I Know GIGO Means “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” It Could Just As Well Mean “GOOD in and GOOD out.”

My sister home-schooled her kids.

A house where kids are home-schooled often has a different sort of decor than homes where kids go off to school each day. I visited a home-schooling house once that had a historic time-line circling the dining room. My sister’s kitchen walls boasted maps, spelling words, and, among other things, a bird clock.

If you missed out on the bird clock phenomena (beginning in 1997), it was an analog clock with numbers AND pictures of various birds around the edges. Every hour, the appropriate bird song would play. A light sensor caused the birds to stop singing when the room was dark, so owners/users of bird clocks would not be waked in the night. Also, there was a switch to turn off the bird sounds completely, for those who might have received the bird clock as a gift, and were not all that interested in constant bird sounds.

Thanksgiving 2000

My sister thought it was a good teaching tool, and for several years, the family’s days were punctuated, hourly, by the sounds of various birds, such as the Northern Cardinal, the Mourning Dove, and the Tufted Titmouse. (There were many kinds of bird clocks. You may have had a bird clock manufactured by someone else, and might be more knowledgeable about some alternate birds.)

The children grew and learned and became lovely, competent adults, going on to college and getting degrees in Linguistics and Education [Natalie], English [Patrick], and Philosophy, English, and almost done with law school [Collin].

The middle kid, Patrick, went into the army right after high school. Of course, he ended up in Iraq at one point, and that was a year of anxiety and frantic, middle-of-the-night prayers, and careful reading of newspaper accounts from the war zone. He returned home safe, and we were glad to have him out of danger. Now he’s a police officer.

But, while he was in various kinds of army training, he would phone home periodically and describe all the interesting and challenging things he was doing. After one event, where they were working, learning, and sleeping out of doors, he said to my sister, “And you know what, Mom? While we were out there, I heard the three o’clock bird.”

Maybe Patrick (or Collin or Natalie) wouldn’t now be able to identify those dozen bird songs from the bird clock of their growing up years, or, if not the birds themselves, at least the hours at which they sang. But truly, I think they might could. What we put early into children often stays, permanently, and is retrievable with a word, a gesture, a sound.

The drawer pulls on my desk.

When we moved into my childhood home, I kept a few of my parents’ things, including a desk that was the first piece of furniture they bought. The drawer handles are the metal kind that have a plate that is screwed to the drawer front, and a metal pull that swings. So, you grab the handle to pull out the drawer, and when you let go, the handle falls down on the metal plate and bounces a couple of times.

As I was filling up the desk with my own supplies, I opened a drawer, let go of the handle and, oh my. A very sudden and strong memory. That bouncing sound of metal against metal was the sound of the last nighttime moments before, as maybe a four- or five-year-old, I fell asleep. I would be safely tucked into bed; Daddy would be working at his desk, pulling and pushing drawers in and out. All was right with the world.

A good life gets passed on to the grandchildren;
Proverbs 13:22a (The Message)

In our house, the house I grew up in, it’s a straight shot across the back of the house from the kitchen, through the family room, which we now use as a dining room, down to the guest room, which was my bedroom. I occasionally get from guests, well, not flack, but some gentle comments, about the ruckus I make when company’s in the house, and I get up early to go to the kitchen. I point out that homemade, from scratch, cranberry coffeecakes do not quietly prepare and bake themselves. I know the sound carries. One of my childhood memories is the first-thing-in-the-morning sound of a fork clanking in a glass bowl, as my mother stirred up eggs before scrambling them for our breakfast. It’s still a warm and comforting sound to me.

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