Here we go, my first real blog. I will now add to the stockpile of 500 billion of them out there on the internet already, which I have to wonder who reads. Everybody's so busy writing, it seems to me, they can't have much time for reading, but this fall in my journalism class I'm requiring my students to write a weekly blog, so I better do it, too.

I'm a little paralyzed at this keyboard since I've never published anything that wasn't revised a million times as I figured out what I was trying to say and to whom, and how to make the reader feel what I wanted them to feel about it and so on etc. The craft of writing - sit at the keyboard till little drops of blood pop on your forehead. Now on this blog, with no actual assignment or deadline or editor waiting, with me just flanging away at these keys, I seem to be saying anything in any old way, which I then of course delete delete delete, but that's not the way to write a blog. I must just let it rip. That's what I'll tell my students anyway.

The only blogs I read religiously, which my husband reads as well - we have a lively little competition about who can find the latest blogs first - are written by our son Nate, who's a 26 year old writer, whose blogs are about films and music and his young man's world, and they are so fine, and so funny, I can't really let him see me writing so badly here - I'm just too ashamed. But I know he'll see this, because he and his sisters are the only people I signed up to be alerted about the existence of this blog. Ha! And that's another thing: I don't know how the blog works exactly, either. I would like to embed the address of his blogs here but I don't know how, but you can find them if you google Nathan Savin Scott, and then the name of his blogs: "You Can't Go Home Again," (musings) and "Shouts from the Balcony" (movie reviews to crack you up), plus he posts on Thought Catalog and other places. I'll figure out how to import his blogs pretty soon, I hope. I need to learn how to work this whole blog before I start teaching in the fall....

The thing I want to import most is the song, "Honey, Come Home" by the band "The Head and the Heart." My three kids all connected me to this song, and it's GORGEOUS.  Nate introduced me to the song, and then my middle one, Tess, went to the concert last week in NYC, where the songwriter explained he'd written the song for his parents who are divorced. And then Haley, my youngest child, set me up with Spotify and put it on a playlist for me ("Mamala"). In the lyrics, the narrator says, "Come home," to a spouse who's left:

Honey, come home,
My stubborn ways are behind me now....

.....Do you remember every block, every minute of every walk/ 
we used to take/we were young/ so many years ago?
And I think of all this time/ that we've wasted with all our fighting
and I cry/ just want to die with the one I love...

Oh God I love my vices but they've taken me to places
that I never thought I'd go
And I am ready to be home...

I was jogging yesterday listening to this song, and I felt this enormous rush of gratitude for my kids, and their friends who were in my classes just a few years ago, and my students now, because they have the sensibility embodied in this song. And of course I felt grateful especially for this little genius of an artist, who wrote this song, whose lyrics are a poem of longing to repair a broken world. Never going to happen, really -- that is what a person my age would say   -- no kid's longing for his parents to reunite is going to fix a crappy marriage  -- but still. This young songwriter, singing to his parents, he just nailed them. Once upon a time his parents took those walks, and then they fell into their vices, and now they are old, and they are afraid, and they need each other. This is the human story. The Greeks taught us this.

Plenty of my students' parents are divorced -  ugly and complex messy divorces - and my students buck up against the pain of all that, and they also see how flawed and frail their parents are, and somehow this gives them hope. They will do better, plus they understand how it happens, how life brings out the worst in people, even people truly filled with love. They are so young, these kids, I don't quite understand how they get this wisdom. I think they must get it from being sandblasted with so much incoming information from the whole globe constantly that they instinctively triage what they can possibly know and understand, and they focus on understanding what's in front of their faces - the streets where they live, the friends they love, and us, their parents, so grown up, and so deeply, deeply flawed. They envision us singing to one another, and then coming on home.

They have so much to teach us. And that's the theme of my blog: it's going to be about the things my 3 kids, their friends, and my students at Phillips Academy teach me, which is a lot, all the time. (Okay one of you please start now by teaching me how to properly work this blog. Should I put it on Facebook? Or Twitter? I could do that - if I could figure it out).