Indiana Voters-in-Training

I could have gone by myself to vote, but I didn’t. Instead, I took all four kids with me late this afternoon. I like for them to see the process.

They watched as an acquaintance from our neighborhood flipped the pages of a three-ring binder with names and addresses to “K” and pointed to my name. They watched me sign.

A volunteer offered them each a malted milk ball and handed them an “I Voted” sticker.  

They accompanied me to the machine and saw the names organized on the screen. They watched me review the ballot, confirm my selections, and press the red button.

Malted milk balls and stickers? Big red buttons?

What’s not to love?

Afterwards, The Boy tore out of the building with a huge smile on his face and sprinted along the sidewalk to our van. One of the people standing outside with a sign promoting a candidate for judge observed The Boy’s enthusiasm and said to me, “You must have let him push the red button! He’s on fire!” Then he called out to The Boy, “Did you like voting?”

The Boy shouted at the top of his lungs, “I loved my choice!!”

Ya gotta love democracy.

Final Festival Report: Katherine Paterson on Beauty

One major revelation I walked away with from the Festival is my need to improve my note-taking skills. 

I have only sparse, sketchy sentence fragments to work with. Normally I record interviews and messages so that I can review them later, but the organizers didn’t allow it.

So my final notes are from Katherine Paterson’s closing session. She said a few things that stood out to me as poetic or inspiring, but I barely took down a complete sentence.

Her topic was beauty.

Here’s a spattering of words on my page of notes:

 

Beauty

Integrity/perfection
harmony
brilliance

Simplicity–nothing superfluous
harmony
pleasing symmetry
brilliance–clarity, shed some light on the human experience

Hold onto your pencils, folks–coming up: a complete sentence or two, though even they maintain some mystery by being plucked from context. Also, you may find my parenthetical note puzzling:

Beauty is born of play (psychologically healthy).

Love and work achieve integration by creating.

…confusion of good with immobility.

Moral education by itself is not beautiful enough.

The Bible doesn’t shy away from truth-telling (through stories). In the truth-telling, there is great beauty.

Children need to be nourished on beauty as much as the four major food groups.

She read from one of her books in which one of the characters, an immigrant mother, was speaking about their children’s need for beauty in the classroom–that she wanted their beautiful children to benefit from the beauty of Puccini, say, or Michelangelo as part of their education. The novel’s character cried out about the need for beauty.

I don’t know that I agreed with all that Paterson presented, and it’s unfair to draw conclusions from these few notes scratched out during a 40-minute message in which she defined and developed the topic. But I wonder if you agree that we need beauty?

Do you feel that our children need to be nourished on beauty?

If so, what kind of beauty?

Do you do anything proactively to bring beauty into their lives?