| In the Cafeteria |
[Sep. 5th, 2009|07:32 am] |
Little E had her first week back at school this past week. One of the highlights (at least that we are aware of here on the home front) occurred in the cafeteria on Friday.
When E started at school down here the cafeteria was a significant challenge for her. It is a noisy place. There's lots of activity. It's filled with children (and E has anxieties about the unpredictableness of kids). She would sit at the same table as other kids from her Life Skills class with their teachers and, particularly in the first year, E needed lots of maintenance to help her stay calm and, on some days, just stay in the cafeteria (on the days where she was completely overwhelmed, she would leave cafeteria early, escorted by one of her teachers). You would be able to recognize her in those days, even when she was completely calm, because she was the little girl wearing the noise-protection headphones (the kind on sale in sporting goods stores that are designed for protecting one's ears at the rifle range or when out hunting).
Over the past three years E has matured and developed her internal resources and, consequently, has done better and better in the cafeteria: tolerating being bumped now and then; capable of dealing with the noise without screaming, fussing, or headphones; getting through lunch without extensive teacher support. But she has stayed at the Life Skills table with her teachers and classmates. When the kids in Life Skills attain greater abilities, the school will "mainstream" them where appropriate (E has been mainstreaming into a session of gym class for a while now). One of the steps in mainstreaming, is for kids to eat with the class they are with when lunchtime rolls around.
When E started at school, one of the little girls who started with her was Amber. Amber and E had major issues during their first year together. Amber was pre-verbal at that point and given to shrieking as a form of communication. Amber's shrieks hit E's hyper-sensitivity to noise very hard and E was start screaming to block out Amber. (At this point I need to say how thankful we are to the amazing teachers that E has and how thankful we are for all the special education teachers out there who manage to keep doing this incredibly difficult work, and doing it with such love and commitment and joy). Despite this very rough start, Amber and E have become friends at school: sitting together, playing together, even inventing games together. Amber has also progressed quite rapidly and today spends large portions of her day at school mainstreamed.
Amber began mainstreaming in the cafeteria last year. Yesterday at lunch, E turned to one of her teachers and asked "Sit with Amber?" And so they took E over to Amber's table and sat them together and E ate her lunch in the cafeteria, for the first time, away from the Life Skills table. Then, when Amber's class had to leave before E's lunch time was up, one of her teachers went to get E. And E said "Eat with other kids?"
So yesterday was a triumphant day for Little E (and for her parents and for her teachers). |
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| What Charlie Watt Hath Wrought |
[Jun. 22nd, 2009|03:57 pm] |
Finished building a set of shelves today . . . they will accommodate bunches of stuff, eventually all in standard-sized banker's boxes . . . a lot of the stuff is what I brought out of my parents' house before it was sold . . . other stuff I accumulated along the way . . . a good portion of the stuff needn't be saved . . . but have not had it organized enough to go through it and separate out the keepers from the junk . . . the set of shelves is intended to allow for that organizing and subsequent winnowing . . . my spouse will be happy with the winnowing part . . . I will be happy with the organization part . . . am also hopeful of finding "artifacts" amongst the stuff that will catalyze LJ entries . . . we'll see.
Built the set of shelves out of 2x4s and boards . . . like Fivecats, who posted about Mr. Watt last year (or maybe earlier this year), such skills as I used in designing and building the shelves had their genesis in Mr. Watt's shop class . . . had him in 7th, 8th, & 9th grades . . . remember back in late Summer 1973 getting my schedule of classes for 7th grade and groaning at having been put into shop class . . . but enjoyed it so much that I choose to take it again the following two years . . . Mr. Watt taught wood shop and drafting, while Mr. Habrat taught metal shop . . . the shop classes I took divided the year in half: two quarters wood/drafting and two quarters metal.
Mr. Watt was one of the older teachers I had at Benjamin Stoddard Junior High . . . he had a pronounced accent . . . and, for three years, pronounced my last name in a unique way . . . something one got used to . . . he was meticulous about things in his class: safety, cleaning up, precision at the drafting table, attention to detail on projects . . . I see all of those things in the way I handle wood-related projects . . . and have always done so since those days at B.S. Jr. High . . . I don't think Mr. Watt would be pleased with my set of shelves . . . like most of the things I build for the house they are sturdy and functional but were put together with little aesthetic consideration and minimal time spent on finishing aspects (smooth edges, tight seems, squared corners, etc.) . . . but hopefully he would be pleased that things he taught to a bunch of 13 and 14 year olds have been retained now that those kids are forty-somethings.
My default thought about the junior high school I attended is that it was a Hell Pit . . . but in thinking about Mr. Watt, have to admit there were some good things as well . . . first and foremost made some very good friends there . . . and had a number of other teachers that I look back on with good memories: Mr. Retzer, who taught orchestra; Ms. Frederick, Ms. Lehner, and Mr. Zeman, who I had for math classes; and Ms. Taylor who I had for science . . . since it has been a third of a century since I completed/escaped Stoddard, don't know how many of these teachers are still alive . . . did check the on-line Social Security Death Index and found 94 Charles Watts listed . . . one of them had his social security card issued in Washington, D.C. (none listed for Maryland) and his birth date was listed as 11 February 1918 and his death date as 15 March 1996 . . . the birth date and the D.C. connection seem to fit . . . would need to check obituaries for March 1996 to see if this is Stoddard's Mr. Watt . . . at least he has achieved that fractional immortality that is available to teachers: some of what he taught lives on after his own passing. |
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| Thirty Years Ago Today, Part 2 |
[Jun. 2nd, 2009|02:37 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  mellow | ] |
Thirty years ago this evening (from 9 p.mm. to 1 a.m.) at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., I attended my high school prom . . . still have my ticket: cost $7.00 , "Formal Dress" requested . . . according to the story I heard (cannot vouch for it's validity) the reason we had such an inexpensive prom at such a nice place was that the Hyatt sent us a contract with the decimal point for the cost incorrectly place one space to the left of where it was supposed to be . . . once the mistake was discovered, so the story goes, everything was already signed and locked in so we got an inexpensive prom at a very nice place (although the reservations person judged guilty by Hyatt management of allowing the mis-decimal-placed contract to get into our hands was, according to the story, fired).
My prom date was Erissa, a member of the Class of 1980, and she was the perfect prom date for me . . . she loved to dance and she got me dancing at the prom (at the time I was of the mindset that it was more important to know how to dance than why to dance and since I didn't know how to dance my initial prom plan was to go and spend the whole time mingling rather than dancing) . . . and dancing was a lot of fun . . . she was also a friend whom I liked a lot but wasn't amorously smitten with so i wasn't all tied up in internal knots about "doing things right" and appearing cool/desirable/sophisticated/etc and yearning for things to be "perfect" . . . instead, because I was with Erissa and she was such a sweet and outgoing person, I was much more able to just be me and be in the moment . . . and I think that's the main reason why I had such a good time at the prom: no preconceptions, no expectations, just the moment, a revolving disco ball, and a room full of friends having a good time.
There was a bit of happenstance in me going to the prom with the perfect date . . . my first choice was Nancy (Class of 1980) whom I'd been developing a unspoken infatuation with through the latter half of my senior year at Potomac Senior High . . . we talked, we hung out (inasmuch as you can hang out while still actually at school), we called one another on the phone . . . we seemed to be getting along, but when I asked her to go to the prom with me, she said no . . . it would have been our first date . . . but it wasn't . . . there was another young woman from the Class of 1980 whom I was also drawn towards . . . her name was Mi Hyun . . . we were friends and I could make her laugh and it was fun being with her . . . but when I asked her to go to the prom with me, she said no . . . so I decided that, the next day when we were at school, i would ask the next girl that came around the corner to go with me, and keep on asking until one of them said yes . . . then, the next day, firmly planted in the hallway near a corner and steeled myself to implement my "a date before dignity" plan . . . at this point would like to say that Erissa was the first young lady to turn that corner . . . but that would be a lie . . . actually let the first pass by, and the second . . . luckily for me, Erissa was the third and I asked and she said yes . . . am tempted to say it was destiny; but going to the prom, as much as I enjoyed it and as much as Erissa was a perfect date for me, doesn't carry enough wait to qualify for concepts like destiny.
My favorite memory of the prom, however, doesn't involve Erissa . . . my very good friend Alden took Kim (another member of the Class of 1980) as his date . . . I knew Kim, although not all that well . . . but they had eaten later and did not arrive until shortly after 11, with the prom already half over . . . they got a seat at one of the tables and Alden almost immediately began mingling . . . while this was a natural thing to do, I noticed Kim sitting alone at the table looking, well, alone . . . waited for Alden to recognize that he should be balancing being a friend-among-friends with being Kim's date, but it wasn't happening . . . Kim was looking more and more miserable each time I noticed her . . . by this point, of course, Erissa had already infected me with Disco Fever and I was fairly energized . . . so, when a song ended, I went over and asked Kim if she would like to dane? . . . she said yes, and we began dancing when the next number started . . . as I had hoped, Alden cut in before the number ended . . . and Kim and Alden had numerous more dances before the night ended.
For someone who was in many ways a dateless geek throughout high school and who had totaled his car just 24 hours earlier, my prom experience was surprisingly, unexpectedly wonderful. |
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| Thirty Years Ago Today, Part I |
[Jun. 1st, 2009|09:03 pm] |
Thirty years ago this evening I totaled my Ford Pinto . . . my friend Richard had moved a year or two earlier and, consequently, graduated from a high school (Chopticon High) different from mine (Potomac High) . . . I drove down to attend his graduation (about a 45 mile trip, or so) . . . afterward, we met up with some other friends of his, Richard got in one of their cars, and I was going to follow them to wherever it was we were going (either a restaurant or some third friends house) . . . only they took off faster than I could go in my Pinto.
Now, you need to remember that thirty years ago cell phones and GPS systems were still available only in Star Trek reruns . . . I was completely unfamiliar with the Chopticon area (indeed with the whole county it was in), we were in a fairly wooded area, and it was already after sunset . . . figuring it would be bad to be lost, I foolishly attempted to follow the speeding away car . . . this was doubly stupid because my bad vision is particularly bad when I am driving at night . . . I probably got the Pinto up to around 55 miles per hour or so when a turning in the road I hadn't noticed earlier came up . . . I turned the steering wheel quickly . . . the front driver side tire blew out . . . the Pinto surfed up the embankment lining the curve . . . flipped over, landing on the passenger side of the roof . . . continued rolling until it was on the opposite side of the road . . . then skidded to a stop.
Somewhere in the process the Pinto ended up pointing in the opposite direction from the way we were going when the accident started . . . probably only a 180 degree spin (although a 540 degree spin may have been a possibility) . . . the driver side window was down when the accident began and at some point my left arm popped out of the window . . . the one thing I remember clearly of the action part of the accident was pulling my arm in . . . and it was on my left arm that i got the only injury I suffered in the whole thing: a small bruise (about the size of a golf ball) on the underside of my bicep where it had apparently banged off the door's window frame.
My first coherent thought from inside the crashed Pinto was, upon looking at a vaguely familiar shape lying in the road about fifteen feet in front of me was "Hey, that's somebody's windshield." . . . my second coherent thought came when I stuck my hand out in front of me and encountered air: "Hey, that's my windshield." . . . I then turned off the ignition (although the Pinto had, logically enough, stalled out during the crash, looked about and found me glasses, and got out of the car . . . if I'm recalling correctly, the whole thing was a mix of surreal and "oh, bother!" . . . another car pulled up almost immediately, having seen the Pintos head and tail lights moving about in the distance in ways inconsistent with normal driving . . . I told them I was there for Richard's graduation and they happened to know Richard's family so they drove me there . . . Richard's parents said later that they didn't believe me at first when I showed up and said "I've wrecked my car. Can I use the phone to call my parents?" because I was too calm.
Meanwhile, Richard realized I was no longer following and got his friend to turn around and come back to find me . . . by the time they got to my wrecked Pinto, there were some on-lookers (as well as a police officer wondering where the people involved with the accident were) . . . one of the on-lookers was a little boy who was shouting out "Blood! There's blood everywhere! Blood!" just as Richard arrived . . . no blood, but disturbing for Richard . . . shortly thereafter I returned to the accident scene and filled the police officer in with my recollections (and he kindly did not ticket me for leaving the scene of an accident).
The Pinto was totaled . . . but at least it didn't explode . . . and it was one of the batch involved in the big "Exploding Pinto" recall . . . when I spoke with my parents on the phone, after going through the accident, they told me that my prom date Erissa had called and said that there was something important that we needed to talk about . . . I was pretty sure she was calling to cancel on me at the last minute . . . instead, she was calling to say that she didn't feel safe going to the prom in my Pinto and wanted one of the other couples we were going with to do the driving . . . smart girl, Erissa. |
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| After the Semester, Cleaning Up |
[May. 13th, 2009|02:35 pm] |
The Spring term ended last week . . . have completed the (for me, anyway) typical decompression period and am finally caught up on sleep . . . have filled four pages with "To Do" stuff . . . one of the items is cleaning up the office . . . am in that process now . . . found lots of books buried between, under, within, and atop various piles of paper . . . thought I would post a list of them:
Joan Bauer, The Almost Sound of Drowning: Poems
Paul Brooks, The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work
Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973
Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom
Foreign Policy Association (eds.), A Cartoon History of American Foreign Policy, 1776-1976
Maury Forman & Robert A. Calvert (eds.), Cartooning Texas: One Hundred Years of Cartoon
Art in the Lone Star State
Ben W. Gilbert et. al., Ten Blocks From the White House: Anatomy of the Washington
Riots of 1968
John Keegan, The Face of Battle
Charles Laird, Webster's New World Thesaurus
Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History
James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam
V. S. Naipaul, The Return of Eva Peron
Richard M. Nixon et. al., The Nixon Watergate tapes: Complete and Official Text
Linda Pastan, An Early Afterlife: Poems
Linda Pastan, The Five Stages of Grief: Poems
Mary Jo Salter, A Kiss in Space: Poems
Ruby Schmidt, Fort Worth and Tarrant County: A Historical Guide
Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam
Seneca, Letters From a Stoic
Joel H. Silbey, Storm Over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures: and a Second Look
Norman Stevens, Antietam, 1862: The Civil War's Bloodiest Day
Brian Turner, Here, Bullet: Poems
Howard Zinn, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawl
From the Zinn (published in 1967), a brief snippet:
"Literate masses can be deceived, as all modern nations -- whether called democratic or totalitarian -- have shown. What is especially dangerous is that the leaders of nations begin to believe their own oratory. A self-deception which invests the entire leadership of a nation (including its intellectuals) with a powerful self-righteousness leads to sins which are uncalculated and therefore uncontrolled." |
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| A Short Poem |
[Jan. 24th, 2009|03:02 pm] |
Wild oats un-sown
germinate within:
an un-harrowed field
of unharvested desire. |
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| Shadows of Things Not Seen |
[Jan. 24th, 2009|02:28 pm] |
Last month one morning, I made some cinnamon toast for Little E for breakfast . . . it's fairly standard breakfast fair for her on school days during the winter months . . . E calls it "Tubby Toast" because of it's (albeit limited) similarity to the food product that The Tele-Tubbies eat.
After getting E set up, I turned my attention to feeding the cats . . . when I noticed that the morning light through the kitchen window was casting a reflection of the toaster on the opposite wall . . . and not just the toaster . . . but also very clear shadows of the heat emanating up from the just-used toaster.
This truck me that morning: I could clearly see the shadows of the heat emanations BUT I couldn't see the emanations themselves . . . the shadows had a lovely, languid quality about them: drifting delicately upward, but in no hurry, with no sense of purpose, just being . . . I enjoyed watching them . . . until Theophilous decided he could no longer wait patiently for his morning can of chow.
While serving up the cat food, tried to thing of other things that cannot be seen with the eye but that cast shadows, at least in some conditions . . . failed to think of any . . . but did get to thinking of other contexts in which we can see things that aren't there.
Like the Tele-Tubbies and an American televangelist whose name escapes me . . . remember hearing, before E was born, that this televangelist was crusading against The Tele-Tubbies (perhaps using them to target public television as a whole) by stating that one of them -- Tinky-Winky -- was an attempt to promote homosexuality (or perhaps even encourage it) amongst the four, five, and six year olds who watched the show . . . the case, such as it was, made against Tinky-Winky was that he 1) was purple, 2) had a triangle on his head, and 3) went around carrying a purse . . . having watched a bit of The Tele-Tubbies, I have to say I can't give any credence to this argument.
My perception is that the tele-tubbies are asexual, being neither male nor female . . . the whole show makes me think that they live as mutated forms in a post-apocalyptic world: their home has the visual feel of a fallout shelter (albeit an above ground one), they receive recorded messages from public-address speakers, their bodies/body suits receive television signals from a world that either no longer exists or at least has nothing to do with their world, their are never any planes in the sky, no one ever comes to visit, local fauna seems limited to exceedingly docile rabbits . . . but I think the source of the televangelists anxiety about The Tele-Tubbies (which he channeled into his homophobia) is the asexuality of the main characters . . . it is my impression that exposure to societies without gender roles can be profoundly disturbing to folks . . . even in microcosmic forms.
I think of the need that some people seemed to have to know whether E was a male baby or a female baby when she was just a baby . . . during the first year or two after birth, gender makes no sense to me for babies . . . yes, they are biologically categorylizable . . . but gender seems to have no relevance to their behavior . . . that's why I've found it odd that some parents seem to make the gender the keynote in communicating the arrival of a new child: "It's a girl!" "It's a boy!" . . . and certainly our society flows in these directions . . . one of the best baby gifts we got, although I didn't know it at the time, was a dozen baby socks in a dozen different colors . . . since E's arrival I have spent more time than I'd care to remember trying to find her socks that weren't pink or white or blue.
So, from my point of view, many people see a gender in babies where it doesn't exist . . . but this can happen elsewhere too . . . as it did to me at the beginning of last month when S, my spouse, and I took E to see a production of The Nutcracker . . . towards the end of the first act, there was the battle between King Rat and his Mice Minions against Captain Nutcracker and his Tin Titans . . . (well, OK, neither Tchaikovsky nor the ballet company used these exact terms (except for King Rat)) . . . and while they were dancing about in mock battle, which E thought was great fun, I noticed that King Rat had some sexy legs . . . and this was somewhat disturbing to me . . . until I saw in our program that the role of King Rat was danced by a woman, rather than a man . . . should this have made a difference? . . . I find that a hard question to answer . . . but my response to what I was seeing AND my response to what I thought I was seeing were clearly different.
Such are the thoughts I had, from seeing the shadow of a just-used toaster. |
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| Remembrance |
[Jan. 24th, 2009|01:55 pm] |
On 31 March 1995, the American pop-star Selena was shot and killed in Corpus Christi, Texas. I was familiar with her as a celebrity, although not with her music. As a celebrity I knew she was flashy, flamboyant, more than a little bit of a diva. Nonetheless, the news of her death both saddened and depressed me and I was in very low spirits for several days afterward. The reason is that she was so young -- just 23 -- when she was killed. All of those years ahead of her, taken away; all of her possibilities, ended.
One of Selena's parents, in her case her dad, was an immigrant to the United States and her family lived in Lake Jackson when she was born. The delivery took place at the Brazosport Regional Hospital, then located in nearby Freeport. But Lake Jackson is where Selena spent the first ten years of her life.
Last month, my mother (herself an immigrant to the United States) died at the Brazosport Regional Hospital, which was relocated to Lake Jackson in the early 1980s (opening in October 1984, some thirteen-and-a-half years after Selena was born). Mom was just a few weeks shy of her 85th birthday when she died, but she had been dying for over a decade. The regressive dementia that she suffered from had been peeling away the layers of her personality since the 1990s. A number of her other ailments gradually took away her ability to walk and limited her physically in other ways. Over the last years, most of her waking hours alternated between physical discomfort and debilitating pain.
So we (speaking of myself, my father, and my sister) had been not only mentally preparing for her passing for a long time, but also had come to recognize that her death would be a release for her, an end to her suffering here on earth. So, perhaps oddly, when my Mom did die it affected me less immediately than when I heard of Selena's death. I had no relationship with Selena, not even through being a fan of her music, and my Mom, well, she was my Mom. But my Mom's years, her opportunities, were all behind her. She was 84, almost 85. And her death was long anticipated.
During the last decade and a half, being with my Mom, interacting with her, spending time with her both physically and in thought, has always meant being with and spending time with her illnesses and frailties and conditions as well as being with her: it was very difficult to separate her from her disintegration. Now that she has passed, all the illnesses and conditions and ailments are gone, and when I spend time with her in thought I can get re-acquainted with the person she was.
The major part of that is and will be, of course, the person who was my parent, who raised me up as a child, who supported me as an adult, who always loved me. But another part will be, through recalled stories and old family photographs, the person she was before I was born, before she became a parent.
One aspect of that person -- my Mom as a young woman -- shows clearly through the photographs. When there's a group picture and one of the young women in the picture is showing a bit more leg than the others: that's Mom. When one is looking a bit more flirty: that's Mom. When one is dressed a bit more flashy: that's Mom. I never knew that woman, but she was my Mom. I never knew Selena, but, in some ways at least, my Mom did: because in these photos she is Selena, at least a little bit. |
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| My Mother |
[Dec. 14th, 2008|06:58 am] |
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My Mom passed away yesterday . . . she was 84 . . . she will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery sometime this week. |
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| Hexagonal Crystals of Frozen Precipitation |
[Dec. 11th, 2008|09:20 am] |
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It snowed down here on the Texas Gulf coast yesterday evening . . . for about three hours or so . . . but the ground was too warm for any accumulation . . . although we did get, after a while, a thin coating of snow on the lawn chairs, the sections of tree stumps (kept as cat perches), and on the chimenea . . . it was pretty: from inside the house . . . outside it was windy, raw, and quite cold . . . I thought of my friend Shereen who recently moved to Chicago from central Texas and is experiencing her first full fledged winter . . . after it had been snowing for a couple of hours, and well after sunset, someone rung the buzzer on our front door . . . it was two of the neighborhood children, all bundled up . . . they said that they just wanted to let us know it was snowing so that we could let Little E go out and play in the snow "if she wants to, just in case" . . . E had already been out . . . but how nice of those kids to want to share the pleasure of playing amidst the snowflakes. |
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| On Their Toes |
[Dec. 7th, 2008|11:07 pm] |
Went with my spouse S and Little E to see a local production of "The Nutcracker" put on at the local high school . . . dancers were a mix of professionals and students (of various ages) . . . it was set to start at 2 and we got our seats (on the front row) at 1:40 . . . E was impatient for the show to start . . . at one point she told me to stand up and, once I had stood up, she pointed to the curtain and said "open" . . . sometimes she's a very optimistic young lady.
Then people with a baby sat in the row of seats behind us . . . E has a history of getting stressed by the unpredictableness of babies . . . you never can tell when they might start wailing . . . so she tensed up a bit . . . S and I also tensed up, particular when 2 o'clock came and no start, then 2:05 . . . things finally got rolling at 2:10.
E absolutely loved it . . . we had to hush her a few times . . . but mostly she was both very excited (lots of hand waving) and quite good . . . we did finally let her go shoeless after she had kicked them off several times when it all got so exciting waving her arms alone was not enough . . . during the intermission she got up and danced a bit in front of the stage . . . she was also peaking under the curtain and wanted to go up on stage to go behind the curtain but wasn't quite brave enough to go by herself . . . she remained enthralled throughout the entire show.
While I found the performance entertaining and well done, I did find myself a bit put off when the performers danced on their toes . . . it looks so unnatural and painful: I felt like I was watching a group of people torture themselves for others' amusement . . . for this reason alone am not sure that I'll ever be a big ballet fan . . . if E continues to like it, though, I'm sure I'll be seeing a lot more of it . . . did enjoy some other live aspects: hearing the dancers feet as they danced and seeing the slight imperfections (a little tremor here, a very slight balance adjustment there) . . . the perfection of filmed performances tends, for me anyway, to remove a bit of the human element . . . seeing a bit of the effort behind the showmanship made it more engaging for me . . . though I still think the toe thing is pretty unpleasant to see. |
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| Perspectives on a Christmas Tree |
[Dec. 7th, 2008|05:19 am] |
We put up our Christmas tree yesterday and, on the whole, it went rather well . . . we had had a small (3 foot) artificial tree for a while and then, three years ago, my sister gave us some money to buy a larger artificial tree, one with the lights built in . . . while the absence of a resinous coniferous smell is a definite drawback, the convenience and re-usability are big pluses . . . last year, had some trouble getting the tree to be relatively straight . . . also problems with attaching the tin star on top without having it drooping . . . all that went well this year.
The cats, so far at least, have not shown any proclivity to wrestle with the tree or the decorations . . . and Little E has also been non-destructive in her appreciations of the tree . . . mostly she has been interested in different ornaments: taking them off the tree, playing games with them . . . we did put the bell ornament up high, in the back, and kept its clapper swaddled in a paper towel . . . last year E found her inner Quasimodo thanks to this ornament . . . somehow, the ringing seemed significantly louder at 5 in the morning than it did at 3 in the afternoon.
Decorating the tree did bring out one of the areas where my spouse S and I view the world differently . . . when we first got this tree a few years ago, we had only a handful of ornaments . . . fortunately, several friends gave us some as Christmas gifts . . . we bought a few of our own . . . and last year we got a bunch from my parents when they moved down here to Texas.
This profusion pleases me: I like a tree that's crowded with stories, where one can read part of our past in tinseled artifacts, where exuberance bursts forth from every branch . . . S takes a different tack . . . where I see a memory of childhood, she sees a moth-eaten one-eyed angel . . . where I see pleasing quirkiness, she sees a tacky winged cow . . . where I see the love of friends, she sees cheesy plastic monstrosities that are half Santa Claus/half snowman . . . I think it safe to say that she would agree that my tastes have resulted in a Christmas tree that, to her, is craptacular.
But she allows me to prepare the tree the way I like it . . . I think this is partially to balance the fact that the house tends to be decorated more along the lines of her tastes . . . I did get to paint and set up the room that functions as the office, though . . . and, now that it is December, we have an exuberant Christmas tree. |
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| Not My High School Movie |
[Dec. 5th, 2008|07:12 am] |
Last month my sister created a Facebook account for me and I have been contacting, and getting contacted by, a variety of old and distant friends . . . about two dozen of them are folks I went to high school with (and/or junior high and elementary school) . . . some of them I haven't been in touch with since 1979 (the year we graduated) . . . perhaps it's the buffer of cyberspace and perhaps its the discrete and fragmented nature of communicating with people in one-to-three sentence segments, but I have found it surprisingly nonawkward talking with folks I haven't seen or heard from in decades.
Perhaps some of that also comes from the bonding experience that took place between us at my high school . . . OK, so there's the phrase: "my high school" . . . why not universalize it? . . . why not "the bonding experience that takes place between students at high school" . . . how distinctive are such experiences? . . . is there a norm for the American high school experience? . . . perhaps a norm that changes over time, but still has some applicability independent of geography? . . . I wonder about this because I think it's possible that my high school in the years I was there at least may have been outside of the national norm (if there is a norm).
The basis for arguing for the exceptionalism of Potomac Senior High School in the late 1970s is two fold.
The first is the genre of the high school movie. Now, there have been high school movies I've liked, such as "Breaking Away," "Say Anything," "Election," and "Rushmore." But I've never seen a high school movie that felt like my high school experience. One of the motifs of many of the high school movies I've seen is the presence of a social caste system ("cliques") that sorts students in a way that prevents meaningful contact between castes. I don't remember anything like that at Potomac. Now, it may very well have been there and I was too clueless to perceive it. And there were definitely group affiliations: being in the band, being on a given sports team, being in NHS, etc. But I don't remember band people disdaining to associate with non-band people or "jocks" separating themselves from nonathletes. Everyone, as far as I could tell, seemed to be able to be friends with whoever they wanted to be friends with. I was kind of nerdy in high school (in truth, I'm still kind os nerdy) but I was friends with jocks, with cheerleaders and members of the pom-pom squad, with folks in the band, with honor society members, with classmates struggling with remedial math; the affiliations that we had with one group or another didn't seem to matter as much as all of us being fellow students.
I don't remember violence being something that we had to think much about in our hallways and classrooms (as in some high school movies) or that our daily lives were vitally centered upon getting drunk, getting high, and/or having sex. Know that I had classmates who got drunk, got high, and had sex--yes--but I remember those things as being add-ons, things one did sometimes (perhaps regularly, but not as the everyday center of ones social life). What I remember as being central was friendship: hanging out, talking, playing cards, walking the mall, talking, going out to the Little Italy pizzeria, and talking. Yes, a significant part of the talking may have been about the idea of getting drunk, the idea of getting high, or (especially) the idea of having sex.
Perhaps a story about kids being friends doesn't have enough narrative sizzle to make a movie. Perhaps I'm completely clueless about what was actually going on at my high school. Perhaps most high schools were more like Potomac and less like the movies.
Which brings me to my second reason for suspecting that Potomac was exceptional. In conversations with friends who went to other high schools, the experiences they describe are different from mine and tend to be more like the high schools depicted in film. I have one friend who was terrorized by the members of the football team at his high school. Others who recall high school as membership in a relatively small social group without much interaction outside of their circle. More like the movies.
If, as I suspect, Potomac was exceptional, I can't explain why. Sometimes I wonder if demographics played a role. In terms of gender, we were about evenly split between males and females. In terms of class, I remember us as coming from a mix of working class and middle class families, with middle-class backgrounds predominating. Regarding race/ethnicity, I looked over my senior class yearbook back in the 1990s and, by my count, we were about 50% African-American, 45% European-American, and 5% Asian-American. Did the fact that our school was not monocultural work against the forming of a social caste system? I don't know. But we didn't seem sharply divided along racial/ethnic lines either. I think of one of our neighborhood rivals, Crossland High School. Remember hearing that they, who were demographically similar to us, did have sharp racial/ethnic divisions; even heard that they had two proms: one for European-American students and one for African-American students. That wasn't Potomac. At least not the Potomac I remember.
Am thinking of doing some time of impromptu survey on Facebook to see how much my recollection here matches up with those of my classmates.
What was your high school experience like? |
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| While Waiting for the Bus |
[Dec. 5th, 2008|07:00 am] |
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Little E woke up at 5:30 this morning busting out with merry energy . . . which she carried forward throughout the "getting getting ready, getting getting ready, getting getting ready for SCHOOL" (it's one of the songs we've made up to go along with daily routines; sometimes parenthood is an opera here in our house)process . . . once E and I were thoroughly bundled up (we had a blue norther come to town yesterday) and went out to wait for her bus, she decided we needed to dance a little bit . . . one thing she's been doing this year is taking familiar things and things that she likes and experimenting with combining them . . . so this morning we combined square dancing with robots with WALL*E hands . . . her square dancing passion comes from our visit to Austin Town, a historical re-enactment of aspects of life in the communities here in coastal Texas that Stephen F. Austin set up in the 1820s . . . her interest in robots has been fueled by a Sesame Street episode ("The Help-o-bots") . . . WALL*E hands come from the movie: make Mr. Spock "Live Long and Prosper" hands, but then keep them that way as you though you had two fingers per hand instead of four . . . so if you happened to be driving along a street in Texas this morning and saw a chubby middle-aged man in an olive colored trench coat and a black knit hat busting some WALL*E handed robot square dancing moves in the company of a smiling seven year old, well, yes, that was me. |
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| Tool Lakka Zool |
[Nov. 29th, 2008|07:49 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | relaxed | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Tunes from "The Big Joe Polka Show" | ] |
My Spouse S made omelets for dinner this evening (with potato pancakes on the side) . . . Little E liked hers, particularly the cheesy bits . . . but she had been asking for one of her favorites: tuna (noodle) casserole . . . which she pronounces something like "tool lakka zool" . . . it's one of those words we (S and I) have had to learn . . . E's pronunciation does present challenges to both us (her parents) and to her . . . but we are all working on making communications with words effective . . . and getting E to enunciate more clearly . . . meanwhile, as long as I'm not too sleep deprived, Little E can (occasionally) place an order for Tool Lakka Zool and (via the miracle of the microwave) get the meal she wants. |
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| Little Cow Girl |
[Nov. 29th, 2008|09:05 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  lethargic | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | In my head: "Little Cow Girl" | ] |
A little over a month ago accompanied my daughter's class on a field trip to the County Fair . . . Little E was particularly enamored of the Brahmans and Herefords and Guernseys and other cows being shown . . . although she also seemed to enjoy the chickens and turkeys quite a bit too.
During lunch in the big auditorium, however, the noise and hub-bub of so many people milling about punched her sensitivity buttons . . . so I took her back outside and we sat at a conveniently empty picnic table . . . to help get her to calm herself down, I sang to her . . . frequently coming up with a new song works well in these situations, since Little E can almost never resist the impulse to listen to a song she hasn't heard before.
Since all of the kids at the Fair that day were given inexpensive straw cowboy hats (it was Special Needs Kids Day at the Fair), I came up with this:
Little E is a little cow girl
Little E is a little cow girl
Little E is a little cow girl
She's a little cow girl
Which seemed to work and helped E calm herself down . . . she liked it enough that she would sing it herself and also ask me to sing it again.
So now were taking one last walk through the livestock area of the fair with E's class and it occurs to me that maybe we can extend the song to some of E's classmates . . . I ask E if she wants to sing about her classmates and she says yes.
So I say, "Can you sing about Abigail?"
E looks at me, from under the brim of her straw cowboy hat.
So I ask again, "Can you sing about Abigail?"
And Little E breaks out into:
Little E is a little Abigail.
Little E is a little Abigail.
Little E is a little Abigail.
Sher's a little Abigail! |
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| Burying a Possum |
[Nov. 28th, 2008|09:59 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  thoughtful | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Hum of the swimming pool filter pump | ] |
This morning we awoke to find a dead possum in the swimming pool . . . sometime during the night it had gotten into the pool and it drowned before it could happen upon the stairs and climb out . . . waterlogged, its body had sunken to the bottom of the pool . . . I fished it out and placed the body in a plastic tub that had once held chlorine tabs (the new bucket is still almost full) . . . then got ready to drive my sister to the airport.
Shortly after noon, I went out to dig a hole to bury the possum in . . . the first step was spraying on lots of DEET because we have a fresh spike in the mosquito population (hopefully the last spike of the year) . . . then getting the shovels: one long and narrow, the other more of a squat chevron in shape.
Half of our back yard has trees and shrubs (at least some of the trees predate the house) . . . so that seemed like the best place to bury the possum: a sylvan, private space; more peaceful, less traveled . . . the first four inches (10 cm) or so was crumbly, dark brown top soil . . . easy digging . . . but then came the layer of reddish clay-dominated soil, relatively dry, but intricately intersected with numerous roots . . . ended up having to steer the hole around and past the roots that were too big for the shovel to sever . . . also had to find out that they were roots and not utility lines of one kind or another.
Digging through the network of roots reminded me of artists renditions of what lies beneath the streets of large cities: water lines, power line conduits, sewage tunnels, subway routs, access tunnels, etc. . . . concern about our own utility lines no doubt brought some of those images to mind . . . after getting down about 14 inches (40 cm), got to a layer of wetter clay dominated soil, with strong tones of greyish-brown blended in with the red . . . and also larger roots . . . found a way past, but this final digging of a hole-within-a-hole was only about one-third the circumference of the main hole . . . and defined on all sides by roots.
The difficulty with this final hole was getting the dirt out after digging it up: couldn't get sufficient horizontality from either shovel . . . ended up getting the hoe and using it like an elevator to lift the loose soil out . . . gig/lift, dig/lift, dig/lift . . . this gave the grave a multi-chambered design, which made me think of drawings I've seen of the interiors of Egyptian and Mayan temple/tombs.
Once the bottom of the smaller hole was about two feet (61 cm) below surface level, went and got the bucket with the body of the possum in it . . . opened the bucket and tipped the dead possum into the hole . . . the body fit easily into the lower chamber hole . . . filled the lower chamber in with dirt, after wishing the possum a peaceful return to substance, and placed an extra concrete paving stone over the lower chamber . . . then filled in half the upper chamber . . . placed another concrete paving stone in . . . finished filling the hole . . . then placed a rectangular concrete paving stone on top . . . the stones being an attempt to dissuade larger scavengers from digging up the dead possum.
The day before Thanksgiving, while driving to the Houston Zoo with my sister and Little E, my sister and I were talking about burials . . . I'm inclined, as my sister is, to be cremated . . . my sister would then like to have some of her ashes surreptitiously scattered in the Pantheon in Rome and some near a clutch of cherry blossom trees near the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. . . . I'm inclined to some place where they might be readily put to use by local plants as a source of minerals . . . we also talked about the Green Burial method . . . Sis said that she had heard that scientists believe that if all humans were Green Buried that it would adversely effect the quality of groundwater everywhere . . . thought about this while burying the possum: but don't think the body will have too much of an effect in that way.
Take comfort from the idea that, in death, our individual substance returns to the sources from which it sprang: material substance back to material substance, immaterial substance back to immaterial substance . . . don't know how much immaterial substance a possum has (or that I have for that matter) . . . but do hope that the dead possum will, through the dynamism of the soil, give his material substance to support new life, bacterial or micro-organism, plant or animal . . . would like to think, when I die, that my material substance can be of use to the world in that regenerative way.
Such were my thoughts, burying a possum today. |
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| ". . . and Keith, bring charcoal briquets." |
[Nov. 25th, 2008|12:13 pm] |
My sister blogs (not on LJ) but she has been having technical difficulties with the Comments section on her blog . . . she recently posted an entry about words and their meanings and on how some words just shouldn't be used for certain purposes . . . in the "that's just so wrong" category she identified giving a car the name Probe.
Which brought to mind this line, which I came across in Wikipedia's featured article on Halloween last month: "We have reached the limits of what rectal probing can teach us." spoken by the extraterrestrial Kang in The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror VII episode.
Which (although I can't logically explain why) lead me to think of a favorite bit of dialog from the Comic Book "Man Eating Cow" (this selection is from Man Eating Cow, No. 4 (April 1993), page 17, panels 3-5);
Leader of the Men's Group: The're endangering our consciousness.
Keith (aka Crime Cannibal): What do we do?
Men's Group Leader: One thing . . . we must internalize our cow experience.
Keith: What does that mean?
Men's Group Leader: Get the cow before those women can and bring it to my house. And Keith, bring charcoal briquets.
Here's hoping that everyone out there has a good time internalizing your turkey/sweet potato/tofu/pecan pie experience on Thursday. |
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| From the Bottom of the Sand Pile |
[Nov. 21st, 2008|12:37 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | relaxed | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Melissa Etheridge's Chrome Plated Heart | ] |
This past Sunday our tree guy was finally able to work us into his schedule and cut down the tree in our back yard that was broken in half by Hurricane Ike . . . the trunk broke about twenty feet (about 5.5 meters) up, but the break wasn't clean . . . the top tipped over but ended spearing the earth with multiple branches . . . in the process it pinned down a telephone line.
So on Sunday the tree guy came and cut down the top part, then cut down the rest of the trunk, sectioned everything into compact cylinders with a chain saw, and then hauled all the pieces away . . . unfortunately, "all the pieces" didn't include some branch pieces that were ensnared in a wild tangle of vines of various types that had taken over much of the tree, while it was still alive.
Before we can call the telephone guy to come fix the lines, we need to clear off as much of the vines as possible . . . before the tree guys, I'd already cut out all the vines reachable from the ground . . . what was left was a haystack-ish blob of interwoven vines (most of them dead) with diameters ranging up to 2 inches (5 centimeters) that, all told, had the volume of a good sized car . . . all suspended up in the air by the branches of several trees (only one of which is dead).
I have made two passes at the mass . . . it's a job that lends itself to thinking . . . for example, while standing underneath the airborne haystack tugging as hard as I can to pull a vine down and out of the jumble: "Standing underneath this and tugging it downwards seems, well, stupid. What if the whole thing come s down?" . . . and "I feel like I'm trying to dig away a giant sand pile, only I'm digging from the bottom up" . . . and "Ouch! Some of these vines have thorns!"
Must admit that I'm glad it's gotten cold enough for mosquito season to have ended . . . they were super abundant for about a week after Ike . . . I was slathering DEET on all my exposed skin in order to get any work done outside . . . so they just started biting me through my shirt, pants, and socks . . . when I added DEET treatments to my clothes they started biting me on my lips, my eyelids, the bridge of my nose, and inside my ears . . . don't know how environmentally friendly the pesticides used by the county spray planes and the city spray trucks were, but they killed off that population boom and I was pretty grateful for that.
Hope to get most of the rest of the big tangle of vines down this weekend . . . it's probably already clear enough for the telephone lineman . . . but, as I was working on it yesterday, it struck me that it constituted a fearsome fire hazard.
And so we are moving around and beyond our visit from Hurricane Ike . . . now if the insurance people would just move a little faster so that we can get to repairing the holes in the roof. |
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| On Being a Cookie Monster |
[Nov. 19th, 2008|02:14 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | content | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Joan Armatrading (in my head) | ] |
Back in the 1980s, I joined the U.S. Air Force and went through my initial training at the USAF's Officer Training School (OTS) at the Medina Annex to Lackland Air Force Base (located on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas) [NOTE: in the 1990s OTS moved to Maxwell Air Force Base on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama]. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner were eaten in the Chow Hall, and the Chow Hall was governed (like everything at OTS) by a set of rules and regulations. OTS was a thirteen week training program and the upper classmen, those in their last six weeks of training, had the job of enforcing the rules and regulations on the lower classmen. Those enforcing the Chow Hall rules were informally known as both "Chow Checkers" and "Cookie Monsters."
Chow Checkers were posted outside the Chow Hall and Officer Trainees (OTs) had to report to the Chow Checker in order to get into the Chow Hall. There was a specified catachism required to gain approval. Usually the arriving OTs arrived in flights and that day's designated flight commander reported to the Chow Checker and the magic words would be exchanged.
Inside the chow Hall, the Cookie Monsters monitored consumption behavior. The tightest rules applied to those OTs in their first three weeks at OTS: Square Meals. Eating a square meal required lots of 90 degree angles: both knees, both ankles, your lap, and also the course of your spoon or fork to your mouth. To achieve the latter, you would scoop/spear your food, then raise your utensil vertically upwards until it was at the level of your mouth, then move it in a direct horizontal line to your mouth, then reverse the path to return the utensil to its plate. Which is to say, Square Meals were an arbitrary bit of lunacy designed to give OTS practice at obedience in detail to rules that were both arbitrary and lunatic. Well, OK, maybe sometimes outside of the training environment rules that were not necessarily arbitrary or crazy. Cookie Monsters were tasked to check all of the right angles, as well as to monitor overall Chow Hall etiquette.
Last week, I began volunteering as a Cookie Monster, of sorts, at Little E's elementary school. I spend 30 minutes on Mondays and Wednesdays in the Cafeteria, my shift overlapping with the dining of kindergartners and first graders. I Cookie Monstered this past Spring, but Hurricane Ike bobbled all schedules here enough that it was a while before I got the green light to volunteer again.
Kindergartners and First Graders do not eat square meals. But they do need ketchup/catsup and help with opening food packaging and, sometimes, attention. On Monday, for example, a first grader (who reminded me of a first grade version of Michelle Obama) complained to me that her feelings were hurt because, when she said that she was ready to go leave the cafeteria, a male classmate responded with a derisive cheer. Discussed the need for maintaining a certain level of civil discourse in the cafeteria. Today, a little boy raised his hand to tell me that I looked like his doctor. Last week had several kids present their consternation with the philosophical cafeteria conundrum of that day: how was one supposed to eat one's chicken before eating their fudgsical without violating the rules about not eating too fast yet finish the chicken before the fudgisical melted too much to be eaten.
I like being Cookie Monster at Little E's elementary school. Spending a half-an-hour dealing with the problems of five and six year old kids is rather refreshing: certainly more pleasant than spending thirty minutes dealing with the manifold problems that come with being an adult. Of course, as adults, we have the leeway to eat our fudgsicals first, and wrap the chicken in aluminum foil to be eaten out of the fridge later as leftovers. |
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