The One That Got Away

I have made a little joke with friends from time to time about how I wanted to be remembered. Mostly regarding how it should not be a mystery about how I passed: "It must have been all the times he ate a Big Mac in one bite," or "After that much Coca-Cola, your kidneys would leap out of your body too." He was a Coke drinker and a Big Mac masher. I'm not sure if that would fit on a headstone, if I have one. It would serve me right if whatever monument ends up at my last mile marker it would read, "He stomped on the Terra."
Aloha, Dave.
Over the weekend, I read this: "After battling the disease of Lewy Body Dementia, Bill Buckner passed away early the morning of May 27th surrounded by his family. Bill fought with courage and grit as he did all things in life. Our hearts are broken but we are at peace knowing he is in the arms of his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." I'm not sure I would garner that last bit about the arms of his Lord and Savior, and I hope I can avoid dementia of any sort. At least the kind that could kill me. 
But if you've been alive as long as I have, or longer, once you read the name "Billy Buckner," you probably thought, "didn't he play baseball?"
Yes he did. 
And you might even remember that he played for the Red Sox.
And if you made it that far on the memory train, you probably got to the part where, in the 1986 World Series, Bill let the potential first championship for the still-cursed team from Boston slip through his fingers. Or between his legs. His error allowed the Mets to score the winning run, and go on a couple of nights later to win game seven, keeping the Red Sox on the Bambino list for another eighteen years. That was the accomplishment that was splashed all over Al Gore's Internet. Not his twenty-one years in the major leagues. Not his lifetime .289 batting average. 
Nope. 
The powers that be posted video of the one that got away.
For the record, Bill Buckner deserves a spot in the Hall of Fame, and he did in fact stomp on the Terra. He will be missed. 
Which is why I'm pretty sure I need to find that picture of me with a mouthful of McDonald's. 

Slings And Arrows

Do you remember when Nancy Reagan bubbled over about her "tiny little gun?" Do you remember Nancy Reagan? There was once an American President named Ronald Reagan, and he was married (for the second time) to a lady named Nancy. To show her firmly held conviction regarding the Second Amendment to our Constitution, she gave a folksy little interview about how Ronnie (the aforementioned President) gave her a "tiny little gun" to protect herself when she was left alone in their Pacific Palisades home.
This was the anecdote that came abruptly to my mind when I read about how our current "president's" golf weekend in Japan was interrupted by the announcement that North Korea had fired missiles in what his underlings described as breaking the U.N. restrictions on such ballistic missiles. Which wasn't how Michael Bolton's boss saw it: "North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me. I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me, & also smiled when he called Swampman Joe Biden a low IQ individual, & worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?"
Perhaps it's our "president" sending us a signal: As a guest in neighboring Japan, the American "President" chose to brush off what most of the rest of the world felt was some kind of provocation as a way to connect with the man he used to call "Rocketman" on their shared disrespect of the former Vice President of the United States. Never mind that those missiles might be used on targets across the Sea of Japan, Kim Jong Un was capping on the "president's" potential rival in the 2020 election. The election in the United States. Far away from the Sea of Japan. And all those potential targets in Japan. Japan's new Emperor Abe viewed those missile tests with "great regret."
Swampman. Low IQ. Totally worth it.

Situation: Normal

You may have heard my stifled scream on Sunday morning, and for that I apologize. No need to panic, as it turns out. Order has been restored in the most benign way possible: turn off the machine, restart and try again. All is well again.
What was the problem?
No Google.
I know, right?
Being the ever resourceful tech genius that I am, I found a tired icon on my laptop's desktop for Microsoft Edge. Cautiously, I opened it to see if there was still an Internet. Feeling reassured about that experiment, I was still worried that some sort of Thanos Snap might have disintegrated half the web browsers in the universe. Stopping first to check my email, and finding it visible through what used to be Explorer, I proceeded to my next most logical alternative. Restart.
I held my breath for a moment or two as I waited for my computer to shake off the cobwebs and bring me back to what I hoped was the land of all that is good and Googly. I reflected briefly on the conversation I had with the daughter of a friend of ours. She wondered aloud why the home assistant was called "Google" instead of something more clever and lyrical like Siri or Alexa. I reminded her that by keeping the name branded, it allowed us all to speak the company's name several hundred more times each day and thus creating neural pathways that would be most certainly hardwired. This sent another wave of panic through me: What if our home assistant had failed as well? Would I have to turn on lights and appliances myself? Touching buttons and switches has become so very antiquated. Hurry up and boot, computer.
As I typed in my user name and password, I continued to hope for the best as my reflection continued. There was a time not long ago when I used to teach my students to use search engines as if it were some sort of level playing field, before google became a verb. Before Google got us all using docs and Chromebooks and forgetting a world of Bing and Ask Jeeves and DuckDuckGo. A time that included Netscape and Firefox. But this was all crazy fear talking. There would be Google again. There had to be.
The words you are currently reading are brought to you by the friendly faceless monolith with the cute doodles. Even before I started making my incessant entries into this cyber-salon, Google had gobbled this little corner of Al Gore's Internet. Like they have so many other avenues and on-ramps on the information superhighway. So I want to thank you all for hanging on while I sorted this all out, and hopefully something that terrifying will never happen again.
Whew.

Magnificent Obsession

She's out there, waiting. I know this time of year all too well. When my thoughts begin to turn to my avocations, my obsessions. For years now - how many has it been? Has she always been there? There must have been a time when she wasn't that angry itch, waiting for me to scratch. The seasons change and the pages of the calendar fall to the floor, but no matter how things change, she's still there to wrestle with. To mock me. To make every attempt at controlling her a laughable charade.
Her? She? What? My white whale. My albatross.
I'm talking about our front gate. No other portion of our house or yard has required so much of my attention and robbed me of so many weekends. Sagging, sticking, slanting, it's never been quite right. When we first rebuilt the front fence, the gate was one long eight foot section that opened in one wide swing. For a month or two, until the weight began to strain the hinges and the corner scraped as it needed to be dragged over the grass to force it to stay open far enough to drive the car up the driveway. For a while, there was a cable running from the post to the end to limit the droop. Every departure and each return served as a reminder of the faulty engineering I had wrought.
There was that cathartic moment when I took a circular saw to the center of it and slapped some hinges on the opposite side. Half the weight, half the problem. Which was about the time we got a dog who was as concerned as I was with the gap between the two sides. Finding a viable latch that could withstand her insistent nudging and prodding brought me a dozen years of searching hardware stores for just the right latch. It was at some point during this era that a neighbor dropped by and left me with two eight inch metal plates he had drilled especially to help me keep the lower portion of the gate from being shoved so as to subvert the closure system. And that worked for a while.
Weather and age have proved to be our collective undoing, as all that fitting and making things just so only last as long as warping and the posts holding the hinges in place stay put where they were before and after the rains came. Friends who come to our house are timid about driving inside the compound for fear of losing their side view mirrors. I could do nothing to alleviate those fears except to stand outside holding the gate back and guiding them as they ease backward out into the street, free from the worry of damage caused by that gate. Her. She. The portal to the rest of the world.
This weekend, she got some new springs. It's a new direction, and I hope that their addition will settle my mind once again as I pursue any other imaginable concern. Stamp collecting. Gardening. Ceramics. Anything that might bring me a moment's peace. Anything that might take my mind off of her.

My Old Desk

This desk isn't going to clean itself.
Nor is this room.
As the end of official business comes crashing in on top of us, teachers like myself are beginning to look at the piles they have generated over the previous nine months and begin to assess the damage. What, amidst the tidal wave of paper that has littered my main work surface for the past year will follow me into the next? Is that the note I was going to send home with Jane after Christmas break? There is most of a ream of gold paper sitting on the right hand side, ready to turn into Jaguar Cards if any teacher comes to ask.
But they haven't. And consequently one of the paperweights that adorn my desk is the weight of the paper I have not used. And yet I have worked around this and other obstacles for weeks and weeks. Don't get me wrong, I can still access my keyboard and make out my screen. Even if it means that I have to shove things to the left and the right. That broken pair of headphones that only works on one side is my souvenir for rescuing it from students who insisted it was broken. Not completely, I assured them, and have proceeded to use that one tiny speaker to reference the sound that might otherwise have come from any other device I might have connected.
Just beyond that is the can of spray sunscreen that has come in handy less and less as the rains have continued to come through this very wet spring. It is there in case I need it, or as is probably the case, just in case I decide to take it home for those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer.
At the bottom of one of the stacks is a laminated sign reminding those who might intrude that testing is taking place, with the reminder at the bottom, "Do Your Best!" For the third, fourth and fifth graders here as well as their teachers, that time has passed. Doing our collective best is now pretty much optional, since the actual teaching has slowed to a virtual halt. We have opportunities to make common sense connections, like reminders that balls don't tend to leave the yard over fifteen foot high fences "on accident."
And there are a number of additional technology scraps that need to find their way to electronic waste or a cabinet where I will find them at the beginning of next year when I will take them out and set them on my desk with the intent of dealing with them. Sometime next year.

If...Then...

How are you gonna keep the kids down on the farm after they've seen Paris? The same can be said for extra recess. It is the closing of the school year, and teachers have all but surrendered to the inevitable tide of pending report cards and twitchy children who have become allergic to the seats we have all worked so hard to keep them in for the past nine months. It is a time of field trips and art projects and cleaning out desks. That last one is an endeavor that I can remember as a somewhat endless task when I was in elementary school. Papers seemed to regenerate withing the dark recesses and corners of that seemingly finite space. And there's that package of erasers I brought in the second week of school, shoved way in the back.
There is some mild leverage left with fifth graders. We have announced to the students and their families that any fifth grader caught in any chicanery or hijinks would be subject to losing their spot on the stage come promotion time. Or worse still, they wouldn't be allowed to line up for the barbecue the day before. The pride of walking across a stage to receive a rolled-up piece of paper may not be as stirring as the thought of all those hamburgers and hot dogs. Leaving us with one final day to negotiate.
Anecdotal memory: As a senior in high school, our marching band went on a trip to Mexico. It just so happened that this tour began a couple days after graduation. We were told by our band director that if there was any mischief or tomfoolery that our diplomas would be rescinded. At this time, I was cruising on the edge of being a bad boy, at least as far as that description can be applied to a high school band member, and I wondered just how serious this threat was. Having been removed as Pep Band President by this same band director, I leaned in the direction of believing it was sincere. What followed was a rather chaste and polite trip to Mexico City and Acapulco with my girlfriend even though our relationship had proceeded somewhere south of the chaste and polite border back home. Meanwhile, we were witness to all manner of misbehavior by the "good kids": underage drinking, sex, curfew violations, curfew violations with staff. All the while, I maintained composure. I wanted to keep my diploma.
Decades later, I am certain that holding us hostage for our diploma was a lot of fluff. I can say this because of the repeated assurances we give our fifth graders even as the kids in lower grades hang from light fixtures and scream profanity at anyone who cares to listen. We are, effectively, inviting them back. Why would we want to keep this one group of knuckleheads from moving on?
It's a long week. 

Just Sayin'

Raise your hand if you love your Amazon Prime. Okay, let's see: one, two, three, four, um - one hundred one million. You joined up because only a schmuck would wait for six to ten business days to get their Instant Pot pressure cooker. And you'd have to be deranged to actually drive to a store that sells it and carry it home yourself. We are Americans, after all, and we pride ourselves on finding the cheapest, most convenient way to do the cheapest most convenient things. Owning a pressure cooker is a great way to save time and money, and if you use your Amazon Prime membership to get that bad boy to your front porch ASAP, you're just being a good American.
But it probably isn't worth losing a life over.
I'm not sure what gangsta rapper and NBC's star of Law and Order needs with a pressure cooker. Or maybe it was any one of the six hundred six million products available for purchase on Amazon. Whatever it was, the composer of the lyrical hit "Body Count" complains that he "almost shot a MF creeping up to my crib last night.... Just sayin." This was part of a Tweet in which he was suggesting that those MFs should be wearing uniforms or be in some way outwardly distinguishable as Amazon delivery personnel. To which Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations & Customer Service Dave Clark tweeted back to Ice-T, "Just sayin…thanks for the suggestion. We MF’ing love you and our drivers. Lots of innovations coming on this and many that already exist to help you track your package and delivery on a map. Thanks for being a customer."
Which puts us all square in the cross-hairs of being a proud American. We don't want to be bothered to go to the store to pick up our pressure cooker, or whatever, and we want to cling ferociously to our Second Amendment Rights. Which makes the only logical solution to do the following: Arm Amazon delivery folks. Uniforms can be expensive and need frequent laundering. Why take the chance that the one night you end up on the front lawn of one of the stars of NBC's procedural cop shows your bright orange vest is at the cleaners? Why take the chance that former bad boy and now reformed good guy gangsta with a gun is going to pop a cap in you when you can be a good delivery guy with a gun and shoot back?
I just hope the pressure cooker survives the exchange of gunfire.