What A Twit

It's not like I was being unfaithful or anything. It's a dalliance. A way to fill time in a way that seems fun and amusing without forming any lasting attachments. Sure, I could have stayed away and kept myself free of any repercussions generated by what some would see as my hypocrisy, but somehow being a part of something that seems so vital and young piqued my curiosity. I wanted to try it out, even if I swore that I never would. I'm an adult, after all, and I could have stayed safe where I was and never "put myself out there." I did, and I kind of liked it. And the company I work for encouraged me.
I joined Twitter. I tweeted. There. I said it and I feel better. I am choosing this place and this time to come out and cleanse myself of the awful guilt I feel to you, my readers of more than one hundred forty characters. "One hundred forty characters" is, all by itself more than one sixth the allotted number of letters for one tweet. I have so much to say on any given day, I bristled at the idea that I might have to truncate or ameliorate my train of thought in any way shape or form. What I have to say is so very important, if it takes me a few extra syllables to get to my point, then I should be allowed the space to do just that.
Interestingly, for many of my readers who may have felt that I was the soul of brevity and refinement, I found this challenge quite daunting. What do I really have to say? The little box asks me, "What's happening now?" It makes me think of Flip Wilson, and then I start to pare down the associations in hope of getting to that magic one hundred forty. I want to wax on about Reverend Leroy Brown.
Not that it matters. It's Twitter. It's disposable, and that's why I find myself periodically drawn to it. Not in the way I pound out paragraph after paragraph here in blog form. My wife told me I should post blogs in links on my Twitter feed. You didn't go to Twitter for a meal. You're there to snack. You go to Entropical Paradise for the buffet.
Or maybe there are just ten to fifteen words in this mess that really means anything. When I figure it out, I'll post it on Instagram.

Whatamess

You may recall, some weeks ago on this very blog, I sang the praises of a fast food chain called Whataburger. If your memory doesn't reach back that far, or you are averse to clicking on links because they inevitably land you on a site that will cause your computer to send your entire 401K to an offshore account in the Cayman Islands, I will refresh: I was pleased and happy that the CEO of that Texas-based burger-based food emporium was sticking by its guns metaphorically by not allowing their physical counterpart to be carried in their restaurants. Preston Atkinson introduced his decision thusly:  "We have to think about how open carry impacts our 34,000+ employees and millions of customers," and he went on to explain how open carry customers were making people uncomfortable. He was taking a stand in a time and place that might have proved to be quite unpopular, given the open carry debate that seems to emanate from the Lone Star State. 

Imagine the collective surprise we had when this past week a pair of police officers were denied service at a Lewisville location of Whataburger. Officers Michael Magovern and Cameron Beckham were looking for a late night snack after working security at a construction site. The employee at the counter told them "We don't server police officers." They went to Dairy Queen instead. 

Dairy Queen has had its own brush with the open carry discussion and demonstrations, but they currently seem to consider badged law enforcement with guns in holsters in a different category. For their part, Whataburger was quick to issue a statement condemning the actions of what we can only assume from previous experience with the drive-thru at Arby's was a joke. Not a funny joke, but since humor is subjective, we can only assume that someone out there is getting a big laugh from pushing that whole "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" sign to their own extremes. It certainly seems like a bad way to spend that hard-earned Employee of the Month capital. For the time being it would be my suggestion to stay away from the Lewisville Whataburger. Something tells me they might not be getting quite as much police presence. 

Haunted

And so, a week later, I try not to go to the back of the house. If I can avoid it. It's not because I'm afraid of what I might find, but what I won't. My son isn't back there anymore. Oh sure, I could poke around in what is still nominally his room and find remnants of the life he led back there. Still some clothes in the dresser. Still some computer parts scattered about the floor. There is even an old pair of Converse high tops stuck behind the door. I told him to move them several times, but they always seemed to find their way back there, wedged just so the door would not open fully.
I am eating chocolate to compensate. It is not bringing anyone back to that room anytime soon, but it is helping fill some magnetic void that will almost certainly have a name in some self-help book or other.
My wife keeps sending me links to articles she has read about how to deal with the departure of one's progeny to the land of ivory towers. I know there isn't really any hope of making the pain go away. I have seen the look on my own mother's face, many years after the time I left for college. Every time I leave her house to go back to mine, across the Continental Divide, her heart breaks a little. I get that. I get that a whole lot better now than I did even back in July. Back in July when I was visiting with my son who had yet to go and leave my house.
Our house. The only house he's ever known.
And still I know precisely why this feeling gnaws at me: It is the precise moment in my own life that marked my greatest fear. I have been waiting for eighteen years to see if my son could do this any better than his old man. How could he not? I collapsed in a frantic heap after one night in the dorm. My younger brother, god bless him, stayed up all night with me trying to fathom what must have been going on in my head. There was no way to describe it other than the terror I felt to my very core. I have never before or since felt so completely unable to imagine anything but complete failure. I washed out. I never even unpacked the boxes. I do wonder now, decades later, what the guy who would have been my roommate told people. We had lunch together the afternoon before that awful night. He met my parents. He told me he would be bringing his stuff the following day.
I never saw him again. The next morning, I packed up my parents' station wagon with all those boxes of odds and ends and dragged them with my tortured psyche up the highway to crawl back into the hole where I stayed for a year, waiting for another chance.
My second attempt at freshman year went much better, though I didn't spend but one weekend on campus. I drove home on Friday night and drove back Sunday night. The friends I made on the north wing of Slocum Hall couldn't quite reconcile this attachment I had with my home. When I thought about how my son might fare, after many rocky nights as a kid doing sleepovers that never quite materialized, I remembered my own gravitational attraction to my home planet. I never really managed escape velocity myself.
My son knew that. Even though I took care over the past year or so to steer clear of that chapter, we all knew the story. And now I cannot describe the pride and joy I feel. But I still stay away from that end of the house. I'm so happy for my son, but I'm still missing the way things used to be. And looking forward to what comes next.

The View From Up There

The Trump has this to say about our country: "It's disgusting what's happening to our country." The country he is referencing is ours, after all, so why don't I agree with him? Maybe it's because my relatives, somewhere up the chain, were immigrants. They came to this country as huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. And breathe they did, for several generations until they started to look and sound more like Americans instead of those huddled masses with silly accents.
Appearances, it would seem, are everything. And those appearances, from high atop Trump Tower, are that the United States has become "a dumping ground for the rest of the world." His Donaldness when on to decry to an audience in Texas, "You people are suffering. I'm in New York, but they're in New York too. They're all over the place." It's getting so you can't go anywhere in these United States without bumping into someone from another country. Unless you happen to be visiting a Native American reservation.
Oh, I get it. He's not talking about those of us who did it "the right way." The legal way. The way that his ancestors did. The ones that crawled ashore millions of years ago and eventually spawned arms and legs and whatever it is on top of his head to become the Front Runnix Repbulicanus. Walking mostly upright and using an especially evolved mouth and tongue to subdue his prey. "Sometimes he puts his foot in his mouth, just like everybody," said Barbara Tomasino, a sixty-five-year-old retired elementary school librarian from Plano, Texas "If he gets elected, he might need to tone it down a little bit." 
Then again, if he gets elected, maybe he'll just wind up and spread the vitriol a little more thickly. Pretty soon, he'll just start making fun of people's looks just on general principle. Oops. Spoke too son. That's already happened. "Look at that face!" he cried as a photo of fellow Republican hopeful Carly Fiorina was shown. "Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?!" The laughter grows halting and faint behind him. "I mean, she's a woman, and I'm not s'posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?"
We are serious. Like a heart attack serious. This is what will "make America great again?" Mister Trump and I do agree on one thing: It's disgusting what's happening to our country. Specifically around the front-runner of the GOP nomination.

The State of Lone Star

Okay, at least I have an excuse: Last week was an awfully busy one. I started teaching PE and having kids coming to the computer lab, not at the same time however. Oh, and my son moved out of the house to go to college. That might explain how I callously skipped over the watershed event of Rick Perry dropping out of the race for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. Some might suggest that I have my priorities squarely fixed and that I should not feel bad about making my own job and family the focus of my life. Others might disagree. Rick Perry, for one. Sorry about that, Rick.

So 2012's also-ran has decided to take the same route again in 2016. Or 2015, since that is the year we are currently enduring. Former Texas governor Rick "Four Eyes" Perry didn't even make it to the primaries this time. Maybe wearing glasses gave him the vision to see that the path ahead was rocky and inhospitable. Or maybe he just got tired of being one of more than a dozen hopefuls in an already crowded casting call. It takes courage to be the first clown out of the car. Or maybe he just forgot where he was parked. 

Whatever the reason, we won't have Rick Perry to kick around anymore. Well, we can continue to kick him, but it won't be in order to get him to drop out of the race. That also means that Rick will probably feel free to take a couple wild swings on his way out: "The conservative movement has always been about principles, not personalities," Perry said, before making a not-too-veiled swipe at Donald Trump, the GOP's current front-runner. "Our nominee should embody those principles. He, or she, must make the case for the cause of conservatism more than the cause of their own celebrity."

Whether Governor Perry truly embodies the ideals of conservatism or no longer up to an electorate to decide. The Conservative Review gave him generally passing marks back in April, Their conclusion:  "Voters seem to see Perry the same way girls look at the 'nice guy' who's not nerdy enough to be the next Bill Gates, jock enough to be the next star quarterback, or cool enough to be the lead singer. They don't mind him being around, but whenever he tries to push for a commitment they just want to be friends." A friend with seventeen million dollars in a Super PAC. Maybe that not-so-nerdy quasi-jock will have to settle for being the guy who tells everyone that the rich guy is trouble, and maybe when he gives all that money back, he can still influence somebody. Somewhere. So long, Governor Rick. We'll see y'all down the trail.

Loves Company

I was standing on the curb, leaning on the hand truck that had only recently held most of my son's worldly possessions. As I watched the stream of loaded down SUVs creep down the street in front of me, searching for a spot to disgorge their kids' belongings, I took a moment to wipe the sweat from my brow. I recognized many of the boxes by size and shape: printer, fan, shelving unit. Necessities. Things that would fit in a dorm room. The bicycle racks behind me were filling up with Schwinns and Treks and beaters that had seen better days. Still, expectant faces rolled their bikes up in hopes of finding one more spot for their two wheels. I was catching my breath after pushing two loads of clothes and TV and computer and cables up the hill from the lower parking lot. My wife and I had given up hope of finding a spot any closer when a silver pickup swooped in and took up what would have been, on most any other day, two parking places. Ultimately, it didn't matter, since there were plenty of barges to be toted and bales to be lifted.
I was working hard to try and limit the amount of thinking I could do. When I stopped to reflect on the job I was doing, it didn't make a lot of sense to me: I was taking an active role in moving my son out of my house and down to the road to the college of his choice. I knew this day was coming, but somehow I had kept myself from fully confronting the reality of those words that I had been hearing for weeks: Empty Nest. I remembered a time, many years ago, when my then third grade son said he was interested in going to college up in Berkeley, so he could still sleep at home. That was a long time ago. At least one long, hot day of moving boxes ago. A day that had my wife and I alternating moments of sadness with moments of joy. We were proud. And excited. And afraid. We could only imagine what sort of emotions were tumbling through my son's heart and mind. Was he as excited about his future as his parents? Was he feeling any fear? If he did, he didn't show it. Maybe he was taking pity on his parents and trying to make us more comfortable with the future we were shaping for ourselves. Then my reverie was broken.
"Hey dad!" I looked up to see a gentleman I did not recognize coming toward me. He was carrying a box. Like everyone else. Then I realized that, not only was it pretty easy to assume my role in the dance performance that was taking place with my hand truck and fatigue, but because of the sweaty T-shirt I was wearing that labeled me as a proud "Cal Poly Dad." I smiled and tipped my cap to my new friend, "Hey, dad." He nodded and moved on up the stairs, helping his son or daughter prepare to make the next big step in their lives together.
It was nice to have the company.

Kind

I spent a lot of years dragging strays home to my parents' house. I understand that the term "strays" sounds somewhat pejorative, but it is an attempt to describe the way my family would absorb kids from other families that didn't have the strong center that ours provided.  Starting in elementary school, I had a sense of which of my friends would really benefit from a dose of what was the Caven nuclear family. My mom baked cakes and cookies. My dad played ping pong with us. There was genuine interest in what went on at school. When I was asked what I had learned that day, I knew that the answer mattered. My parents gave that vibe to the kids that came home with me, and the friends that both of my brothers gave the same experience. There is a vast sea of adopted children who call my parents "Mom and Dad." In some ways, this helped solidify the feeling I had that I never really needed to leave that home. That was a place of comfort, safety and acceptance for a generation. My mother still gets the occasional phone call or Christmas card from the kids she helped when their own parents got too busy to be a part of their lives. My father's memory is one cherished by a group of adoring fans who remember the way they felt when they walked in the front door.
Rushing forward to late last week, my son was out busying himself with the farewells to his hometown haunts and friends that he would be leaving behind to go off to college. He was driving around the city with the gang of kids that had christened themselves "The Kind." The clock was ticking on the moments they would all spend together, even though a large portion of that group were headed off to school together. It was important for them to have last tag on the faces and places of their youth. Which is why I was so incredibly flattered to have them land on our front porch at nine thirty last Thursday. It was still a school night for me, a fact they respected even though they were flirting with the idea of pulling an all-nighter in order to get in all the conversations and connections they wanted to pursue before they packed up and headed out of town for their next great adventure. The Kind had stopped by my house to say goodnight to me. My son his buddies trooped into my bedroom and hung out for fifteen or twenty minutes, chatting up my wife and I as part of their farewell ritual. And before they cleared off, in front of all his friends, my son leaned down and gave me a hug as everyone behind him wished me pleasant dreams.
And then they were gone.
But they really weren't.
They will always be there.
And I couldn't be more proud.