Snapshots

 Twenty-seven is a kind of nowhere birthday. 

Not that this will stop us all from celebrating my son's most recent trip around the sun. We gathered this past Sunday, coincidental to Mothers Day since so much of that event had an essential bearing on the whole birthday thing. There was a cake. There were presents. 

Then he went home.

To his house. 

But it wasn't always that way. We used to get up early and stay up late. I came home from my work as my first year as a teacher was winding down just in time for putting together his green riding tractor. There was a room full of the kids from across the street, all of whom were older and ready to have a hand in the care and feeding of our one-year-old. And have some cake and ice cream. 

Subsequent years had a similar theme. The cakes became more elaborate, and the wheels became more complex. The guest list changed as he grew. Eventually he started having a say about who was invited. Then one day it was announced that he would be going out. Thanks for the cake. And the presents. But I'm going to meet some friends. By this time the wheels had become motorized, and the addition of a driver's license expanded his world. 

And shrank mom and dad's. Just a little. Now don't think that there's a trace of bitterness in this. I fully understand. Birthdays with your parents tend to skew almost immediately into "remember when" territory. Just like I am doing right now. But since the whole goal of raising a kid is to have them grow up, this development shouldn't come as any sort of surprise. 

Yet I can't help but remembering my son's life as a series of snapshots. Age five. Age ten. A series of cakes that continued to press the bounds of creating with sugar and eggs and flour. The bikes. The Legos. The parties in the back yard. 

But my son's life no longer fits in our back yard, much to his parents' chagrin. We raised a clever young man who has a world to whom he needs to be introduced. If you see him, tell him we said Happy Birthday. He's really quite a guy. 

Make A Monkey Out Of Me

 Another Planet of the Apes movie is now showing at a theater near you. Perhaps you may have seen some of the promotions. If not, I am here to let you know that the saga of intelligent apes has now reached the ten-film plateau with no real sign of slowing down. 

Now you probably want to know if I will be buying a ticket. This one is an itch that I have been scratching, hard, since before there were ever Wars in the Stars. I grew up with Zira, Cornelius and their pet human Taylor. I sat transfixed as the budgets were throttled back with each new iteration until we were left with a weekly live-action TV series on CBS. Then quickly after the show's mid-first season cancellation, a Saturday morning cartoon was the last-ditch effort to catch on to those hard-core Apes fanatics who were willing to lap up those thirteen half hour episodes. 

And if you believed that this beaten horse was dead, pardon the non-simian metaphor, you were wrong. Tim Burton, whose sensibilities often crossed paths with mine, brought us what was at the time a new notion: A Reboot. Tim's magic was not enough, or perhaps too much, to revive the story of a future where those intelligent apes end up making many of the same mistakes as their human forbears had made. Almost as ironic as, spoiler alert, finding a Statue of Liberty half-buried in the sand. It might have had something to do with having Marky Mark Wahlberg cast as an astronaut. Or maybe it was just time for this once clever notion to die. 

Meanwhile, Twentieth Century Fox was becoming a nostalgic notion itself in the new century. Thirteen years ago, Rise of the Planet of the Apes came along, with its CGI chimps and orangutans and gorillas, with Andy Serkis using all his motion-capture performance skills to bring us an ape for the digital age. It made almost half a billion dollars in its theatrical run. 

Spawning the now oh-so-familiar series of sequels just waiting out there for when the bottom line at Fox gets a little red. 

Because Dave will pay to see it, right? 

Formulaic dystopian future flicks are my bag. Don't hate me for it. 

There's plenty of other reasons to hate me. Like giving away that Statue of Liberty thing without a spoiler alert. 

With Much Appreciation

 It's a celebration of mother. Not unlike the celebration of the celebration of teacher that I experienced this past week. The conversation out in front of the school at the end of the day started something like this: "When they have a day of appreciation for your job, they're definitely not paying you enough." Not that we teachers didn't end up feeling appreciated by our principal. There were donuts one day, nachos on Tuesday, cookies another. We were awarded nice cards with little tchotchkes attached to remind us of the value she places on our work. 

But all that attention got me to thinking about Mother's Day. We set one day aside each year to give out flowers and cards and housewares to show our appreciation for the one who brought us into this world. 

Once a year. There's something a little off about that math. Each day on earth is a gift from mom to you. Why is it that we pick this one Sunday to be the day we show our appreciation for the gift of life? Some might argue that the appearance of Father's Day just a month later cheapens the moment just a little. 

Not that fathers don't deserve their own day in the sun. 

But mothers? How about those nine months of carrying you around while doing their daily chores, and then once you appeared she still ended up carrying you around only now it was in her arms, making those chores even more challenging. Yes, I believe that sending along a bunch of posies to the woman who picked you up and kept your life in order while hers became quantumly more challenging is the least we can do. 

The mother of my son continues, all these years after that initial spark of "hey, let's have a kid," devoted to the life she brought and nurtured through preschool and served as room mother and eventually PTA President once he landed in high school. She checks up on him. She wonders how he's doing. There's always a sense of relief when he gets home safe. 

Always. Even though his home is far away now. These are the ties that bind, to borrow a sentiment from Bruce Springsteen. Make some time to stare with wonder and awe at your mother, wherever she may be. What she has done is amazing. 

And always will be. 

Change Of Season

 The grass on the hillside is growing high, partly because of the season, but also because the buildings and grounds crew for the district are taking the same tack that many of the rest of us are: The year is almost over. Currently, if a ball was errantly kicked up into the standing weeds above our playground, we would have to put a picture of it on milk cartons in hopes of finding it before next fall. 

The flurry of standardized testing that is taking place is another sign of the creeping close of the school year. Everyone's skills and capacities are being measured one last time in hopes of defining a line that creeps up from left to right. See kids? You haven't just been taking up space for the past one hundred eighty days or so. 

You learned something. 

If they started the year without a sense of letters or numbers, hopefully they have more now than when they first took a seat in their classroom. In between calls for quiet and fire drills and copious amounts of recess that were extended by extra trips to the bathroom or water fountain or leaving early or not coming to school at all, the arrow somehow ended in the up position. 

Just before we turn them all loose again for two months with our fingers crossed that the inevitable "summer slide" won't set them back too much once the call goes out for them to return to these hallowed halls. 

All of this was accomplished during a year that we had at one time been asked to close our doors. No classes. No recesses. No balls kicked into the weeds. All of these kids would have been shuffled up and dropped into different schools with different teachers and all those new faces. 

And who knows how tall the grass might have grown on those hillsides?

I can complain about how things went down this school year. We have a lot of work left to do with the kids that come back next year. One hundred and eighty days to try and squeeze it all in, give or take. 

Mostly give. 

Fashionistas

 A few mornings back, I had a choice of headlines: Israel seizes control of Rafah border crossing, and See what all the stars wore at the Met Gala. 

On the one hand, I am always fascinated by the world of fashion. 

On the other hand, I am always fascinated by the world of war. 

A tough choice that. 

Essentially, it all comes down to the way I want to approach the coming Apocalypse. Do I want to know when the missiles are coming, or would it be better to dance while Rome is burning? In this particular model, Rome will be the United States. The missiles might come from Russia. Or North Korea. Or Pakistan. Or some corner of the planet that decides to up their game when it comes to those vague "Death to America" threats. 

Why would anyone on this musty old planet of ours wish harm to us, or in this case, U.S.? How about the strained opulence of events like The Met Gala? While so much of the rest of the globe is starving or shooting at one another, celebrities assemble on the first Monday in May to prance about in fantastic costumes in hopes of raising money to fund the part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's (checks notes) department of fantastic costumes. Individual tickets to this event are prices at seventy-five thousand dollars. Each. 

Competing for my attention on the morning after the big costume party, or rather the big expensive costume party, were photos of the whimsical creations of designers who create outfits to be worn for one night and tanks rolling into Rafah. The line was blurred briefly by the appearance of protesters outside the Gala, but they were kept blocks away from the event by police blockades ready for anyone who might try to crash. 

Or blow up. 

And the division between fantasy and reality was maintained for one more night. 

Sleep tight, America. 

A Long Time Ago

I hope the Fourth was with you. 

Lisp notwithstanding, I vicariously enjoyed the fabricated holiday celebrating the Star Wars franchise. This experience stemmed primarily from the time I spent in front of my computer looking at clips and memes created by the legion of superfans and snarkmeisters alike. Star Trek fans especially seemed to delight in poking fun at the relative newcomer to the space opera scene. 

Then there was the fifteen minutes my wife and I watched The Empire Strikes Back. I was reminded once again of the ride we all went on starting in May of 1977. Before VCRs. Before streaming. Before the wide brush now used to spread even the thinnest paste of pop culture. 

I stood in line to see Star Wars. More than once. 

By the time the prequels began to be churned out, some of the specialness of those first three bits of magic was being drained away. These films were my son's trilogy. He was taken out of school early to see The Revenge of the Sith. This was a new century and a new machine was cranking these stories out from a galaxy not so far away. 

It would be another ten years before The Force was Awakened. Two more features followed in quick succession and voila, the third trilogy was completed. By March of 2020, you could purchase the whole megillah on DVD and watch all nine with just a break now and then to cool off the machine and take a potty break. 

Around this time the owner of all this intellectual property began to spin off additional splinters of story through a magic portal that allowed many of us to binge stories from a long time ago that were fresh and new. 

Not everyone showed up at this new galactic trough. My wife and I, from a generation that was much more prepared to wait chose to let our son keep us apprised of any new developments out there. The kids at my school started showing up with Baby Yoda backpacks and Mandalorian water bottles. 

I could remember when Yoda was an old Jedi, not a baby. My "you kids get outta my yard" button was pushed and the wonder that I felt all those years ago was harder to access. 

Not impossible. Just a little more difficult. 

What did it take to bring it back? Those fifteen minutes of Empire, when Han tells Leia, "You like me because I'm a scoundrel. There aren't enough scoundrels in your life." Suddenly, there I was, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."

After Effects

 Okay. 

I've had enough.

Turn them off. 

Turn them all off.

All the cameras. All the microphones. Stop recording these imbeciles for playback later. Are we really expecting that the level of discourse will suddenly shift and the rumored moral center will return? 

Let's start with America's Mayor, or at least that's how he used to be known. Rudy Guiliani recently announced that Saturday Night Live “got intimidated of saying anything that might be suggestively racist,” which, he says, is racist “in itself.”

Get it? Okay, blah blah blah First Ameendment he can say whatever he wants to. But do we have to listen? Stick microphones in front of him? 

Care?

Then there's the ASPCA's poster person for all the wrong reasons, Kristi Noem. After spending a week defending the release of her upcoming memoir, titled with supreme irony No Going Back, she landed on a number of different chat shows to explain why she is still in any way relevant. When asked about her account of meeting North Korea's Kim Jong Un, she said that she had been made aware that there were several edits being made for inaccuracies but stopped short of saying that as senator or governor of South Dakota that she had never met with the Beloved Leader of a communist country. Then when she was asked about the remarks she made at the end of the book about coming after Joe Biden's dog Commander. "Say hello to Cricket," she enthused in her book referring to the fourteen month old dog she shot and killed. Rather than back off the canine American tumult she had created, she doubled down: “Joe Biden’s dog has attacked twenty-four Secret Service people. So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog,” Noem told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “That’s the question that the President should be held accountable to.”

The question I have for CBS News and every other media outlet: Can we just stick a metaphorical fork in this one? She's done.