walkingman

My sons love the fact that we are multi-cultured and thus celebrate multiple New Years Days each year. Besides the traditional western New Years Day we celebrate the Chinese and Korean New Years Days, which are the same day, as blended family members were adopted from these two countries. This year we celebrated this day on February 14th. My law partner is Jewish and we also celebrate Rosh Hashanah with him and his family. We celebrated it with them last week. I am glad that my wife and I are able to expose our sons to different ways of looking at the world. We have sat down and explained to them the Gregorian calendar, the lunar calendar, and the Jewish calendar. We want them to understand the different ways of marking the year. It may not seem like such a big deal until you realize that the entire world does not consider today to be September 12, 2010. The old school way would define 2010 as A.D. or anno domino, the year of the Lord, that is the year since Jesus birth. Anytime before his birth was indicated as B.C. or before Christ, that is the years before his birth. Now they are instead called C.E. for common era and B.C.E. for before common era so as not to offend non-Christians. According to the Chinese calendar this year is year 4707.
What we have tried to teach and instill in our kids is that there may be more than one correct answer depending upon what part of the world one is from. The American way may not always be the best solution. We should be willing to listen to other points of view. Technology may not be the right answer. The tried and true old simple way maybe the better way. We can communicate rapidly with each other in terms of speed but are we actually listening to each other? A text requires us to limit the amount of characters we use in our communication. An email allows us to use more characters and actual paragraphs. A telephone call allows us to hear the other person and obtain the nuances of their voice and get instant feedback and responses. A letter is formal and personal and can be kept and reread and held on to. I fear that in the rush to rush we are losing something precious and irreplaceable.
Our house is filled with the latest electronics and the kids are welcome to use them and to master them but they are also exposed to the old ways of life. Texts and emails are sent out along with letters that are either handwritten or printed from the computer. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, and various friends and family members are amazed to receive correspondence from us via snail mail. And the amazing thing is they all say that they really appreciate receiving real mail for a change. My wife keeps a diary while mine is called a journal and they are a written record of our thoughts and feelings, our history if you will. No one may read them once we pass away but they allow us to vent, to share, to just be ourselves on paper. Our boys have tried but they tire of the task and view it as work. I hope one day they discover the joy in remembering ones days.
We have books piled here and there. We have cds overflowing shelves. Often times the tv is off and the disk changer is loaded and you can tell who loaded it by the tunes filling every room. Each person has his or her favorite reading place and the genre of the pile gives away each reader. The oldest son is into mystery, the youngest son is into sports, while the wife loves poetry and cookbooks, and yours truly has the law journals and history. Each has his own interests but together we make a terrific family.