imagine that our principal had fallen for the advertising from McGraw Hill, publishers of these SRA Reading Laboratory boxes. I went to the McGraw Hill web site and see that they still sell updated versions of the same thing. Apparently having children read on their own in these truncated bits frees the teacher to help other kids. It might be a great marketing ploy, but it is a waste of kids’ time. We were better served in other grades by being able to read full length books once we were finished with our other assignments.

Our grade school had a rich library and we went to it frequently. While I had the ambition to read every book there(I was a nerd even in those days!), it never happened. The savvy librarian kept buying new books! And every one was more interesting than anything in that box.

I am delighted when I read other bloggers respond to reading challenges, such as going through 25 books in a summer. In a similar vein, I encourage my grandchildren to enter book stores’ summer reading programs with a free book as a reward. I appreciate those readers who keep track on Good Reads and similar platforms. But as for me, I am a recovering speed reader now focusing on slow reading.

In grade school we were constantly encouraged to read faster. This peaked in seventh grade when we were introduced to the contraption pictured above, a controlled reading machine. It projected filmstrips on a screen with just a portion of a sentence at a time. The speed increased every time we were shown these passages which were broken down into bits as illustrated in the right hand photo. The faster the filmstrip bits sped by, the more anxious I became. Anxiety shuts down the cerebral cortex, so I lost the ability to comprehend anything. Unbelievably, I still am haunted by a selection focusing on the stickleback fish and its mating habits! It totally confused me and I never forgot the ordeal.

In college my roommate took the Evelyn Wood speed reading course to try to keep up with her assigned reading. It seemed to involve moving one hand diagonally across the page quickly. I never tried it, but she thought it worth the tuition. I just tried reading ever faster, particularly the semester I had to read a 19th century British novel each week. I wasn’t able to because I kept falling asleep.

A good friend introduced me to the concept of slow reading. She really takes her time with each book with no intention of hurrying herself along. Remarkably she actually remembers what she reads! I am trying her method this summer, lazily reading my way through literary biographies a few pages at a time. I have more time to absorb and think about what I am reading. But I won’t come close to covering 25 books this summer. Maybe I need to establish a new reward for the least reading done!

Woke up this morning, saw this robin’s nest under our upper deck and immediately began singing along with Bob Marley “Three Little Birds.” Its message is very clear. “Don’t worry about a thing, Cause every little thing is going to be all right.” I have always loved that old song, and was especially glad to be humming it as the head of my country went overseas and seems to have solved Brexit all by himself! Oh and his son-in-law has found a way for lasting peace for the Palestinians and the Israelis! And a tax on imports from Mexico will solve the humanitarian crisis at our Southern border! As you know, I have rarely commented on the political insanity of the United States, but the series of news items risked putting me over the edge.

Thank goodness the robins are oblivious and decided, for the first time, to nest in a spot I see as I walk out the back door. The nest to the right is empty, but the one on the left has three thriving and always hungry babies. They are watched over by a fierce robin, a phrase I would have called an oxymoron before witnessing this adult. The bird has even dive bombed my grandson who got too close to the nest trying to talk to the babies. So no matter how misguided my president is at the moment, one robin knows exactly how to take care of those under her. I wish my Commander in Chief knew as much!

A favorite singer songwriter of mine, John Gorka,  has great lyrics “I’m from New Jersey, I don’t expect too much. If the world ended, I would adjust.” Though I am not from New Jersey, the rest definitely applies to me. Moments of generosity were sorely lacking in my upbringing. One such moment shown above is the love given me by my then sixteen year old Aunt Cary after I had been left with her and my grandparents for several months as a toddler.

So when I received two mentions from two different bloggers yesterday, I was totally delighted. I have been stunned by the generosity not only of those two, but also from the blogging community in general. This blog was my first foray into social media, after avoiding Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I had no idea what to expect when I began posting. I only knew the venomous comments that often appear on-line about news articles or editorials. Whether I have stumbled onto a particularly kind part of the blogging world, or whether it is kinder in general I don’t know. What I do know is that responses to my writing have been generous and thoughtful.

I have tried to reciprocate this generosity by taking the time to consider others’ writing and then to comment about it. I have also tried to respond to each comment I receive. This give and take keeps me keeps me generating new ideas to write about. I also want to repeat an offer I made some time ago to edit anyone’s writings that would like the help. I recently edited three research essays for a nurse in London for whom English is a second language. I learned a lot about critical care nursing along the way. I want to repeat that this is free of charge, just a way to use my skills from years of teaching.

So thanks to you all. Your reading makes my writing very rewarding.

The best learning proceeds from genuine curiosity.  Here I am examining a trout just caught by my father on our camping trip. I will soon learn what the insides of a fish look like and how it turns into something we will eat. My curiosity continues to guide my life, from the books I read to the friends I make. I genuinely want to know and understand things, and I have been able to keep this trait alive.

When I taught literature to college students, I made it a point to always reread each poem, play or short story we were to discuss before the class met. I did this even if I had read it fifty times before and could have easily “coasted” through the class. When I was encountering a piece “again for the first time” I could more easily appreciate students’ struggles with the readings and could engage their curiosity. I might ask “why do you think this poem is so confusing?” Or “where were you in the story when your mind drifted off?”

Sadly I frequently had to confront the effects of earlier teachers. Questions that I was sincerely asking were sometimes received as one more “guess how the teacher is going to answer her own question.” Needless to say that kind of teaching to the teacher doesn’t engage anyone’s curiosity. But after a while they realized that I didn’t have an answer to the question I had just posed. I really wanted to know what they thought.

I hope that all of us can keep our minds open to new possibilities and continue to find the world as Alice in Wonderland found it “curiouser and curiouser.”

I was delighted to have Sally Cronin highlight some of my past posts on her Smorgasbord site. She generously offered this chance a while back and I took her up on it.

I learned to swim at a very long very cold indoor swimming pool at my parents’ athletic facility, the Multnomah Athletic Club. I was a very short very skinny little girl, and even in the shallow end I couldn’t touch the bottom. I was equipped with water wings very similar to the photo above and told to jump in. I detested every minute of the experience, but I did learn to swim. I certainly never would have put fun and swimming in the same sentence.

Fortunately, each summer I went to Camp Fire Girls camp which also had a very big very cold outdoor pool, but it came with very kind, loving counselors. Each summer a different Red Cross swimming award was the goal of the week. The steps were very clear such as tread water for one minute and float on your back for one minute. Even the challenges when I was older were fun. One involved jumping in the pool fully clothed and removing my shoes before swimming to the edge. I even learned to dive from the side of the pool though I never mastered a dive off a board.

In the summers after I learned to swim I often went swimming with a friend at a neighbor’s pool, in the lake in the adjacent town,  or in the creek at my grandparents’ summer home. I never had any supervision in those places. I think parents generally assumed that kids could swim and left them alone. Even at the beach there were never any lifeguards. I was startled to find lifeguards all over the East coast beaches and large warnings if one wasn’t present.

Why were all those swimming pools so cold? Apparently the idea of heating a pool hadn’t caught on during my childhood. I never got into a heating pool until I joined the YWCA as an adult!

As I was reflecting about my Latin class I remembered something I mentioned in passing a couple of years ago. My Latin teacher was, I now believe, an alcoholic. We had Latin class after lunch, and she was in rare form. She got up on the desk and did a declension of the Latin “Hic, Haec, Hoc” as she kicked in a mini Can Can routine.

Teachers were absolute authorities when I was in high school, and what they said went. We never disagreed about their assessments of us, and we wouldn’t have dreamed of having our parents talk to any teacher about a disagreement. The teacher was always right. And this included their idiosyncrasies, such as dancing on the desk. I am sure none of us ever spoke about it out of class.

Our very strange English teacher used to put his feet up on his desk, put his hands down the front of his trousers and talk about the day’s readings. We found it “icky,” but that was as far as it went. Our response to that behavior makes it easier to understand how children tolerated aberrant behavior from adults such as priests in those days.

One excellent English teacher always wore what I thought was the same dress every day for the entire school year. I learned much later that she actually had five of the same dresses made for her which she was rotating. I guess she didn’t want to have to think about what to wear on any given day.

I even had one intriguing English professor in graduate school. He had terrible stage fright about lecturing to the class. To solve this, he would start the lecture as he walked down the corridor outside the class door. Then he would enter, mid sentence, and continue on. It was confusing at first since we missed the beginning of the first sentence, but we became used to it.

I shudder to think what idiosyncrasies my former students might report about me!

My paternal grandmother was French, but that is not why I took French as my elective in high school. We had the choice of Spanish, German, Russian, Latin or French. Spanish was not considered useful. (How little we knew.) Russian seemed impractical since I didn’t intend to be a diplomat. I still associated German with Hitler, so it held no appeal. But French supposedly was the language of the intelligentsia. Not that I knew who they were, just that I was supposed to learn French.

I never mastered either speaking or listening to French. In fact when a clerk spoke to me in Paris, I fled. It took me some time to realize she had said,”May I help you?” But I did learn to read French, enough so that I passed a written exam in it for my Master’s degree. It has also been very useful to read the genealogical records in France for my grandmother’s ancestors.

And what I have learned! My very unpleasant grandmother hid an interesting truth from us as she presented herself as the epitome of grace. She had never married my grandfather and was in fact still married and the mother of four small children when she ran off with my grandfather to Canada at the end of World War I. And intriguingly, her mother had been born in San Francisco when her family went there to supply goods to the gold miners. And her family was Jewish. A complete surprise, but all there in the French newspapers and cemetery records.

So while I can only read French, it has saved me from parking tickets in Quebec and has allowed me to learn much more about my family background. Things my grandmother was determined to keep to herself. C’est la vie!