4 years ago I was given an assignment to write about a family member in my Freshman seminar on the personal essay. I wrote about my little brother, structuring the piece around the middle school play I had helped manage that starred him as the courageous owner of a diner leading the battle against Mongo the space alien. I titled it "My Brat" (brat being the Polish word for brother), and to this day it's one of my favorite pieces.
2 months ago I implemented my first personal touch to my class curriculum. We have these Challenge sentences the kids have to memorize every night, just some 10-word blah I make up off the top of my head every morning. It's a silly thing but its the backbone of our curriculum and also takes up an entire class period every morning, so I don't complain. But it did seem like a pretty useless endeavor to have these kids commit a sentence to memory and forget it as soon as they've written in down during the morning test. So I started making up short stories - 8 sentences, 10 words per sentence give or take - that I could feed the kids one sentence at a time, that they could write down, illustrate, craft a cover for and presto! every month each kid gets to author their very own book.
And the first story I wrote? A little ditty about the "Running Boy." A boy likes to run, but he gets sad when he has to stop running due to the obstacles appear in his path (you know, trees, walls and the like). So one day he decides to jump over a wall and once he realizes obstacles can be used in his running, he can be happy ever after. Sound familiar? I just introduced my 6-year olds to the watered-down, ESL version of parkour.
I don't talk to Tristan very often, and I don't really know very much about what's going on in his life. But he pops up in my life in unexpected ways even all the way over in Michigan, or Korea. He's pretty awesome, my brother. I think that has a lot to do with it. He's a role model, and I'm not just using that in the general sense. It might seem a little silly that I, the eldest and 5 years his senior, aspire to be like him. But I must say that whatever meager little footpath I shuffled out for my siblings he blazed right over, expanding, paving, developing, and just to top it all off, polishing until it shone. Oh the Rewalds, each one better than the last.
Happy birthday, Tristan. I am so crazy proud of you. Ja cie kocham!
This is the best Birthday cart I have seen in my (considerably long, mind you) life. Adriana, you certainly have your ways with words in a heartworming beautiful way. I could not have said it better(who could?) to express how proud I am of Tristan too. Happy Birthday to all my three kids on this occasion. I am so glad each of you were born, because each of you makes Mom and my lifes so rich. Ja Was kocham.
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