The Eighth-Grade Experience Project #2 -- Of Mice and Men. Y'all Could've Warned Me

The idea for Eighth-Grade Experience Project started here, with a search for my older son's required school texts:

From my Facebook page, on Aug. 9, 2019 --

When the eighth-grade reading list has all the stuff you read in college on it, and you think, “Great! I have all these already!” But really, you don’t, because somewhere along the way you lost “Of Mice and Men,” which you never really liked, anyway, and it’s not even in any of the heavy collections you’ve trucked from Bakersfield to Seattle to Fresno to Flagstaff to Sacramento to Bakersfield to San Diego, Connecticut and Florida, and you notice that the Norton Anthology of American Literature cost $28 at the Golden Empire Bookstore in, probably, 1993, and you don’t recognize the handwriting or understand the notes in the margins, but know the script must be yours and that you once understood.... And you find old postcards stuffed between the pages from a college friend who was brave enough to pack up and travel the world, and you text her pictures of the postcards — 19-cent stamps and almost 30 years ago!! — and you’re glad you had to search for that Steinbeck text, even if now you are headed back to the Amazon to buy a paperback with no history at all.

.....

"Of Mice and Men" used to be on this shelf with these other blue-jacketed Steinbeck hardbacks, a Book of the Month Club special collection, purchased decades ago, when I lived in the California so familiar in Steinbeck's work. I probably felt like any self-respecting resident of the Central Valley should own these books, though, apparently, I never got around to reading them all. 

Because, certainly, I would have remembered "Of Mice and Men."

Y'all could've warned me.

The intent of the Eighth-Grade Experience Project is to try to reconnect with my son, who is 12 and has copped a teenage attitude for five, maybe six years. I'm hopeful that having something in common like shared stories will show him I'm interested in his world and give us something to talk about.

"Of Mice and Men" gives us lots to mull -- animal abuse, abuse of people with disabilities, poverty, mob mentality, oh, and murder, among other polite conversation topics like inequality and whorehouses. 

Blake's never even seen a rated-R movie. 

Maybe it's partly our fault we're in this situation? Blake's fall birthday meant he squeaked into kindergarten at 4. We realized that one day he'd be the last in his grade to drive, and he'd go away to college before legal adulthood, but we never considered what would happen when the subject matter in middle school outpaced what was age appropriate for him.

"You already finished that?" he asked me the other day, pointing to our new copy of "OMAM."

"Yes, it's short," I told him.

"That's good," he said.

"Yes," I said.

Then he said, "The best books we read were in sixth grade.

"Last year's books were not good at all. They were all tied to what we were learning in history. They were all about war and suffering."

I hadn't realized that.

Last night, we picked up Dylan's sixth-grade class read ("Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus"), and I read aloud to them both while they played Minecraft on the XBox. Dylan was mad -- he'd been told to "not read ahead," but Blake begged me to keep going. 

So I did, practically yelling to be heard over Dylan's protests.

When I stopped, Blake said, "You should be an audiobook reader."

"Oh, I'm that good, huh?" I said.

"Well, you're not terrible," he said.

Sixth-grade book for the win.

Blake, age 12. Size 13 feet. Trying on a suit for cotillion, Sept. 1, 2019.

The Eighth-Grade Experience Project -- #1 The Giver. We Used to Be Readers

Once upon a time, we Neumanns were readers. 
We read at bedtime every night for years. It was my favorite time of day, and I like to think it was the children’s, too. Then, at some point, the wheels fell off the routine and pretty much everything else, but that's another story....
Summer reading assignments, however, never have been popular with any of us.
One August, early in our elementary experience, we realized the first day of school was fast approaching and the reading log was not yet filled out. Plenty of books had been read, but nothing recorded.
"You have to fill this out," I remember saying, and Blake collected a pile of books, all with one- and two-word titles, so he wouldn't have to squeeze "From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler," or some such, onto the paper's too-tight grid: Title, Author, Date Completed.
"Your teacher wants to know about you," I told him. "She wants to know what you like to read. What will she learn about you from these?"
"That I like books with short titles," he said.
I told a wise and respected friend, and she confessed that she fills out the log for her children. "It's about the reading," she said. "It's not a handwriting assignment."
Ah-ha. It's about the reading.
This summer, the one ahead of eighth grade, Blake was to read two books, one from a choice of six or so, and the other from a choice of two. For the first, he chose one he'd read years before -- to make it easy on himself, and I couldn't make him do any differently, he said -- and, still, he was so uninterested in completing it that even dollar bills stuck with Scotch tape to our kitchen wall along with “30 minutes of summer reading" tickets went ignored.
After a few weeks, I pocketed back my money and he eventually slogged through the book, anyway.
The second book he picked from the two choices because -- go figure -- it had a short title: "Speak." But he let that one sit, too, so I started it myself.
It was about a girl who'd been sexually assaulted, and that's important subject matter, but for a 12-year-old now-reluctant reader? Ugh. Not this summer. I steered him toward the second book, Lois Lowry's "The Giver."
"I haven't read it, but I know it's popular," I told him.
"Why haven't you read it?" he asked.
"I think I heard it's sad," I told him, and he knows I don't read sad things on purpose.
"I'm not going to read it," he said.
"You have to."
"I don't. No one reads the summer assignment. It's optional."
"It's not."
"It is."
And so it went. For 58 years, or however long the summer break was.
We carried "The Giver" on vacation to Colorado.
"That's a really good book," said cousin Olivia.
"That's a really good book," said friend Christopher.
"I'm not reading it," said Blake, and he last-minute stashed it in the checked luggage on the way home, so it wasn't even an option on the flight.
"This book will be done if you want a ride to camp," I told him when we returned, 36 hours before sleepaway camp was to begin.
"I know you want me to go even more than I want to go, so I'm not reading it," he said.
He might've been right about that first part, but he at least started the book, and he got a lift to the dude ranch.
The best day of summer is sleepaway camp drop-off day. (Note to self: Sign up for an earlier session next year.)
The second-best is pickup day.
"Oh, hey, Mom," he said on the drive home, after he’d told me about his horse Hershey, his scaredy-cat counselors, and his eating nothing but Frosted Flakes all week “like the vegans.”
“Two kids in my cabin also had to read 'The Giver' this summer. I borrowed it when we were stuck inside when it rained. I only have 15 pages left. It's really, really good. 
"Do you have my book with you?"