London Calling

I decided to start up a little fracas when I suggested to my co-workers the following conspiracy: The leaders of the G8 were all but backed into a corner to do something positive on some front - Africa, the environment, setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq - and now we pause for this horrific new development, a series of bombs go off in London. We condemn this barbaric act. We raise our level of fear to orange. We are outraged by this heinous crime - so outraged in fact that we can't get around to doing anything about that climate or African debt or much else right now because we're just so damn outraged.
Coincidence, or just really crappy timing on the part of the terrorists? Either way you slice it, there seems to be very little that we can do to avoid staying the course. I have nothing but sympathy and compassion in my heart for the victims of this latest attack. At the same time I feel compelled to point out the most significant difference between this bombing and the ones that have been taking place on almost a daily basis in Iraq is that of geography. In this case, the setting was London and the innocent victims were British and not Iraqi. There have already been plenty of experts willing to line up and point the finger of blame at al-Qaida. That same kind of certainty existed after the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma.
Sadder still, Muslims across the planet are being asked to apologize and accept tacit responsibility for explosions that have nothing to do with the teachings of Islam. "We know that these people act in the name of Islam, but we also know that the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims here and abroad are decent and law-abiding people who abhor this act of terrorism every bit as much as we do," Blair said. The vast majority, indeed.

Bachelor's Degree

I have a creative writing degree. I don't have it laminated or framed and stuck to the wall over my desk, but I have one. It's the thing that keeps me typing away - that and the voice of Billy Crystal in "Throw Mama From the Train." He said, "Remember, a writer writes!" Then he went home and stared at his typewriter. It's a funny movie about writer's block.
As a freshman in college I took the first in a seemingly endless series of creative writing workshops. My instructor was a TA - a cool guy with a moustache and didn't seem to have a particular agenda for us as blossoming writers - he admonished us at the end of the course to "keep the habit of a pen." I took this advice literally for many years - insisting that a Bic Rolling Writer was the only tool for my best and deepest thoughts and inspirations. This replaced my beast of a manual Underwood typewriter as my mechanical means of musing. I filled spiral notebook after spiral notebook with poems, short stories and endless bits of potential comedy. I took the advice to heart - I grew a callus on my thumb from the death grip I kept on my Bic.
But there weren't a great many professors interested in reading my pent-up scrawl. I got an electric typewriter. The best thing about an electric typewriter is that it hums. It sits there and waits with all that potential energy and when you start to write, it explodes in a pica space tab set shift lock flurry of which my eighth grade typing teacher would be proud.
Computers were confounding to me. I was a confirmed Luddite. When I worked at a video store, I begrudgingly did data entry and inventory control with these new fangled machines - but I dragged my typewriter into the back room when it was time to do the monthly newsletter. I did all the layout on a tagboard pasteup sheet - cutting and pasting in the most literal way imaginable. Then one day, the video store closed. I had graduated from college with degree in creative writing, run a video store and had no marketable skills. Happily, my mother was able to hook me up with a friend of hers who had helped ease her transition into the world of personal computers. I learned the ways of Wordstar. I learned to highlight and replace - to cut and paste with a click of the mouse. If you liked a paragraph, you could keep it and delete the rest. Magic!
Word processing is creative writing. I can use italics - if I want to (a later version of that creative writing instructor insisted that exclamation marks and italics were signs of weak writing. Your words should carry your meaning. Maybe she was right. Then again, maybe she didn't know what she was talking about!

Forced Perspective

Feel free to try this at home or at your place of work: Go into a room with three or four other adults and make the following observation - "Lance Armstrong sure is one heck of an athlete." Then start the clock. See how long it takes before someone points out that Lance Armstrong left his wife and is hanging around with that Sheryl Crow.
Six time winner of the Tour de France, cancer survivor, founding director of the Livestrong Foundation inspiring and empowering people living with cancer, and philanderer. Having put together one of the most impressive teams and one of sports greatest strings of victories, one must certainly be captivated by Lothario Armstrong's romantic escapades. What a letch.
I shouldn't be surprised. Around the time that John Elway was finally reaching the top of his particular Everest, winning back to back Super Bowls after setting countless other NFL records on his way, he had the bad taste to end his marriage. Oh, how the mighty are fallen. Those Lombardi trophies are looking just a little skanky all of a sudden.
That fifty percent divorce rate will knock just about anybody out of the saddle - even our heroes, it seems. I remember having a nasty twinge when I heard about Lance divorcing - and John - and then I remembered that great pontificator Charles Barkley, who once suggested that he (and perhaps all athletes) shouldn't be role models. This is how he described the new shoes that Nike wanted him to endorse: "These are my new shoes. They're good shoes. They won't make you rich like me, they won't make you rebound like me, they definitely won't make you handsome like me. They'll only make you have shoes like me. That's it."
I guess that's kind of how I feel about the personal lives of athletes and other celebrities. Watching them and cheering them on in the field of their endeavor isn't condoning their accomplishments as husbands, wives, or fathers. We can still sit slack-jawed at the super-human feats that these very human individuals achieve. Well, except that pinhead Tom Cruise...

Light and Run Away

It has started. My son, now eight years old, has been asking me since dawn when we could shoot off some fireworks. It's a gene that hasn't been weeded out yet. Pyrotechicmania runs very deep in my family. I still get a little glazed look when I see a sign that says "Fireworks - 3 Miles."
Growing up in the foothills of Colorado, I understood the inherent danger of all fireworks. Smokey was pointing directly at me when he said "Only YOU can prevent forest fires." I have vivid memories of the film strips and glossy color photos the fire department showed us of mangled fingers and limbs - "a cherry bomb did that." What I was thinking, of course, was "Wow - if it could do that to a kid's hand, think what it could do to a model of the USS Enterprise."
I learned some of my initial demolition skills from my father: how to blow a peanut can out of a coffee can half-filled with water, how to twist fuses together to maximize your firepower. Still, most of the summers I spent growing up were in the middle of a national forest, so we tended to play down the rockets' red glare.
When my older brother got his driver's license, we would take periodic road trips to Cheyenne, Wyoming. There, just across the border from Colorado, you could buy all kinds of sordid and dangerous things. We'd throw around twenty or thirty dollars and come home with a couple of grocery bags full of sulfur and gunpowder. Once I got my own car, my friends and I took turns throughout high school making the run to Wyoming. There was an old guy who worked one of the bigger stands who described each item thus: "Shoots up in the air, emits a shower of sparks, report." The report was what we were after - the bang. The bigger the bang the better.
During college I was still making my occasional trips to reload. On one of these excursions we found something we couldn't live without: Festival Balls. These were miniature versions of the mortar shells used in professional fireworks displays. It came with a cardboard mortar and six shells. Only the most admirable restraint kept us from coming straight home and setting them all off.
Now a quick diversion: When I was in college, I believed that the damage deposit you paid on an apartment was the amount of damage you expected to do to the place you were living during the course of your lease. With that mindset, we occasionally shot pop bottle rockets indoors. We had cone sparklers on our enclosed patio. We lived a little close to the edge. That being said, it should come as no surprise that after the initial firing of the Festival Ball mortar, we set ourselves to thinking, "What would happen if we didn't use the tube?" The answer came as the flaming ball shot across the street under a car and made a very colorful display beneath it - without igniting the gas tank.
Last year I drove my family across the desert southwest. We were on our way out of Nevada when I saw the sign: "Last Chance for Fireworks." My jaw went slack as I glazed over and headed directly for the converted semi-truck trailer with its faded Black Cat signs. I knew we were headed to Colorado - my mother's house - so I disciplined myself to some very basic purchases. That Fourth of July, a new generation of Cavens learned to light and run away.

Summer School

The guy at Office Depot looked at the stack of notebooks and pencils and asked me if we got reimbursed for buying all that stuff. By "we," he meant teachers, and the answer was "Not unless I'm willing to wait for months and probably get questioned about why I didn't go to this or that vendor instead or put in a request ahead of time - and so on. Then he asked me why kids didn't show up with pencils and paper - wasn't that expected?
In a word, no. Expectations for the kids I teach start a little simpler than that. We're all about butts in seats. We were given a district mandate of ninety-eight percent attendance - this year my school was well below that. Far enough below that for it to be a concern for the powers that be. It really is a pretty simple equation: kids in class have a better chance of learning than those who are not. All that reading, writing and arithmetic is pretty much lost on an empty chair. So that's where we're starting.
But I can remember when it was different. I remember the first day of school and a letter home that described the necessary items for every third or fourth or second or first grader. It used to be a cigar box - to hold the rest of the elements. A box of crayons (not the elaborate, built-in sharpener version - just a starter set). An eraser, just in case mistakes were made. Pencils to get the year started (I was lucky enough a couple years to have a dozen or more with my name printed on them). The scissors would depend a lot on the year, with round-tip being favored for the first couple of grades, but nice pointy ones by the fourth grade. A box of Kleenex and a small bottle of Elmer's glue to round it out. By fourth grade, binders and looseleaf paper became vital, and other items appeared on some teachers' lists while absent from others. Each student had a nominal survival kit for at least the first few weeks of school.
That time is over. I now buy a few dozen pencils each year that say "Stolen From Mr. Caven's Room" on them. I give them to my students. I tell the ones that ask that it's a joke. Just a quick note: the cost of the war in Iraq is now estimated to be approximately $5.8 billion each month. I'll take a quiet hand if you can tell me what that turns out to be per day.

The Tide is Turning

There is bad propaganda, and there is good propaganda. I'm listening to the good kind right now. The Live 8 concert is roaring through the speakers over my computer - Madonna's "Ray of Light." Every song has an intentional weight today. They're saying it with music. Poverty sucks. People shouldn't starve to death. Is it ironic as hell that Madonna is telling us this? You bet. But what's the alternative?
Twenty odd years ago, I was sitting in my apartment with my roommate listening to the college radio station. It was very late at night, and the DJ was obviously a little stoned (and we probably were too). He was fishing for someone to call him on the studio line - he was insisting that "somebody's getting rich off of this 'We Are The World' crap." My roommate and I looked at each other and smiled; cynical as we could be about any and all things, we believed in ending famine in Africa - Bruce Springsteen sang on the record, for crap's sake. We waited for the rant to escalate. He took some wide swipes at Michael Jackson and Huey Lewis, but he stayed away for our boy Bruce. Later that summer we watched and taped (I still have all five VHS tapes in my basement) Live Aid. We pledged our money. Later that Fall I got my T-shirt. On the back it read: "This shirt saved a life." We amused ourselves with all the ways in which a shirt might save a life, but down inside we knew we had participated. We had gotten off the fence and done something instead of just sitting in the stands and jeering.
Today they're asking again. Save a life. Feed a child. Help the world fix itself. I am especially happy to see Roger Waters coming back to play with Pink Floyd today - it was his song from the "Radio KAOS" CD that helped me integrate this into my deeply doubting mind. From "The Tide is Turning" -
I used to think the world was flat
Rarely threw my hat into the crowd
I felt I had used up my quota of yearning
Used to look in on the children at night
In the glow of their Donald Duck light
And frighten myself with the thought of my little ones burning
But oh, oh, oh, the tide is turning
The tide is turning

Sign the list - get off the bench

Vaya con Dios

The family across the street is moving today. They were the ones who greeted us when we moved in eight years ago. We met them in waves - there are eleven of them. At times it was like their house was one of those clown cars - people just kept coming out of it. Nine kids. Well, there weren't nine kids when we moved in - two more have joined them since we got here. The oldest daughter has just welcomed her first son - the circle of life continues.
We quickly became the "cookie house" for the kids. In a house full of nine competing wants and needs, our house became an oasis of calm and focused attention. The little girls who brought over their Barbies to share tea parties with my wife have grown up and are looking for the next best thing. The boys who used to have to wait for their mother to cross the street are now crossing their little brothers to come over and play cars with our son.
We provided dictionaries and math tutoring. We loaned colored pencils and paper for craft projects and Mother's Day cards. We shared our leftover birthday cake. We gave them odd jobs to do to raise money for a Father's Day present. We loaned them a lawn mower to cut another neighbor's lawn for a few extra bucks. We were a safe place to play.
We had a friendly competition at Christmas for the neighborhood's best lights. They shared their inflatable snowman with us, since they only had room for an inflatable teddy bear in their yard. My wife snuck over late one night and hung a blue ribbon on their fence. We knew that they were really going to move when the three reindeer that had been on their roof for years finally came down. There are still some toys and car parts in the front yard, so we know they'll be back - but I miss them already.