Standing Eight Count

What am I so worried about? My son, who will turn fifteen next month, is planning his sophomore schedule for high school and I am fretting about just how he will manage to turn all of these disparate bits of information into his life's work. He has been saying for most of the past decade that he wants to design cars. How will his world evolve if he misses that particular bus? I suppose it's a parent's job to feel the urgency of following your dreams. Maybe that's because I never used to dream about being an elementary school teacher. It just kind of happened to me. Now I dream about being an elementary school teacher all the time.
When I was fifteen, I had in my mind a future in the arts: film, cartooning, writing. The path to any of those possible careers were as hazy and indistinct as the Northwest Passage. It seemed to me at the time that if I stuck around school long enough, I would matriculate in the direction that was best for me. And so I spent years at jobs that might have been mere way stations for other more motivated individuals. I was a manager at Arby's. I unloaded trucks for Target. I managed a video store. I installed modular office furniture. I managed a wholesale booksellers' warehouse. I was on my way to a life of managing this or that for someone else. It wasn't until I was thirty-five that I fell into the open pit that has evolved into my teaching career. As it turns out, a great many of the skills I needed to become a teacher were nurtured by the jobs I had before. I can fix the furniture in my room. I can help unload boxes of supplies when they show up late. I help out in the lunch room. There are books everywhere, and the managing thing? Well, I manage to stay busy.
All of that came two decades after my fifteenth birthday. The idea that my son will have honed his own career path to a fine edge at this point would be a surprise. By contrast, the fact that there seems to be a pause on the path to becoming the next John DeLorean or Enzo Ferrari comes as something of a relief. In another twenty years, when I'm sitting in his office and talking about how worried I was when he was trying to decide between Honors English and the Paideia Program. He'll be fine, even if he has to spend some time making roast beef sandwiches to figure that out.

Suspended Animation

George Carlin is not the only one to point out the differences between football and baseball. Still, he did a fine job of distilling the disparities between America's Game and America's Pastime. The one that has stuck with me for many years is the way baseball managers have to wear the same uniform as the players, as if there was a chance that, in a pinch, they might trot out on the field and turn a quick double play instead of merely hurling a few epithets at an umpire before skulking back to the dugout. Even those relatively fit specimens in the coaching ranks of the NFL would look pretty silly in full pads and helmet. And that's not where the divergence ends.
Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen has been suspended for five games because of his comments about Fidel Castro. In case you're unfamiliar, Fidel is not an up and coming lefty from the Dominican Republic. He is the retired leader of Cuba. A communist. Ozzie told Time magazine he loves Castro and respects the retired Cuban leader for staying in power so long. At least two local Miami officials said Guillen should lose his job. Praising Castro in Miami is a little like supporting a mosque in lower Manhattan. Free speech? Maybe.
Meanwhile, over on the gridiron, Sean Payton's boss upheld the New Orleans Saints coach's season long suspension for his team's pay-for-pain bounties. That would be sixteen games, or twenty if you count the preseason. There aren't very many voices in the Big Easy calling for coach Payton's head. They're just trying to figure out how to keep things running while they sort out how things could have gone so wrong just three years after their Super Bowl win. Or maybe they're trying to figure out how they got caught. Paying your team to commit extra-curricular violence is one thing. Lying about it to Roger Goodell is another thing.
Now Ozzie Guillen is going to try and save his job and some face by explaining just exactly what he meant when he was talking about his respect for a brutal foreign dictator. Sean Payton is going to try and find a brutal dictator to come in and take his place until it's time for him once again to play ball.

Def-Con 2012

I remember watching the missiles coming out of the silos in the TV movie "The Day After." I remember writing my own short story about waiting for the missiles to fall when I was in high school. I survived the Cold War. We all did. The United States is 1 and 0 in wars in which atomic weapons were used. Hooray for the Red, White and Blue!
Now we fret and fuss about who might want to join that club. Iran? North Korea? Pakistan? It's not the pervasive fear that I remember from my youth. This one is more pointed, sometimes mixed with haughty superiority. "North Korea? They can't even get their missile all the way across the Pacific Ocean." I might feel differently if I on Maui, of course. And then there are the stories of "dirty bombs" that aren't intended to level cities, just kill off thousands with lethal doses of radiation. It does make me pine for the days of Matthew Broderick and the WOPR. We should all learn so much by playing a few games of tic-tac-toe.
In the meantime, those silos in Kansas are still proving to be useful for someone. Real estate developer Larry Hall has options to retro-fit War-for anyone who seeks comfort inside concrete walls that are nine feet thick and stretch one hundred and seventy-four feet underground. He is installing an indoor farm to grow enough fish and vegetables to feed seventy people for as long as they need to stay inside and also stockpiling enough dry goods to feed them for five years. The top floor and an outside building above it will be for elaborate security. Other floors will be for a pool, a movie theater and a library, and when in lockdown mode there will be floors for a medical center and a school.
It will be a place where even the most paranoid could relax and enjoy themselves until the threat of solar flares or zombie infestation runs its course. Or Obama's second term.

The Choir Invisible

There's a lot of mortality going around these days. People shooting other people over grades. People shooting other people because someone else shot their daddy. People shooting other people because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. These are in addition to the daily flurry of death that doesn't require ammunition: cancer, natural disasters, car crashes, mine collapses. And no Mike Wallace to report on it.
It gets me to thinking, as I have for most of my life, about what it might be like when I shuffle off this mortal coil myself. I have always maintained a solid fear of death which, as I grow older, seems less and less appropriate. Every day that I make it through is a gift and I know it. Not that I live any sort of risky lifestyle, outside of my predilection for cheeseburgers. I am pretty cautious and the older I get the more I find myself slowing down as I approach that yellow light. I just don't want death sneaking up on me.
I have therefore decided to accept the following scenario: At some point in the future, hopefully a good while from now, I will be out in the yard, mowing the grass when I will be felled by a massive stroke. This suggests that I won't have to wither away in a bed someplace, and I will be useful right up until the moment that I am not. It also means that each and every time that I am able to complete both front and back lawns without dropping death, I am cheating death. It might not sound glorious, but it beats the heck out of "innocent bystander."

Playing With Fire

I had an Earth Two moment the other night. I was out for drinks with my co-workers after a long week, and we were regaling one another with tales of our challenges and frustrations. At one point, the lady sitting next to me started asking everyone around the table where they went to college. This quickly changed to the date we graduated. Once again, I was confronted with the generation that separates me from most of the rest of the people with whom I work. As a matter of fact, it occurred to me the young woman sitting next to me could have been my daughter.
Not because of any soap opera type subterfuge, but simply because of the math. Back in 1980, when I was a senior in high school, I chose to jump the line into the world of those without virginity. Over the next few years I experienced, along with my girlfriend at the time, a few moments of "what if?" The certainty of birth control and sexually active teenagers is an exercise in probability that confounds just about everyone, but mostly the teenagers themselves. Had any of those percentages that had been so much on our side been turned around the other way, I would be the father of a thirty-something man or woman. To say that I was unprepared for such an undertaking would be an understatement, considering the relative difficulty I am having as the parent of a fourteen-year-old. To say that I am grateful that the metaphorical bullet was dodged is yet another understatement.
But it does give me pause. First to reflect on the gray hairs that I must have given my parents while I was busy playing with fire. Second, I feel like I will be much more ready to discuss the full facts of life with my son as I consider how many lives are touched by the coupling of two enthusiastic teenagers. I wonder how things might have been different, but I'm glad for how they all turned out. That's the gift of another generation.

Super Stitions

One of the things I like about the idea of Karma is the notion that there is some sort of payback. Life and luck aren't generated spontaneously. In some ways, this metaphysical theory is subject to physical laws: you get back what you put in. That was the jumping off point for the train of thought that I followed on my bike ride to work late last week.
I saw a black cat start to cross the street in front of me, and whether it was simply a moment of feline indecision or the sound of my approaching bike tires, he turned and slunk back into the shadows beneath a parked car. Whatever bad luck that might have come my way was circumvented by the mechanism of my bicycle or the food that cat had eaten the night before that kept him from making his mad dash across my path. A block further down the street, another cat was more assertive. This one made it across the street in front of me without much hesitation. I noticed that this one was mostly black, with white paws and chin. That's when I began to speculate on the bad luck ratio that is described by the relative blackness of the cat which crosses one's path. If the cat is fully black, but turns back is there any bad luck delivered, or will it simply dissipate without having made the full connection? Would it take a white cat going the opposite direction to counteract any of the bad ju-ju created by its darker cousin? How about if any one of them happened to walk under a ladder on the way, or broke a mirror? If I had stopped to pick up a penny a block before, would it be a wash?
Then a crow flew out of a tree and flew on ahead of me for a while. If birds are somehow opposed to cats, would this black bird have an impact on my fate, or would its blackness be the operative detail? It occurred to me briefly that another choice I had was simply to turn around and go home, avoiding the entire scenario. Or maybe it's all a lot of hooey. I just crossed my fingers and turned around three times after that last one. Just in case.

Time Off For Bad Behavior

AJ and Riley didn't make it to Spring Break. Don't worry. They'll be fine. They just got a little extra time off before their regularly scheduled vacation. Of course we might never know exactly what happened at home when the news came about the fight they had in the hallway after school, but we can assume.
AJ's mother tends to answer the phone this way: "What'd he do this time?" Sometimes his teacher is calling to tell her what a good day AJ had, but when she sees that number on the caller ID, she simply assumes. Admittedly it's a pretty safe bet on his mother's part, but AJ didn't stand a chance on this one.
Riley, on the other hand, responded in a way that many of us might relate: He ran away. Rather than go up to the principal's office as he was directed, he took off. He got it into his head that being sent to the principal's office was the next step to being shipped off to Juvenile Hall. Maybe his mom had let him know that he was on this slippery slope, and he figured that bypassing the principal's office would short-circuit the process. It was my brother the sheriff's officer who taught me this lesson: "You can't outrun Motorola," meaning that if you blow past the first patrol car, the radio will just call up the next one to watch for you half a mile down the road. Such is the case with the telephone in our business. Add to that Riley's siblings who were more than happy to take the suspension notice home. For Riley, there was no escape.
And what was so important to these ten-year-old boys that they would poison their week by starting with a fist-fight two days before they would be free of each other for nine days? It was a girl, I'm told. Ginny was the face that launched a thousand ships, or in this case, a few dozen fists. No word yet on how her Spring Break will progress.