The Mouths Of Babes

Janice is a kindergartener. She came to my room on Thursday morning, along with the rest of her class. I am used to Janice being a little chatty. My approach for her is similar to the one I take with many of my younger students: I wait her out. Shushing her only leads to her becoming more insistent about getting whatever is on her mind off of her mind and out of her mouth. That's what I did on Thursday. I kind of wish that I would have found a way to keep her quiet.
"Mister Caven," Janice announced, "you have a fat stomach."
I remembered my position and my poise. I said nothing.
"And you're bald," she continued.
This resulted in the standard mix of giggles from her classmates and shocked gasps from those who had yet to fall prey to the Dark Side. After this, it took me a few more minutes to bring the group back around to the topic of numbers bigger than eleven and less than thirty. There wasn't a lot in those digits that could compete with Janice. Still, I pressed on.
What Janice didn't know is that she hurt my feelings. I know that is what she meant to do, but I didn't want to give her the satisfaction. I was ignoring her, a strategy that I often prescribe to children who come to me with complaints of bullies teasing them. Still, somewhere down deep inside, the round kid that was teased on playgrounds decades ago winced. I wanted to tell Janice that I had lost more than twenty pounds over the past year, and I was working on my weight not just for appearances but for my health. As for the baldness, I suppose the fact that I had shaved my head just the week before was my own fault, but there was a simple matter of genetics and age that provided that outcome. I wanted to defend myself.
I didn't. I waited until the rest of the class, and Janice, were ready to get the directions for the day's lesson. Just before I was going to set the kids loose on their computers, Janice raised her hand. "Mister Caven," this was a squeak compared to the sneer I had been hearing just a few minutes ago, "I had an accident." She had wet herself, and though a thousand other thoughts raced through my head, I scribbled a quick note and handed it to her, calling ahead to let the office know that she was coming and would need a change. Even mean little girls have accidents sometime.

Tess

It makes sense that I would remember her name. It makes sense that I am a teacher now. At the time, she wasn't a teacher. Not yet. She was still a student teacher and I was a sixth grade student. It makes sense that I remember Tess and not Miss Straw because that was the way my teacher Miss Leonard, or Kitty as she seemed to want us to refer to her, ran her classroom. We were all on a first name basis. For the record, I don't believe I ever referred to Miss Leonard as Kitty.
But I did call Tess by her first name. She was tall and fair, with strawberry blonde hair. She was probably my first real crush. Tess read stories to me. Well, she read stories to our entire class, but as I sat there in my desk, enraptured, I felt as if they were just for me. She recommended books to me that she felt would be both of interest and at my accelerated reading level. She read my writing and praised it effusively. Why wouldn't I be in love with this woman? At the bottom of the autobiographical sketch I wrote at her assignment, she wrote "Cleaver, Cleaver, Cleaver!" At the time I didn't imagine that she was comparing me in some way to a meat hacking device or connecting me in some way to Ward and June and their sons Wally and Theodore. I recognized immediately the praise she was sending me: Clever, Clever, Clever!
Again: Why wouldn't I be in love with this woman?
It was later in the year when I got the bad news. Usually on Fridays we had time to do crafts, or projects that didn't fit into the otherwise loosey-goosey curriculum in Miss Leonard's room. I used this time to draw and, on occasion, play chess. It was during one of these rather quick matches against a severely over-matched classmate that Tess stopped by to watch me in action.
"Oh Dave," she enthused, "you play chess!" Most of what came out of Tess' mouth came with an exclamation point.
I mumbled something in reply, trying to appear deep in thought, but thoroughly distracted by her presence.
"Henry plays chess." What? No exclamation point? Full stop.
I don't remember asking, but I'm sure the look on my face read, "Henry?"
"Oh, he's my fiance!" Back to the exclamations. "He's in the seminary."
Again, no response from me as the pieces sat idle on the board. Seminary? She was going to marry a priest?
"I'll have to bring him by some Friday, and the two of you can meet!"
What a great idea!
"Maybe you two could play!"
Great! I can't wait.
I spent the next two weeks imagining how this encounter would go. Could I beat this religious nut so soundly that Tess could only see me as the next logical alternative? Could I be that cleaver?
When the day finally arrived, Henry showed up looking like John Denver with an afro. There was just a hint of red in his hair, which made the two of them look like Up With People castoffs. "Dave, this is Henry!"
I shook his hand and tried to look as clever as I was sure that I had been advertised. "I hear you play chess," were the first words Henry spoke to me.
Suddenly I was completely aware of just how young I was and how small. We went to the carpeted area where I often read and set a chess board up on the floor. We sat cross-legged across from one another, with Tess looking on from between us, leaning slightly toward Henry.
I don't remember the particulars of the game. I don't remember if anyone else in the class watched. Or cared. I know that I was beaten rather efficiently, but I could tell that I wasn't getting Henry's A game. When it was over, Henry shook my hand again, "Good game."
I mumbled something, completely distracted by the proximity of the two of them. Grown-ups. Ready to spend their lives together being wholesome and probably clever in their own right.
"I told you he was great!" sparkled Tess. I don't know if she was referring to me or Henry. I just know I was having my heart broken solidly for the first time.
When I think about Tess now, I don't think about the heartbreak. I think about all the encouragement she gave me, and how I wouldn't be a teacher if it weren't for her. But when I think about heartbreak, I think about Tess.

Antisocial Media

I am an old fogey. I don't have a Facebook page. I'm not ready for Reddit. Nothing about Pintrest piques my interest. The chatter of Twitter makes me tired. And, as of this past week, I have learned more about Instagram than I care to forget. I don't have thoughts that are easily condensed into a hundred and forty characters. That's Haiku. I don't tend to take a lot of photos of myself or the pavement in front of my house. The content I feel compelled to add to the ever-expanding pile that is Al Gore's Internet are the words you are reading here before you.
Most of you are here by my invitation. As a result, I tend to filter myself to that audience. I also understand that there are those who stumble across my rants and musings on their way to finding articles about Douglas Leedy's electronic masterpiece, and for that I apologize. Such is the nature of words and discourse: all the really good ideas have already been used, and if you're very clever you can repackage them in such a way that they seem like yours. I'm looking at you, J.J. Abrams.
I'm also looking at myself: the guy who is so out of touch that he had to find out if Instagram had any age restrictions when he heard that there was a series of slanderous messages being sent around a group of fourth graders. As it turns out, this small cadre of younger than thirteen-year-olds were caught up in a web of ugly intrigue that had all manner of name calling and lewd suggestion, all of which went without the notice of anybody's parents. It took a sharp-eared coach with her ears out to catch all the drama being fomented in and around the jump rope area. Eventually, there were a lot of tears and a lot of finger-pointing. What made the situation worse was that Instagram by its nature is essentially anonymous. You never know who you might be inviting in to your tablet or phone and what vileness they might spew. Unless you took the time to talk to your kids about what they were doing with all that technology they lug around.
I got to have some of those conversations with a number of kids that day, and then their parents. I hope we all learned something. I hope I never have to go on Instagram again. Now I have to educate myself on Rumr. Gosh, how I miss the olden days of writing on the bathroom wall. I'm old.

Accidents Will Happen

Aside from the requisite Mythbusters episode, I wonder how many times the ability to find a needle in a haystack has proved to be worthwhile. A literal needle in a literal haystack sounds like a practical joke, or perhaps some arcane method of birth control intended to keep farmer's daughters from taking that literal roll in the hay. In which case, it seems that dumping a few more needles into the mix would make it more useful, but therefore making the odds of finding said needles easier.
It's a figure of speech, but it was what I was thinking as I saw a co-worker pull up to work with a flat tire. He had discovered a nail in the rear driver's side. and the air had all but left him and he was riding on the rim. Aside from the obvious next steps of finding a place to change out the impacted wheel, I started to be curious about just how that nail found its way into that tire. Like porcupines and balloons, these two items are natural enemies, but their interaction would seem to be necessarily limited. Once upon a time I could have imagined a world that was still being built, with cities full of ongoing construction. Nails would be pervasive, even more than the hammers that pounded them. Now? Those nails have been knocked into place, where they've been for ages, and many of them have even been replaced or enhanced by stronger stuff: rivets, concrete, Velcro. How did that lone offending fastener find its way deep into the tread of this one particular tire? The odds of this occurrence in 2014 seems awfully slight.
Unless, like those needles in that family planning haystack, they were put there with malice aforethought. My son plays enough driving games on his Xbox that I have vicariously encountered spike strips, but I'm reasonably sure that my colleague was not attempting to outrun a highway patrol pursuit, and that kind of damage is more than one note. Instead, I tried to imagine some young hoodlum creeping by curbside, and inserting that lone nail into that one tire. That made about as much sense, and wasn't nearly as exciting as imaging my fellow teacher in an episode from Grand Theft Auto VI: Elementary School Rampage.
It didn't make sense. That's what makes it an accident. That's probably why they don't tend to store hardware directly adjacent to freeways and also why quilting circles weren't held in barns.

Job Security

In another life, I installed office furniture. It was modular, mostly from AllSteel, a product of Aurora, Illinois. On my first day of work, I was given a box knife and told that I needed to take all the file cabinets, chairs and desk tops from their cartons and stage them strategically about the IBM office complex where we had been deployed, like the Army Corps of Engineers, to construct a new hive for the busy bees that would eventually inhabit the cubicles we were busily building. Only I didn't do much building. Instead, I spent my day dealing with corrugated cardboard, shrink wrap, and dozens of plastic bags that held the treasure of furniture inside.
I never made it more than a few steps inside the building. Most of my time was spent unloading the truck, unboxing the raw materials, and then cutting up the empties and putting order to the chaos that I had made. In one box, I stuffed all the plastic. In another, I stacked the wooden slats that came at the bottom of every two or three drawer filing cabinet. There were a lot of those. As for the rest, I chopped up as much as I could to consolidate the mass of cardboard that had once surrounded all the furniture that was now becoming an office. I was pleased with the way the volume of the truck shrank as I busied myself about my work. This caught the attention of one of the leads on the job, and he anointed me "King of Trash." I found this appellation friendly enough, and it didn't occur to me that as the new guy, I would be master of that particular domain for some time to come.
What I did discover, was that there was a perk to being the monarch of rubbish. At the end of the day, if I drove the truck now laden with recyclable material, over to the scrap yard just a few blocks from our warehouse, I was paid a few extra dollars for my trouble. Not exactly a king's wages, but it allowed me to get extra pepperoni when I needed it.
Eventually, a new guy joined the crew, and I had to relinquish my title along with the box knife of which I had become so fond. But every now and then, I would volunteer for waste removal, just to keep my honor intact. And that extra three dollars in my pocket.

Sliding Into Home

Baseball season is starting soon. Just a few days away now. I'm ready. The distraction of hockey and basketball have yet to take hold in my head, and even the bracket that I submitted for the NCAA tournament wasn't clever enough to make me a billion dollars, so now I wait for the next six months of professional sports to come blowing in like a lion, or at least a lamb with a really bad attitude. To this end, shortly after football season ended, my Denver Broncos windshirt went back into storage, and I brought out the Chicago Cubs version.
The fan base for the Oakland Athletics is generally more relaxed about their affiliations than that of the Oakland Raiders. I can expect to get away with little or no reaction from the townsfolk for my Cubbies gear, especially since it doesn't show up as a threat the way anything orange and black with the letters S and F on it does. The National League rival Giants across the bay tend to cause the biggest ruckus in this neighborhood, much in the same way that Raider fans tend to see Forty-Niner supporters as Chardonnay sippers who don't appreciate the blue collar ethic of their more urban counterparts. Chicago Cubs fans? They're just lost.
That's how I felt until last week, riding my bike home from school, when a car coming the opposite direction from me stopped. "Cubs?" shouted the driver, "They're never going to be anything! They never have been!" Or words to that effect, with a few choice expletives that flavored the whole thing. Then, just before he stomped on the gas and sped off, he added, "Go A's!"
I wanted to explain to him my history with the Cubs, and if I had an Oakland A's jacket, I would probably wear it. I've got T-shirts and an official fitted cap in green and gold. It's just that the team from the North Side of Chicago has a lot of history for me. I expect that someday, my son will tell his kids about how his father used to carry him in his little baby bucket to the upper deck of the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. How he bought his dad tickets for Father's Day. Stories that will make it hard for him to imagine wearing any other team's colors.
I wanted to explain this to the guy who is obviously more ready than I am for baseball to start. Go A's. Go Cubs.

Buried In The Past

Some secrets should stay secrets. Some things that have been hidden should never see th light of day. Some things are better left buried. Folks in New Mexico seem to agree. Environmental regulators from the Land of Enchantment are blocking two companies from digging up an Alamogordo landfill in search of a rumored cache of what some consider the worst Atari video game of all time: E.T. Officials say an approved waste excavation plan, or WEP, is needed before any dig can begin.
Who wants to find the worst video game ever made? Why, the makers of video games, of course. Fuel Entertainment and LightBox Interactive recently announced plans to search the landfill for the game that proved a financial drain for Atari. The companies plan to record the dig for a documentary to be released by Microsoft for the Xbox One console. Filmmakers have even offered fans the chance to enter a giveaway of anything that might be unearthed. If this all sounds a little like video schadenfreude, you're probably not the only one. There was a time when Atari and Steven Spielberg ruled the world. It was a mythical time when women wore shoulder pads and men wore sunglasses at night. It was a different world. Expectations were different. There were people back then who played Dungeons and Dragons without irony. I know because I was one of them. The D&D players, not the sunglasses or shoulder pads. I was also the proud owner of an Atari 2600 console.I spent many hours in my parents' basement honing my Missile Command and Space Invader skills. These were elemental games that were rooted not in story, but in survival. E.T. was not that. It was a journey, a voyage. And it was nearly incomprehensible in eight bits, but it had a good beat and it was easy to dance to. It was a way to wile away the hours until something better came along. Because that's really what the 1980's were all about.
Now these retro-nerds want to dig up that somewhat mournful part of my youth? Go ahead, but you'd be better off trying to clear all the screens on Breakout.