Earth Day Every Day

Dear Dad,

So here's the horrible truth, I totally missed Earth Day this year. I know, I know! You marched in the first Earth Day. You taught us about doing right, or as right as you can, by the environment before it was cool. We were composting things and reusing things and recycling things long before there were green and blue bins for that. But hear me out.

I remember being a kid, probably around Briton's age because, like him, I was full of righteous indignation over things, in this particular instance, the fact that Earth Day was just once a year. It should be Earth Day everyday, my twelve-ish year old self wanted to shout at the world. Why should there be just be one day when we worried about what harm we are causing the earth? Why should it be only once a year that we want to fight for the planet we live on? It should be all the time, right?

What goes around, comes around

Dear Gillian,

The Columbia Earth Day celebration was rained out last week. Seems fitting, in a way.

Rain is the epitome of recycling: Raindrop to stream, stream to ocean, ocean to cloud, cloud back to raindrop. Repeat for a million years or so.

Earth Day is very special to me. I was a freshman in college in 1970 when θ -- the Greek letter theta – began appearing on bumper stickers and posters. Theta on a green field was the new symbol for ecology, which itself was a term that never made it into my textbooks.

By April, I was wearing the symbol myself and part of the organizing team for Earth Day 1 at Shasta College in my hometown, Redding, CA. I have seldom felt so proud as when I carried the giant θ-emblazoned flag as we marched through downtown.

I tell that story to my students now and their eyes roll. Few know what “Earth Day” means – nor do they care. I suppose I should be upset, but I’m strangely pleased. Their ambivalence means that hippie-haired gaggle of protesters in 1970 succeeded. We changed the world.

From One State to Another

Oregon to a Missourian

Dear Gillian,

Spring is just starting to peep out here in the Heartland. The trees are budding and the bulbs are blooming. In a week or two it will be honestly green.

But Missouri is not Oregon. I think the real green every time I glance down at my right hand and see the sparkle of my UO ring. After 14 years as a professor here at the University of Missouri, I’m a loyal Mizzou Tiger. But in my heart, I’ll always be a Duck.

Oregon is a mystery to most Missourians. I asked a few of my students this week what they though of when I said “Oregon” or “Oregonians.” I was met with puzzled looks and a couple of “I can’t even imagine it.”

Missouri to an Oregonian

Dear Dad,

Remember in Eugene when you’d get those rare days in spring where, after dreary skies and an eternity of rain, the sun came blazing out in all it’s summer glory and no one came to class, not even professors because, well, the sun was shining! It’s that kid of day here in Portland. Unfortunately I’m no longer an undergraduate who can just skip a class now and then, and while it is my day off from work, I’m stuck inside studying cataloging, which, by the way, is not the kind of thing you want to do on a beautiful sunny day.

The western half of Oregon, as you know, is blessed (cursed?) with an abundance of rain. I actually don’t mind the rain. I’m not sure if it’s a gene passed down from our English roots or just the fact that I’ve spent more of my life in the rain than out of it that has made it, for the most part, a perfectly pleasant kind of environment to live in. It means that you spend a lot of time indoors or in raincoats, sure, but it also means that it’s green an lush almost all the year round.

Kids, parents and performances

To Watch, To Dream, To Love

On Friday night I sat in a darkened high school auditorium and watched my girl dance under the bright stage lights. I have seen this particular dance at least a hundred times. I sat through the beginning stages of learning it, listened to the ballet teacher stop and start and stop the music again and again to work on this step or that. I helped with costumes and dress rehearsal and yet, it never got old, watching my beginning ballerina, no less serious for her inexperience than a more advanced dancer, sous-sus, plié and relevé her way through the performance.

This is the first chance I've had to be the one watching other than school music class concerts. The first time I was the audience to my own children. It's only in the last few months that both kids have discovered the excitement of preforming, Evelyn with dance, Briton with acting. His play is just a few weeks away (which reminds me, I better get sewing on those saytre costumes he promised my time and sewing machine for). And as much as I loved (and I mean LOVED) being on stage as a teenager and young adult, I have to say I am enjoying this audience thing even more.


It's not just the fun of watching your child do something wonderful, and lets face it, even if things go terribly wrong, I'm still going to think my own children are fabulous. It's seeing them be inspired by their own abilities, seeing that flush of happiness on their face at the end of the dance, when the audience is clapping and they are smiling and bowing, seeing that familiar thrill, the one I remember, sending their limbs jittering with excitement.

As much as I think to myself "That girl is a dancer!" I've never been the parent who pushes their kids into this activity or that one. In fact, I may have under-exposed them to after school activities simply due to my dread of driving all over town for lessons, classes and practices. I don't expect them to find the thing that drives them now, at eight and twelve. I don't really care much if they stick with dance and drama or float away from them and onto other things. I want them to love life. And if that means dancing four hours a day, well ok. But I'm also ok with building foam swords for a hobby. Watching Evelyn dance was heart-clenchingly sweet. One of the joys of being a parent. And I suspect I'll watch many more dances, and several plays as well for the boy, but even if I'm just watching a reenactment of Jason and the Argonauts in my front yard (it happens) just watching has turned out to be so much fun.


  -Gillian

I'm more than a fan. I'm the Dad.

It’s hard to imagine two more opposite performers than our children.

Gillian, our oldest, was born with showmanship. Last-minute complication had the nurses excited as they wheeled Cecile into the delivery room. But like the diva she was and is, she simply came out smiling and singing.

Garrett, our son, had less dramatic but arguably more dangerous natal entrance. He was born jaundiced and spent the next several days under bilirubin lights at the hospital while his mother and I worried.

Both of my wonderful children have, through the years, provided endless hours of the joy, laughter and even terror only a parent can experience. I never tired of their very different performing styles.

Our first video of Gillian shows her dressed in a pinafore and belting out “It’s a Hard-Knock Life” from Annie. She and her friend choreographed their act, complete dance steps and hand gestures.

No surprise, then, that she insisted on going to the Oregon Country Faire to have her ninth-month belly painted or that last week she dressed in the 1920s tweeds of Madame Librarian for a festival. She has never stopped delighting her audience – even if that was just good old Dad.


Our first video of Garrett showed a toddler pushing a toy shopping basket through the house with fierce determination. Nothing was going to stop him; nothing was going to break his concentration.

He was destined to become an engineer. He tackles every challenge with focus, energy and forethought.

The easy part of watching your kids perform is liking it. What’s not to like? Children (your own, that is) cannot sing off-key, fumble their lines or trip over props. It’s all part of the Biggest Show on Earth – parenthood.

Not that they can’t give you the cold sweats. When Gillian announced that she planned to become a drama major and that her boyfriend would be an art major, I had nightmares of supporting them for the rest of my life. Thankfully, Gillian changed both major and boyfriend.

Garrett specialized in stomach-gripping physical performance. He took up soccer early, but blossomed when he moved into the goalkeeper’s box. A keeper is the masochist at the end of the field who dives on the ball just as other players are kicking it. That is, when he is not diving into the path of a leather cannonball.

Eventually, Garrett grew out of competitive soccer. So he took up whitewater kayaking. You will never know how long you can hold your breath until you watch your son turn upside-down amid foam-splashed boulders.

But Garrett always rights himself, just as Gillian always gets deserving applause. And both make me so proud that I would gladly give up anything Hollywood can imagine to watch them perform the miracle of life.

Bravo, my children. Bravo.

Clyde