Places I Grew Up: Homeschool Co-Op

For a while we were part of a community of homeschooling families named MACHE for Mountain Area Christian Home Educators that met a nearby church. It looks almost like I remember, except for the fence and fewer trees.

When we had band lessons under Bart, we would come here one day a week and then a place in town on another. We would assemble our instruments in the foyer behind the auditorium, where we would practice, left in the image. I started with the clarinet and Andrew with the flute. We had had some exposure to reading sheet music before, I think, but for me this really solidified reading treble music. (Later, I would take piano under Mary and solidify reading bass.)

I don't know how much I knew about the clarinet when I started. (We used to watch Boston Pops, and in one of our unit studies Mom made a poster of an orchestra with circle stickers to represent the seats and different colors for instrument classes like woodwinds.) I'd probably play every instrument invented if I could. At one point I wanted to learn drums. I think I remember meeting Bart about me playing brass, which was his forte (pun intended!), but we thought my asthma would be a problem. 

Dad had played trumpet in his high school's marching band. He has lots of trumpet albums (Maynard Ferguson, Herb Alpert, etc.), a few recent ones I think from my grandmother Celeste. And some synthesizer ones too, like Isao Tomita. We had a synth (Roland I think) that Andrew and I liked to play, especially later. Mom had played flute and guitar. Andrew and Matthew would later go on to learn guitar from a teacher up in the mountains named Don. I think before that, Matthew and Haley learned trumpet and flute in town from Bart's son.

It's probably for the best that I landed on something quieter than drums or brass. Clarinet also put me in a good position to later play alto sax. Saxophone interludes are still one of my favorite things about 80s music!

One clarinet I used I borrowed from a family who also played in the band. There was tape on the bell and sometimes it would fall off. A little embarrassing to have that kind of attention from the whole class. There are life lessons there, though. I got another one later, still have it. Wonder if it still works. (Wonder if I should get new reeds before I try. 20 year old spit! 😶)

If I remember correctly the same family helped drive us to band when Matthew had heart surgery. The mom had beads that spelled her name on her keychain. Don't remember much of our conversation except that I mispronounced a word -- I learned dressage is more like massage than message. I learn new languages to avoid making that kind of faux pas. (But please don't ask me to say that out loud; haven't learned French yet. 😉) Edit: Reword and add note, because I don't think this did justice to how very kind not just she and her family were but also everyone was during that time. We had a lot of help, and I'm very thankful for all of it. 

Band is what I remember most here, but there were other things as well. We attended a production of Pilgrim's Progress here. Some things we tried a couple of times: a 4-H group, a bell choir. One of our more regular ones was a chess club. I don't win at chess much, so one game when I was ahead I started taking out every opposing piece I could to clinch the win. It was a stalemate. 😬

We took standardized tests here. One time I finished a test early and drew a koala eating tapioca on scratch paper we were given. (It made sense at the time.) The proctor made my day by complimenting me on spelling tapioca correctly. 

When I was young, I made the best painting in my life so far at that building. (Not saying much! 😛 Art's not my strong suit.) It was a mountain scene that reminded me of one my grandmother Judy painted. She showed us that mountain once when visiting her mother, my great-grandmother Lillian (a.k.a. Granny; we call her by the same name Mom does!), in El Paso. 

One time I was making biscuits but I forgot to take them out of the oven when we had a class. Worse, I didn't realize until we were on our way back, when I told Mom. We worried that I burned the house down! Fortunately it was a short drive and we found only very well-cooked (re: charred) biscuits.

Mom taught creative writing and bookmaking. I made a book of poems and a murder mystery based off the comedy "Murder by Death." They're not as good as I remembered. One part in the beginning of Gotta Clue made me chuckle like a book I found after college, John Swartzwelder's "The Time Machine Did It," which I highly recommend. Also, the poems about pets are nice. (One of my chores was to take care of our pets.)

Places I Grew Up: Library

Libraries, books, and reading were big parts of our education. Mom taught us to read with a book called 100 Easy Lessons. Think the incentive for me to finish was a trip to Planet Fun, which Andrew had gotten me pumped over when he told me about a slide where you went so fast you almost flew into a ball pit. (Incidentally, I've always associated Planet Fun with Pizza Planet from Toy Story.) It may have been a book still when I was using it, but we eventually turned it into a 3-ring binder. This was its cover:

Andrew was also a big influence in teaching me to read. For fun, we'd read his Boys' Life magazines and comics like Calvin and Hobbes. Dad too would read the Bible to us while we drew pictures on the den floor. One time I drew an armored knight -- think Dad was reading Ephesians 6 that evening! -- and we fastened his arms and legs together with brads. He'd also read things to us kids before bed like Dr Seuss.

When I was very little, we'd go to the Lomas/Tramway library in town, which had a gorilla made from tires in its courtyard. Later, we would drive past the library in Tijeras on our way home from town to watch its progress as it was being built. (Its Facebook page says it was finished in October 1994.) I think I remember us being there for the Grand Opening, which would make sense given how excited we were about it.

We also watched Cherry Hills Library go up, since it's over by Mom's parents' house. (Its Facebook page says that was 1998.) 

For the longest time, Tuesday was our library day. Especially when we were car schooling we would stop by on our way to or from town. We were very active in the summer reading program. We often took (and take!) books everywhere we went because reading was something to do in downtime: in waiting areas, while our siblings were taking classes, on road trips and vacations. 

We got to where we could read in moving vehicles, even on rough roads! I would entertain -- I hope I was entertaining! 😛 -- other passengers by reading aloud strips I thought were funny from Garfield books I borrowed from the library. Think all the kids borrowed Garfield books. (Coincidentally, Mom's dad Don and Haley share the same birthday as Garfield artist Jim Davis. And the day after is Mom's mom Judy's birthday.)

Even when we were going to the library weekly, we would sometimes each get many books. We used to have a communal blue plastic basket like you might use for laundry filled with the weekly haul. Although we did also keep books in our rooms. Because we'd also be asking for holds on books from other branches, Mom joked we were good for the library's book circulation. 

We all kind of had genres we liked to choose from. 

Dad has always been mystery (detectives like Morse, Poirot, Dalgliesh, etc.) and thrillers like Clancy and Cussler. He and Matthew read Ted Dekker's Odd series, and he and I read John Grisham.

Mom would do whatever our unit study was at the time (Ancient Egypt, Wild West, etc.), productivity books, and things like best-sellers for beach reading. Everyone had genres they liked, but Mom and I are probably the most discursive. I didn't read a lot of sci-fi, but I read some, and I think she's the same way. Think my liking for zany fiction comes from her, because she liked Ramona the Great, Steven Kellogg, and Junie B. Jones.

Andrew liked sci-fi/fantasy like Dune and spooky stuff like Goosebumps, which he would pass on to me and I also liked -- think we may have been limited to one per person per trip to limit nightmares... and also to encourage a little more variety in our reading 😉 -- and Stephen King.

I liked Encyclopedia Brown, zany fiction (like the Bailey School Kids series or Judy Blume's Fudge books), comics, classics (one series had books like Edgar Allen Poe and The House of the Seven Gables in comic book form), and non-fiction. 

Matthew, our Trekkie, was also sci-fi/fantasy, reading Star Trek books by Shatner and Nimoy. I think once or twice he found Dr Who books too. Tom Baker and K-9 were his favorite. He once knit a long Tom Baker scarf and gave it to Dad, and I think he also made a cardboard K-9. He and Haley were big fans of the PBS morning lineup and would check out the Arthur books frequently. Recently he's also been reading classics like 20,000 Leagues and Moby Dick.

Haley went through a stage where she read a lot of Mary Kate and Ashley books. (Think she probably wondered what it would be like to have a sister.) As they grew up, she and Matthew both got into Mangas. One she lent me to read a few years ago was One Piece -- not much into Mangas myself but that was a really fun book!

Just by being there so much, we got to know some of the librarians pretty well. One in particular was Michele, whom I remember being at the children's center desk and who we talked to about summer reading. 

One time while checking out a nonfiction children's book by Asimov (part of his Library of the Universe Series?) I got in a conversation with a librarian about him. I knew little about him or the subject matter. But I'd skimmed the book, and there was a drawing of him on it and I thought he looked smart, so I told her he was a genius. Probably the truest yet most uninformed thing I've ever said! 🙂

When Mom needed to clean house when we were little, a lot of times we would help, but sometimes we would go outside to play. (Sometimes she may have just needed time away from us rapscallions.😉) By legend, Andrew and I would sneak (library?) books out there around our waists under our shirts. Swings and slides and dogs are fun, but books are too!

When LOTR was in theaters, Andrew and I made a board game like Trivial Pursuit about it for an event at the library. Seems like we met a fellow student named Forrest from Karate at that event too. Somewhere I've got a bunch of bookmarks from the library around then of the movie's characters (can edit if I find them). Here's one:

We also found some work through the library. One of Andrew's first jobs was as a page at our local library. And when he went to live with Dad's mom Celeste in Texas, he worked in a library over there too. (Celeste also got us, especially Matthew, into Hank the Cowdog books on tape, which she would borrow from the library and play in her car while traveling.) I volunteered at the library when I was not at school. And when I was at NMT and UNM, it wasn't unusual to find me in the library.

We got hit a little hard by fines when we moved to Virginia. Weren't used to them. Our libraries in NM have a very generous policy about renewals and late books. (One library book that I'd swear we had for years was Stranger with My Face -- we got so many library books they'd sometimes get mixed up with our own, but they'd still have a barcode or big orange sticker showing they were the library's!) The selection of books in VA, though, was top-notch. I found a receipt the other day of books I borrowed, and it was stuff I'd forgotten all about until I rediscovered after school, books by Peter Singer and Dostoevsky for example. 

The library has been in many ways our home away from home. I still visit, not as much as I used to, but I also still have fond memories of libraries and the books and folks that we found inside them.

Places I Grew Up: Karate Dojo

I grew up east of Albuquerque, NM, on the other side of the Sandia mountains, between Tijeras and Edgewood. When I was very young we lived in the city, but about the time my brother Matthew was born we moved up the canyon to about 2000 ft higher elevation than ABQ itself (about 5000 ft), which can make a difference with some recipes. 😄

I was homeschooled up through high school. I'm told that we started with my older brother Andrew, who had some difficulties in early education. Since Mom was a teacher she suggested that she could teach us instead. When Andrew did better and I was doing ok too, we decided to continue. There were times when Mom would say the rest of us never set foot inside a real school.

How we were educated changed over time. Early on we would meet with nearby families and a co-op. Later we would almost "car-school," driving from teacher to teacher. That was a lot of work! So after that we had a phase where we were almost entirely schooled at home, although church was another resource; this thread was always present in our education, but for a time we focused on it primarily. And then we were introduced to public education through community colleges. (When we moved to VA when I was in high school, we had some opportunities that were like co-ops and car-schooling.)

When we were car-schooling in NM, one of the activities for us three boys was karate. If we were out shopping and in our ghis (uniforms), Mom would sometimes observe that we looked like bodyguards around our sister Haley. There was a dojo in Cedar Crest, which was at this plaza when we started as white belts. (We moved locations, so it's another place now.) Seems like we upgraded our fireplace to a pellet stove through a place right next door, but that's no longer there either.

Sessions usually consisted of:

1. Bowing in (if you were late you may have needed to wait a bit for a senior member to recognize you, motivation to be on time)
2. Stretches/warm-ups
3. Techniques: the whole class would line up by rank and go back and forth the exercise space practicing one technique at a time. (For example, forward leaning stance was a lot like lunges.) We would breathe out on completion of each move, and kiai (pronounced key-eye, shout) when we reached the opposite end of the room.
4. Forms: Sequences of techniques that the whole class would perform in columns. We'd start with the forms everyone knew, bowing out when we'd exhausted our knowledge to either learn more forms from the instructor or a student with a higher belt level, or to watch stoically from the sidelines as more senior members performed higher-level forms.
5. Sparring: Usually best in one-on-one fights to 3 points. A point was gloved punches that landed on torso, maybe a penalty for blows that hit the (helmeted) head. Strangely, since I've had an interest in boxing, I wasn't as hyped up to do this as I thought I would be. 
6. Fun time: Usually aerobics like somersaults or punching, kicking, or leapfrogging over a punching bag. Our instructor, Shane, sometimes used a padded stick to indicate sequences of jumps and rolls for us to perform.
7. Recitation: Shane was careful to remind us always through echo-and-response with students enthusiastically shouting "Yes sirs" and "No sirs" that
1. Practice is important, but "perfect practice makes perfect"
2. The skills we were learning were last resort, for self-defense only, and never to harm
8. Bowing out (more senior members last, if I remember correctly)

Shane was a great teacher and role model. He could be funny: Sometimes when stretching we would sit Indian style with the soles of both feet touching, and we would stretch our backs by leaning forward, at which point Shane would ask us to breathe in deeply through our nose... and therefore smell our stinky feet. And he could be serious: There were times when horseplay and messing around were simply not allowed. 

Shane also pushed students out of their comfort zone. He coaxed one young student into learning how to say "yellow" correctly before earning the belt. For my part, I had always been a little on the lazy side with physical activity because of asthma, but he made sure I got my exercise in! But he also made sure we didn't push too hard.Seems like his father also taught karate. Shane had a ponytail and goatee, a look I've tried once or twice. (Edit: Thought he might have also given students mementos from out-of-area competitions, but not sure.)

We shared the building on Wednesday nights and Saturday mornings with a Jazzercise group led by a lady named Judy. The leftmost part of the facility was for guests like parents to watch or wait to pick up the students. The gap to the left of the building in the picture had a staircase that I went down very infrequently if at all. One time a student tried sliding down the staircase's banister and got their leg stuck between it and the wall! The senior members had to help ease them out.

When we moved locations to further up the crest, we were in another plaza near a BBQ place called RIBS; Mom, Dad, and Haley (who did ballet/dance lessons instead of martial arts) would sometimes grab a bite there while they waited for us. We may have been a complex or two down from RIBS. (Seems the far left end had an aquarium, where we got betta fish.) The new building had a mirror at one end of the room so we could watch and correct our posture. The waiting area was separated from the exercise area by a windowed wall so parents could talk without breaking the class's focus.

Highest level I remember getting was brown belt. Earning a black belt was strenuous: You had to go through several kyus (represented by black tape wrapped around end of belt) with several levels to get it. Some of the black belts had red tape at the ends. Didn't learn all the ins and outs of the belt system -- some of my certificates have JG for Junior Grade (I think) but I don't know what that means -- I just knew that if you wanted to pass when testing day rolled around you gave 101%! I failed tests when I didn't do that. You had to sweat!

We also trained for competitions. There was sparring, but I don't remember doing it. I remember you walked crisply in front of judges, announced yourself and your form, and then performed it like testing day.

Martial arts has been a good influence with a positive impact on me. At NMT I took classes in Kung Fu with other strong role models. In the future I may look for ways to get involved in it again.

Local Restaurants

 Been meaning to try more local restaurants. But had trouble figuring out where to start. So when I saw a news broadcast on an app especially for ABQ, I knew I had to give it a whirl:

 And tonight I used Selflane to find Gyros Mediterranean. Wish I'd ordered something more adventurous (for me)... like lamb, which I don't know if I've had. But the Turkey Pita was really good! And the salad. I'm very partial to feta! And the patates, like a cross of potato chip and french fry.

Looking forward to doing it all over again soon!