He is nine years old.

We are standing at the edge of the world, together, in the dark.

Dark. Darker, inkier than the dark in my backyard or his.

But not an eerie dark. This one familiarly wraps itself around us.

Friendly. Comforting.

The sounds we hear are the murmuring of the water as it laps our toes.

Our toes are immersed in the frigid water of the Pacific Ocean on the Oregon coast in July.

Toes, I say. 

He is in the water, sitting down. Even after a day frolicking in the waves, he cannot resist the feel of the surf lapping at his chest. 

The murmur of the water is answered by his laughing embrace of it.

It has been his friend for the first 9 years of his life. A predictable, welcoming friend every summer.

Once, 5 years ago, he toddled confidently and fearlessly into the waves before his parents noticed and fell over, submerged in the icy depths of a tide pool.  

His mother ran screaming into the surf to pull him out. He emerged, spluttering, but not angry or put off by the enticing surf.

Now he challenges the water with a boogie board, flies kites as far into the surf as he dares, and laughs at the cold and icy fingers of the water touching his body.

In this moment, we are both enclosed in a world of darkness, gentle sounds of peaceful waves, his laughter, and our contemplation of the dome full of stars overhead.

It’s an ocean above us of stars.

Behind us, around a campfire, his cousins, sister, parents, aunt and uncle and Babop (grandpa) ooh and aah while they watch the shooting star display overhead. 

He and I point out a couple of them to one another.

Mostly, however, we are united in a companionable silence that acknowledges the holy awareness of

Just this moment–companions with the gentle lap of the surf, the dark, the edge of the world, and the sky.

Behind us, I can hear his father walking toward us

Not to warn, pull him back, or disturb the sanctity of allowing his son 

Just to be: here in the dark with nature’s lights spread out above us and

Sea smells and feels.

Allow this moment to be.

I could have scrolled past this and left it alone.

Ok, in terms of potential social media reactions, that’s what I did. I didn’t leave a comment.

It was a simple post about the name given to a children’s daycare center: “The Children’s Hour.” 

My reaction was physical, maybe even audible: “Huh?”

Not, I am assuming, “Huh?” in the context of what the person posting the comment intended. A couple of responses that were left bore testament to that fact. There was a context to this tweet that I clearly didn’t grasp. Mine was the reaction of someone asking “what do you see that I don’t see?” 

Somewhere in my memory something stirred. “The Children’s Hour.” The title made me smile and remember my mother and her frequent recitations of memorized poetry. I grew up hearing stanzas from “Hiawatha” interspersed with Biblical passages and snatches of verse from “Psalm of Life.” My parents were educated when teachers frequently assigned poetry for students to memorize and perform in front of the classroom. Longfellow was obviously a “go to” for memorization and recitation. Still, I couldn’t quite place the reference to “The Children’s Hour.” So I did what most 21st century seekers do: I googled it.

And there it was. A 10-stanza poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. “The Children’s Hour.” Reading it, I could almost hear my mom’s voice. I didn’t spend too much time basking in the glow of that memory. That came later. I was too immediately focused on the question of “what is objectionable about this poem?”

Longfellow wrote the poem in 1860. It was included in the collection of his poems, Tales of a Wayside Inn. A bit of digging (thanks Wikipedia!) reveals that the poem was often taught in the early 20th century to elementary school children. The Wikipedia entry also references an educator, R.L. Lyman, who thought the poem’s language and literary devices weren’t suitable for children, arguing that it was “about children” and not “for children.”

This still didn’t answer my question.

Ok. It’s from an earlier time when the task of raising children was peripheral to the busy, productive lives of their fathers. The poem’s content indicates that a father “pauses in the day’s occupations” to greet and roughhouse with his kids. Longfellow included the names and descriptions of his own 3 daughters in the poem, which personalizes it as his own experience.

And obviously, the “day’s occupations” are the purview of said patriarch while the task of raising the children falls to their mother or, potentially, a nanny. So it represents a patriarchal view of parenthood as well as a view of life from a privileged standpoint. 

That’s a possible answer. 

Back to Google. I did some more digging, and I discovered that there are several daycare centers named “The Children’s Hour,” including an academy with that name in Lake Oswego, Oregon. (Fairly impressive looking library in the photos from that one.) But the number of daycare centers and academies with this name made me ask: is this poem more relevant to 21st century life than we realize?

I walk through my neighborhood frequently. It’s one that lends itself to walking; in fact, we have people who drive to our neighborhood to enjoy walking their dogs. The residential streets here are quiet and people recognize and greet one another regularly. There are at least four daycare centers (none of them named The Children’s Hour) within a 6-8 block radius. So, as I’m out walking, I often see parents picking up their children at the end of their work day. Daytime or afterschool care of these kids is the purview of someone besides mom or dad.  It’s obviously a  more harried experience than the poem’s speaker has, but these are people “pausing the the day’s occupations” to greet their children and take them home. Harried as this pick up time is, I often hear laughter and “what did you do, today?” and see kids sharing artwork with their parents. 

So, I ask again: what is objectionable? Doesn’t this poem resonate in some significant ways with the experience of raising kids in 21st century American culture? And would naming a daycare center after the poem be similarly appropriate?

And then my eyes fell on this:

The play written by Lillian Hellman–The Children’s Hour.

Pause here while I admit to my ignorance (until now) of this play. It’s a literary work that has been the subject of controversy and literary and cultural criticism. A bit more digging, and I acquired two critical literary essays written forty years apart. It has obviously been the subject of an ongoing discussion–and one I will pledge myself to enter via reading the play, viewing the film (Audrey Hepburn!) and reading the critical essays.

So, my thanks to a colleague who posted the tweet about the daycare center, for giving me yet another literary journey for Winter Break this year.

And, yet–

While I understand what the tweet was implying because Hellman’s vision of a girls’ school as a battle between mercy and cruelty hardly recommends it as the name given to a daycare, I wonder if the owners of the multiple daycare centers so named are aware of that possible connotation? Hellman gave the play its title as a purposeful ironic twist on the title of Longfellow’s poem. Is it possible that the daycare proprietors are unaware of the play’s existence, or, if they are, its content and theme? Is it possible that, like me, they have associated that title with a vaguely remembered short poem about children roughhousing with their father at the end of the day? 

I have a degree in literary studies (albeit, not as advanced as my colleague’s), and I have never read the play. I believe it’s quite possible that there are others, some even daring to wander the halls of academia, who have not.

My colleague has obviously read and studied the play; thus, her response to the name given to the daycare center. I believe her response and mine are akin to what Gerald Murnane refers to in “A Loose Fish”–the brief adaptation of his essay that is included in the January, 2022 edition of Harper’s. In his essay, Murnane refers to James Joyce’s irritation with anyone reviewing a book by summarizing or commenting in any generalized way on the content. He apparently expected any such reviewer to be able to quote passages from the book, a feat Murnane argues few people can accomplish. Murnane suggests that we remember our own “impressions” or “memories” of a text. In doing so, he argues, we have “adapted a fictional text for the best of all purposes: to enrich an actual life.”

We each, my colleague and I, have our own “impressions” of the text we associate with the title, “The Children’s Hour.” And those impressions enrich our lives.

I’m an unabashed word nerd. I won’t suggest that I’m any better at using words than anyone else is, but I’ve relished the heft of well-used words all my life. I can track this enjoyment all the way back to 5th grade. During a heated exchange with someone who always felt compelled to make me feel small, I had a moment of pure, unadulterated victory. I somewhat dramatically exited the room with: “You make me so sick, I could vomit!” I returned to find my tormenter looking up the word “vomit” in the classroom dictionary, and one of my best friends laughing.

So it is no surprise that Benjamin Dreyer’s text, Dreyer’s English, is a book I’ve grown fond of.

I’ve written in the margins of my own copy, and I carry it with me to class when I issue my students a grammar challenge. Dreyer’s text is witty and entertaining. I realize those are adjectives not usually associated with a text about English grammar and usage. 

But here’s the point: English is wonky. It doesn’t conform to many of the “rules” we’ve attempted to put on it, and many of those rules are arbitrary and wonky preferences handed down to students by frustrated English teachers. I usually begin my writing courses by using Mr. Dreyer’s section on Rules and Nonrules. I should point out that I’ve broken several of those nonrules already in this post. That is a subject for another day and another blog post. For now, I want to say a few words about a punctuation mark that is clearly the most misunderstood punctuation mark we have: the apostrophe.

As I’m writing this, we have finished yet another season of Christmas cards and Christmas letters–a genre of autobiography that used to fill mailboxes and now seems limited to a faithful few friends and relatives. 

Christmas cards are, by their very nature, personal messages sent to friends and family, and even business associates via the mail or handed to someone in person. I say “personal messages” because of their intent. When most of our communication is relegated to text messages and social media, these letters fill a gap. 

In my family, we regularly had extended Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings or summer campouts when everyone told their stories and expressed their opinions. I am, of course, revealing my privilege, here. Our family gatherings were loud, filled with laughter, and mostly fun. My poor Uncle Jim, who was a Democrat, had to endure the harangues of two Republicans around the campfire–his father-in-law, and my dad. But Uncle Jim’s camp spaghetti and my dad’s sense of the ridiculous always came through. The Christmas letters seem intended to fill in the gap left by busy lives and long distances between family members.   

The holiday letters we receive feature numerous photographs, often requiring a magnifying glass to ascertain that I don’t, indeed, know many of the people pictured. But they serve as a pictorial history of one family’s year. The letters feature narratives of family events throughout the year–trips to Yellowstone, hiking treks, births, marriages, deaths, surgeries, and other physical mishaps. One memorable Christmas letter years ago detailed some rather personal events ending in a divorce. Even the cards we receive now (thanks to the ease of companies like Shutterstock) function similarly. They are brief generalized greetings with photos that demonstrate how busy a family has been or how grown up their children are, now. Some even function as a parody of the genre. My daughter’s family sent a photo parody of the film Christmas Vacation, last year.  Garrison Keillor once referred to text messages as a way of letting other people know “where I am right now.” These letters and cards are an extended text letting everyone know “where our family is right now.”

As a word and grammar nerd, there is one element of these communiques that I can’t leave alone. I have to pick at it.   

What to make of a Christmas card that comes addressed to “The Allen’s”?

Let me start this discussion by paraphrasing one of my grad school profs who insisted that the apostrophe may be the worst experiment ever foisted on the English language. And let me follow that up by quoting my Grammar for Teachers prof, Mark Lester, who said “I don’t defend the English Language; I just teach it.” 

This is your warning: don’t @ me, people!

Some simple rules. Apostrophes are used for these two purposes in most cases:

1. Contractions. (Not the kind associated with birth that are painful, but another kind, which often seems equally painful–the kind where you connect two words together such as: don’t (do not), isn’t (is not), and so forth. 

Doing so has led to all kinds of confusion with this contraction: “it’s.” It means “it is,” but it is often confused with its–a possessive pronoun that is used like his, hers, theirs (and so on).

And please don’t connect 3 words together: ”should’nt’ve” (should not have, which you indeed should not have done! Unless, as Mr. Dreyer reminds us, your name is Flannery O’Connor.)

2. To indicate possession or ownership of something (The dog’s bone, the cat’s toy, and so on. (And of course, that pesky confusion over “its” now raises its head.)

Back to the addressee of the Christmas card: “The Allen’s”–and what to make of it.

Obviously, in the rush of the holiday season, it is much simpler to write “The Allens” rather than Mr. and Mrs….Or even Angela and Steve Allen. Addressing the card to all the inhabitants named Allen at the address you are compelled to write out saves you time and involves less cramping of your hand. It also covers all the inhabitants named “Allen” currently residing here. My partner, me, our dog, our chickens and ducks (all named), and so on. That seems to be the intent.

But this is not that. It came with an apostrophe. It isn’t a contraction (“Allen is”), so it is clearly a possessive. 

Our last name is Allen. Are you perhaps intending this card for one Allen? And, if so, what possession of that Allen are you addressing this to? The Allen’s guitar? The Allen’s fishtank? And who is “The Allen” in that case?

On second thought, maybe I should start referring to myself as “The Allen.” It has a nice ring of authority.  But what will Steve call himself? “The Other Allen”?

There is a rule in Mr. Dreyer’s text that I will quote. He writes it in all caps, and warns his audience to step back as he does so. (You can imagine this being shouted–from a rooftop or out the front door, if you like.)

“DO NOT EVER ATTEMPT TO USE AN APOSTROPHE TO PLURALIZE A WORD.” 

He also gives the following offer to his readers:

“For a modest monthly fee, I will come to wherever you are, and when in an attempt to pluralize a word, you so much as reach for the apostrophe key, I will slap your hand.” 

I make the same offer to my writing students each semester.

What about how the senders of these cards write their own names?

What to make of: The Smiths’?

Or the Jones’?

Ok, I’m picking on people I love. And, that’s elitist of me. Apostrophes are, as my grad school prof, Dr. Logan Greene insisted, a terrible experiment foisted on a language that is already full of contradictions, exceptions, and weird pronunciations. But we are stuck with them, as I remind my writing students. If we want to make our communications with one another clear, we have to understand how to use them correctly.

So to the Smiths’, the Jones’, and the people sending greetings to the Allen’s–Happy New Year. 

My blog is a collection of my thoughts–some old, some recent, some still in progress, and some left abandoned for a later time. I write about things I’ve read–books, essays, opinion pieces, poetry, and social media comments.