Learning From The Past

Today in my Reading Institute, I just happened to find myself sitting across the table from the sister of one of my former students. He's getting ready to attend the eighth grade, and his sister is starting her first year back teaching after a year off for maternity leave, so there's quite a big gap between them, but there I was, spending the day with Nestor's big sister.
"You remember Nestor, right?" she asked.
I tried to get a face from the past, but came up with a jumble of possibilities.
"He used to cry a lot."
Bingo. Now I knew exactly who her little brother was. This was a kid who spent half of the fourth grade in the hallway, too shy to come in the door. And the tears. Nestor would cry if you looked at him sideways, and there was a lot of that at my school. Somehow we made it through the year, and I remember that he even walked into class on his own for the last few months without his mother.
"You know, he wanted you to move up to fifth grade and be his teacher the next year too," his sister told me later in the day.
I didn't know that. Now that I'm getting ready to turn my teaching clock back a few years and return to the computer lab, that kind of information is a pleasant reminder of how things used to be. And maybe they will be again. Only without quite so much crying.

I'm A Loner, A Rebel

"I'm a ramblin' guy - got a lot of important things to do. Are you kidding? What time's the TV go off?" - Steve Martin
I hear you, Steve. I've just rambled through the first twelve hours of my week of bachelorhood, and I'm already starting to bump into things. Where I once considered myself quite the lone wolf, I now find that the silence in here is deafening. I plan on getting familiar with each and every one of the hundreds of cable channels at my fingertips.
Then later this afternoon I will be back to looking for something else to do. In the meantime, I'll be trying to pretend that I feel comfortable in my own house. But that's not the worst part. My dog misses my wife and son more than I do. She's wandering around the house, looking out the windows and staring at closed doors, waiting for them to come home. I don't know how to break it to her that I'm it until the rest of the family returns from the East.
It reminds me of another time that my wife and son went off visiting, and I was stuck here at home. For some unfathomable reason, I chose that weekend to go see "The Blair Witch Project" and then came home by myself. My dog was waiting for me then, too. She did the same thing then that she did last night, only back then I was pretty sure that she was peering out into the darkness at some approaching evil. I didn't sleep at all that night.
It's going to be a long week.

My Son, The Rocker

I have always taken a great interest in what goes into my son's ears. I am the one who took him to hear Bruce Springsteen, DEVO, and The Police before he was in middle school. I feel as though I have a limited time frame in which to affect his music tastes, and the clock is ticking.
I found this out on our trip to southern California. On the way down, I rode shotgun and programmed the music we listened to via my iPod. I remembered all the road trips I took with my parents as a kid, and the lengthy negotiations we endured to listen to rock and roll as we drove through vast regions of the southwest United States. We listened to a lot of John Denver as a result, and I still have a deep and abiding affection for many of his songs. There are others that still cause a type of allergic reaction. "Rocky Mountain High" gives me hives.
Thus, I was determined not to create a similar reaction in my son. I hate to think of him merely enduring "Cadillac Ranch" or suffering through "Beautiful World". So, when he asked me if he could play a few songs off his iPod, I happily switched the cable and soon we were listening to the world through his ears.
At first I confess I felt a surge of pride as I noticed that many of his favorite songs were the ones to which I had introduced him. Then there were a few I didn't recognize. Happily I did not immediately reach for the volume control, but I was surprised to hear just how hard my son rocks. Bands like Linkin Park and Disturbed came out right next to many of the cute little ditties that I had recorded for him on birthday CDs from the past.
Last night it was time to fill up his iPod for his late-night flight back east with his mother. I worked hard to include as many rock classics as new favorites. I wanted to include Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" without skipping Powerman 500's "When Worlds Collide". It was a painstaking process, but when I had finished assembling his playlist it was seven hours long, and only filled half his disk space.
Oh well. He's eleven. I know that he probably wouldn't mind having a little "Winnie the Pooh" at the end there, just to help him get some sleep.

Revision

Once upon many years ago, while I was courting my wife-to-be, I wrote her a poem. The refrain of which read, "You can come and go in my life." At the time I was doing everything I could to appear as a witty, clever, and patient potential mate. I was going to play this one very cool. It was important to establish just how much freedom I was willing to install directly into this burgeoning relationship.
Over the years, fifteen of them as married folk, my words have come back in interesting and at times painful ways. The truth is I didn't fully explain myself back then. What I meant to say was, "You can come and go in my life, but I hope you choose to stay." That last bit didn't make the final edit. It wasn't very poetic, and it sounds just a tad desperate.
But that's where I was in the 1990s. I had gone 0-for-the Reagan/Bush administration when it came to girlfriends, and I was becoming very tired of sharing my one bedroom apartment with an ill-tempered budgie named Buttercup. I suspect that Buttercup's temperament was only a mirror of my own, and that made it all the more important for both bird and man to find a resolution.
Then, just shy of my thirtieth birthday, everything changed. I fell in love and moved to California and started a new life. Buttercup got a fresh start as well. She went to live with my niece. And I believe that I owe this upheaval, in no small part, to those words I wrote in my spiral notebook and mailed away in a romantic flurry. Did I know what I was getting into? Would I have had my lawyers look the document over before sending it? Should I have taken time for a rewrite?
Nope. Those were magic words. They changed two people's lives, and by extension dozens more. Since then, I've written a poem or two to express the love I feel for my wife. Many of them have been quite clever, but none of them has gotten me into the trouble that first one did. And you know what? I love trouble.

Komedy Klassics

Stop me if you've heard this one: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." No? Well, according to researchers, that joke goes back to Sumeria in 1900 B.C. It's not exactly a laugh riot, I grant you, but it does include one of the funniest words in any language: husband.
But seriously folks, we've got scientists getting paid to find the word's oldest joke. It reminds me of the Monty Python skit about the "killer joke", not to be confused with the eighties band, Killing Joke. The Python joke went something like this: "Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! ... Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput." If your high school German is up to snuff, you're probably just now picking yourself up off the floor. Or not.
Because that's the thing about jokes, isn't it? Sometimes the magic works, other times you just get a blank look for your trouble. Or worse, you could get the omnipresent joke-killer, "I don't get it." I wonder if the originator of a 1600 B.C. gag about a pharaoh, said to be King Snofru, "How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish," got only shrugs on his delivery. Ancient Egyptians weren't known for their timing.
Long before the boys in Monty Python got together, sometime in the 10th Century, we get our first English joke: "What hangs at a man's thigh and wants to poke the hole that it's often poked before? Answer: A key." Again, not exactly "The Parrot Sketch", but back then there was all that trouble with the Vikings, and it probably seemed like the height of levity. I guess you had to be there.

Eat To The Beat

I ate a lot of cheeseburgers last week. I was on vacation. That was the way I reconciled the fact that I was pounding down red meat with the occasional slice of bacon. The fact that I spent at least three of those days taking that fuel out on high-speed-turbulent-roller-coaster-type-rides was just a way to test my digestive process. The good news is that everything stayed put. That turns out to be the bad news too.
Since a good meaty chunk of the time I spent on my proto-Atkins adventure was spent in Los Angeles, I took special interest in the news that their City Council is putting South Los Angeles on a diet. The council voted unanimously Tuesday to place a moratorium on new fast food restaurants. The definition exempts "fast-food casual" restaurants such as El Pollo Loco, Subway and Pastagina, which do not have drive-through windows or heat lamps and prepare fresh food to order. This comes hard on the heels of California becoming the first state in the nation to bar trans fats, which lowers levels of good cholesterol and increases bad cholesterol. As one of the chief architects of the now infamous "Hamdog," I feel a wave of change sweeping the state, if not the country. I can smell it. It smells like cilantro.
Dunkin' Donuts will begin offering a new slate of better-for-you offerings in August. "We're staying very true to our brand and very true to our heritage," said the company's executive chef Stan Frankenthaler. "We're just growing and evolving." Evolving into a muffin and flatbread turkey sandwich company, he means. In gastronomically related news, restaurant chains Bennigan’s and Steak & Ale have filed for Chapter Seven bankruptcy protection and stores owned by its parent company will shut their doors. It just got a little harder to find a good plate of Cheese & Bacon Potato Skins.
I guess it's a good thing to eat healthy. You live longer. But do you really want to live forever in a world without Asiago Fried Cheese with marinara sauce?

W.W.P.D?

President Pinhead continues to make history, even as his days in office trickle down to a precious few. Monday evening the White House announced the Pointy-Headed One approved the Army's request to execute a soldier convicted of rape and murder. Private Ronald Gray has been on the military's death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, since 1988. His execution would be the first for the U.S. military since 1961. "While approving a sentence of death for a member of our armed services is a serious and difficult decision for a commander-in-chief, the president believes the facts of this case leave no doubt that the sentence is just and warranted," White House apologist Dana Perino said.
Gray pleaded guilty to two murders and five rapes in a civilian court and was sentenced to three consecutive and five concurrent life terms. But guess what? A general court-martial at the Army's Fort Bragg then tried him and in April 1988 convicted him of two murders, an attempted murder and three rapes. He was unanimously sentenced to death.
Pinhead allowed one hundred fifty-two executions as governor of Texas and has signed off on three executions of federal inmates since he became president. It's unclear why Pinhead didn't act until Monday, since the request for Gray's execution was sent to the White House in 2005 by the secretary of defense after Gray exhausted his appeals. Executions nationwide have been on hold while the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of lethal injection. Lethal injection is the official method for execution at Fort Leavenworth.
Maybe our President feels that clock ticking. The one that says that time is running out for him to have the power of life and death. I suppose if there is a bright spot, this is a confessed murderer who has received the due process of two legal systems. Then there's the case of "ex-soldier" Steven D. Green. The former Army private was charged with killing four members of an Iraqi family and raping one of the victims before shooting her. Green was honorably discharged from the Army as a private first class for what court papers referred to as a "personality disorder." It is still possible, if convicted, that former private Green could be executed for his crimes. Given the time consuming appeals process, it's still possible for Pinhead to establish residency in Kentucky and run for governor before sentencing. What Would Pinhead Do?