LETTERS FROM HOME: TAKING ENOUGH CARE TO MAKE OURSELVES HAPPY

April 3, 1997

Dear Pat,

Watching my 7-year-old niece Kim write her story "The Tooth" during her Easter vacation reminded me of a crucial difference between childhood and adulthood: In childhood, no line separates work and play. Children do what gives them pleasure, and when it stops being pleasurable they start doing something else.

Often adults can be found doing things they don't enjoy, and they're not satisfied to stop at masochism. If they have the power, they also make other adults do disagreeable things. And because they do have the power, they make their children be miserable, too.

Thus children eventually learn the difference between work and play.

Kim lay on the floor working on "The Tooth." Sometimes she worked at a table. Sometimes she stopped to play games with her sister, then wrote some more. She lived the writing.

The story was nine pages and counting last time I read it, and that included the front and back of some pages.

It has to do with the fairy that rewards children with money in exchange for the baby teeth they lose. Kim's protagonist also loses her money somehow and spends about seven of the pages looking for it.

She predicts the money will be found by the time the story ends.

Nephew Kyle and I played golf. He's just learning and I'm just teaching. He broke a nine-iron in half when he whiffed at a ball and hit a sapling instead.

Kyle wants to hit a homer every time he swings. The physics of golf rewards not strength but technique and hitting the ball flush, I moralize to him. Shift your weight, left arm straight, shift your weight back, left hip out of the way, right elbow tucked in, keep your balance, hit against a firm left side, follow through. Don't forget to stay in balance. Words to live by.

These are all the things I haven't yet learned how to do in concert. All reminders that can make work out of play.

Kyle plays soccer and baseball and the trumpet and is learning the piano. He'll figure out golf if he wants to.

Most of all I hope he learns one of golf's great lessons: No excuses.

Eight-year-old Carly is the enigma. Sometimes seems afraid of the world. Is scared of Hank (justifiably), and a little afraid of Lucy (yeah, she might lick you to death).

Catch her singing to herself and you hear small angelic sounds. But she doesn't want anyone to hear. This year she made her school's cheerleading team, though. People change, and children change the fastest.

In "Care of the Soul," Thomas Moore asserts that work is sacred. Work that is joyless, he says, does damage to the soul.

Waitressing, selling cars, digging ditches, all sacred. We've all known waitresses, car salesmen and ditch diggers for whom work is a sacrament, a rite of nourishment, of making dreams come true, of sculpting the earth with a shovel. This is soul work as saintly as any.

But there also are men and women in sweatshops, the hell of foundries, mind-numbing office cubicles, in slaughterhouses where fear can be smelled, in barracks and barrios where mere children are learning how to kill. Souls that yearn for respite.

To be 7-year-olds, lying on the floor, taking care to make themselves happy.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.