Before we left for Costa Rica a year ago, Liam and Reid were both given new stuffed animals. Liam’s was a sloth (befitting our upcoming journey), and Reid’s choice was a baby leopard (also fitting, but also sometimes a baby cheeta). Reid names the leopard “Spots” for the obvious reason. Then his name evolved. Spots, Pots, Potsy, and finally it grew a last name: Condle-Cots. So now we have Potsy Condle-Cots:
Just before leaving Monteverde and Monteverde Friends Meeting I wrote a short article on the challenges of sustaining the Quaker tradition for their inaugural newsletter, Semillas. I try to employ some of the science I know around the durability of institutions and the dynamics of human cooperation to explore the topic. It was an admittedly simple and shallow analysis, but I hope some find it useful.
It can be found here: http://monteverdequakers.org/reflections-on-sustaining-the-quaker-tradition/ in both English and Español.
I offered the boys a cash prize if they dug up an old and unused clothes drying rack in the back yard. I expected it would take a few days, but no, with the help of the Heibeler kids, Lucas and Marcus, it was finished in an afternoon. Next work project: wedding the garden!
When we lived in 17 Winterhaven we had mostly second hand furniture. Okay, that’s still true, but we didn’t have many chairs or couches. We did, however, have two single matresses which we liked to push together or pile on top of eachother so that we the kids (ages 2 and 5) could jump on them. So we’d say “let’s have a jumping party!” Katie and I love the idea of a “Jumping Party.” In fact, just today Liam and Reid joined our neighbor Lucas for his birthday party at a trampoline park near the Orono movie theatre. Much more jumping, and an actual party. However, “the jumping party” still lived on because that is what we call those two matresses, which still function as a type of couch on the loft, covered in the two red sheeds they usually wear.
Today the Jumping Party happens to have a flaming sword resting on it among the pillows.
Mpenzi is Reid’s central, favorite stuffed animal. Penzi for short. Penzi features in a great many “Charlie and Penzi stories” told by Katie, which often involve wonderful crazy superpower-like abilities and utter silliness. Reid first got Penzi for valentines day when he was one year old. A gift from Sal and O’da. Penzi was a bean-stuffed doberman puppy dog toy, still is. But Penzi would often, often go missing. When we moved to our house at 24 Winterhaven Reid was 2.5. In the fall one year, at age five, Penzi was lost while galavanting outside at dusk in the woods behind the house. We didn’t find him until the snow fell, then we had no hope. He stayed lost. At age six we moved to Costa Rica for a year, and Penzi was not with us. When we returned, however, we got a new Penzi, who is not quite the same model, but similar enough to be genuinely treasured. Now we are back, and Reid is seven, but Penzi has gone missing again. A Penzi, always on some crazy adventure. Where next Penzi?
In 2017, as I write Reid will tend to use number like “ten thousand billion and seventy four” in a pinch to describe something really very very large. But there was a time, perhaps two years ago, when Reid would use “ten thousand five hundred fifty four” as his go-to big number of choice. Before that it was 10,555, which he apparently felt was not sufficiently nuanced. While ten 10,554 is long behind us now, I’m glad we are still in the days of “ten thousand billion.”
Liam turned ten last month, soon after we left Costa Rica. There is much we want to remember about his tenth year of life.
Liam remains a man of obsessions–said obsessions are generally tethered to his art table, a critical feature of any Liam abode. In Maine, he sets up shop on the loft with lots of origami paper, pens, and other supplies, and in Costa Rica he made due with our house’s coffee table and whatever he could make into a square sheet for folding paper (receipts, post-it notes, notebook paper, and fliers).
This year, Liam started out the year still passionate about Pokémon. Perhaps it was the combination of cuteness, ferocity, interesting taxonomy, battle potential, and lots of facts to memorize. Memorize them he did, pouring over his 700+ page manual and recording every last detail. I was reminded of 2-yr-old Liam who would recite lines from his favorite picture books as he fell asleep at night. Ever the artist, Liam created a hand-made Pokéball out of a tennis ball and colored balloons, his own intricate origami Pokémon designs, Pokémon drawings, a lengthy written report on Pokémon Go, and ornate card sleeves and carriers.
Sometime around February, Pokémon lost its appeal (there was little left to memorize in the manual, perhaps) and Liam pivoted with a vengeance back to his tried and true obsession: origami. He designed a stunning origami bison skull, a Droideka (Star Wars) model, and an origami Metagross. If we couldn’t find Liam, we simply followed his trail of folded creations and drawings, and voila!
Another passion of Liam’s this year was soccer, or fútbol as he and his Tico friends call it. Liam jumped into the fray of Costa Rican kids’ soccer with great courage, a land where headers are expected (sorry North American docs), footwork is beyond fancy, and the level of play is like nothing we see in the States. The intensity seemed to captivate Liam and he went from a middling, kind-of-interested U.S. soccer player to a guy who somehow always snuck the ball around us and suddenly demonstrated deep ganas (desire) to improve his game. One night in a rough Nicaraguan border-town, Liam watched a group of kids playing fútbol under street lights next to the river, and within minutes he was out on the cement field asking if he could join them.
More than anything, this year Liam revealed his amazing gift for languages. He started out the school year in a Spanish-as-a-Second-Language class but was soon mainstreamed. Before we knew it, he was conjugating verbs in tenses Tim and I have yet to master, getting complimented daily by Ticos for having a perfect Costa Rican accent (not to mention diction, like starting sentences with the Tico qualifier Bueno), and generally soaking up Spanish. Now that we’re back in the States, we still find ourselves turning to him for help whenever we encounter Spanish: searching for obscure words like jaguar or fisheries at our local Spanish table, or trying to make sense of Latin pop songs in the car (Me: “What did the singer just say?” Liam: “He said, ‘Bring me the alcohol to dull the pain,’ Mom.” Me: “Oh!”).
Of course, language is culture and Liam seems to have carried some Costa Rican culture home with him. When we asked him tonight if he would finally (this was not the first time we were asking–the guy often moves slowly) bring his dishes to the kitchen, he said, “Ya lo hago,” which roughly translates to mean, “I’m already doing it.” In an objective–or at least North American cultural–context, this was simply not true, but it was a perfect Costa Rican reply. Liam had started to think about bringing his dishes to the kitchen, so in that sense he was already on the job. He is our pura vida guy.
Liam’s gentle, compassionate character sometimes ran him into trouble this school year. Tico kids play tough, and though there were some equally gentle, lovely kids in his class, there were also some bullies who gave him trouble. Liam’s inclination was to bite his tongue, not to rock the boat (his greatest fear was that he might get into trouble if he stood up to them). We–and his teachers–finally persuaded him otherwise. On the day Liam tackled a kid on the soccer field after the kid bit him, we celebrated by making a cake. It was hard to watch Liam have to deal with bullying, but we realize that learning to stand up to aggressors is perhaps better done at age 10 than 13, or 25, or 40.
At the end of the year, Liam and Reid’s school continued the tradition of a “Meeting for Appreciation,” the sort of ceremony you might do at the end of a camp session. Kids and teachers met in the Quaker Meeting House and stood to share messages of appreciation. Tim and I didn’t make it to this event. We were at home packing for our family’s imminent departure. We should have realized Liam might share something. Throughout the school year, Monteverde Friends School students attend weekly, hour-long, mostly-silent Quaker Meetings, and earlier in the year Liam had risen one Wednesday morning to calmly share a message that teachers told us left them spell bound for days afterward. “He’s a wise old soul,” one generously said. No other child shared a message during Meetings during the entire school year until this end-of-year Meeting for Appreciation. Sure enough, within an hour of the end of Meeting for Appreciation, we received a flood of messages from friends and teachers who were impressed with what Liam had shared and with what friends had said about him. “What a good kid,” they commented. One friend said that if we had been there, we would have needed “muchas tissues.”
He’s a lovable fellow, Mr. Liam, and what a treat it has been to watch him grow in Central America this year. Happy birthday, kid.
Here is something from the archives. Hijo means son in Spanish.
Hijo A: Look, I found a wishing rock!
Hijo B: A wishing rock, what’s a wishing rock?
Hijo A: It’s a rock you can make a wish on.
Hijo B: Yeah, but it doesn’t work.
Hijo A: I hope it works.
