Maximizing family time together

How can you maximize the time your family spends together and maximize the transfer of values from one generation to another?

I got thinking about this when my sister mentioned that her family was bringing her in-laws (both in their 90s, and not necessarily the easiest people to get along with!) into their home for several weeks. How could that time be made as pleasant and profitable as possible?

One of the things we do in our family–even now, after the kids are grown and three of the four are married, and we have five grandkids: We read out loud together. We don’t watch TV. Every once in a while we will watch a movie. But for maximum mutual engagement, besides just plain talking with one another, we will read a book together out loud.

Sarita always suggests three or four books we might read when we’re headed off for vacation. The rest of us, then, together, make the final selection.

[I should note: Sarita has an uncanny ability to choose "the best of the best" when it comes to books. But, then, I guess, she ought to! After all, she reads over a dozen books a week, and she has been doing that for some 40 years or more.]

The books themselves, of course, offer tremendous value on their own. But they also offer another value: they inspire us to interact. We always seem to want to talk about what we’re reading.

Let me illustrate.

Reading Aloud Together

Besides reading together on our annual “Family Fun Weeks,” Sarita and I have also been reading for the last many months with our our daughter, our son-in-law, and our granddaughter who live only a few blocks away. Several nights a week for the last many months, they have been coming over and we have been reading together. I’m usually the one who reads out loud while the others listen in.

Some of the books we’ve enjoyed

So far we have read Joan Bauer’s Hope Was Here –a delightful, thought-provoking, emotionally satisfying story about a young (I’d say, 15-year-old) woman who was abandoned as a child by her single mother to the care of her mother’s sister. Hope’s aunt is a short order cook and Hope has been working for several years as a waitress. Hope seems to observe life through the lens of food and restaurants and waitressing. It’s a fascinating book on the basis of how it’s written. But there’s an underlying message of hope as well . . . about relational redemption even in the midst of abandonment.

That kind of book provides tremendous opportunities for family members–everyone who is listening to the book being read–to talk together about what they are hearing, the life lessons you might take away from what you’re talking about (i.e., listening to), and so forth. Sometimes even hearing different family members exclaim about a turn of phrase–”Wow! Listen to that! How [the author] expresses _____”–can be insightful . . . not just about the book, but, much more, about the family member who makes the comment. –You gain some insight into how that person looks at the world.

Anyway.

Besides Hope Was Here, we have also read C. S. Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy . That is beautiful, but (I have to confess) it tended to put me to sleep as I tried to read it, and I don’t think I found it as engaging. It’s fantasy, and I’m “just” not all that into fantasy, even if and as it’s written by one of the world’s leading Christian authors of the 20th century.

Finally–in the last many weeks–we have been reading the Ralph Moody Little Britches stories. (So far, we have finished Little Britches and Man of the Family; we are in the midst of The Home Ranch. –And we have five more to go after this one: two of them being some of the most profoundly intense books I have ever read. (Those would be The Fields of Home [Yowza! So intense, I could hardly stand it when I read it the first time six years ago with Justin! But talk about a story of redemption and reconciliation! Oh! . . .] And then, almost similarly intense and hugely enjoyable in the realm of character development: The Dry Divide.)

Anyway. I said I hoped to show you a bit concerning how reading aloud together might work.

On Monday evening, I was reading chapters 6 to 8 in The Home Ranch. It’s a book dedicated to telling the story of a 3½ month period in the summer of 1911 when Ralph, the author, was 12 years old and earning the wages of a full-grown man while working as a cowhand on a cattle just outside Colorado Springs here in Colorado.

In Chapter 6, it’s just a couple of days after the hands have arrived and everyone is still settling in. Ralph realizes he has–or, at least, he feels he has–a lot to prove . . . especially since he is only 12 years old yet being paid wages close to those being paid all the other man.

In the story, the day before, Ralph had raised a bunch of eyebrows when he competed in a rodeo-style competition with the other cowhands to see who would have use of which horses throughout the summer. Instead of settling for three average beasts, Ralph sought to win–and achieved his goal of acquiring–two extraordinary animals: Mr. Batchlett/the ranch owner’s prize cutting horse . . . and a physically beautiful stallion that even the most self-respecting cowboys figured was pretty well impossible to ride (though Mr. Batchlett loved the animal). . . .

I just realized one of the reasons I love Moody’s books so much: Ralph describes events and people in enough detail that you feel as if you are there. But he doesn’t turn his observations into moralisms. He doesn’t forewarn us of things to come. He doesn’t summarize “lessons” we should take away from what he has written. Instead, he lets us take away whatever lessons we want from observing things through his eyes. And, boy, what we can learn! So that’s what I hope you will get a feel for from reading the rest of this post: How you might use the out-loud reading of books to bring your family together.

I said I was reading chapters 6 through 8 on Monday evening.

Chapter 6 opens the morning after the ranch hands have acquired their strings of horses.

A little bit about Zeb

Mr. Batchlett assigns Ralph to work with a tall, gangly guy named Zeb who displays a number of rather odd characteristics (which I don’t need to go into now). Ralph, Zeb, and four other guys are sent off into the mountains in pairs to cut fresh fence posts. Due to Zeb’s almost languid, deliberate pace, Ralph and Zeb arrive at the canyon where Mr. Batchlett has told them to cut the posts long after the other guys do–probably a good 45 minutes or an hour later.

Ned and Sid were hacking away to beat the band when we reached the canyon, and already had eight or 10 posts on their wagon. I wanted to hurry and catch up with them, but there was no hurrying Zeb. He sat looking over the firs for nearly 10 minutes before he pulled the wagon and below them. I had one horse unharnessed, hobbled, and turned out to graze before he had the uncles undone on the other. But when I took the axis out of the wagon, I could see he hadn’t been loafing while I was [engaged in some other activities that morning]. They were ground and stoned almost razor edges, and each had was carefully wrapped in a gunnysack.. . .

Through the early afternoon, Zeb kept going in that lazy, loose jointed way of his, but it made the sweat run down my back to limb trees as fast as he felled, cut them into post lengths, and carried them to the wagon. The sun was still high when we had our wagon loaded, but I hadn’t done a quarter of the work. Sid and Nat had been chopping steadily, but they still had a couple of hours’ work to do when we pulled away for the home ranch.

The next day, Ralph is able to do much more to help with the post-cutting, but when the men return to the ranch, Ralph finds himself in over his head. Because he had acquired the best cutting horse as part of his string, it is his responsibility to do something he has never done before: he has to cull 50 head of stock from the milling herd. And he performs poorly, to say the least.

When the job was finally done I was so ashamed of myself that I wanted to crawl off and hide, and I felt as if I’d been run through a thrashing machine.

And now comes Hank

Less than an hour after the culling is done, in the middle of supper, Hank, the one hand we have come to despise–a man who is always telling everyone how superior he is (though everything we have seen him do he has done exceedingly poorly!) — . . . Hank decides to take Ralph down a few pegs and makes some severely derogatory remarks about Ralph’s performance.

If I hadn’t been so tired and ashamed of myself, it wouldn’t have bothered me, but that night I couldn’t help boiling over. “Why don’t you brag about your post-hacking?” I snapped at him. “I’ll bet I can cut twice as many posts as you can any day!”

“You didn’t cut no posts!” Hank shouted. “Zeb cut ‘em! By dogies, if I ain’t cut two posts to your one I’ll . . . why when I was [your age] . . .”

Mr. Batchlett thumped the table hard, and said, “That’s enough! You team up with Zeb tomorrow, Sid, and let these two wildcats find out who’s got the longest tail.”

The next morning, true to his character, Hank feigns massive back pain and then slinks off to who-knows-where, hoping not to have to do any work at all. After all the other hands have gone to cut posts, Mr. Batchlett sends Ralph to find Hank and get him on the job.

Hank moaned and groaned all the way back to the corral, but he didn’t do much of it after we got there. Mr. Batchlett was waiting by the gate, and as soon as Hank let out one grown, he snapped, “That’ll be enough! You’ve ducked this kid all you’re goin’ to! Now get on that wagon and head for the mountains! If you’re not back with a full load of posts by sundown I won’t keep you around here.”

Those words completely transformed Hank. He and Ralph set off at high speed. Ralph tells us the details of Hank’s ongoing foolishness as he gets them into deep trouble by his attempts to take shortcuts and to prove his superiority at every turn. By the end of the day, Ralph has cut a full half load of fence posts while Hank doesn’t really have one to his name. Hank then scares the horses so they dump Ralph’s portion of the load, then exclaims about the bad weather coming in and suggests the two of them need to light out on foot to escape what he suggests is an impending flash flood.

I reckon we’d best cut acrost the ridge and get home ‘fore at cloudburst sets in. I know these here mountains like the palm of my own hand. ‘Tain’t more’n seven, eight miles the way the crow flies.”

“Isn’t it best to go back the way we came?” I asked. “If we found the team we could finish out the load by sunset.”

“No, by dogies!” Hank shouted. “I don’t aim to get catched in no dad-burned canyon in a cloudburst! And I don’t aim to get catched in these here mountains after dark without no gun! . . . “

There was nothing for me to do but pick up my jumper and axe, and follow him as he led off up the mountainside.

As it turns out, Hank has no sense of direction so the two of them are stuck up in the mountains, in a rainstorm, without proper rain gear, no food, no matches, no anything. And they spend the night on a ledge. Ralph has sense enough to get them covered with piles of dry pine needles to keep them warm.

I think the following passage is why I wanted to write this to you. It’s from pp. 84-86 in The Home Ranch. Can you imagine the kinds of conversations you might have with your children–young or old–if you and they were to read a book together with content like this?

I don’t know whether I slept or not, but I dug down into the needles and raked them over me as if they were a blanket. I only remember being cold and scared for a long time, and that I ached all over. When the first light of morning came, white fog filled the canyons, and low-hanging gray clouds sliced off the tops of all the peaks and ridges. Hank was half-buried in the needles, lying on his back and snoring with his mouth open. As I watched him, he jumped in his sleep and mumbled something I couldn’t understand, but I could tell that he was afraid. For the first time, I knew we were nowhere near the calf pasture, and that Hank was completely lost.

I’d heard plenty of stories about people being lost in the mountains and wandering in circles until they died of cold or starvation. I was already so hungry I felt weak, and was sure we’d just wander around till we dropped in our tracks. Then I remembered that we’d have been at the home ranch before dark if Hank had followed back the way we’d come, instead of being so cocksure about making the shortcut.

The more I thought of it, the sorrier I was for myself, and began thinking I hated Hank for always bragging and acting as if he knew more than anybody else. I don’t know why, but that started me remembering things I’d done since I’d come away from home–and I wasn’t a bit proud of them.

Mr. Batchlett had had to scold me a dozen times for tearing into things before I’d stopped to think. I’d picked Blueboy when I knew he was too much horse for me and that nobody wanted me to take him. And, only because Hazel had called me a little boy, I’d picked Clay [the cutting horse--JAH] and made a monkey of myself every time I’d used him. I’d made an even bigger monkey of myself when I’d climbed on Kenny’s donkey backwards. And I couldn’t be very proud of bragging because I could cut posts better than Hank; or of sharpening the axe I thought I was going to use, and leaving his dull–or of not showing him how to fell trees after knowing I had beat him anyway.

I’d never stopped to think of it before, but, ever since I could remember, I’d wanted to do something real big, so people wouldn’t call me Little Britches and treat me like a boy. But more than half the time I’d tried to do things that were too big, and had only made myself look silly.

As I lay there thinking about it Hank mumbled again, and struck out in his sleep. My first thought was that he’d struck out just as blindly when he tried to make the shortcut. And then I was ashamed of myself. I couldn’t help thinking he and I were a good deal alike. Maybe he was trying to do things too big for him so people wouldn’t call him an old man. Maybe he bragged about things he used to do because he couldn’t do them anymore, and because he wanted the same thing I did: to have other people think he was a smart and able to do things as they were.

As the daylight strengthened I forgot about being afraid–and about being sorry for myself. I’d thought I hated Hank, but I knew I didn’t, and that he was the one to be sorry for. All I had to do was to use my head a little to know that I wasn’t in very much trouble. We couldn’t be too badly lost, because we hadn’t gone very far, and knew the home ranch was just east of the mountains–certainly not more than 10 or 15 miles away. In June there would be no blizzards or hard cold that low in the mountains, and the sky was almost never clouded over for more than one or two days at a time. Just as soon as we could see the sun and find our direction, it would be easy to find our way out.

And when we did get out nobody would blame me for getting lost, and I’d have all the rest of my life to do something really big enough to be proud of. But Hank was an old man. He’d probably never be able to do anything big enough to make people respect him. Beside that, Mr. Batchlett had told him he wouldn’t keep him unless he was back with a load of posts by sunset. Then, too, after all his bragging about knowing the mountains, the men would josh him forever about getting lost. I didn’t believe there was much sense in trying to go any farther until the sun came out, so I pushed more dry needles up over Hank and went back to thinking until he woke up.

What aspects of this reverie do you think you might want to discuss with your kids . . . and grandkids?

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