Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 357

In the words of Budo…

A screen shot of a highlighted section of Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, posted by a reader.

Seriously, there are no better people in the world than readers. And especially readers who highlight sections of the text that meant so much to me while writing the book. 

Best compliment of my life

I received the greatest compliment of my life yesterday when my daughter, Clara, told my wife, “Mommy, thank you for marrying the funnest guy in the whole world.”

I got a little teary hearing those words.

 

Prior to this, I’d been keeping track of the greatest compliments of my life. Four in all.

On January 1, 1988. I was sixteen years old. I was standing on a bridge in California, strapped to a bass drum, ready to march in the Rose Bowl Parade. Two teenage girls were sitting on the curb nearby, waiting for the parade to start. After giggling a bit, they managed to get my attention and tell me that I looked a lot like Tom Cruise. I was clearly better looking in 1988, the sun was probably in their eyes, and Tom Cruise had not yet lost his mind.
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In the summer of 1988, I was spending a week in Weir’s Beach, New Hampshire with a bunch of friends. When not chasing girls and getting sunburned on the beach, we spent a great deal of time at the arcades that were within spitting distance of our cabins.

At the time, our friend Coog was known as the best video game player of our group, and one of the finest gamers of all time. Even today, he’s still our most prolific and experience gamer. But after a week of watching me play old school arcade games like Dragons Lair and Asteroids, my roommate Tom said to me, “Matty, if you and Coog started playing the same game on the same day, Coog would  beat you every time. But if I gave you both a week to practice, I’d put my money down on you every time.”

For a long time, this was the best compliment that I had ever received.
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In 2008 Elysha and I were sitting in the doctor’s office, listening to the doctor explain a complicated procedure that I would be undergoing. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but in the middle of her explanation, I made an exceptionally honest, somewhat surprising, slightly inappropriate comment about myself and the process that we were discussing.

The doctor looked at me, clearly unsure of what to think.

After a moment, Elysha jumped in and said, “Doctor, my husband is the most authentic person you will ever meet.”

Until Clara’s words yesterday, this was the greatest compliment of my life.
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In 2012, I overheard one student say to another student:

“Mr. Dicks isn’t the kind of guy who says something and doesn’t do it. He only says what he means. Even if it sounds crazy.”

I could’ve done without that third sentence, but it was still pretty good.

Clara’s sixth birthday. Make it stop.

My little girl turned six last week. She seems so old.

Time hasn’t exactly flown by. I write to my daughter everyday, so perhaps that allows me to mark time well, but time is still moving forward, incessantly so, and my girl is getting bigger and more independent and more autonomous by the day.

If I could, I would freeze my kids at exactly these ages forever. Six and two. I don’t care about the diapers or the babysitters or even the car seats. I’d go all-in on six and two and be happy forever.

When I tell this to Clara, she says, “Daddy! It’s my job to grow up!”  Sometimes she sounds so much mature than her age.   

           

Death bed regrets revisited: 2015

Four years ago, I responded to a list of the most frequent death bed regrets of the dying by indicating that I didn’t think any of them would be mine.

Then I listed what I thought would be my most likely death bed regrets.

At the time, they were:

I did not travel enough.
I never pole vaulted again after high school.
I did not spend enough time with Clara.
I did not get into enough fist fights.
I started publishing novels too late in life and did not have a chance to tell all my stories.

Two years ago, I revisited this list and decided that the desire for fist fights was probably not wise. Research shows that people get seriously injured and even killed with disturbing regularity due to punches in the head.  

Other than the desire to punch someone, the list held up well.

Two years later, I revisit the list again to determine if any changes need to be made.

1. I did not travel enough.

Still a problem. I still haven’t traveled enough. I was recently asked to spend a week in Brazil this summer, teaching storytelling to high school students, and I spent a few days in Indiana last year, but I’m not exactly piling up the miles. The kids are at a tough age to travel, too, and while Elysha is still home with the kids, the funds for travel are limited. But my hope is that when Elysha returns to work and Charlie is a little older, we can begin to make this happen.

2. I never pole vaulted again after high school.

I actually have an idea for a book that would have me pole vaulting again for a season. My agent loves the idea (it might be her favorite of my many book ideas), and I love it, too, so this is a distinct possibility.

3. I did not spend enough time with Clara and Charlie.

I’ve added Charlie to the regret now, but I’ve reached two conclusions about this regret:

Regardless of how much time I spend with my kids, it will never be enough.

Compared to many parents I know, I actually spend a great deal of time with my kids. My teacher schedule allows me to spend many, many days with my kids while most are working, and I spend almost every minute from the time I get home until the time I tuck my kids in bed in their company. So I’m doing okay, I think, but will also never really think so.

4. I started publishing novels too late in life and did not have a chance to tell all my stories.

I can certainly try to write faster, and I am, but there’s no way to recapture lost time. Perhaps there will be a day when I want to retire from teaching and can afford to write fulltime. That may help.

And now for an addition to my list:

5. I didn’t spend enough time outdoors.

As a kid, I spent the vast majority of my childhood outside, and I also spent hundreds of days and nights camping. But it’s been years since I’ve slept under the stars, and even longer since I have gone fishing or canoeing or rock climbing or all of the other things that I loved and still love. I don’t swim often enough. I don’t play basketball enough. I don’t go hiking often enough. Golf brings me outdoors quite a bit, but that’s about it. I’m hoping that my children will find a love for the outdoors like I had as a child, and together, I can find a way to avoid this regret. 

Poetry memorization need not be boring or a waste of time. I have used it to make a woman swoon (possibly) and enact one of my greatest pranks of all time against a fellow teacher.

Mike Chasar of Poetry Magazine writes about the lost art of poetry memorization. While it’s true that the academic demand to memorize poetry has all but disappeared from the American school system, I’m happy to report that this dying art remains alive and well in tiny corners of the world, including several of my own.

I took a poetry class in college with the late, great poet and professor Hugh Ogden, and he required us to have a newly memorized poem “of substance” ready for each class. 

“Of substance” meant that it had better not be four lines long.

We sat around a large, wooden table and recited our poems as our classmates listened on. Remarkably, Hugh had many of the poems that we recited committed to memory as well. He would close his eyes as we recited, almost as if he were listening to music and not the fumbling, occasionally inarticulate words of an nervous, undergraduate English major.

It was an incredibly difficult but incredibly rewarding expectation. I still have about half a dozen of those poems committed to memory, including Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” which I fell in love with through the process of memorization and still love today.
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Later, when I had students of my own –third graders and then fifth graders – I would require them to memorize at least one poem “of substance” each year. My students would grumble and complain about the requirement, but once they had the poem memorized and performed it on stage, they were happy to have done so.

Today, my students perform Shakespeare, and they memorize dozens and sometimes hundreds of lines with nary a complaint. And we still memorize our one poem of the year, myself included, in honor of Hugh.
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Years ago, in a time when Elysha and I still exchanged a present for every night of Hanukkah, I memorized Elysha’s favorite poem, William Blake’s  “The Tyger” and presented it as one of my gifts to her. With the poem committed to memory, I told Elysha that she had access to it at any time as long as we were together, and I would always recite to her on demand.

She loved the gift, or at least pretended to love it. And I can still recite the poem today, as can she.

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But my favorite moment of poetry memorization occurred about ten years ago when the teacher in the adjoining classroom began using the following call and response with his students:

Teacher: Oh Captain!
Students: My Captain!

I asked the teacher if he knew the Whitman poem that he was using – which I had memorize in college for Hugh and still have committed to memory to this day – and he did not. He had taken the idea from Dead Poet’s Society, the Robin William’s film about an English teacher at a boy’s boarding school in the 1960’s. 

I thought this rather unfortunate, so the next time he was absent from his classroom, I handed a copy of the poem to each of his students and asked them to begin memorizing it in secret. I explained that I would pop into their classroom whenever he was out to help them memorize the poem and rehearse, and one day, when they all knew the poem by heart, they would leap to their feet in the midst of the call and response, and instead of simply saying, “My Captain!” they would proceed to recite the entire poem to him.  

It finally happened on a morning in April. Since our classroom had an adjoining door and window, I was able to wait and listen for him to shout his first, “Oh Captain!” of the day. Then I watched as they all stood and recited the poem back to him. Shouted it back to him. 

In my memory, their recitation was universal and flawless. I suspect the truth was something not quite so cinematic. Still, it was amazing.

Had I been more familiar with the film at the time, I would’ve had them all stand on their desks. That would’ve been cinematic.

Not nearly the late bloomer that his Daddy was

I didn’t dance with a girl until I was 15 years-old at the sophomore semi-formal.

My son is getting a ridiculously early start.

The moment for which every author longs, experienced by my wife.

My wife was checking out books at the library when a woman stepped up beside her and handed Unexpectedly, Milo to the adjacent librarian.

“That’s my husband’s book,” Elysha said.

“What?” the woman asked.

“What?” the librarian asked.

“That’s my husband’s book,” she repeated. “He wrote it.”

“He did?” the woman said.

“He did?” the librarian said.

I can count on two hands the number of times I have seen one of my novels in the wild, and I have never seen Unexpectedly, Milo in anyone’s hands outside of friends and family. I see it on bookstore and library shelves all the time, but rarely in a reader’s actual hands.

I dream of the day when I step on a plane or walk across a beach or stroll by a row of treadmills and see a handful of people reading my books. For a few select author

The woman returning the book, it turns out, knows me. I attended her book club a few months back to discuss Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend, and she has since read my other two books. In fact, the library where the woman borrowed the book places a rating sheet on the back page, giving readers the chance to assign a numerical score and add comments about the book. She had been the first to take the time to fill out my book’s rating sheet.

It was exciting for my wife to see someone plop down one of my books right in front of her, and part of me is glad that my wife was able to experience that “in the wild” moment. I spend much of my life trying desperately to impress her, so a moment like this helps my cause.

Still, books in the wild are a tough thing to come by, and I was a little jealous that she was there to experience that moment and not me. Perhaps with the publication of my next book, set for the fall, my opportunities for seeing my books in the wild will increase substantially.

Fingers crossed.

Sleeping with goats on The Gist

I had the pleasure of appearing on The Gist this week. Host Mike Pesca interrogated me about my life story, and we talked about how you can take a life event and craft an interesting story from it. I talked about sleeping with goats, shotguns to my head, and being arrested and tried for a crime I did not commit. You can listen here or subscribe to The Gist in the iTunes music store or click on the Soundcloud link below:

This was my second appearance on The Gist. My first, in case you missed it, was a couple of weeks ago.  

The purpose of these appearances is to discuss storytelling. In addition to these discussions, we are taking story pitches from Gist listeners, and one lucky listener will have the opportunity to work with me on his or her story, with the goal of taking the stage and telling the story at a future storytelling event. 

If you would like to pitch us a story, listen to the episode for details.

What’s the word for this feeling?

The Germans have a word for everything (schadenfreude is one of my favorites), so what is the German word for the sadness that suddenly befalls a child when he realizes that it’s time to leave his friend’s house and return home to his thousands of plain old toys.

My daughter is failing to follow in her father’s footsteps, and I am both thrilled and mystified.

I think back on the terrible way that I treated my sister through much of our childhood – and especially when she was very little – and then I see a picture like this, drawn by my daughter, and I can’t help but wonder:

What is she thinking?

As a parent, I’m thrilled beyond measure that Clara loves her brother so much. But as an eldest sibling, I can’t imagine why my little girl doesn’t see the joy in torturing her younger sibling as I did so often when I was her age.