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There were always things my parents said that I said I would never say.

Did you get that?

Yet now, nearly 30 years later, when my kids start pushing my buttons, and I am at a loss for words, these old go-to phrases suddenly emerge from my own vocal chords, as if ghosts from the past have taken up residence in my over-sized Adam’s apple and are controlling everything I say.

These are the top 10 things my parents said that I now find myself compelled to say:

1) “Because I said so.” This was the ultimate ending of any argument, and I find myself using it more these days as my kids get older and their reasoning power reaches a new level. I finally understand why my parents used it – there is no comeback. For example:

“Dad, can I have some ice cream.”

“Not tonight. It’s almost bed time.”

“What?! You always eat ice cream before bed! Why can’t I?”

“Because I said so.”

2) “I’m not saying it again” (AKA “I’m saying this one last time”) – This basically means nothing. I tell it to my kids all the time, and they know that it’s meaningless. They will ask again, and I will say it again. The only way to break out of this particular cycle is to drop “because I said so” on them.

“C’mon dad, can’t we stay up for 10 more minutes?”

“It’s bed time. That’s it. I’m not saying it again.”

“Please, please, please let us stay up? Why can’t we stay up?”

“Because I said so.”

3) “As long as you live in our house, you’ll play by our rules” – how condescending can you get? Our kids aren’t quite old enough to appreciate this one, but I still drop it from time to time:

“Take off your shoes, kids.”

“Why do we always have to take our shoes off? We’re going right back outside!”

“Hey, as long as you live in my house, you’ll play by my rules.”

4) “one more time” – this one is more of a fragment, but can be used in all kinds of different settings: “if you so much as touch your sister one more time…” or, “if you come out of your room one more time…” or “if you shout here in the library one more time.” This particular phrase is only useful if it is followed up by a suitably ambiguous threat like “you’re gonna get it.”

5) “If you want it, then save your money up and buy it yourself” – this one might be more specific to my household, I don’t know, but I’ve decided to use it as a standby when requests for stuff become frequent. It makes about as much sense as “because I said so,” seeing that my son gets an allowance of about $4 a week, half of which he has to put into a piggy bank as “savings.”

For example, sometimes when we’re at the store he’ll see a Nintendo Wii and ask for it – if I’m correct, these run for around $300?

“Dad, can we buy a Wii?”

“Hey, if you want it, save your money up and buy it yourself.”

Wrinkled brow.

“How long would it take me to save up $300?”

“About three years. Give or take a few weeks. If you never buy anything else.”

I’m going to stop at five today and ask you the question: what are the old stand-by phrases your parents used? Help me fill in the final five for tomorrow’s post, and if your phrase is included I’ll be sure to give you credit.

This Tuesday’s Top 10 idea is brought to you by Janelle. Thanks!

We like to moan and groan about Mondays.

We like to rejoice in the wonderment of TGIF.

But what if we saw each Monday as a new beginning? A chance to start over? An opportunity to push aside our screw-ups and hang-ups and unrealized goals of the previous week, the previous month, even the previous year, and start fresh?

What if we could regain the imagination of our childhood and believe that, this week, anything is possible?

Maybe this is the week we get that job.

Maybe this is the week we get that acceptance letter.

Maybe this is the week that an unimagined reconciliation occurs.

Who knows.

But I do know this – every single week during which something awesome happened, every single week during which you’ve overcome or conquered or achieved, every single one of those weeks…began with a Monday.

When Shawn asked me to write a guest post, he suggested the topic of “how you got into poetry.” This is actually a bit puzzling for me to write about, because I wasn’t really given a choice in the matter — rather, trained for the vocation from infancy.

What do I mean here? I mean that I was a colicky baby — as my mother, until the very end of her life, never let me forget. My parents discovered that taking me for a car ride, in itself, didn’t always solve the problem, but taking me for a car ride and reciting nursery rhymes helped greatly. Until, that is, I started screaming when the poetry stopped. To save her sanity, my mother crammed like a college student before finals and memorized reams of verse.

When she began teaching night classes (math must have been a blessed relief from all the doggerel), my father had me to deal with, and by then I had fallen hard for a book called Milkman Bill. I wanted this read to me over and over and oy vey is mir, over. Dad’s sanity-saving ploy one night involved reading me the book word-for-word backwards: that is, “truck shiny his into climbed Bill Milkman.” Only my mother came home, caught him doing this, and chewed him out for potentially causing dyslexia. Far from it. I loved the fresh idea that you could juggle words for comic effect.

And of course, being the children of two academics, my sister and I were raised in a house that resembled a small library, albeit one with Legos all over the floor. I was taken aback at times to go over to friends’ houses and discover walls bare of books. I remember bouncing on the bed as Dad read Vachel Lindsay.

By age four, I had produced the following magnum opus:

Nature is green.
Nature is wild.
Why, nature can be
Just like a child!

To my absolute dismay, this poem, typed out (the privilege of using Mom’s electric typewriter was, at the time, the coolest thing ever) and suitably decorated with drawings, stayed on my grandmother’s fridge until she moved to a nursing home — sometime in her early nineties. I trust that you kind readers of Shawn’s blog will avoid asking me pointed workshoppy questions about this quatrain, namely whether I meant that children were green as well as wild.

I found a best friend who liked books too, and we played at being the characters from Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. By my second semester at Penn State, I had declared an English major with a concentration in writing, and was looking for a writing-intensive course to fill my fall schedule. I spotted a section of English 213 — which turned out to be taught by poet, translator, essayist, and memoirist Bruce Weigl — and thought, “Oh, poetry. That should be easy.” (When did these words come back to haunt me? When I sat down to write my four-hour master’s degree candidacy exam, after turning in a thesis advised by another great poet, Carolyn Forché.)

But how do you train a poet in childhood? You indulge her curiosity. You take her to the library as a treat and let her roam the whole thing. On Saturdays, when we lived in Grand Forks, North Dakota, we would head downtown to a used-book store called The Book Fair. (Lancaster County friends, take note: Aaron’s Books in Lititz similarly encourages kids to plop down and read.) You take her out into green, wild nature: I have photographic evidence of my involvement in the Audubon Society literally before I could walk. You give her chemistry sets, Erector sets, and the aforementioned Legos, all of which train the mind to build intricate structures. You give her notebooks, blank books, journals. You may, of course, wish to point out that the Jabberwock has jaws that bite and claws that catch.

That is how I got into poetry: standing a while in uffish thought beneath the Tumtum tree. Or maybe it was a Truffula Tree, one of the few saved by the Lorax. Both species are good at showing your future poet how sounds can be arranged into patterns, and how much fun this is.

Check out Gwyn’s latest book of poems, “Ordinary Beans,” HERE

This afternoon I get to go back to Messiah and talk to English majors about life after college.  A friend of mine, Adam Benner, heard about this and sent me a message on Facebook:

Heard that you’ve been selected to assuage the fears of Messiah’s English majors…I’m actually waiting for them to invite me for a talk designed to inspire fear in Messiah’s English majors.

I’m not sure how many fears my story will assuage, but I do hope it will encourage them to use their imagination, and follow their passions, and not get caught up in thinking they have to do things the way everyone else does them.

More than anything, though, I’m just looking forward to being back on campus. I love that place and all the memories it gave me, and I can’t wait to just wander around with Maile, visiting some of our old haunts: there’s the creek and the covered bridge that used to be such a part of my emotional landscape; the library where many late nights were spent cramming and procrastinating; the entrance to the dorm where Maile and I had our first smooch; the cafes and the classrooms and the auditorium; the place in the woods where I asked her to marry me.

What’s a place in this world that you enjoy going back to? What’s it like when you get there?

Today is dedicated to the f-word.

Failure.

* * * * *

When do we start fearing failure? Is it in school, when messing up brings low grades or looks of derision from our peers? Is it in early adulthood when we’re made to feel that one wrong decision could screw us up for life? Is it at work, when “just doing our job” is elevated above contributing something new and exciting that might not work?

I don’t know when this fear of failure enters our lives, but I don’t think we’re born with it. Why? Because when I watch young children, I just don’t see it.

* * * * *

If we don’t strap our 1-year-old Sam into his high chair, he will try to crawl out. He’s fallen from similar heights before, but previous failures won’t keep him from trying again. He has an indefatigable (my favorite word in the English language) perseverance; he refuses to let fear of falling keep him confined in that darn chair.

Abra, 2 1/2,  will happily jump across any span, whether it’s from a chair to the table or from the sofa to the floor. She’s not worried about getting hurt, even though she has in the past.

My older two children, Cade and Lucy, are starting to hear the whisper of Failure, warning them that they might not get it right. I see this most in their learning process, where they are sometimes afraid to try something a little out of their comfort zone. But, for example, when they write to their heart’s content, not worrying about spelling or grammar or punctuation, they exhibit a joy and excitement they wouldn’t have felt if they hadn’t tried.

I’d rather read their  stories about Pentsilvigo (instead of Pennsylvania) than come over to the table and see that they hadn’t yet started for fear of spelling something wrong.

* * * * *

When Maile and I lived in England, I had a incredible mentor named John Walker.  He and his wife Vicki took Maile in and treated us like we were their children, loaning us their car when we first arrived, inviting us to dinner when we would have spent otherwise lonely nights in our small cottage.

John was an incredibly successful business man, retired in his mid-50s but still buying businesses and turning others around. There’s one piece of advice from John that I’ll never forget – it was his mantra for life.

“Fail fast,” he’d tell me. “Make your decision and go with it. Use what you learn from the failures to make it better. If you sit there doing nothing, you’ll still encounter the same failures, except they’ll take you years to get past, instead of weeks.”

* * * * *

Feeling paralyzed by a decision?

Fail fast.

Just a few announcements today.

1) In case you haven’t seen any of the other announcements, the Fireside Writers’ Conference scheduled for October 22 and 23 has been indefinitely postponed due to low registration numbers. I am exploring the possibility of holding it in Lancaster in the spring at a much lower price (around $50). “Like” the Fireside Writers’ Conference page on Facebook for updates.

2) A huge thanks to those of you who donated to the charity:water initiative – we raised almost $12,000, which will provide clean water to nearly 600 people for the next 30 years. You guys are awesome.

3) I have a few leftover copies of my two books (“Twist of Faith” and “Think No Evil”) from my recent time at the Frederick County Fair. I am selling them now for $15.00 each (include shipping), so if you are interested let me know.

4) HELP! I need some good topics for future editions of “Tuesday’s Top 10.”  If you have any good ideas, let me know in the comments section below.

5) My fingers are going numb. It’s that cold in my workshop today.

6) I’ve been invited to speak to English majors at Messiah College this Thursday. I think I’m supposed to encourage them with my story…hopefully they’ll be encouraged to discover that an English major 11 years out of college can be married, have four kids, own two minivans with a combined 325,000 miles, work in sub-zero degree temperatures every day, live in a double-wide mobile home and still be happier than he’s ever been in his life.

Have a great Tuesday!