29: Rest and be Thankful
Originally emailed on Oct. 27, 1999
You would think I was facing my easiest Halloween ever, what with the boys' father having, just this past summer, bought them both fabulous cowboy outfits which, despite their best efforts, they have not had time to grow out of. You would be wrong. They don't want to be cowboys for Halloween, and here's why:
In mid-September, Mark's teacher told all the students that they were required to read a book and prepare a whole assortment of assignments around it, to be due in early November. She gave them a list of novels to choose from, all historical (meaning they range in era from 1750 to 1972). The kids would read the book and do a conventional book report, read some encyclopedia articles on related topics and do a historical report, and then create some kind of visual art, like a diorama, representing a scene from the book. Ed, also an elementary school teacher, thought this sounded like a terrific assignment.
Mark thought he was in hell. Mark is not interested in books, history, or art. I stepped in, in Super-Mom mode, determined to find a way to get him excited about the assignment. "I've read most of these books," I told Mark. "I'll pick the best one, and I'll read it out loud to you and Sammy. We'll pop popcorn and have special treats. It will be something fun we can do as a family! Doesn't that sound neat?"
Ed was enthusiastic. Sammy was cheerfully willing. Mark thought it sounded marginally better than having to read the book himself but not quite as good as renting the video, which I refused to allow. So, we went to the library and got a copy of Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson, and one night the next week we made our special favorite family snack treat, a big bowl of popcorn with a bag of peanut M&M's mixed in, and then we settled in to our book.
The book, as you will recall, starts badly, excitement-wise: young David Balfour, his father dead, is given a letter to deliver to a relative he never knew he had, and he sets off on foot to Edinburgh, where the relative resides. That part is exciting and mysterious. What is not exciting or mysterious is that he is accompanied on the first leg of his journey by an old family friend, Mr. Campbell, who gives him a great deal of dull advice and a Bible. "This isn't a religious book, is it?" Mark asked.
"Eat your popcorn and shut up. It gets exciting soon," I told him. And it does. Young Davie is sent up the tower steps in the dark, only to discover by a happy accident that the staircase is unfinished and that he was meant to plunge to his death; he is kidnapped to be sold into slavery in the Carolinas (historical question: were white people really slaves in the American South?); he helps to overthrow the evil plans of the ship's company (during a 14-to-2 battle with swords, pistols, and that action-movie standard, the blunderbuss); the ship he is on sinks and he is marooned; after escaping the island, he is caught up in the Highland intrigues of the day; with his friend Alan Breck Stewart he makes a daring escape across the heather with Redcoats at his very heels; and finally, through a clever plot, his uncle's role in Davie's misfortune is revealed and he become the Laird of Shaws, his family's estate. All in a book only slightly larger and thicker than my checkbook.
To my delight, the boys became completely caught up in the story. One night, Mark even suggested taping the new episode of Star Trek: Voyager so that we could keep reading. Admittedly, we were in the midst of the most tension-filled moment of the book, when David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart spend a day lying atop a great boulder against which the Redcoats who are searching for them actually lean to rest, and we all wanted to know how they would get out of that pickle. But still; we'd heard a rumor there were going to be Borg on Voyager, and that's a powerful draw, too.
Now Mark and his friends play Kidnapped all the time. I can hear them now, running around in the back yard with towels tied around their waists for kilts, whacking each other with fake swords and calling out catch-phrases fromthe book: "Do ye nae ken? I am the chieftain of this clan!" and "If ye think ye can defeat the clans, ye are the more deceived!" and, of course, Alan Breck Stewart's signature line, "I bear the name of a king!" They make little secret code bundles, like Alan Breck Stewart does in the book ("Getting a piece of wood, he fashioned it into a cross, the four ends of which he blackened on the coals....He strung the button on a strip of his great-coat which he had used to bind the cross; and tying in a little sprig of birch and another of fir, he looked upon his work with satisfaction." He tells Davie he will leave the totem in the window of a friend in a nearby hamlet. "This cross is something in the nature of the cross-tarrie, or fiery cross, which is the signal of gathering in our clans; yet he will know well enough the clan is not to rise, for there it is standing in his window, and no word with it. So he will say to himsel', The clan is not to rise, but there is something. Then he will see my button, and that was Duncan Stewart's. And then he will say to himsel', The son of Duncan is in the heather and has need of me."). The boys make such things and leave them for each other, so that we parents are always sweeping little ratty bunches of sticks, dead leaves, and bits of fabric torn from our children's T-shirts (!) off our front porches.
When his friends aren't around, Mark will actually even play with Sammy, he is so into the game. Mark always has his choice of character, but Sammy is content to be either Alan Breck Stewart or Davie Balfour, as Mark prefers, so they get on quite well. I know that Mark dominates Sammy, but I am happy to see them playing together anyway. I am also glad to see Mark, who is not an especially imaginative boy, so caught up in something.
The upshot of all of this, of course, is that they both want to be Highland Chieftains for Halloween, and I am therefore scouring thrift shops for leftovers from the kilt fad of my high school years and little leather purses that can pass for, well, those little leather purses Scottish men used to wear right over their privates. I tried to argue the boys into wearing their cowboy outfits, but they're tired of their cowboy outfits. I also tried to point out that Davie, being a lowlander, would not wear Highland costume, and that Alan Breck Stewart, despite being a Highlander, wouldn't either because at the time the novel takes place Scotland is being "pacified" in the wake of a failed revolution (led by the famous Rob Roy) against England, and it is against the law to wear clan colors or traditional dress. The boys don't care; it's kilts or nothing this Halloween. Therefore, if I think I can get away with not producing two kilts by Friday (costume day at school), I am the more deceived.
Harriet's little brother Ron turned seventeen last month. He immediately moved out of his parents' house and into an apartment with some friends who are students at Michigan State, and he is going to court to become an Emancipated Minor. One day when he came by to pick up Sammy for an outing, I asked him why, and he said he was tired of his parents "busting his balls." "Of course, I'm not going to say that in court," he said. "I'm going to say that I experience an atmosphere of repression and hostility at home due to my alternative lifestyle and minority sexuality."
"The last I heard," I said, "You didn't seem very ready to be emancipated. You had a plan to move into Harriet and Nona's house, as I recall."
"I may still do that, once I have emancipated status," he said. "But for now it looks better if I'm paying rent on a place of my own."
"Can you afford it?" I asked.
"I've been working since I was fourteen," he said, "and I've saved nearly every penny. I've had my own checking and savings accounts since I was fifteen, and last year I bought a $1000 120-day CD, which matures soon. I think I can roll it right over, though; I won't need that money for awhile."
I was speechless. "You're speechless," he said. "You think I'm flighty and spend all my time bopping from party to party. Well, that's true. But I know how to save, too."
"I guess I thought all that party hopping cost money," I said.
"It does," Ron replied, winking. "But it's never my money."
As Ron and Sammy headed hand-in-hand down the street to the bus stop (they were going to the mall, where one of the Backstreet Boys was supposed to be signing CDs at a record store), I found myself once again wondering whether my judgment is faulty in letting Sammy spend so much time with Ron. "If I think Sammy needs another male role model, which seems unlikely," I told Ed later, "I could just call Big Brothers/Big Sisters and get him hooked up with some nice stable man of mature years with no tattoos and no crazy ideas that kids should move out of their parents' house at seventeen."
"Sammy lives with a nice stable man of mature years," Ed says. "He hardly needs another fuddy-duddy like me dragging his fun quotient down. Besides, another idea he might pick up from Ron is that kids should go to work at fourteen, open checking accounts at fifteen, and buy $1000 certificates of deposit at sixteen."
"Which he managed by flirting--and who knows what else--with older men, so they'd buy him drinks and clothes. I just don't know," I mused. "I'm troubled about Ron. Is he exploiting the men he flirts with, or are they exploiting him? Or is it all just a harmless game? He's still a kid, even if he seems more worldly than you and me put together."
"Maybe you should talk to Harriet about it," Ed said. "It would be good to find out what she thinks."
"I will," I said, "next time I see her."
I meant to tell you, Ed and I have our own favorite moment from Kidnapped. At the end, when Davie has taken his rightful place as Laird of Shaws and Alan Breck Stewart has once again escaped the noose, Davie walks with Alan toward Edinburgh, from which friends will help Alan make it safely to France, where many expatriate Scots are living in exile since the revolution. Outside the city, they stop to say good-bye, and the place where they stop is called Rest and Be Thankful. Ed and I love it that there is, or was, a place in the world with such a name. We imagine it as a peaceful place, high on a heathered hill, with a perpetually blue sky and comfortable rocks to sit on for a moment by the wayside. That Davie and Alan part there is of course a symbolic moment; they may never see each other again, but they have reached a moment of rest in all their adventures, and they have, as they would say, muckle to be thankful for. "It's a good reminder," says Ed, and we often say to each other now, when we're feeling overwhelmed with busy-ness or with the contrariness of our children and each other, "Let's take a quick trip to Rest and Be Thankful." And I'll say it to you, because it's worth hearing again: Rest and Be Thankful. And Happy Halloween.
© Copyright 1997-2001 Su Penn. Design by David Dierauer.
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