Featured Creature

My wife's book club was discussing "Frankenstein." For those of you unfamiliar with the novel, I will give you a moment to catch up. Everyone prepared? Good. Let's begin: Mary Shelly subtitled her story of a mad genius who constructs his own man from pieces of cadaver "The Modern Prometheus." You all remember, from our reading, who Prometheus was. Not the confounding Alien prequel from Ridley Scott, but the Greek mythology dude who made a man out of clay. Does that sound familiar? There are lots of stories about men made out of clay, including Gumby. What makes this one different?
Maybe it's because I read Mary Shelly's book when I was eleven years old, after I had fallen under the spell of Boris Karloff's monster some years earlier. It was a deep read, and one that confounded me at times. Having read "The Andromeda Strain" the summer before, I was prepared for literature that was, upon further reflection, out of my depth. As it turns out, it was totally worth it. I got to see the Monster as something other than a shambling mass of scars and ill-fitting black suit. As much as I continue to revere Karloff's creation, this was a much more profound experience. Where did they get that flat head and bolts in the side of his neck stuff? Sure, he was frightening, but not nearly as well-spoken as the creature from the novel: "All men hate the wretched; how then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, they creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us." Perhaps a little more eloquent than "We belong dead."
It was also that summer that I stumbled on the Classics Illustrated version. It kept most of my Universal horror film vision intact, but inserted more of the globe-trotting bookworm interpretation of the creature that I had become familiar with. This was the version that I turned to in my mind when I heard of my wife's book club meeting. That's why I don't get invited to these things very often.

Catch Me If You Can

I think I get why my father got all misty as he watched the end of "Field of Dreams" with me. Sure, there was the overt connection between father and son. We certainly had baseball in common, at least from the spectator side of things. It was the way I learned about sports from my father. I watched them with him. We didn't play together that much. He was busy with work and so on. I didn't question it. When my brothers and I played softball in the meadow at our cabin, it was my mother who came down to pitch. My father was late driving up from town, and by the time we had dinner and attended to whatever wilderness survival chores we had to do, it was dark. Like Wrigley Field, there were no lights in the meadow.
I remember standing out in the street, tossing a ball back and forth with my little brother. There was a lot of "whoops, sorry" as we threw near our intended target, or dropped an easy one off the heel of our glove. The guy from across the street, who had three sons of his own, took it upon himself to come out and give my brother and I a few pointers. We listened intently and did the best we could with the coaching we got, and when somebody else's dad went back inside, we returned to our less-than-stellar technique. "Whoops, sorry."
When my son turned six, I took it upon myself to take him out in the front yard and have a game of catch with him. We were getting ready for tee-ball, and I wanted him to feel comfortable when the ball came to him. "How many more are we going to do?" He asked me. "About nine million more," I replied. And so we tested each other's limits. How long should a game of catch be?
Ten years later, I found myself in a meadow far away from the one in which I frolicked as a kid. My son had brought his favorite object to hurl: a Frisbee. We tossed the disc back and forth for half an hour. It was very reminiscent of the baseball toss I had shared with my younger brother. "Whoops, sorry." There were a few nice catches, and most of the time we came within walking distance of putting the disc near one another. But mostly we were having a catch. It felt good. Even if we still have a couple million left.

Testing The Limits

It's called the "Scholastic Aptitude Test." Prospective college students across the land are lining up, IDs and number two pencils in hand, to take this assessment in hopes of impressing someone with their score. Their scholastic aptitude score. My son sat in a room for four hours this past weekend, packed in with a great many of his contemporaries, filling in those little bubbles as a measure of all he knows.
Of course, this isn't any sort of absolute measure. It's a yardstick that has been in place since before his father sat in a similar room and filled in a similar group of bubbles. The happy news is that filling in bubbles on standardized tests is something at which my son excels. Even as his grades had drifted south of C, he has continued to surprise and defy expectations in this particular arena. Good for him. I am a tad chagrined at the notion of a test that is supposed to measure one's scholastic aptitude. Isn't that all of them? He's been taking tests of his scholastic aptitude for more than a decade now, and he continues to show up as a pretty bright kid.
And yet, he still has to prove it. Over and over again. Exam after quiz after analysis. Essay after fill in the blank after multiple choice. He's cleared those hurdles, often with plenty of room to spare. Now he's hit the big time: college board admission tests. If he scores 2400, if he gets all the questions right, will he be college material? If he already knows all that stuff, does he really need to go to college? Couldn't he just transcend all that mess and move on into a comfortable adulthood where tests become a thing of the past?
When I found out that, to become a teacher, I would have to take a pair of tests, I almost gave up right then and there. I was becoming a teacher so that I could give people tests, not to have them administered to me. This was the cosmic joke I learned: We're never done taking tests of one sort or another. What my son did this past Saturday just opened the floodgates on a whole slew of additional opportunities to pick the correct response. Good luck to him. Good luck to us all.

Rated PG Part II

"Did you catch the robbers, Mister Caven?" Armando was walking out of school with his mother at the end of a very long day.
"I think we took care of it," I told him with a grin of confidence. Inside I wasn't entirely sure.
The day had begun with a letter in my box informing me that one of our second grade classrooms had been broken into, and a great many items had been taken: baby wipes, oatmeal, toys, a great big bag of candy. This doubled up on the fifth grade room upstairs that had also had things stolen from it, specifically a great assortment of rubber band bracelets that the class had been making and selling as a fundraiser. It probably should have been an easy enough leap to connect the two incidents, but we didn't right away.
Why not? Because schools are supposed to be safe places. When I went down to talk with the teacher and students of the second grade class, they all looked so terribly sad, and after a few moments of relating the discovery of the ransacking of their room, the talk quickly turned to all the different times these kids and their parents had been victims of crime. Break-ins, hold-ups, car theft, all of these were things that happened to them out in the mean streets of Oakland. It wasn't supposed to happen here inside their safe haven: school. When I left, I assured them that their principal and I would get to the bottom of this, and we would set things right. I had no idea how we would do this, but I wanted to give them something on which to pin their seven-year-old hopes.
Around lunch time, we got a break in the case: A fourth grader had been spotted with a bag full of rubber band bracelets. Upon preliminary questioning by our principal, he said that his sister had given them to him. "Where did your sister get them?" That's when the story started to twist and bend. It's also about the time I showed up and played my "good cop" card: "You're already in trouble, so you might as well tell us the whole truth. At least that way you can't get into more trouble for lying." It took a few more minutes for this seed to take root.
Eventually, he spilled the whole story. His sister and his godbrother ahd been walking home the night before, and they stopped by the school, at his sister's suggestion to see "if there were any rooms left open." They found two, and the three of them filled their backpacks with what they could carry and slipped out the side door. "Does your mother know you took all these things?"
As it turns out, the answer was yes, and when our principal walked the boys home at the end of the day, she never got to speak to the mother. Some of the items were returned, but the food and the juice boxes and one of the containers of baby wipes had already been consumed by the family. In this household with two single mothers and children ranging in age from one to fourteen, the kids had been providing for their families. In the way that made sense to them.
I heard about the home visit, and my principal and I wondered what sort of impact we might have on the situation. We had found the thieves, we had recovered some of the stolen goods, but we didn't feel heroic. When I walked out of the office and saw Armando leaving the after school program, walking out into the darkening streets of his neighborhood, I wanted to give him some good news. I think we took care of it. As much as we could.

Bye Week

It's been such a long time
I think I should be goin', yeah
And time doesn't wait for me,
 it keeps on rollin' - "Long Time" by Tom Scholz
It seems like just a few weeks ago that football season started. All was fresh and new, the school year had just started. My wife, as is her custom, bid me farewell and went off to join her friends at the Gatsby Picnic. This yearly ritual clearly defines the line between those who wear the period-correct clothing of a bygone era and those who prefer their period-correct clothing to have numbers on them.
And so it went, for four and a half months. Weekends, Monday nights, and the occasional Thursday evening were consumed with the passion and fury generally reserved for more concrete pursuits. Along the way, my wife kept tabs on me, participating as a good and faithful sport, including managing her own fantasy football team, The Dancing Cavaliers, in our league. Her knowledge of the inner workings of professional football have grown over the years, but have yet to outweigh her interest in things Art Deco and art in general. She knows who Peyton Manning is, and she understands when things, as they did just three times this past season, don't go the Broncos' way. Her husband becomes gloomy and can be difficult to approach for a day or two. Scoring more points than any offense in the history of the NFL, kicking the longest field goal, and throwing the most touchdown passes ever were nice trophies to keep me involved while I waited for the inevitable: a return trip to the Super Bowl.
Last week, for the AFC Championship, my wife put on her orange socks and her Broncos' sweatshirt. She sat on the couch and watched with me. The whole game. The one that sent us to the Super Bowl. She took a very active role in the proceedings, pronouncing herself the "First Down Nazi," shouting at the TV, "No first down for you!" as Tom Brady and the Patriots made their late attempt to try and wrest the inevitable victory from the jaws of defeat. Hungry, hungry defeat. We had such a fun time that I almost felt bad about the last time I attended an Art Deco affair, and felt that I couldn't wait for it to be over.
Because it isn't over yet. We're getting together again this Sunday. There's a little matter of the Lombardi trophy to settle. And then we can go back to talking to each other about laundry and child rearing and fixing the furnace. Takin' my time, just movin' along.

Rated PG

Do you know what phrase I never hear? "Justin Bieber's parents." Instead of simply hearing about how the Bieb has just been caught egging his neighbor's house, wouldn't it be refreshing to hear that someone would step in and give this young miscreant the trouble he deserves? "Justin Bieber's parents are very disappointed in him." I would guess this goes double for the most recent drunk driving arrest in Florida. According to police officers on the scene, after his arrest, Bieber cursed out the arresting officer then admitted to having beer, pot and prescription drugs in his system. Drag racing stoned is no way to go through life, son.
He's nineteen years old. His "posse" was driving SUVs behind the drag race in order to block traffic. It's good for a boy to have people around him he can trust. People who will take the fall for you when you're carrying a little extra weed into a foreign country. Guys who would lay down their lives for you, or at least carry you on a tour of the Great Wall of China. "Justin, that was very immature of you."
How and/or why could this possibly matter? This Canadian popstar manchild will eventually have little or no impact on the planet or its eventual fate. Why should I care? Because I'm a parent. Justin's mother, Patti Mallette, had this to say: "He knows what I disagree with and he knows all the things that I'm really proud of him for, too. I mean, people don't talk about all the great things he does every day." For the record, things for which she is proud of her son: meeting with Make-a-Wish kids, going to sick kids' hospitals, visiting with them and taking his time, giving back to charities. We assume the not-so-proud list includes the whole DUI thing and incidents like urinating in a janitor's mop bucket in the kitchen of a New York night club. When asked what the coolest thing about being Justin's mother is, she replied: "I think it is being able to use this platform for good. I get to write a book and tell my story and bring hope to all kinds of teenagers that really need it," said the author of Nowhere But Up. In that 2012 memoir, Mallette recalls her earliest memories, which center around an alcoholic and abusive father, who left the family when she was two years old. It also describes how fourteen years old, she began experimenting with drugs, including alcohol, marijuana and LSD. She also started shoplifting. When she vandalized school property by starting a fire in a bathroom, she was suspended from school. She was seventeen when she got pregnant with a bouncing baby Bieber. The boy took his father's name. This may be why we never hear about Justin Bieber's parents. It's kind of redundant.

Over And Under

It is one of life's eternal questions. It's not like whether or not you prefer to squeeze the toothpaste from the middle of the tube or carefully roll it up from the bottom. There is a rule for that. It is printed for all to see on the package. "For best results," it tells us, "squeeze from the bottom of the tube." It is prescriptive advice. You could choose to crush it from the middle and still get about half the expected result, but eventually you would be left with a great blob of paste at the bottom of the tube that needed coaxing back to the top. There are consequences for your actions. There is a lesson to be learned.
The same cannot be said of how you choose to put the toilet paper on the spindle. There are two options: In one vision of the world, the paper comes over the top and cascades, not unlike a two-ply waterfall, toward you. In the second, the paper is much more discretely dispensed from below, with the potential of that leading edge a mystery until it comes pouring out from below. It seems like a chance operation, depending on a number of different protocols, not the least of which is: are the lights on or off?
If you trust in Al Gore's Internet, the declination of your toilet tissue can tell us a lot about the aspects or defects in your personality, depending on which site you happen to land. "Overs" are control freaks. Or optimists. "Unders" are team-oriented players who are more carefree and relaxed. If, as I mentioned, you are subject to the whims of those who research such things. I suppose that I am somewhat bemused and happy to think that I live in a world where such things are researchable.
Even if I live in a home with a bunch of right-brained middle of the tube squeezers, I can still look forward to mixing things up a little when it comes to the way we do things. Tonight, forks on the right hand side of the plate.