Enabling

I spent the better part of last week teaching children how to draw a heart. Not the sticky, anatomically correct hearts and valve version, but rather the simple and sweet shape that is most familiar on playing cards. And Valentines. I gave them several ways to deal with the symmetry of the shape, offering to give examples wherever I could. But I drew a line when it came to drawing a heart for them to use on their card to their mom or dad or sister or whomever was about to receive this outward projection of their affections. It should come from them.
The happy news was that, to a one of them, they all understood this. Giving your heart to someone is a tenuous business at best, which may be why most of them chose to send their Valentine greeting to their parents. A few wanted to give their hearts to their classroom teacher, which seemed just a little more daring. And a few third grade boys even dared to inscribe the names of girls in their class. I didn't get to see if they had the courage to actually hand their card over to the girls whose names they had so carefully spelled.
That stage was taking place across town at my son's high school. Hearts were being shared and broken all week long. There was a flurry of breakups in the freshman class, one of which left my son's best friend on the skids without the possibility of parole. There was no way to tell him that there would be many more Valentine's Days in his future, with heartaches that would most certainly rival the one he was experiencing now. He will have to lean that just like the rest of us. Just like we learned to draw our first heart.

Good Guys

Hearts and minds. That's what the powers that be wanted to win in Vietnam. In order to stop the vile threat of worldwide communist domination, it was important to make sure that the Vietnamese were impressed with the duty and commitment of our soldiers on the ground. It's a pretty tough sell when you're asking nineteen and twenty year olds to put down their automatic weapons long enough to play soccer with the locals. Especially if the locals are as interested in killing you as you are them. Still, it's a noble notion that went horribly wrong with incidents such as the Mai Lai Massacre.
Maybe this sort of thing has its genesis in Sand Creek, sometimes euphemized as a "Battle." A band of native Americans, mostly women and children, were killed in Eastern Colorado. The discovery of gold brought settlers who needed the freedom to roam about and claim the land as their own. The Cheyenne and Arapaho that camped near Sand Creek were in the way. Keep in mind, gold was once more valuable than oil. After signing a number of treaties and assuring the tribes that were there far in advance of our white migration, the U.S. Army decided to rid the plains of the upstart "Dog Soldiers" who refused to play along with the negotiations of their chiefs.
There were no Dog Soldiers at Sand Creek. The massacre had the effect of inciting more raids and terrorizing settlers in that region over the next four years.
One hundred and fifty years later, we have U.S. soldiers urinating on the corpses of Taliban. And now Marines posing with a flag that is incredibly reminiscent of a Nazi flag from World War II. Investigators determined it was a "naive mistake."
Hearts and minds, boys. Hearts and minds.

The Net

Mitt "Catcher's" Romney may have been on to something when he said that the very poor are doing fine. There is a safety net to catch them if something goes wrong, and he promises that if something goes wrong with that net we will do what it takes to fix it.
Bad news, Mitt: The net is already broken. One in four children in America is living in poverty. Twenty-five percent. These are the ones that Salamander Gingrich was suggesting could get jobs cleaning up their school to offset the embarrassment of accepting food stamps. This is one quarter of our next generation. I get to meet a lot of them at my job, where I do see many of them helping out by cleaning the cafeteria or picking up the playground. We don't pay them. It's their school. We are teaching them. And they are teaching us.
More than eighty-five percent of the kids at our school qualify for the free lunch program. This includes breakfast as well, and a snack if they stay for the after school program. Nothing wrong with the safety net there, unless it's the food that we have for them. We do the best we can with what we have.
There is some magic formula for figuring out how to get the right amount of money for each student, but that part of the net could use some inspection. There are those who would like to tie funding to test scores. Others have suggested that once students perform at a certain level, that funding can be taken away. For example, as a reward for bringing our school out of Program Improvement, we have had our Title One funds cut. As our teachers and kids close the achievement gap, the money begins to dry up. Once they are all reading and writing at grade level, that net gets smaller and smaller.
These are kids. Like Sammy, a first-grader, who was still in the office after school the other day because his mother had forgotten to pick him up. His aunt wasn't answering her phone. He had worked on his homework and drawn his pictures and was still waiting when it was time for our secretary to go home. She offered to drive Sammy to his house. Sammy had already been at school since seven forty-five that morning, and it was nearly four thirty. He had put in a full day. He got home all right, and made it back to school the next morning, ready to brave the dangers high above the crowd in the safety net.

Pre-Occupied

If you have an older sibling, you've heard this: "Possession is nine tenths of the law." This can be applied to just about any situation that involves material, from GI Joes to Hostess Ding Dongs. I have experienced this from both the small and the large, the have and the have not, and I can say that it is frustratingly true. If you are bigger, you have more stuff. And if you are bigger and you don't have more stuff, you try and take it.
This concept dates back to Scotland, where their brogue may be affecting their math, but they insisted that "Possession is eleven points in the law, and they say there are but twelve." I never studied law, but I'm starting to get the impression that if I were to study for the bar, I would start with a volume on possession. In the Hatfield-McCoy feud, with testimony evenly divided, the doctrine that possession is nine-tenths of the law caused Floyd Hatfield to retain possession of the pigs that the McCoys claimed were their property. The Hostess snack cake feud at my house lasted only a few minutes, but most of the same principles applied.
And so I am left to wonder: What is that other tenth of the law? Should I even bother to look it up, since ninety percent of everything else is tipped in possession's favor? Maybe I should content myself with the possessions that I have already acquired. All that stuff has to count for some sort of legal clout, and when I consider the rights of property owners and the way that banks can come in and take away houses full of those possessions it does make me curious about how one percent can control so much. What is ninety-nine percent of the law?

Sky Scraper

There are a lot of ways to note the passage of time. One of the easiest ways for my family is to look out the front window at the magnolia tree that fills one corner of our yard. Fifteen years ago it was an empty spot, waiting for the sun to hit it. When we planted it, the tree was still feet below peeking over the fence. We needn't fear that it would attempt to escape. Now, after a decade and a half, that fence is obscured by a towering plant of magnificent foliage. It holds its own easily with the weedy white plum in the opposite corner that was there years before. It is the plant that we are most proud of. Unless you count our son.
When our baby boy grew too big for his crib, we considered getting him a "big boy bed." We even shopped for one of those plastic race car frames, but lost interest abruptly when we acquired a queen size mattress and box spring. We liked the idea that the three of us could all lay down at bedtime for a story, and there would still be room enough for the stuffed menagerie and assorted Lego constructions that found their way there before lights out. And for the longest time, he would ball himself up in one corner, surrounded by blankets and pillows with all of that comfy real estate with room to expand.
That's just what he did. When he was in elementary school we lifted that bed up high above the floor of his room, leaving a corral below for Bionicle storage and a place to build. Up above, he was growing. When I reached over the end of the bed to give it a shake the other morning, I felt a foot: my son's. He was stretching, but he was stretching to the length of the bed. I recalled the ladder that he used to climb into bed for so many years. That's out in the garage now. He uses a stool to hike himself up and let himself down, but he is no longer the little sprout that we planted there once upon a time. He's still a few feet behind the magnolia, but he'll get there.

Halftime

I remember when Ronald Regan told us all that it was "morning in America." He wanted us to know it was time to push the reset button. In his run to become the fortieth president of the United States, he was letting us all know that he was there to usher in a new era. He may have been doing the metaphorical version of shaking us awake.
Of course, it's not like we had been asleep, exactly. We had all been hoping that the Vietnam War and Watergate followed by massive inflation and recession was merely a bad dream. That was the strength of the grandfatherly assertion that a new day was dawning and everything was going to be all right again. Thirty-two years ago.
This past weekend, another voice of quiet authority: "This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again, and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines. Yeah, it’s halftime in America, and our second half is about to begin." This wasn't Grandpa Reagan. It was your cranky old uncle, Clint Eastwood. He may have been talking about our great nation, but he was referencing one city in particular: Detroit. He wasn't running for office. He was selling cars. He was selling cars to a country that was watching a football game when he said, America “knows how to come from behind to win.” Then, the New York Giants did just that. It would have been more amazingly impressive had it been the Detroit Lions who made that last-minute comeback, but with all that red, white and blue on the field, it couldn't have been any more quintessentially American.
And as the confetti rained down, Eli Manning stood on the podium and received the keys to a brand new Corvette. Not a Chrysler product. Don't tell Clint.

Into The Woods

This past weekend, we went up to the cabin. Well, we went to a cabin. This one was called "Cottage Springs." It was a change from the last two years. The place we went to previously was called "Capone's Hideaway." Prior to that we made a yearly trek to the Sierras to a place with toboggans nailed to the wall which I'm sure had a clever name because it is the very nature of such places to have an appealing epithet. One that would describe the pleasant, convivial experience that takes place in and around those faux log walls. Each year when the snow begins to fall in the east, we start to make our plans to go to "the cabin."
This is the easiest possible contrivance for me, since this is how I grew up. My family owned a cabin in the woods. It was built on a plot of land by a creek. It was purchased from a parcel that was cleverly named "Aspen Meadows." It could be that this was the name that had been roughly translated from the roaming bands of Sioux warriors, but more likely it was the brainstorm of a real estate developer who hoped to make the location as appealing as possible to the potential buyers out there, wandering in the grove of aspen.
And so we built a log cabin, and it sat at the end of a path that passed two towering blue spruce. The front window faced a great, green expanse of grass. Nestled between a great pile of granite and a pine-covered hill, we felt the cultural pressure of finding a distinctive name for our mountain getaway. But we never did. We always referred to it as "The Cabin," so much so that an artist friend of ours carefully painted those words on a small wooden sign that we hung at the top of the stairs on the front porch when we arrived. We never gave it much thought after that. The big pile of granite? We called that "The Rock." There were those who constructed their "Whispering Pines" and "Ponderosa Crossroads" and felt the need to remind anyone passing by of their choice by erecting some elaborately signage. That wasn't us. We went to the cabin. It was a lot more relaxing than Pine Hills Bluff Lodge. Too much name. Not enough relax.