On Sunday, I loaded up my three kids (ages 7, 4, and 3) our hyperactive , neurotic dog, a dozen  suitcases, three bikes, and all of my sanity and began driving West toward Utah.

I know…. Crazy.

You see, my father’s family is having a reunion out in Southwest Utah and we had been planning to go for over a year.  I had assumed that we would fly.  But we kept looking for cheap flights, only to find that they didn’t seem to exist.  The flights we were able to find were slightly more expensive than what it would cost to fly to Ireland, and I just couldn’t seem to justify spending that kind of money to go somewhere that we could theoretically drive.

(You see, this is how my mind works.  Unfortunately, the fact that Utah is connected to Maryland by land makes it “theoretically” drivable.  This mindset does not bode well for any future trips to Alaska or Chile.)

So, I began planning out the trip.  I decided early on that if I was going to drive that I wasn’t going to rush it.  I think you could probably get to Utah in four days of 10 hour driving apiece, but I know myself and my children well enough to realize that  a plan like that would only end in a recreation of that scene from “The Shining.” (It’s me!  I have lunchables!)

So I began to plan out a more leisurely “fun filled” drive across the country – A drive that would take us past some of our nations greatest artifacts.  A roundtrip drive that would take approximately (gulp) 5000 miles.

I planned to stay with friends as we traveled and to explore little bits of Americana on the way, providing myself and the children with that once in a lifetime experience guaranteed to create memories for the rest of their life…. Not neccesarily good memories, mind you, but memories none the less.

So, I began planning out our trip.  I figured it would take us a week to get out there, a week in Utah and a week to get back.  So, a three week total... 22 days to be exact.

Wow, that’s a really long time.

My wife, recognized early that this was a “really long time” and knew that she wouldn’t be able to take that kind of time off work (or so she said) so she is flying out and meeting us in Denver a week after we depart.  (She’s not just cure folks… she’s also really smart!)

As I am writing this, I am sitting in a friend’s basement in Kansas City.  I’ve got a belly full of Kansas City barbeque (Did you know that they serve it on slices of wonder bread?  Somebody needs to introduce these people to the “bun”) and so far my sanity is relatively intact.

We have visited the Cincinatti Zoo, the St. Louis Arch, a children’s museum, a restaurant where model trains bring you your food (http://www.fritzskc.com/)  and have even stopped at Zumwalt State Park.

Zumwalt State Park is a small park honoring Jacob Zumwalt (my ancestor) who was one of the first people to settle West of the Mississippi and reputedly one of the first to celebrate a Methodist sacrament West of the great river. It was people like my ancestor that basically allowed western expansion to happen and who paved the way for inter-continental transportation, the development of the nation’s breadbasket, and eventually the creation of the town that would bring us such cultural icons as “Singing in the Rain” and “Rush Hour 3.”

So, on behalf of my great great great (however many) grandfather:

You’re welcome.

So far, the trip has gone very well.  We’re only on day 5 (Seventeen more to go!) but with only a few minor squabbles, the kids have managed to survive and enjoy themselves.

We have seen some great sights (the St. Louis Arch really is amazing.  You sit inside this 4 foot high aspirin tablet and ride it to the top) and some weird sights (Let’s just say that after a fairly horrifying display by a Zebra at the zoo, we have finally answered the “black with white stripes” or “white with black stripes” controversy ).

We have also spent some great time with friends and learned a lot along the way.  For instance, I have learned a ton about Missouri solely from their billboards.  Here’s what I know:

1)      Missourians love Quiznos

2)      A billboard is a great place to advertise (at least that’s what about half the billboards said)

3)      Missourians really really hate abortion and enjoy telling you this in condemning and graphic terms.

So, really, what else could you ask for in a trip?

Today, however, we are about to ask for an awful lot.

In about an hour I am supposed to begin the 500 mile journey across Kansas.

When I first began planning this trip months ago, I started looking for interesting places to stop and fun things to do to help break the trip up and make it more fun.  Even in places like Nebraska this wasn’t terribly hard to do (did you know kool-aid originated in Nebraska?

But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find a single damn thing worth doing in Kansas.  Sure, there’s the barbed wire museum and the separate (but equally exciting) barbed wire post museum, but somehow those didn’t appeal to me all that much.  So I began asking people what there was to do in the great state that brought us Bob Dole and Melissa Etheridge.  And according to everyone I asked (including Bob Dole and Melissa Etheridge) the only thing to do in Kansas is to get the hell out.

It is apparently 500 miles of corn fields and emptiness – an insanity inducing drive that has finished off better men than me.

Initially I was going to split the trip up over two days, but as I thought about it more, I decided it might be better to just press onward and get it over in one 10 hour day of madness.

So, that’s where I am, poised to enter the land that only Dorothy Gale has ever wanted to return to (and you just know she ended up marrying a lawyer and moving to St. Louis).

I am fearful, but optimistic.  I have planned a trip that will take us to the greatest treasures that Kansas has to offer, including a small monument marking the “geodetic center of the lower 48 contiguous states” and the world’s 2^nd largest ball of twine (damn you Minnesota and your slightly larger ball of twine!)

If I don’t survive, tell my wife I love her and that yes, she was the smart one to choose to fly out.

You can follow our adventures on twitter at @marcuszumwalt

So far we have recorded the discovery of all kinds of treasures ranging from major historic landmarks to a billboard advertising a personal injury lawyer who was wearing an eye patch:

http://brownlawoffice.com/

I mean come on, I don’t know what you’re affliction is, but surely to pete there is a better remedy that being America’s first pirate lawyer (you may commence jokes about pirate lawyers…….. now.)

So, please, won’t you virtually join us on our little journey?  I’ve been posting status updates that include location, odometer readings and sanity levels (currently at 93%. Surely to be much lower by this evening).

I hope to post more blogs, but seeing as how I have to manage three kids, our dog, a dozen suitcases, three bikes, and all of my sanity it’s not looking good.  I’ve been trying to write this (not particularly interesting or funny) entry since last Friday and finally just had to get up at 6:30 to try to knock it out before the kids woke up (thus explaining why it’s not particularly interesting or funny).  So I would love to promise daily blog updates, but I don’t seem capable of it.  But I will try to keep you (Joe and Joanne Public) informed of all of our goings on and  I will try hard to pinpoint that exact moment when I completely lose my mind (dibs on Wyoming anyone?)

So join me on this venture, and feel glad and smug knowing that you are, in fact, sitting safely and sanely at home.

Or at least that’s what they keep telling me.

I’ve come across two articles in the last week that have gone to great pains to tell me how miserable I am.

The first article talked about how Marriage is Under Attack!

No, no, not from the gays.  But I can see how you would think that!  Usually, I’m always reading stuff about how my marriage is under attack from the gays.  I get so sick of it!  Some days I just with the stupid gays would just go get married themselves and leave my marriage alone!  But does that happen?  No!

Anyway, this is not a homosexual attack, it is an attack by time.

That’s right, time is attacking my marriage.  As you may recall, there is something called “the seven year itch.”  This is a rash caused by the fact that a lot of marriages fall apart after seven years, because the woman gets a wandering eye, and the man gets a wandering body.

Well, I’ve got to tell ya.  I was pretty darn happy when Sarah and I got over the seven year mark.  I kept waiting to feel like I had rolled around in poison ivy, but (luckily!) the itch never came.

(whew)

But then I read this article:

http://lifestyle.msn.com/relationships/article.aspx?cp-documentid=24897268&gt1=32023

It turns out the whole seven year itch thing was an old wives tale (presumably told by old wives who had been married for, a far superior, 8 years.) 

Well, it turns out that it is actually a 12 year itch!  Can you believe that?  You get over the seven year hump only to be told that your marriage will almost certainly dissolve in another couple of years.

Now luckily, Sarah and I just celebrated 13 years of marriage (and by “celebrated” I mean we sat on the couch, ate sushi together and kept saying things like “I am so tired.”)

So we should be in the clear, but I’m just not sure.  I mean, if they’re going to change the itch from seven to twelve, what’s to stop them from changing it to fifteen or twenty?

I recently read an article saying that very few couples make it to their 75^th anniversary….because they die! 

How sobering is that?

So, anyway, that was the first horrible article telling me how depressed I am.

The second one came from New York Magazine.

Now, normally I expect nothing but joy and bubbly optimism from those heel-clicking perma-smilers in New York, so it came as quite a surprise to read such a depressing gritty article from the town of merriment.

The article is called “All Joy and No Fun – Why Parents Hate Parenting.” 

http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/

In it, some lady who has a bratty kid talks about how much parenting sucks.  And then, in an irony laced, depressed writing style, begins to pull out statistic after statistic showing how people who have kids are horribly depressed and suicidal and people who didn’t have kids are happy as clams, jet-setting around the world and drinking mimosas at every meal.

The author also got interviewed on the today show, which is fun to watch. 

Because it’s the today show, you learn virtually nothing of value, but the video is a hoot because poor Meredith Viera starts off the interview saying something about how the author is a single mother, then the author interrupts and says, “I’m not single,” and then Meredith blushes and apologizes and asks about her husband and then the author says she doesn’t have a husband, and then Meredith makes a mental note to have someone fired.

Good quality television.

 http://www.hulu.com/watch/164180/nbc-today-show-parenting-got-you-down-you’re-not-alone

Anyhoo….so this article talks all about how sad and depressed I am and how much happier I’d be if only I had never made the HORRIBLE choice to have kids and then more kids and then more kids and then even more kids and…. What the hell is wrong with me?!?

You think I would have learned how miserable and unhappy I was after the first kid made me so miserable and unhappy.  Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Of course, the funny part is that I don’t necessarily feel unhappy.

I feel tired…but I’m not entirely sure that’s the same thing.  I felt tired when I was teaching in Detroit, but then I really was tired and depressed (ooh!  I wonder if the study of all of the parents was done in Detroit and the study of all of the non-parents was done in Hawaii?  That would explain everything!)

I do think the article is fascinating.  It brings up a lot of interesting issues to think about, especially if you are a parent who is wondering why the little rugrats haven’t brought you bliss that that stupid Pampers commercial seemed to have promised

I thought it was particularly resonant in discussing how parenting differs today from 50 years ago and how modern parenting has morphed into this relentless and virtually impossible pursuit of perfection.  Particularly in places like New York, where this article was penned, there is a sense that children must be sent to the best schools and the best after care and the most prominent summer programs and be near the most developmentally appropriate playground and the most sensory rich environment to better engage the emerging neuron connections, or whatever and that if you don’t do all of these things, exactly right, you kid might end up spoiled, and self-centered (or is that what happens when you Do do all of those things?  I can never remember).

Yes, I think this article has a lot to say in a morose, “well, crap” kind of way.

But I think a lot of it boils down to this:

1) Some people are meant to be parents, and some probably aren’t.

2) Some people have the skills and personality that make parenting successful and easy and others have to work extremely hard to handle the complexities of raising children.

3) Some kids are relatively easy and some kids take an awful lot of work.

Such is the complexity and randomness of life.

Being a parent requires a pretty specific set of skills and it is a set that we are never taught.  If you get a job at McDonalds they will spend a week or so training you.  If you give birth to a baby, you’re pretty much on your own aside from the hospital’s mini-class on bathing your child, caring for the belly button stump and OH MY GOSH DON”T EVER PUT THEM TO SLEEP ON THEIR STOMACH!

Furthermore, most people spend a lot of time preparing for an infant.  They read tons and tons of books from Dr. Brazelton and Jenny McCarthy about how to care for a baby.  But then do almost no reading about how to raise a toddler and child.  And the reality is, it can be a lot easier to raise an infant than a two year old.  And unfortunately toddler problems tend to compound themselves until all of a sudden you have this difficult family situation with needy, whiny kids, an exasperated spouse, too few hours in the day, and a serious inclination to drift toward the liquor cabinet. 

So, I guess parents are more unhappy than non-parents, right?

No.

Sure, some are.  Abso-frickin-lutely some are.  They love their kids and wouldn’t trade them for the world…. but they’d trade them for the weekend.  And yes, for many people, parenting has become so difficult because of a variety of circumstances that they might conceivably have been happier in another parallel dimension where they never had kids.

But that’s the wrong way to look at an article like this.  This is the point where the true results of a social science report like this get twisted into a simplistic headline grabbing non-truth.

The issue is not “are childless people happier than parents?”  The issue is more about did people find what brings them happiness.

I don’t believe that you need to have children to be happy, but I do believe that I needed to have children to be happy.  It’s part of who I am.  I love being a Dad and I think I’m pretty darn good at it.  And had I not had children, I think there would have been a lingering emptiness in my life that I’m not sure I would have ever gotten over.

However, that is just me.  I have several friends who have chosen not to have kids and are leading full, happy productive lives. 

Both of these scenarios are perfectly acceptable and my guess is that there is a huge percentage of parents who are very happy.  I think the real revelation of this story is not that some parents are unhappy (it doesn’t take more than a trip to Wal-mart to figure that out), but rather that most childless couples ARE happy.

Our country has this stereotype of the miserable childless couple who always wanted to have kids but couldn’t and now they cry into their cups of “General Foods International Coffee” whenever an ad for diaper rash cream comes on the telly.

In generations past, an infertile couple was often condemned to childlessness, but now, most couples who have difficulty conceiving have a variety of options - these options are often expensive, invasive and complicated, but they do exist.  And most couples who want a child are able to have one through some means.

Which means that this sample of “happy childless couples” is precisely that: People who have chosen not to have children and are pretty happy with their decision. 

It probably doesn’t hurt that not raising kids is a hell of a lot cheaper and easier than raising kids.

I suspect that there are just as many happy parents as happy non-parents.  In fact, I suspect that (based on numbers alone) there are many many more happy parents than happy non-parents, based solely on the fact that there are many many more people with kids than without.

The problem comes with the numbers of (comparatively) unhappy parents.  Remember, this study doesn’t say that people with kids are unhappy, it simply says that childless couples are happi-ER. 

I think this is because there is such pressure to have children in this society that the people who actively choose not to are pretty sure of themselves and of their decision.  Whereas, I do suspect that lots of people have a child out of societal pressure, obligation or a lingering fear that they will “regret it” if they don’t.

Furthermore, and most importantly -  parenting is hard. 

Really, really hard. 

And as I said, earlier, the skills necessary to be not just a successful parent (whatever that means) but also to make parenting easy, are not readily available and are not usually taught.

And this is where the article is a little more successful.  It does a good job of discussing some of the things that make modern parenting so difficult, time consuming and stressful without ever achieving the image of the perfect well-adjusted family that we have all had imprinted in our minds by episodes of the Cosby Show.

In short, no matter what the New York Magazine says, childless people are not happier than those with children.  They are just (on average) happier than some people with children.

I love being a parent.  At times, it feels like the only thing I’ve ever been good at. 

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t, occasionally, difficult and frustrating and incredibly annoying, but, for me, it is and will always be a hell of a lot easier than teaching in Detroit.

That’s the true secret to life.  The people who always say, “parenting is the hardest job I’ve ever had” just had jobs that were too easy.  As long as you’ve had a really difficult, thankless job that you essentially fail at no matter how hard you try, BEFORE you have kids, then child-rearing feels like a wildly successful venture.

When I announced to my colleagues at my school in Detroit, that I was going to stay home with our infant daughter, someone asked, “aren’t you worried about how hard it’s going to be to raise a baby?”  I remember I looked in my classroom at the 34 children shouting and squabbling and carrying on and I said, “As long as my wife gives birth to less than 33 children, I think I’ll be fine.”

It’s all about perspective.

We currently have three kids and are about to adopt a fourth.  Sure it’s been challenging and difficult at times, but as I said, I’m good at it.  And compared to my last job, this is a breeze. 

I love being home with my kids.  I love being a parent and I don’t care what the New York Magazine says….

I’m pretty darned happy.

My youngest, Micah, turned three on Monday.  We had a party and a cake and presents and all the things that come with turning a year older, but is there anything a child looks forward to more than the birthday blog that their father writes completely unbeknownst to them? 

I think not.

So, without furthering anymore of that ado, here is a list of 10 things I love about my Micah J.

1.  He Can Talk!

Last year, when Micah turned two, he only said a few words.  In fact, my wife recently came across an email from last year where I had written to tell her that Micah had just pointed to a picture of her and said, “mama.” 

This counted for big news at the time.

Micah had been diagnosed with some speech and developmental delays and at the time it was impossible to know what had caused them and how easily they might be corrected.  When he turned two, he had been in speech therapy for about six months, and the results had been minimal at best.  I was still telling myself that he would make up this deficit, but it was very unclear when that might happen.

But then Micah, in his own inimitable way, decided several months ago to start talking up a storm. 

Parents pass around a number of apocryphal stories to reassure one another of perceived weaknesses in their children.  The one I heard over and over again was about the child who said almost nothing for years and years and his parents were terribly worried and then one day he started talking in complete sentences.

Well, it wasn’t quite like that, but it wasn’t too different either.

So, anyway, my point is that as Micah is about to begin his life as a three year old, he is finally able to tell you all about it. 

2.  His Smile

Micah has a smile that can light up a room. 

This is a pretty universally agreed upon fact, but I think it might strike me a little more significantly than others, because for a long while, Micah didn’t smile a lot.  Partly because of his speech delays, Micah was kind of an unhappy kid.  He wanted to communicate, but couldn’t and so there were many tantrums and breakdowns as a result of the fact that he wanted something in his desperate two year old way, but couldn’t figure out how to tell us. 

He would just scream and gesture frantically, while I stood bewildered in the middle of the Target parking lot, until I realized that he was furious that his sister had gotten out on “his side” of the van.

And not that we don’t occasionally still have some tantrums, but for the most part Micah is a happy, joyous child nowadays and I get to see that bright glorious smile of his more and more often.

3.  His Lance Armstrong Abilities

I’m speaking, of course, about his propensity for using and then discarding women.

No, no, wait. That’s not right.

I’m talking about his madcap bike riding skills.  (excuse me, I mean… “skillz”)  The boy is a holy terror on his 12 inch Diego bike. 

About 2 or three months ago, he cast his tricycle aside and decided to try out the two wheeler for the first time.  He climbed on and, after a little practice and getting used to the wobble of the training wheels, he realized that he could pedal himself forward.  He then realized he could pedal himself forward really, really fast.

This was fantastic.  He loved the speed and the daring.  There was just one problem, he had not quite mastered the use of the brake.  So he developed the habit of hurtling himself down the driveway at a couple hundred miles an hour and then using a curb or the side of a car as a means to stop.

My wife went out and showed him how to push back to brake and within 15 minutes he was hurtling himself down the driveway flying head first toward the garage door, only to squeal to a halt inches before slamming into the wall, all the while giggling with glee.

Drives his mother crazy.

4.  The Way He Plays With His Siblings

Now, I am not suggesting that he is a boy that never ever, say, takes a plastic guitar and cold cocks his brother with it…..

But in GENERAL….he plays very sweetly with his brother and sister.  Last week, his sister was out of town staying with her grandparents and Micah and Asher were hauling around a dozen or so stuffed animals in a box playing “daddy.”  They would take them into the playroom and let them take turns rolling down the plastic slide and then they loaded them back into the box and brought them into the living room where they put them to bed on the couch and covered them with a blanket before climbing in next to them.

It was about the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.

5.  He’s the Knock Knock Joke King

I bought my kids a joke book recently.  It was, maybe, the dumbest thing I’ve done since I bought them that box of cymbals, whistles and agitated parrots.

My older children, rather sweetly at first, began reading the jokes to one another and then repeating them to people they met.

Everyone they met.

Several times in a row.

As you might imagine, it doesn’t take too long before this kind of thing gets a little old. 

Anyway, a favorite joke emerged.  It goes like this:

Asher:  “Knock Knock”

Unsuspecting stranger:  “Who’s there?”

Asher:  “Impatient Cow.”

Unsuspecting stranger:  “Impati…..”

Asher:  “MOOOOOOOOO!”

Ok, it’s a fairly cute joke the first couple of thousand times you hear it, but after that the shine starts to wear off.  Well, as it turns out, the kids have repeated this joke so often that now even Micah knows it.

Of course, what is old and slightly annoying coming out of a 7 year olds mouth for the hundredth time becomes adorable and charming when it’s being garbled by a three year old with speech delays.  So, no matter how many times I’ve heard it, the impatient cow joke still cracks me up every time I hear Micah mumble his way through it.

6.  His Tiny Booty

Ok, my children are not exactly heavy weights.  They are all kind of small and kind of skinny, but Micah has taken this to a new art form.  The boy is scraw-nee.  We keep joking about what will happen when he starts to lose his baby fat, but it’s sort of one of those, “ha ha, uh…. ha…. um ….*sigh*”  kind of jokes.

It goes beyond just being able to count the boys ribs, he is just a wiry little bundle of crazed energy.

That being said, he has the cutest little derriere this side of the Pecos (reports have it that the world’s “cutest” derriere belongs to 2 year old Agnes Whipplemire who lives just West of the Pecos.  I don’t actually believe it’s cuter, but there are liability issues to asserting otherwise)

Anyway, the boys itty bitty booty is just too cute for words.

When he’s wearing a bathing suit, it looks like he’s smuggling a pair of nectarines into the pool. 

It is just too, too adorable.

7. He Has a Best Friend - Meena

Micah has a best friend.  She happens to be the younger sister of big brother Asher’s best friend, so the two of them see each other a lot.

Serena is a few months younger than Micah, but they love each other dearly.  They love to play together and squeal with delight when they see each other.  They just have the absolute best time together… when they’re not busy trying to gouge each other’s eyes out.

You see, for the last year, these two two-year-olds have behaved like, well,  two year olds.  They have been self centered and possessive and believed that the world should, by all accounts, revolve around them.

A common scenario would be that we would be over at Serena’s house and Micah would pick up one of her toys.  Serena would yell at him, Micah would yell back.  Serena would try to take the toy.  Micah would push her away.  And then Serena would lunge on top of him while pulling out her shiv.

This scenario would play out in the precise opposite manner if they were at Micah’s house.

Micah started calling Serena “Meena.” This was primarily as a result of his speech issues, but there may have been some underlying psychological resonance as well.

Serena, for her part, would regularly report at the dinner table that Micah had pushed her that day, even if they hadn’t actually seen each other.

It was a match made in thunderdome.

But as these two lovebirds have grown older, the instances of blood being drawn and fingernails needing to be surgically removed from foreheads has decreased considerably.  Now, when they run into each other’s arms screaming, “Micah!”  “Meena!” we can be relatively reassured that this playdate will still end with smiles and hugs as compared to tears and accusations.

It’s good to have a best friend.

8.  His singing

I am not a phenomenal singer, but I do well enough to get by.   I have sung in church or in college a capella groups, or community theater productions with relatively low standards and it is something I have always enjoyed.  And I have always hoped that my modest talent and love for singing might have been passed on to one of my children.

Well, my love for singing has definitely been passed on to my daughter, Audra, but unfortunately the talent part seems to have skipped by.  And Asher doesn’t seem to show much interest.

So my hopes are now riding on Micah.  It’s a little too early to tell about talent, but he does seem to have a love for singing.  He is particularly fond of the holiday classic “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” and the “Ooo, Eee, Ooo, Ah, Ah” chorus to the witch doctor song – both of which he will randomly break out and start singing in bed, or in the car or in the checkout at the grocery.

Enthusiasm like that is just plain contagious. 

9.  His Climbing Ability

His brother Asher is still probably the climbing champ of the family, but for his age, Micah probably has him beat.  Before he could walk, he was climbing up the sides of our playset and he hasn’t stopped.

He’s got the bug.

Which he may come by honestly considering that his older brother is an expert climber and that his uncle regularly spends his weekends climbing the rockfaces of mountains for fun, even though you could usually just drive right to the top in an air conditioned Ford Fiesta.

On a regular basis, we will have visiting friends or grandparents cringe in horror as he climbs on to the top of something that he probably shouldn’t be on top of.  But for us, it’s just part of who Micah is.  He’s a, now, three year old who loves to climb, loves to ride his bike and can pump for himself on a swingset.

He may have a speech delay, but he’s more than made up for it in his gross motor skills.  I’m confident he’s going to get at least a 4 in A.P. Outdoorsiness.

College credit here we come!

10.  He’s a Snuggler

Micah is our youngest child (so far!) and he’s also been our most difficult.  And being the youngest he tries desperately to keep up with his older siblings and do the things that they are doing, whether it’s age appropriate or not.

But he’s still my baby.  Maybe because of some of the extra work we had to put in because of his delays, or maybe because it’s just who he is, Micah is a snuggler.

When he gets tired or cranky, he NEEDS to be held, to be snuggled.  Sometimes I’ll be cooking dinner and I’ll feel something on my leg and see him standing there, Linus-like, holding his blanket, sucking his thumb and just being close.

It’s great to see your children grow up and do new things, but sometimes it’s nice just, even for a moment, to have a hint of that baby they used to be as they cuddle on your lap, snuggling in close, shutting out all the troubles of the world.

My little boy, what used to be my baby, is three now.  He starts preschool in a few weeks and grows more independent every day.  But in some ways he will always be the little boy tugging at my pants leg and, for at least a little while longer, I know he will be the somewhat larger, nectarine smuggling boy sitting in my lap.

Two was a hard year, but it was also a year of extraordinary change.  Micah is growing and changing before my very eyes with new achievements and new talents.  He’s my beautiful little baby boy.  And on this mid July day, I wish him the happiest of Birthdays.

I just finished reading a book called “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro.

It was a brilliant book, although so elegantly understated there were times I wished he would state things a little more overly.  I know that’s vague, but It’s a beautifully written story and I don’t want to give it away in case you’d like to read it (and for my illiterate readers, it’s going to be a movie this fall!)

So, I recommend you read it.  And then call me up, because I want to talk to somebody about the ending.  I mean, what’s up with that?

Anyway, without giving too much away about the secret evil twin serial killer twist at the end of the book (whoops!  I’ve said too much!) this novel is about a group of boarding school students who are growing up in a world just slightly different from the one we currently occupy.  They struggle with love and friendship.  They fall into petty jealousies and deep friendships.  There are moments of cruelty and moments of compassion.  For the most part, they grow up like most of us, trying to find their place in the world. 

The only main difference (and I don’t think this gives away too much) is that while they have to find their own place in a community of friends, their place in society is already prescribed.  They do not have to struggle to figure out what they will do when they grow up or what their purpose in life is. That is already set for them.

But they are still left to struggle with the other complexities of life – of finding love, of holding on to it, of creating happiness out of the life that you have.

I just finished the book last night, and my thoughts are still muddled, but I’ve thought a lot about these themes.  As people, and as Americans in particular, we believe that we have a great deal of control over our lives – over what we do and how things turn out.

Our protestant work ethic society basically suggests that you can be anything you want to be (Doctor! Basketball Star! President!) if only you work hard enough.  And once you achieve your goal, then everything will be right with the world and you will find happiness, contentment and joy in life.

And while there is a nugget of truth in this, the reality is much more complicated.  Yes, with hard work, there are many opportunities before you, but not all.  We are limited by genetics, and family history and where and when we were born.  I will never be a basketball player, or the president, and (I hate to break it to you) but neither will you.

There has got to be at least as much luck involved in achieving your dreams as there is hard work and ambition.  And of course, most of us discover sooner or later, that while the right job, the right house, the right income can guarantee some pleasantness in life, it is not a guarantee of happiness or contentment.

No, happiness is much more esoteric and seems wildly resistant to one’s planning and working hard to achieve it.

In the book, although the characters’ purpose and station in life is set, they are still responsible for finding contentment and happiness and love.  And in that way, they really aren’t any different than the rest of us, except that they learned early on, that those things would not come hand in hand with a degree, or a certain job.

I don’t know how much sense I’m making at the moment, but the point I am obtusely trying to make is that a contented life does not usually come in the ways that we expect it to.  This is something I struggle with, because I am a planner and it has become apparent to me that you can not “plan your way” to happiness.  I may think that repainting the foyer will make me happier and, indeed, removing the incredibly bland, life-sucking wall paper and replacing it with a color of some sort, will probably keep me from becoming depressed every time I walk down the hallway, it is not likely to actually make me happy.

I say all this to get to a point that is not particularly insightful or particularly brilliant but is, for me at least, comforting.

On Monday, Sarah and I celebrated our 13^th wedding anniversary.

It’s a pretty lame anniversary.  According to some website, the 13^th is the “textiles” anniversary.

yippee.  Jo-Ann Fabrics here I come.

We’ve been married long enough that it’s hard to get too excited about a low double digits anniversary and it’s not enough of a milestone to feel like you’ve actually accomplished something.

“Hey!  We just celebrated our 13^th anniversary!”

“Oh… hey, that’s great….uh….super….”

And we ended up celebrating it with about as much enthusiasm as a 13^th anniversary seems to warrant.  We spent the day driving back from visiting family and had a celebratory anniversary milkshake at McDonalds.   We thought about mustering up the energy to go out that evening, but couldn’t find a babysitter.  So we got home, put the kids to bed, ordered some Sushi takeout and sat on the couch watching some absolutely forgettable television.  I know that it’s forgettable, because our anniversary was 4 days ago and I have no idea what we watched.

In short, it wasn’t too radically different than any other night of our life.

It was not our dream anniversary.  It was not a magical night.  It was not what we hoped or planned for.

But it was nice.  And I was pretty content.

I am married to an absolutely wonderful woman.  She is cute, sexy, funny, smart and in ways that I can’t even quite put my finger on, manages to be a seemingly perfect fit for our life as a couple, life as parents, and life as individuals.

I could not have planned how I would meet someone as wonderful as she is (although I did have to plan how I would break up with my current girlfriend so I could start dating her) and yet, somehow, it happened anyway.

Lots of people spend their lives working toward big moments, but life isn’t really played out in the big moments.  The big moments are what get printed in your obituary, but life is lived out in the simple, forgettable moments – in reading books with the kids, or talking with friends, or while eating sushi out of a plastic container on a 13^th anniversary. 

My future is not necessarily set for me as it is for the characters in “Never Let Me Go.”

Lots of things can still happen.  There can be ups and downs still in my future.  I may have great public successes or a lifetime of quiet progression.  But the reality is (and I do try to remind myself of this) that the joy in my life will never be measured by the things that happen to me, as much as it may feel that way sometimes.

The joy and success of my life, will almost certainly be measured, not by accomplishments, careers, and achievements, but rather….

by how many nights I have the privilege of sitting next to my wife on the couch and doing nothing.

Contentedly.

My daughter is one of the more thoughtful 7 year olds you are ever likely to meet, which is nice, considering she is also one of the more self-involved 7 years olds you are ever likely to meet.  If she can not convince some poor adult to be her audience as she dances, sings, emotes and channels the love child of Laurence Olivier and Miley Cyrus, she will literally just perform for herself in front of the mirror.

But today we’re talking about how thoughtful she is.

Last week, the night before the last day of school she announced that she wanted to write a note to every child in her class.

I looked at my daughter, and I looked at my watch and then I looked back at my seven year old daughter.  “Uh….. ok.”

With most children, I would have laughed at them and told them that there was no way in the world they were going to get twenty-something handmade notecards written in the couple of hours before bed time, considering that they only even learned how to write about a year ago.

But not Audra.

She has tenacity.   If she says she is going to do something, you can pretty much count on it getting done.

Well….. if she says something like “I’m going to make a couple dozen cards in the next hour,” or “I think I’ll build a scale model of the Eiffel tower out of chex mix,” she’ll get it done. 

If she says, “yes, I’ll keep my room this clean,” she doesn’t really mean it.

So, while I began fixing dinner, Audra got her supplies together and started cutting paper and drawing.

I was worried about the time she had available to her.  There were only a couple of hours left until bedtime and a good chunk of that was going to be taken up by eating dinner and telling her brothers to leave her alone.  But I figured that she would just write “C YA L8R” on each card and call it a day.

Not my daughter.

She got done with the first two cards and this is what she had done.

Holy crap.  These were like illustrated epistles individually designed for each child!  Comments on gymnastics and future class placement?  This was some serious letter writing, and look at those drawings!  Do you know how hard it is to draw a triangle person upside down?  Or how about Audra’s illustration of her “elephantitis of the hand” condition.  It’s got to take a lot of self confidence to put that on paper!

My first thought was that I was just so proud of her.  It would have been easy to do nothing and equally easy to just do a slap dash job throwing something quick and easy together.  It takes a lot of work and a pretty special girl to sit down and write and illustrate different cards for every single child in class.

My second thought was “YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO FINISH!”

I mean come on, these one of a kind creations were going to take forever.  So I did the only thing a parent can do in a situation like this:

I nagged.

Every time I saw her get distracted, or take a cold wash cloth to press against her sweating forehead, I would snap at her.  “NO RESTING!  You’ve got 23 more cards to go!”

Every once in a while she would update me with her progress.

“I’ve only got 14 more to go, daddy, plus one for my teacher and one for the assistant and one for the bus driver and…”

THE BUS DRIVER!?!  Are you crazy?  You don’t have time for that!

But she soldiered on.  And as the evening passed she had written almost twenty different cards, such as:

Dear Peter,

I found this poem expecily for you this how it gose!  Peter Peter pizza eater, how I wish that you wear neater, hafe the pizzas on your shirt, clean the mess or no disert.  I hope you like it.

Your friend, Audra

Dear Ty,

I hope you have a great summer and be prepard for second grade I hear its hard work!

Your Friend,

Audra

With these words of encouragement and possible insult, my daughter was sending a message to the kids in her class. 

“I value your presence in my life.  You have changed me in ways you may never know.  I hope we can see each other in the future and, please, please, learn to use a napkin.”

Sometime after 9:00 we sent Audra off to bed with 4 more to go, plus the bus driver.  I was a little nervous about her getting it all done, but at 6:30 a.m. she was up and back downstairs hard at work finishing off the last of her cards.

By the time she got on the bus that morning, she had written one for every kid in her class, her teachers, the assistants, and, yes, the bus driver.

I’m sure most of the kids in her class took the cards, glanced at them and tossed them in their backpacks.  But that’s ok.  Because I think Audra has figured out that the joy in giving is not dependent on how that gift is received.   

It is a pleasure knowing that we are raising such a thoughtful, hardworking, and creative little girl.  And, yes, I do completely claim the credit for that.

I’ll leave you with two of my favorite cards that she wrote.  I like the sincerity.  I like the honesty and I like the fact that she accurately drew herself as a tiny dwarf next to her normal sized friends.

Have a great summer!

I have a problem.

A condition, really.  Or, at least, so I’m told. 

I have, what people repeatedly tell me, is a “Costanza Wallet.”

Apparently back in the 90s on a little show called “Seinfeld.”  The character of George Costanza carried a large, overstuffed wallet so full of receipts, bonus cards, photos and the occasional snippet of cash, that it literally caused him to sit on an angle when he put it in his back pocket.  Here is a three minute primer on the issue:

So, I have been accused of this very same thing.  And, I have to admit, my wallet probably bears more similarities than differences to the “costanza wallet.”  I’ll get into the details later, but for the sake of being honest and forthright, here is a photo of my wallet.

Ok, now let’s begin with the excuses.

First of all, this is a great wallet.  My father in law gave me this leather wallet almost a decade ago.  He picked it up in some South American country he was visiting (Bolivia?  Honduras?  Istanbul?)  And it is a very high quality wallet.  I abuse it every day, stuffing it full and bending it shut and forcing it into pockets and it never quits on me.  I have replaced the chintzy plastic accordion card holder three times, but the wallet keeps on ticking…. er…..not becoming unstitched.

So, I am very fond of it.  And, yes, I do have to admit that it is a bit large and, yes, it is uncomfortable to put in my back pocket because it is so large, but I have solved this problem. 

I put it in my front pocket!

Sure, it makes me look like have a large rectangular tumor growing out of my thigh, but it fits just fine, is easy to access, and I always know if it is there or not, because it slightly inhibits my leg movement.

No one is stealing from me!

But, I recognize that the main criticism my, apparently quite rude, friends have is that I have “too much” in my wallet and there is an implication, therefore,  that some of the things in my wallet are “unnecessary.”

Now, before I start defending the contents of my wallet, let me just say.  It is one thing for a man to criticize me as he condescendingly holds up his slim wallet with a driver’s license, credit card and single twenty dollar bill inside.  It is, however, something else entirely for a woman to mock me while simultaneously hoisting a 30 lb purse over her shoulder that is essentially the size of a small collie and contains everything from an umbrella to stapler to a large case of Luna bars. 

I may have a large, somewhat unwieldy, wallet, but it does fit nicely in my pocket.

These women, LITERALLY, need a shoulder strap to carry the contents of their personal belongings with them, so LAY OFF!

If I attached a shoulder strap to my wallet, it would look like the daintiest little clutch ever, and everyone would say, “oh my, how do you carry everything you need in such a tiny purse?”   And then they’d beat me up.

Anyway.

As I’ve stated previously, my wallet has lots of important stuff in it.  Let’s examine it shall we?

On the interior of my wallet I have 4 dollars, 11 receipts and a 1983 penny.

On the right side I have very important cards.  I have my debit card which I use all the time, my Barnes and Noble book card and my Borders book card and a credit card and… wait a minute.  There’s supposed to be a second credit card here.  It appears to be missing.  Hmmmm.  Give me a minute.

Ok, so we checked it out.  I don’t know where the card is, but we looked up the account info and no one has stolen it and purchased beer or guns or Liza Minnelli tickets or anything.  (although this does seem like a good opportunity to purchase beer, guns and Liza Minnelli tickets and blame it on someone else.  Hmmmm.)

Ok, The other side of my wallet is where I keep all of the cards I need to access on a daily, weekly or semi annual basis.  Here is a list of what I have there.

Regal Cinemas Club Card

A free Movie ticket coupon

Bow Tie cinemas club card  (I do love the movies!)

My Starbucks gold card (that’s right… I’m a gold level member)

Some “family perks” card for a store I can’t identify, but I already have 3 punches on it!

A $10 off coupon at Target

A buy 6 get 1 free card for Maggie Moos Ice Cream (only 1 to go!)

My Safeway club card that doesn’t work anymore because the back is all messed up

A $5 off Target coupon that expired in April

An Office Depot club card that may or may not do anything

Pigtails and Crewcuts 50% off your 10^th haircut card (4 more to go!)

Coldstone Creamery buy 10 get 1 free card (ALL 10 STARS PUNCHED!!!)

Gymboree rewards card

A 2^nd Maggie Moos buy 6 get 1 free card (only 3 to go!)

Borders kids book club card circa 2004 with three punches

A never used Great Cookie Company Cookie Club card

An American Craftworks buy $250 get $25 off card (only $237 more to go!)

California Tortilla Burrito Elito Card

Metro SmartTrip Card

And My HSA Insurance Card for paying Doctor’s bills.

Now, some people might suggest that I don’t actually need every single one of the 20 cards I have listed here.  But I think if you look back over the list, it is pretty clear that I need every single one of those items and that I am “this close” to saving a whole lot of money.

Ok, so did I mention that this was a tri-fold wallet?  Because, so far we’ve just been over the left side and right side of the wallet.  As you might imagine, these are the areas where I keep my most used cards, because I need to have quick and easy access to them.

I keep the less important cards in the middle area where the accordion plastic thingy is.  These are the cards that I either rarely need to take out, or that I only need to flash to people occasionally.

Let’s do a quick inventory so that you can see how important they all are.

My Driver’s License (Turns out I’m an organ donor!)

My health insurance card
Audra’s health insurance card

Asher’s health insurance card

Micah’s health insurance card

Aloysius’s health insurance card (who hasn’t lived here since January)

AAA card (possibly expired.  Probably should check)

A 2^nd AAA card (definitely expired)

A now illegible handwritten card from my wife that probably says I Love you or something

A Bank of America credit Card that expired in August of 2004

A tiny Southwest airlines rewards card that I printed off

A car insurance card that expired in October 2007 from a company we no longer have

My voter registration card (never know when you might need it!)

An ATT pre paid phone card from when I had to use pay phones in college

My Library card

A library card from a county I lived in 3 years ago

My Drew University Alumni card (good for 10% off in the bookstore!)
A dental insurance card that I’m pretty sure is from 3 jobs ago

A picture of my children from 2 years ago

My Kennedy Center Membership (I get free coffee in the lounge!)

A Smithsonian Membership that expires in 9 days (gets me nothing!)

Wolf Trap Membership (I love to support the arts!)

A photo of when I only had 2 kids (good times)

A second Voter registration card (You can never be to safe with your freedoms!)

A debit card for the checking account we never use

My Sams’ Club membership

My BJ”s Club Membership

An expired Smithsonian membership (gets me less than nothing!)

A Borders frequent drink card, probably from when we lived in Michigan circa 2000

And a buy 20 get 20% off card for a consignment shop (Only 17 punches to go!)

I also have a picture of Sarah on our wedding day.  A picture of Audra at 6 months old And a four year old picture of Audra and Asher.

So, to summarize:

My wallet contains 54 cards, 5 photos, 11 receipts and 4 dollars.

Ok, that seems bad.  But bear in mind, I carry cards verifying that I am a “member” of 24 different organizations that offer me discounts and special perks.  That’s pretty impressive isn’t it?  I bet you don’t know too many people who are “members” of as many special clubs as I am.  (If you want, I can even use my memberships to get you into some of these elite clubs.  If you ever need 40 rolls of toilet paper, I can HOOK YOU UP!)

So, gentleman and especially ladies, why don’t we just lay off my wallet, shall we?  I think it is pretty clear now that I have very carefully selected everything I carry with me and that everything in there has been useful to me at some point in the last 10 years, or is likely to be useful to me sometime in the next 10.

I was a boy scout and our motto was “Be Prepared.”  I fully expect that every other former boy scout in the world has a wallet very similar to mine.

Think of my wallet as a swiss army knife and all my membership cards as the tiny saw: completely useless and ineffectual, but good to have.

So, if everyone can just get off my back about my wallet, that would really help, especially since its weight is already causing me some spinal problems.

And besides, inventorying my wallet like this has helped me to learn a lot about myself.  I’ve learned about my compulsions, my neurosis, the relative infrequence with which I open the trifold area of my wallet but most importantly, I’ve learned this:

Coldstone Creamery owes me a free ice cream cone.  And in my mind, that validates every card I have.

So, there!

I have delightfully terrible news for you today:  Jesus was electrocuted.

Ok, let me explain.

Two of my best friends in the whole world live in Cincinnati.  It’s a lovely place.  A fact I am repeatedly told by my friend Sean who grew up there, went away to college, married one of my best friends and dragged her back there to raise children and enjoy the Cincinnati way of life (which, best I can tell, involves eating chili on top of spaghetti and drinking a lot).

Anyway, despite the fact that they live in Ohio, we make an effort to go visit them every year - usually in the middle of a snowstorm. 

One year, when I was visiting them in the middle of a snowstorm we needed to drive up to the Dayton airport to pick up my wife who had wisely decided to fly separately rather than drive with me through a foot of snow as we traveled across West Virginian in a van with our children.

So, Sean and I were driving from the Natti up to Dayton to pick up Sarah because it’s too durned expensive to fly directly into Cincinnati.  Sean, being the natti-o-phile that he is was eagerly pointing out to me all kinds of random things as we drove at about 20 miles an hour along the highway in blizzard conditions.

As we were driving along, discussing why in the hell the city of Dayton even existed, Sean excitedly said, “Hey!  We’re about to pass the Butter Jesus!”

“What?’

“The butter Jesus!”

“What?’

“The butter Jesus!”

“Wha…..”

This went on for a while.  Eventually, soon after passing “Trader’s World” and the Hustler store, off on the right, emerging from the torrent of snowflakes was the largest statue of Jesus I have ever seen in my life…. and I’m from Tennessee where we love us some big ol’ Jesuses.

There, along the side of the highway was a 60 foot high statue of the torso of Jesus in the middle of a large pond.  Jesus holds his hands outstretched to heaven as if saying “Thank you father.”  Or possibly, “Hey!  A little help down here?  I’m stuck in this man made lake in the middle of Ohio!”

The statue is painted this fairly unappealing yellowish color which has led most of the locals to refer to it as “Butter Jesus” as if it were the second place finisher at the ag. fair.  It is also commonly referred to as “Touchdown Jesus” since Jesus appears to be signaling to God that the extra point was “good”

Any google search for butter Jesus or touchdown Jesus will take you directly to a photo of this monstrosity, but I’m a nice guy, so I’ll just give you a picture here.

Ah, butter Jesus.

Well, I was duly impressed by this massive testament to a love of Jesus and general poor judgment.  But I was also confused.  Why in the world did they have just half of Jesus?  Why not the whole guy?

Now, iIt could be because they wanted to depict Jesus as he returned from being baptized.

Maybe.

My guess, however, is that while a 60 foot Jesus is really expensive to build… a 120 foot Jesus is just stupid amounts of money.   That would make it as tall as the “Christ the Redeemer” statue in Brazil.  Of course, that is a beloved symbol of not just Rio, but God’s compassion for all of the people who reside below.  And Butter Jesus is just a big tacky paper-mache statue on the side of the interstate in Ohio…. not that it really detracts from the beautiful scenery that is suburban Ohio, but… still.

Anyway. 

I was definitely impressed / amused / appalled by this statue which seemed to embody both the best and worst of American Christianity.

As the years passed, I would keep an eye out for butter Jesus whenever I happened to be driving to Dayton.  We also got in the habit of passing along information about this highway landmark whenever it, inevitably, appeared in the news. 

Then, one Christmas as I was trying to figure out what to get Sean for Christmas, one of my favorite singers released a new album and the very first cut was titled “Monroe, OH.”  I didn’t think much of it at the time, until I popped it into the CD player and the first line of lyrics were

“A sixty foot Jesus, rising out of the water.  On the side of the interstate, waist deep in rapture…”

Holy crap!  It was a song about butter Jesus!

If there had ever been a better Christmas present for someone lived in Cincinnati, and loved Butter Jesus, well, let me tell you, it was hard to imagine what it would be. 

Here for your listening pleasure is Robbie Schaefer’s “Monroe, OH.”

Delightful.

Equally delightful, but perhaps a bit more disturbing is the fact that this is not the only song written about the absolute best thing between Cincinnati and Dayton.

The singer Heywood Banks also wrote a song, aptly called “Big Butter Jesus.”

So, as you can tell, Butter Jesus is definitely an inspiration to people.  Whether it’s a good or bad inspiration is debatable.

Whether spending several hundred thousand dollars to build a giant tacky statue of Jesus along the side of the interstate is a good idea is, as far as I’m concerned, legitimately up for debate.  But who am I to question these devoted followers.

Now, God, on the other hand, is totally in a position to offer an opinion on such a matter.  But how would God go about expressing his position on such a thing?  How would God express his opinion as to whether a giant expensive tacky statue was either a beautiful tribute to his love for us and a visible example of his grace, or an absolutely appalling waste of money on a giant, tacky, idolatrous, highway horror.

So how would we know?  How could we tell whether God thought this was a bit of Divine Dairy or a Butte Abomination?

Well, how about this.  What if God were to send a giant lightning bolt out of the sky to strike Butter Jesus and

BURN IT TO THE GROUND!

Seriously.  Would that be a sign?

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20100615/NEWS01/306150004/Jesus-destroyed-by-act-of-God

Burned to the ground.

I am not one to take this kind of thing as a sign…. But, honestly, if you’re not going to take this as a sign, what will it take?

This story has been all over the news.  It was in the Washington Post and on MSNBC and CNN with headlines such as

“Touchdown Jesus meets Fiery End”

And

“Big Butter Jesus Zapped by God!”

Wow. 

I am really hoping the reporting continues.  The church is already pledging to “rebuild” which is…. I don’t know….. fine?  But here’s my big question.  Here is the question that I want our investigative reporters to investigate and to answer.

According to the church’s insurance policy, IS lightning striking big butter Jesus, engulfing it in flames, and burning it into a smoking pulp considered…..

….an act of God?

Because if so…. Maybe we should reconsider the whole “rebuilding” thing.

I have to tell you, if I built a 60 foot high statue of Tina Turner dancing to Proud Mary in the front yard and then, one night, it burned to the ground, and the insurance company declared that it was as a result of….

….an act of Tina Turner.

I gotta tell you.  I would just sweep up the ashes and spend the estimated half million dollars it would take to rebuild it on something else, like say… feeding the hungry, or healing the sick or something else Jesus was always prattling on about.

Or, honestly… anything else at all.

Anything.

But, if that is not to be, if Touchdown Jesus is to rise from the non-metaphorical ashes once more, then might I at least suggest…

Maybe a different color?

RIP Butter Jesus  

2004 - 2010

As I’ve mentioned, our family is in the process of adopting a child from Ethiopia.  Part of the process involves doing a lot of reading about adoption in general, but also about the country in particular.

Ethiopia is a country with somewhere between 4 to 6 million orphans, most as a result of the ongoing AIDS epidemic.  A little over 2,000 children are adopted each year.  And in between those numbers is a great deal of pain, misery and death.

One of the books we read told the story of a woman, Haregewoin Teferra, who started an orphanage for children whose parents died of AIDS. 

http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/

This was when very little was known about AIDS and most people feared the disease to the point of shunning anyone with an association with it.  This woman became the only person in the area who would take in AIDS orphans and one of the only people who would even talk to or associate with individuals infected with the disease.  Because of this, Haregewoin becomes a magnet for some of the most desperate people in the city.  She had infected men knocking at her door begging for scraps of food.  She had dying mothers showing up in the middle of the night imploring her to take their children.

It is heartbreaking.

Despite that this all happens on the other side of the planet, when you are reading the book, it is not difficult to put yourself in the position of this one good woman. 

You want to help.  You feel the pain of both the mothers abandoning their children and of Haregewoin who must now figure out how to feed one more child in her burgeoning home.  You feel her desolation as she offers up a few crumbs of food to strangers, even though she barely has enough food to feed the children in her care.

The thought that runs through your mind is this:  If someone showed up at my door begging for food, begging for help to save their child, then I would do the exact same thing that Haregewoin did.  I would help them.

It is a natural instinct, the desire to help others.  And certainly if someone were to show up on your doorstep you would do what you could.  We all would.

Would any of us turn away a dying woman who rang our doorbell, begging only for some food to feed her child?

No.

But of course, we don’t really have to worry about that, do we?

I don’t know about you.  But I never have people showing up on my doorstep begging me to give them some food or asking me to take their baby from them because they are about to die.

It never happens.

Many people would say that this is blessing.

Aren’t we blessed to live in an area where that doesn’t happen?

Well, yes and no.  You see, the thing is, that it is not “a blessing.”  A blessing implies that somehow we have been given something.  And we have not been “given” the fact that we do not have people coming to our doors.  The fact that our doorbells remain silent is a choice.

Perhaps one could argue that we have been “blessed” with enough money to allow us to live somewhere that doesn’t have such poverty, but, still, the choice of WHERE we choose to live is solely our own.

We choose the location of our home.  We hire people to help us find a home in a “good neighborhood.”  We spend lots of money to ensure that our home is “safe” and “comfortable.”  And although we shroud these decisions in the desire to “protect our property value” or to attend “good schools,” there really is no way to escape the fact that at the very core of what we are doing is actively choosing a home largely based on the fact that it keeps us physically distant from people in need.

Obviously, this is not a catch all statement.  There are certainly people who make different decisions.  But for the most part, people all around the world spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to be as far away as possible from people with less money than themselves.

There is no blessing or serendipity in the fact that people do not knock on our door begging for food.  We paid lots of money to ensure that fact.

I am certainly no exception to this.  We live in a very nice home on 2 acres in the country.  You really can’t even get out here without a car.  And, of course, I would tell you that I didn’t choose this home because it was far away from the poor, the hungry and the destitute.  I chose it because there were lots of trees, and because it was quiet, and because the neighborhood was “nice,” but the truth is that the results are the same.

And when we use the words “nice” or “good neighborhood” or “good schools,” whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we are specifically describing places that – by their definition – are devoid of the poor and all of the societal ills that accompany poverty.

This self segregation that we all participate in is not unique to America.  Indeed it exists throughout the world.  For the most part, we all buy as “nice” a house as we can afford and this inherently places us in a neighborhood with other people just like us.  There aren’t too many people much poorer than us and not too many people much richer.  We all end up being pretty similar – the same income level, the same kind of family structure and often even the same kind of race and religion.  And this feels pretty good.

We are not overly annoyed by a next door neighbor who has just bought a 44 million dollar yacht, nor are we embarrassed to mention to the guy down the street that we are going to spend a week at the beach because he’s living in a tin shack.

No, we all set our lives up in such a way that the choices we make (yachts, trips to the beach, begging for food) seem normal.  There is no need to question these choices because all of the people around us are making the exact same decisions we are. 

Or, let’s be honest, the choices our neighbors are making are actually a lot worse, aren’t they?  I mean, the Smiths go to Disney World every year!  That is just decadent.  And the Joneses didn’t contribute anything to the community bake sale, and I don’t think the Jacksons even go to church!

When we are merely judging ourselves based on the actions of those directly to the left or the right of us, it’s pretty easy to feel good about yourself.  To feel like you are doing good in the world because of that one time a month you volunteer at the food bank, or the fact that you give at the “Sponsor” level to the American Cancer Foundation.  That alone raises you to the top 90% of all your neighbors.  And how can it be bad if you’re being better than everyone else?

And of course, as we sit in worship hearing about the good Samaritan, we reassure ourselves that were we to come across a man who had been beaten on the side of the road, that we would go out of our way to help that person regardless of their race or religion or income - while simultaneously ensuring that we would never come across such a person. 

We create lives that allow us to live in deceitful ignorance that any of this pain and hardship exists in the world, while a few miles down the street in an area of town that we actively avoid driving through there are thousands of people suffering in precisely the way we claim we would help if they were to show up at our doorstep.

So, we lead a life of self delusion.  We are smart, intelligent people, who on a daily basis fool ourselves into believing that the world, or at least OUR world, is a good and happy place with little pain or suffering.

I indict myself here.

I spend my days in relative comfort and yet still find the wherewithal to complain about the minor annoyances of my life – the rude guy on the highway, the careless waiter, the limited produce selection at the grocery store.

I don’t know if living this way is evil.  I’m not entirely convinced that living a “good” life in a “safe” neighborhood is wrong.  It is, in fact, what we aspire to for our children and what we sincerely hope that the poor and destitute of the world will someday be able to achieve.

I don’t know that it is wrong to live this way, but I do know that it leads to a complacency – a sense that we are doing enough, and that the world is ok, because that is what we see when we look out the window.

Meanwhile, a few miles away, the view outside the window is very different.  And 7,000 miles away in Ethiopia, the view is even more different still.

It is probably not wrong to live a “good” life, but it is almost certainly wrong to live a life of self imposed ignorance. 

If we profess that we would be willing to help if only the need presented itself, then we must take responsibility for the fact that we have actively chosen a life where the need is hidden. 

Every day, people knock on the doors of Haregewoin’s orphanage. 

Every day, my door remains silent.

There is no mystery to this.  There is no blessing.  There is no fate.

It is merely a matter of choice on our part.  I don’t know whether it is wrong to make the choice that we have made.  But I do know that it is wrong to deny that it was an overt and conscious decision. 

As any real estate agent will tell you.  The value of any house is not in the structure itself, but in its location, location, location.

The question we need to ask ourselves is not just what is in the location we have chosen to live at, but also, what is not there.

Who is not there?  And what responsibility or obligation do we have to help people once we have removed ourselves from their presence.

Few of us could abandon a dying child on our doorstep.  We would see it as a moral obligation to help them, because “fate” had pressed our lives together.

And yet every day we make the choice to own a doorstep free of such horrors.

We choose to free ourselves of this “moral obligation” because our lives are designed to never come in contact with such need.

I would suggest that it is a sin to turn your back on a child in need – that it would be evil to dismiss a starving mother from your front door. 

But is it also a sin to place your door in such a location that the poor and starving could never find it?

I’ll admit that I do not know the answer to this question.

But I am troubled.

I was running a little late, but I was still on time. 

I had all three kids loaded into the van and we were driving Audra up to the bus stop.   I just needed to get her on the bus by 8:40, and then drive Asher 15 minutes to the preschool in Bowie by 9:00, and then take Micah with me for a morning of errands so we could be back to the preschool by 12:00 and blah blah blah.

Well, it was 8:42 as we pulled out of the driveway, but I was still feeling confident.  I knew we had missed the bus at Audra’s bus stop, but I have a secret weapon.  Right after us, the bus turns down a side street to make a few stops, so, if I can buzz past that side street, before it completes it’s little circle, I can usually head to the end of the road and wait for the bus there.

I zoomed (carefully) to the top of the hill.  As predicted, we had missed the bus, but I was sure we weren’t far behind.  I hung a hard left and hurried along.  I passed the side street and…. YES!  We had done it, the bus was down there.  All I needed to do was hop down a mile or so and wait.

As I was driving I was listening to this story on NPR about people who donated money to pay down the national debt.   Apparently back in the 80s when the US debt was just a measly couple trillion dollars, some nurse in Wisconsin decided to try to encourage people to send in donations to the federal government to pay down the debt.

And shockingly…. People did.  It was a fascinating story about a generation of people who had survived World War II,  saved their whole life and didn’t believe it was healthy for the country to carry such a large debt.  And since the government seemed unwilling to do something about it, they decided to start sending in checks.

This was fascinating to me. The issues around our national debt have always concerned me and I loved this odd, but practical solution to it.  This one nurse managed to rally thousands of people to send in millions of dollars.  Of course, (spoiler alert) it didn’t work.  Apparently, in the early 90s when the government was running a surplus and the debt began to decrease in the Clinton years, people thought maybe this debt thing would get taken care of and stopped sending in donations.

The whole thing was completely bonkers, but there was something endearingly simple and straightforward about a group of…..

“Dad!”

Audra was calling out to me from the back seat.

“Dad!  Why does that sign say ‘Bowie’?”

I looked up and there was the “welcome to Bowie” sign that we’ve probably driven past a thousand times.

Jiminy Christmas!  Can’t these blasted kids give me a couple of frickin minutes to myself so I can just listen to the stupid radio and… sheesh!

“Well, Audra,” I said, with perhaps a hint of sarcasm.  “The sign says Bowie, because we’re driving into Bowie, and….  Wait a minute!  What are you still doing in the car!?!”

Holy crap.  I had gotten so involved in that stupid radio story that I had driven right past the bus stop and put-putted merrily along my way, without even thinking, straight toward Asher’s preschool.

DAMN YOU NPR!!!

So I made a quick u-turn and began driving as fast as seemed reasonable back toward Audra’s school which was 15 minutes in the opposite direction.  If we hurried, she could still make it to school on time.  I can’t believe I did that.  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid!

“Daddy,” piped up Asher, “Where are we going?  My school’s the other way.”

Shut up shut up shut up!

“I know honey, we forgot to take Audra to school, so we’ve just got to run over there really quick.”

And that’s the story about how I was running a little late, but was still going to be on time, but then ended up being totally late and how, really, it’s all NPR’s fault.

The End.

So, Al and Tipper are separating.

After 40 years of politics, uncomfortably long kisses and standing around telling everyone how great their marriage is, the Tennessee golden couple are going on a break.

Oh, did they learn nothing from Ross and Rachel?

I don’t know, somehow this has really bothered me.  I went to middle school and high school in Tennessee and I have fond memories of my mom dragging me to the stuffy upstairs attic room of our library to sit around with half a dozen senior citizens and listen to Senator Gore talk in his funny accent about exciting things like social security reform  (this was years before anyone had even thought about using lock boxes as a governmental financial tool).

The funny thing is that Al was always funny and charming and engaging in these little sessions and so it was always such a surprise to me when I saw him looking so awkward and “stick-in-the-muddish” during the 2000 election.  The Al Gore I saw fielding questions from overly medicated seniors would have totally won the election….. I mean won it even more. 

So, anyway, I’ve always had a fondness for Al.  And likewise I’ve always had a fondness for Tipper, even though I’ve never quite gotten over the fact that people call her “Tipper” which seems either silly, or rude, or like the kind of nickname you get for being a little too wild in college, but certainly not something you would call your wife… but what do I know.

Yes, I was charmed by Al and Tipper.  They always seemed cute and a little goofy and sincerely happy to be with one another.  It was always nice to see models of happy marriages, especially in the world of politics – an arena which seems to either cause men to have affairs with unattractive women (or men) or to have long term loveless marriages of convenience with their cold, angry wives who seem to always be wearing a forced smile.

I mean think about it.  How many sincerely happy politician couples can you think of?

No, Al and Tipper were like America’s nerdy sweethearts.  Sort of like Sandra Bullock and…. Er, Justin Timbelake and Britney Sp….. uh, I mean, Elizabeth Taylor and….. no, wait how about Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy?  Of course, they were married to other people and all, but…. Oh never mind.

Anyway…. Al and Tipper.  40 years.  Now, kaput.

It really bothered me.

I think what bothered me most was that there didn’t seem to be any reason for it.  It’s been 48 hours since the announcement and there is still not even a whisper of an affair, or another woman, or another man, or even a sexy polar bear who’s just a little lonely and needy after losing her habitat.

And believe me, while I may question the efficacy of capitalism or the inherent goodness of people, I will never question the ability of the tabloids to dig up some *** once they’ve been given a lead.  If the Enquirer hasn’t found anything yet, there’s nothing out there to be found.

I think I could understand it better if Fox News was reporting  that Al was having a torrid affair with Jane Goodall or that Tipper had fallen for the pool boy (or girl..… “couldn’t you see it?” my wife asked me last night.  Hmmmm)

Actually, I’m pretty sure that Al Gore might be gay, based solely on this clip of Ed Helms doing his “Gay Al Gore” impression.

Yes, if there was another man, or woman, it would seem a little easier to digest.  Because, as horrible as that might be, it would explain it.  “Oh,” we would say, “Just like a man, Al has gotten all twitterpated over Madeline Albright.”  Or, “Well it’s sad, but I can’t say that I’m surprised that Tipper left Al for Ron Reagan.  (Tipper and the Lil’ Gipper).

But when, there’s nothing that has happened – no affairs, no horrible life event, no mid life crisis -  it leaves you worried that what finished off this relationship was… well, nothing.

I mean Al and Tipper have already been through the worst of what their life has to offer.  They have endured a tumultuous political career with multiple presidential runs, a horrible car accident that almost killed their son and perhaps the most traumatic political defeat in American history.  Through all of that they clung together and, if anything, their marriage seemed to grow stronger. 

And now, just as life seems to have returned to normal, and their days are filled with interesting people, loving grandchildren and various accolades, they have decided, at age 62, to “separate.”  Whatever the hell that means.

The thing is that this story makes you worry not just about Al and Tipper, but a little bit about marriage in general.  They had a storybookish marriage, with ups and downs like all marriages and they came through it, good and bad, only to decide after 40 years…. “eh, whatever.”

I have not had a lot of experience with divorce in my life.  No one in my wife’s or my family has ever been divorced and most of our friend’s marriages are still going strong.

I read an article recently that said that most divorces either happen in the first couple of years of marriage after the couple says, “what the heck were we thinking?”  Or after about 8 years when the stress of kids takes hold (it apparently takes a year for the divorce to finalize, once the “itch” starts).  Or after the kids leave home and you realize that you don’t have anything in common anymore and your mid life crisis sets in and you go get a Porsche and a 28 year old girlfriend.

But after 40 years?  That almost never happens.

We like to think that marriages are for all eternity – that the love that bloomed at age 19 is enough to carry us forward for another 60 years until that lifetime of french fries catches up with us. 

Standing here, about to celebrate 13 years of marriage, I don’t want to contemplate the idea that things can be good at 5 years of marriage, good at 10 years of marriage and even good at 20, 25 and 30 years of marriage, but then, somewhere after you have spent two-thirds of your life married, it can just not seem worth it anymore.

That’s scary.

To think that no matter how great things are at the moment, that pain, misery, or just a lingering blah can still destroy a marriage thirty years from now.

For that reason I have been praying that Al is getting all hot and heavy with Sonia Sotomayor or that Tipper is having a raging lesbian affair with Elizabeth Edwards (wouldn’t that be nice?).

I just don’t want to think that my wonderful 13 years of marriage could still be vulnerable to nothing more insidious than, simply, time.

I know it’s not that clear cut.  Sarah and I have a remarkable relationship.  We have had an easy, wonderful, first 13 years of marriage and I have no reason to think that the next 20, 30, 40 or 70 years won’t be exactly the same (yes, I plan to live to 107).

It’s just that it makes me a little sad to think about the Gores and this quiet, bland,  dissolution to their 40 years of marriage.

And mainly it worries me, because I’m just not sure I want to live in a world where the best political marriage I can think of is….

Bill and Hillary Clinton

This isn’t going to be much of a blog today.

It’s kind of a busy week.  In fact, you’re pretty lucky that this one’s getting written at all.  You see, we have the home visit part of our adoption home study tomorrow and, apparently, when a social worker shows up at your door to assess your family and home, it is important to make the home appear to be clean. 

This is never a particularly easy task for our family, but it has been made worse by the fact that the teenage boys living in our basement have left and the basement is suffering from three years of having teenage boys living in it.

I don’t know if it has been vacuumed at any point in the last three years.

This can be a problem when plates of food are regularly brought downstairs and stored for weeks on top of piles of old laundry.

To further complicate matters, the teenagers left as if they were escaping the mob.  They just got up and walked out the door.  So, the cleaning involved stuffing several giant trash bags full of clothes and CDs and what not to give to Goodwill before I could even start throwing away the giant bags of actual trash.  (If anyone wants some Girbaud t-shirts - size XL, the Goodwill in Annapolis has a nice selection)

I also found some missing silverware, a bottle of hot sauce, two hammers, an air hockey table and a tube of tattoo cream.

We also found at least 20 missing towels.  Apparently when one of the boys would come upstairs to shower, they would take a towel out of the linen closet, shower, carry the towel downstairs to the basement, throw it in their dirty laundry and then put it away with their laundry and then the next day, go upstairs take a new towel out of the linen closet and repeat.

Meanwhile Sarah and I and the kids were all drying off by using a single old Little Einstein’s towel and a large washcloth.

Anyway…..  So I spent the last two days hauling furniture, listing things on craigslist, vacuuming, scrubbing, swiping at cobwebs and using more bleach, Lysol, and carpet cleaner than is probably healthy for any one human.

In addition, I decided that I should probably wash all the clothes and towels and such that had been left in the absolutely filthy basement, and so I stripped the beds and carried everything upstairs and created a giant mound of dirty laundry.  The kids actually played king of the mountain on it.  I think it took 8 loads of laundry to process it all.

Ok, so what’s my point?

Well, the truth is, that I have been way to busy to worry about blogging or even worry about coming up with a witty and intriguing topic on which to blog about, so instead you just get some incoherent ramblings about dirty clothes and tattoo cream. 

Hope you’re enjoying it

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about was this:  Last night, Sarah had a meeting, so I decided to begin folding the 8 loads of clean laundry in addition to the 5 loads of the kids’ laundry that had been sitting upstairs in our bedroom for the last week.

I decided to watch “Say Anything” while I folded.  Now, believe it or not, I had never seen “Say Anything” before.

I know, I know.  How can someone of my generation have missed that movie?  I don’t know.  It’s just one of those things.  We all have those one or two things that are supposed to be integral to our youth that we somehow missed.

Come on, admit it, there is at least one quintessential movie from your teen years that you, for some reason, completely missed.  Maybe you had to go to your grandma’s that weekend, or maybe it was always checked out at the video store and you never got a chance to rent it and then Jimmy Broadwater accidentally left it on the front seat of the car and it melted and the cheap guy who ran the video store never replaced it and that’s why you never saw “The Goonies.”

Well, Say Anything was my Goonies.

So, I hadn’t seen the movie, but it’s an iconic movie, right?  So I pretty much knew what it was about from all the references people are always making to it.  Here is what I was pretty sure happened in the movie:

John Cusack played this guy, Lloyd Dobler, who fell in love with the sweet beautiful girl at school and they had this awesome summer together, but then something happened.  Maybe he slept with some other girl, or maybe she got mad because he was spending all his time practicing with his band “The Lloyd Dobler Effect.”  Who knows.  Anyway, John Cusack decides to win the sweet beautiful girl back, so he drives to her house late at night and stands outside and holds his giant boombox up over his head and plays “IN YOUR EYES” at full volume and she hears it and looks out the window and runs out into the rain and they kiss while Peter Gabriel warbles, cue credits.

That is not what happened.

John Cusack holding that boombox over his head is one of the most iconic moments in film.  Everyone knows that moment!  Every year it is parodied in some kind of movie or tv show, and yet, as someone who had never seen the movie, it came as a huge HUGE surprise to me, that….

It didn’t work!

John Stood out their pouring his heart out to this stuck up girl with the jailbird father and you see her lying in bed, listening to:

“In your eyes, The light the heat, In your eyes”

…and she knows Lloyd Dobler is out there desperately wanting to be with her (after leaving 8 messages!)  But does she run out there to embrace him?  No!  SHE ROLLS OVER in bed and goes back to sleep!

What the heck!  I absolutely could not get over the fact that the boombox thing didn’t work.

It would be like if at the end of Empire Strikes Back, when Luke has just lost a hand and is hanging on to the bottom of Cloud City and Darth Vader leaned down and said, “Luke…. You’ve got a little something right there”

Or if at the end of the Karate Kid, when the Karate Kid was all busted up and bloody and he went into that crane stance… he just wobbled and fell over.

Or if at the end of Ferris Beuller his parents caught him skipping school and he got grounded and they took “Save Ferris” off of the water tower.

Or if they actually did put baby in that corner!

You see what I mean.

Anyway, it was a good movie and I enjoyed it but I may never get over that boom box fiasco.

If I ever held up a boom box outside a girl’s house and blasted something horribly meaningful like “In Your Eyes,” or “Private Dancer” I would darn well expect the lady of my affections to be properly wooed.

Whatever.  I’m glad I saw it.  I’m glad I got the laundry folded and I’m glad Lloyd did end up with the girl in the end (even if it took the stupid IRS to make it happen). 

The only other thing that could have made it better would be if the Lloyd Dobler Effect was a real band.

Now, THAT, would be awesome.

Yesterday I turned 37.

Thirty–seven.

The big 3 - 7.

Now, I ask you, what is the point of that?  Honestly, is there any more useless age to be than 37?  I’ve still got another year or so before the “almost 40” jokes start coming, but it’s not like I’m “just a hair over 35” anymore.

Sort of a useless age, really.  But I suppose I’ll make the best of it.

Presumably to make my birthday seem more significant, a friend of mine recently pointed out that I was born on the same day as Cher.

I suppose that is something. 

I mean who doesn’t like Cher?  Sure, you may not love her.  But don’t you think everyone at least finds her interesting?  Come on, the woman has done just about everything.  She’s won an Oscar, she’s been on television, she made the whole world rethink the sexiness quotient of short guys with bowl cuts… 

And think about her music.  Everyone must love at least one Cher song.  If you like plunkety plunkety folk music then surely you can enjoy, “I’ve got you Babe.”  If you were born after 1990 and like dance music, then “Believe” has got to be a fave.  Or if you were born in 1920, I imagine the “Shoop Shoop song” makes you feel like jitterbugging at least a little.  And if you were even alive during the 80s, mustn’t you have a special place in your heart, for crazy old Cher straddling a cannon and singing “If I could turn back time?”

So, it’s sort of nice to share a birthday with Cher.  I mean, I’m not really sure what it gets me, but it’s good to know.

The other famous people with whom I share a birthday are Dolley Madison, Jimmy Stewart, Broson Pinchot (you know – Balki) and Busta Rhymes.

Ok, keeping those names in mind, let me just take a minute to explain why I don’t believe in astrology.

Look at those names up there.  Because according to astrology, since we were all born under the same astrological sign (Taurus the bull, snort snort), presumably we should all have similar attributes. 

That’s right.  Me, Jimmy Stewart, Busta Rhymes and Cher are all cut from the same cloth.  (That must be some crazy ass cloth).

However, I must say that I’ll buy into good ol’ crazy American astrology before I’ll buy into the Chinese astrology. 

Ok. Let’s think about this.  American astrology presumes that you are similar to everyone born the same month you are.  I mean, sure, that makes sense.  Surely, everyone born in May is like me…. I guess.

But Chinese astrology is truly crazy town.  According to the Chinese you are more or less similar to everyone born the same year as you.

 I am an Ox, which means that I am docile, but that I have a temper and I am hard working and like long courtships, and carry grudges and am very stubborn.

Ok, fine, whatever.  But think of it this way: Chinese astrology basically presumes that you are pretty much the same as everyone who graduated from high school with you.

Think about that.

Think back on all those kids who were in the same grade as you in high school.  Do they all seem pretty much the same? 

That kid involved in model UN, the kid who spent all of Algebra smoking in the bathroom, the cheerleader who had all those rumors spread about her, the guy who was always working on his Camaro, the girl who thought the guy working on his Camaro was “so hot,” the kid who got angry and complained to the teacher when he got an A-, the band kids, the vo-tec kids, the jocks, the nerds, the drop outs and that one kid who always wore his members only jacket even though it had gone out of style 5 years earlier?

Seriously?  They’re all the same?

I think someone’s been sucking on too many lead painted toys.

Just to give you an idea.  Other people born the same year as I was are: Heidi Klum, Monica Lewinsky, Neil Patrick Harris, Pimp C (the rapper, not the theologian), Richard Reid (the shoe bomber), Tori Spelling, Rachel Maddow, Tempestt Bledsoe, Nick Lachey and Joe the Plumber.

Again, truly exactly the same.

So, as much as I enjoy contemplating my oneness with the universe and how we are all the same based on whatever some stars tell us, I’m just not sure I buy it.

I think the reality is that it may be nurture, and it may be nature, but it is certainly not nativity.

So, despite whoever else may or may not share my birthday, or my birth year, I think I’m simply going to claim it for myself, thank you very much.  Even if it is an insignificant 37, it’s my 37 and I have no intention to let Joe the Plumber or Balki or anyone else take credit for who I am.

That being said, Cher is always welcome to come over and have a slice of cake.

Shoop shoop.

For the first time in three years, there is no one living in our basement. 

Three years ago, we invited some former students of mine from Mississippi to come stay with us while they looked for jobs or went to college.  And for three years we had as many as three or as few as one 18, 19, 20 or 21 year olds staying with us.  But this past weekend the last one decided to give up and head back home.

It had all started innocently enough.

When I was fresh out of college, I took a job teaching third grade in one of the poorest areas in the country - the Mississippi Delta.  It was hot, and isolated and suffered from a history of racism that wasn’t always left as history.  Although the rural community I taught in was almost evenly divided between blacks and whites, the school I taught was 100% black and had been since the day integration laws were finally enforced in the early seventies.  The whole area still operated like it was 1957.  In short, it was a pretty miserable place to live.  But I enjoyed teaching, and I loved the kids I taught.

When my new wife had had enough of living in the Delta we made plans to move.  When we told people we were leaving, several parents told me that they were sad to see us go, but that they understood.  “This is no place to raise a family,” they told me, even as their kids played, barefoot and shirtless, in the driveway.

After I moved, I kept in touch with several of the kids that had been in my third grade class and a few that hadn’t.  And over the years, I had several of them come stay with us for a week or two.  And so, for ten years, these kids would spend a week in whatever place we happened to be living as we traveled around to different jobs and grad schools in Virginia, New York, Michigan, West Virginia and eventually settling just outside of Washington, DC.

As the kids got older I started talking to them about their future.  After their junior year in high school, I brought three of them up to spend the summer with us.  I helped them find summer jobs in the area and over the course of the summer I took them, along with my two young children, to visit a variety of colleges in the area.  We talked about the differences between large schools and small schools and the advantages and challenges of attending an historically black school, or a school where they would be part of a very small minority.

We purchased SAT prep books and collected college applications and gathered phone numbers of admissions officers.  And armed with all of this information I sent them back home for their senior year of high school. 

But it soon became clear that this was not enough.  Their SAT scores came back abysmally low.  I doubt that they had ever cracked the SAT prep books and their 12 years of subpar education hadn’t prepared them for much.  We went ahead and sent off some college applications but it became clear that no colleges would accept them with those scores.

The problem was, that aside from college, their options were pretty grim.  There were few to no jobs available in the area and few of their classmates had any plans for what they were going to do after graduation.

So, we invited them to come live with us.  We could put some beds in the finished basement and they could have their own space, but still be a part of our family.  We had contacts in the area and could help them get jobs, and there were several good community colleges nearby that could be used as a stepping stone to a 4 year school.

I have to confess, that I thought that this was a fool proof plan.  Obviously, this would take a lot of work on the parts of these recent graduates, but I knew that we could support them by helping with their school work, or paying for classes, or helping them to apply for jobs.

I knew all about what challenges faced these kids (or so I supposed).  I knew about drop out rates, pregnancy rates, the challenges of having received a poor quality education.  I knew all about this and knew that the cycle of poverty almost always required something dramatic to break it.

A teen mother who gives birth to a child that she doesn’t know how to raise is far more likely to grow up to be a parent who gives birth to a child they don’t know how to raise than a college graduate. 

I decided that what these teens needed was guidance and support.  I would have had no idea how to apply to college or find a good job were it not for my parents and guidance counselors. 

These kids had neither. 

But that was something that our family could provide.  We could walk them through all the complicated steps of becoming an adult and help them to navigate the complex world of FAFSA forms and college registration and job applications.

For people who have grown up in an environment where going to college and getting a job is normal, it is easy to forget how complex and often nonsensical the process of entering that world can be.  I knew that I could be the bridge that would allow these students to cross from their world of cotton fields and catfish farms into the middle class world of colleges and jobs that I knew very well.

Initially, it appeared that my instincts were spot on.  When I took the guys with me to register for classes at the community college, it became clear that without me they would be absolutely unable to negotiate this world.  I encouraged them to be the ones to ask for direction or advice, but most of the time, they didn’t even know what to ask and, invariably, I would have to step in as we navigated the endless process of applying to the school, completing entrance exams, meeting with counselors, registering for classes, filing for financial aid, proving residency, obtaining school identification, finding classes on the map, purchasing books and backpacks and pencils and notebooks and finally walking into school on the first day.

Every step required finding a different office in a different building on the sprawling campus, providing paper work from a separate government office across town, writing home for copies of birth certificates and taking tests over and over again in an attempt to get a high enough score.

I learned quickly that if I did not take them directly to the office they needed to go to, introduce them and explain what they needed, they would not do it.

They were a couple of black kids from Misssissippi at a community college who’s enrollment was 10 times the population of their rural hometown and which had a staff and student population that was almost entirely white.  For a couple of kids who had rarely had the opportunity to talk with white people and had been told to be careful when they do so, this was a daunting challenge.

Finally, they were registered and classes began.  We were off to a good start, and I felt good about what we had accomplished.  I had been able to lead them through a foreign world that I was comfortable in and to introduce them to its quirks and idiosyncrasies. 

Of course, the hard part was still up to them.  They had to read the books and take the tests and pass the classes and these were not tasks that had ever been required of them before.  In high school, no one carried books home and homework was rarely assigned.  Teachers struggled to merely maintain control of the class and to try to communicate some information.  Before each test, students were given a handout of what was going to be on the exam and told to memorize it. 

College, even community college, was mindblowing.

And the challenges soon began to take their toll.

One of my students left a couple months into the semester, citing his lack of interest in the schoolwork and the fact that he had gotten a girl back home (not his girlfriend) pregnant.  He’s now working at a gas station making fried chicken.

Another left after failing every single one of the courses she had signed up for, including the one credit course titled “student success.”  She mumbled something about going back home for a job, but she has been unable to find one.

Two more guys stayed with me for a couple more years.  One continued to struggle with classes at the community college, but pushed on because he was the star player on the basketball team.  But eventually, his struggles and laziness caught up with him.  He skipped classes, didn’t turn in work and plagiarized papers.  We offered to help him with his work and encouraged him to sign up for one of the schools tutors, but his pride and his shame kept him from doing either.

Eventually his grades fell so low that he was kicked off the basketball team.  He struggled on for another semester, but without basketball, school was just work and he eventually went home.  Right now he’s got a part time job at a factory and we’ve heard that he has also gotten a girl pregnant, also not his girlfriend.  He lives with relatives and tells people about how he used to be MVP of his college team.

Eventually we were left with just one person in our basement.  I’ll call him James.

James was a unique kid.  He had never been good at school.  He was diagnosed with a fairly severe learning disability while still in elementary school but no one in the school system had the training or knowledge necessary to help him overcome it.  So he floundered in the system’s poorly run special education program until his mom pulled him out of it in 10^th grade, since special ed students did not receive diplomas at his high school. 

He struggled, but finally graduated.  However, he decided that he was done with school.  So, we never even attempted to enroll James in classes.  We just started looking for jobs.

He worked for UPS for a while and then after we pulled some strings with a friend, he got hired in a union plumbing company.  James flourished in this job.  He showed up on time, he worked hard and he did whatever he was asked without complaining.  This, alone, put him ahead of 90% of his fellow employees.

His new boss loved him and made sure he got the choicest assignments.  When the company reached a slow period, his boss made sure James got transferred to a department where there would be no layoffs.

James saved his money and even though he sent money home to his mom every month, he was able to save up enough money to pay cash for a car and to pay the monthly insurance on his own.

James had applied to get in the union apprentice program where his pay would jump from $12 an hour to $17 and after five years he would attain the level of master plumber and be making around $70,000 – an annual a salary that is over three times what I made when I was teaching in Mississippi.

By all measures, James was successful, but he wasn’t happy.

He liked his co-workers but felt very different from them.  Even though most of his coworkers were black, they couldn’t have been more dissimilar from a guy who had grown up in a small town in the deep south.  For a while he accepted their offers to join them at clubs or parties on the weekend, but he never felt like he fit in and eventually he just stopped accepting their offers altogether, choosing to stay at home and sit in our basement watching reruns on tv, alone.

He went home for Christmas and was almost in tears getting on the plane to come back to Maryland.  He only called his mom once a week because it was too painful to do it more often.  And eventually he stopped calling his old Mississippi friends altogether.  He couldn’t stand talking to them on the phone and hearing all the noise and shouts and laughter in the background.

James stayed with us for two years and was successful in every way, but he just couldn’t shake the desire to be home in Mississippi with, literally, everyone he had ever known his entire life.

When the other students who had been staying with us, one by one, packed their bags and left the basement he seemed to take it in stride, but it became clear that their presence had meant more than he realized.  Eventually he was the last one.  And unlike his friends who had left, all with a string of failures behind them, he was standing at the beginning of a promising career that would allow him to make more money than anyone from his hometown had probably ever made.

He knew that if he went back home, there would most likely be few to no jobs available.  Most of the catfish plants had closed up and the only employer in town had recently shuttered its doors.  The skills he had learned as a plumbers assistant for a company that specialized in constructing multi-story government complexes would be irrelevant in a town where there was not a single two-story building and almost no new construction in the entire region.

We tried to talk him out of leaving.  His boss tried to talk him out of it, but in the end, the pain was just too deep.  He didn’t mind being up here in Maryland, but he didn’t like it.  He wanted to be in the only home he knew.  He felt like his future was there, even if there was, in fact, no future there.

And so, last week, under the guise of going home to visit his family for a week, James went home forever.

I can’t say I was surprised.  When we said goodbye, we knew that this was probably a permanent goodbye.

When he called to tell me he wasn’t coming back, I did what I always do, and wished him luck and told him that if he ever changed his mind….

But he won’t. 

He’ll live with his mom and eventually find a job.  It won’t pay well, and it won’t be full time and it won’t have benefits, but it will earn a little money which he’ll use to pay for gas and groceries to help his mom out.  Eventually, he’ll get someone pregnant and the cycle will start all over again.

Even though I knew that all of this was probably coming, I was unprepared for how hard it hit me.

There have been so many ups and downs with this little adventure of inviting teenagers to come live with us.  There have been basketball victories and high grades earned, there have been jobs attained and wonderful successes.  But there have also been failures, and horrible choices, and wrecked cars and cruel thoughtlessness.

And eventually I grew numb to it all.  I found that I could not get emotional every time someone decided to leave or to do something that so adversely affected their life.  I just had to accept it, judge it as little as possible and move on to the next step of determining how to move forward until, in the end, there was no way to move forward at all.

But even through these ups and downs I still clung to the belief that there would be a success.  Maybe not every one, but, perhaps,  at least one.

I’ve always hated that old school cliché about “If you can make a difference in the life of just one child…”  I resent the idea that helping one person should be considered an accomplishment when you are responsible for helping an entire class full of children.

But as time went by, I found myself clinging to it more and more.

Please Lord, let there be a success for at least one…

So, when James left, I was saddened not just by my failure to help him, or the others that had already left, but I began to worry that not only could I not help them, it may not be possible to help anyone.

You see, these were not just average kids we brought into our home.  These were the kids who showed real promise.  They were the ones who had something a little extra that would allow them to be successful.  They were smarter than their peers back home, or they had some athletic skill, or they were hard workers.  They weren’t necessarily the top students in their graduating class, but they each had something that set them apart from all their other friends who still live at home and spend their days trying to figure out what to do.

If these kids couldn’t make it….

If these kids, with the extraordinary time, money and effort that we put in to helping them succeed couldn’t make it…. Then what hope is there for anyone down there in that morass of racism and neglect that we refer to as the Mississippi Delta?

If a family who takes someone in and spends thousands of hours and thousands of dollars helping them to overcome all of the deficits in their life; if we are unsuccessful… repeatedly – then is there any reason to believe that a new government program, or a new approach to education or a new non profit, each with their limited resources and limited impact could ever ever make a difference?

I am not just mourning my inability to make a difference; I am mourning everyone’s inability to make a difference.

And yes, I am sure value came out of this experience and I am sure that each of my former students have learned something valuable that will help them in life.  But the reality is that had I not ever become a part of their lives, they would have grown up and struggled to get a job after high school eventually falling into the same traps of welfare, poor employment, and poverty that has trapped their parents and grandparents for generations.

The reality is that their lives would not look very different if they had never come to stay with us.

I am not a pessimistic person by nature.  At my best, I am an optimistic pragmatist, but the problem with pragmatism is that, often, there is very little optimism to be had. 

Like all foolish young people, I wanted to change the world for the better.  I started off teaching, and found that although there were many small miracles, that the job of a teacher does not allow for much impact on the day to day life of a child mired in neglectful poverty. 

And so I thought, what more can I do?  How could I take a larger step to make a difference, and so we invited, two, then three, then four former students to come live with us.  And I must now face the sobering fact that all of the money, time and support in the world is not nearly enough to overcome 18 years of poverty, crappy education and a community that is insular to the point of making leaving it virtually impossible.

I don’t know that James will be unhappy back in Mississippi.  Initially he will be overjoyed to be near friends and family again.  But I worry that as he grows older and is better able to understand the limits of the opportunities around him, I fear that he will begin to second guess his choices.  As he realizes the complications that come with a job that has little chance for improvement and a life that constantly demands more and more  in the way of children, rent, and responsibilities without ever providing you anything more in the way of opportunity, I worry that he will mourn his choices and his circumstance.

When James left, he said that everyone he knew in Mississippi told him he was crazy to give up a good job just to come back there.  They said, didn’t he know that there was nothing down there?  But he left anyway, knowing that none of his friends or family could understand the pain of being away from everything you had ever known, because none of them had ever left. 

At least not at 21.

The reality is, that we did everything we could and we still failed.  But our failure is nothing compared to society’s failure.  For there are hundreds of thousands of children who’s future is entrenched in the racism and oppression of our past, and who’s lives will never improve much from those of the parents who want their kids to leave but can’t seem to let them go.

It truly is no place to raise a kid.  But there will be thousands more raised there as the years go by – fatherless kids whose moms wanted a baby but didn’t want the responsibility.  And those babies will grow up and shuffle through a poorly funded, demoralized school system that can do little more each year than push them one step closer to graduation – a graduation that prepares them for little and a world that offers them less.

Upon leaving high school, most of these kids will never have left the state they were born in.  Most will only have left the county on their school’s one trip to the zoo.

They will grow up and repeat the mistakes their parents made, in an endless cycle of poverty that grows stronger with each passing generation, forming a shell that is harder and harder to break through. 

For the first time in three years, there is no one living in our basement. 

All that is left are a couple of old tennis shoes, a few forgotten t-shirts in a drawer and a floor littered with fallen dreams – both theirs, and ours.

1)

I only have two naughty t-shirts (three if you count the one with Tina Turner’s legs on it.  I don’t count that one, but Sarah does)  One of the t-shirts was given to me by my wife.  It’s a white t-shirt that just says “SAHDILF” across the front.  As you know, SAHD, stands for stay at home dad.  If you can’t figure out the rest, I’m not going to help you. 

I really like the shirt, mainly because my wife gave it to me.  It shows that she has a sense of humor and that on rare occasions, she even agrees with the sentiment.

My other naughty t-shirt I purchased myself.  As you may or may not recall, several months ago after the health care bill finally got passed, Joe Biden got caught on the microphone leaning over to President Obama and saying… well…. here it is.

(Sorry in advance if my video imbeds are not working.  The whole site seems uber-glitchy lately.)

Well, I saw on the news a few days later that the official Obama fundraising store was selling t-shirts that said, well…..

So, of course, I bought one.

It took about 2 months to get here, (it’s union made) but I finally got it a couple of days ago and have been wearing it proudly. 

A couple of people asked me what it meant.  Another person asked me if the B stood for Big, or Bad.  But all in all, I decided that it was both clever enough and innocuous enough to keep me out of any real trouble.

Besides, it’s a direct quote.

Anyway, we were sitting around the dinner table last night eating Pad Thai that I had made.  I had grand intentions to cook Pad Thai from scratch.  I had tried to make it from scratch once 10 years ago, but when I opened the bottle of fish sauce, the smell was so rancid, I had to throw everything I was cooking away in the dumpster down the street and air out the kitchen for 20 minutes.  In the ensuing years, I have told myself that the fish sauce was spoiled.  Although who the heck knows, perhaps it’s supposed to smell that way, I mean it is called “fish sauce,” which I can only assume means that it is made by pureeing fish and then bottling them.

So, anyway, I was going to try again, seeing as how it’s a new decade and all, but I couldn’t find all the ingredients I needed at my local grocery store, so I got some boxed Pad Thai mix which is something I almost never do: 

“Just cook the noodles, add some tofu (Audra pronounces it two-fu) and mix in the sauce packet.”

I know, I know.  In general, I’m opposed to anything involving a “sauce packet,” just on basic principles, but in this case I had my heart set on Pad Thai and this was my only option that didn’t involve driving thirty minutes in the rain to the nearest Asian market and then risking another fish sauce debacle.  So even though I’m sure that this was the Asian equivalent of hamburger helper, I made the box of Pad Thai and we all sat down to eat it.

Which brings me back to my naughty t-shirt.

As we were sitting around the table, out of the blue, my seven year old daughter, Audra, says, “Daddy, what does “BFD” mean?”

Oh crap.  That stupid Joe Biden is always getting me into trouble.

I immediately started trying to think of what to tell her:

Ballet for Dummies?

Bovine Foot Disease?

Best Funicular Device?

Bariatric Fish Disease?

Beverages For Dogs?

Boring Foreign Diplomats?

Borscht Filled Donuts?

I had nothing.  Luckily, my wife, very nonchalantly, said, “Big Fat Deal.”

“What?”

It means, “Big Fat Deal.”

“Oh.”

And that was that.

Whew…. Close one.

2)

The next morning we were getting ready for school and Audra wanted to know whether she could take Pad Thai for lunch.  At first blush, I had no problem with this.  I’d certainly much rather have her eat Pad Thai than whatever fried abomination they were selling at school, but I wasn’t sure that Pad Thai was exactly what your average 7 year old took to school.

“Are you sure you want to eat cold Pad Thai for lunch?” I asked her.  She was nonplussed about eating cold Pad Thai, so what the heck, I guess I’ll let my daughter take a Tupperware of cold peanutty noodles to school.  Why not.  She probably won’t get beat up for doing something like that.

Probably.

3)

The third truly odd thing that happened to me relating to Thailand is this:

My kids have become very fond of this song called “A Different Side of Me.”  It’s by the new teenybopper boy band, Allstar Weekend, that the Disney Channel has had in heavy rotation.  The song is catchy enough and the boys singing it seem nice.  I’m sure in a couple of years they’ll all be on celebrity Rehab with  Rod Blagojevich, Lindsay Lohan and Wolf Blitzer, but for now they seem like nice enough kids, and their music doesn’t make me want to hit my head against the wall too hard.

Here’s their new video. Like most videos it doesn’t actually make any sense. They sing “I want to be a rock star, a super hero…” but then it shows them all pretending to be knights in a castle.

The song never says anything about being a knight.  What’s that about?

Of course, I don’t guess that Michael Jackson’s “You Rock My World” had anything to do with gangsters, Marlon Brando, stomp style percussion scenes, or dance offs, so…..

But, whatever, the kids liked it and it’s a catchy enough song:

In fact, it’s so catchy, I thought I could probably even stand to listen to it again, and so, being the good parent that I am I decided to look up where this band was playing on tour.  Maybe if they were playing close by, and the tickets were cheap, I’d think about taking the little rugrats.  So I went to the band’s website and then to their tour page which was on myspace.

Really?

Myspace? 

When was the last time anything of value was on Myspace?  I mean come on, that is so 2009.

Have you ever been on myspace?  I can see why the kids like it, it looks like one of them designed it.  It has all of the asthetics of a 7th grade computer science project.

Anyway, the fact that Myspace is so crappy is not the point of my story.  The fact that AllStar Weekend is touring in Arkansas, Kansas and some Army base in the middle of nowheresville Kentucky is also not the point of my story.

The point of this story is in reference to one of the little side banner ads on the All star weekend Myspace page.  You know, the little ads in a box that change every time you refresh the page.

Well this ad said:

“THAI GIRLS NEED LOVE” 

It then said something about connecting you with Thai girls who were seeking love or marriage and then had some sketchy web address.

Ok, now I don’t know anything about mail order brides, or web advertising, or, honestly, whatever it is that that ad was promoting, but is the webpage of a teenybopper band really the place to promote something that I assume only appeals to creepy middle aged men?

Let’s not dwell on that too hard.

Granted other banner ads said,

“Cheapest Croation Available”

“Michael Jackson Profiles”

“Blog for B2B”

So, the truth is, I have no idea what any of that is about.

Anyway, there you have it: three completely odd Thai related incidents in a short 12 hour period.

Honestly, it’s a lot more Thailand than I ever really needed to be a part of.  But I have learned a few things.

1.  Be careful about what kind of t-shirts I buy.

2.  Pad Thai tastes just fine the next day.

3.  Keep your eyes peeled for creepy old men at Allstar Weekend concerts.

4.  Try extra hard not to look creepy if I ever take my kids to an Allstar weekend concert.

5.  Never ever, ever never go on the myspace again.

Ever.

A few weeks ago, I was reading an article in Newsweek about Michelle Obama’s new program to fight childhood obesity.

I know what you’re thinking:  “Who reads Newsweek anymore?”

I know, I know.  It’s ridiculous.  I think I’m their last subscriber.  I was kind of inclined to cancel the whole thing after they revamped the entire magazine in an effort to make it more boring, but I already had a 2 year subscription, so….

Anyway, back to Michelle trying to keep Pre-Schoolers from becoming Pork- Schoolers. (Ha Ha Ha)

I remember when the third most important O, (after Oprah and her husband) announced that, as her signature first lady job, she was going to combat childhood obesity.  I remember my first thought was:

Really?

Childhood Obesity?

You’re one of the most accomplished influential women in the world and this is the issue you’re going to focus on?  Last time we had an accomplished lawyer first lady she planned to revamp the entire health care system. 

Granted, she completely failed, but hey, you can’t fault her for going after the big dogs.  But “childhood obesity”?  Really?  Is that what you’re going to use your experience as a hospital administrator and a Harvard Law School graduate to accomplish?

I suppose it’s better than Laura Bush who, almost ludicrously, decided to try to eliminate gang violence (whew!  Glad that got taken care of!)  (Seriously.  She seems like a nice lady and all, but was there anyone in America less equipped to eliminate gang violence than Laura Bush?)

So, I suppose it’s a little catty of me, but I kind of thought that such a distinguished first lady might try to attack something with a little more heft than childhood obesity (no pun intended).  Why don’t we send her over to deal with the Mideast Peace process.  Don’t you think the Palestinians and Israelis would listen to her?  She’s got a cousin who’s a rabbi, and we all know her husband is a Muslin. 

Or what about Greece?  Couldn’t we send her over there to give them a stern talking to about their money issues?  Or maybe she could single handedly fix the whole Don’t Ask Don’t Tell debacle?

“I SAID, don’t ask…. And you!  You over there!  Don’t tell!”

Anyway, she’s focusing on fat kids and that’s fine.  There’s no doubt that this is a serious issue in America.  As someone who taught in Mississippi, it’s definitely something that someone needs to be concerned about, but, and perhaps this is the cynical side of me, it strikes me as the kind of thing that a well intentioned first lady focuses on for a few years, does some photo ops talking to kids in a carpeted library and spends an afternoon serving rutabagas in the cafeteria, but in the end doesn’t accomplish a durn thing.

Remember when Barbara Bush wanted to help kids read and so she just showed up and read them books?  Or when Nancy Reagan wanted to get kids to stop using drugs, so she went on Diff’rent Strokes and told that little red head kid to just say no, darn it!

And now everyone can read and our drug problem is non-existent!

So, I’ve got to tell you, I’m a little afraid that Michelle Obama is going to visit some schools, help some underprivileged kids plant an organic garden behind the playground and have a guest spot on Two and a Half Men where she tells the round kid to stop eating so many Ding Dongs.  And in the end, kids are going to be just as obese as ever, but will know the proper way to harvest arugula.  But perhaps I’m just too cynical.

(I’m not)

Anyway, as I alluded to at the beginning of this rambling diatribe, I read an interview in Newsweek where FLOTUS talked all about what her new “Let’s Move” program was doing.

As much as I had concerns that this wouldn’t amount to anything, I was still optimistic, because I think that there is potential for changes to be made and this is a situation where the federal government could actually have a significant impact (I’ll explain later).  So I was pretty disappointed to see what she had actually had to say in the interview.

Here’s a link to the interview if you actually care:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/235180

She basically starts off saying that there’s not much government can do, and that it’s mainly up to local communities, but that she’s seen some great things, especially schools that are:

“getting kids Hula-Hooping and jumping rope. They've created requirements where teachers have to eat lunch with the kids, and they've seen vegetable and fruit consumption go up.”

Are you frickin’ kidding me?

Her solution is hula hooping and….. (excuse me, I almost choked on the words) making teachers eat lunch with their kids?

Teaching is a profession where you are not allowed to go to the bathroom without calling someone to come watch your class.  You are with your kids all day long.  In the schools I worked in we didn’t get a planning period most days, nor did the kids go to art or gym or computers…. because we didn’t have those things.  Those kids were with me from the moment they arrived until the moment that bell rang at the end of the day.

Lunch was frequently the only time I had to myself.  It was the only time I had to prepare for the afternoon lessons and it was THE only time I had to socialize or even speak to another adult. 

At one school I taught at, we took turns monitoring the lunch room and at the other, we did have to eat lunch with the kids and it was not my favorite part of the day.

Is this really our solution?  To force the burnt out, under-appreciated, under-paid, over worked teachers of our nation to eat lunch with their students?

Come on, Michelle.   Why don’t you suggest that at Sidwell Friends and see what your daughter’s teachers think of that.

She also prattles on about healthy grains and whatnot, but there’s a whole lot of talk and not a lot of actual plans.

Her “Let’s Move!” website isn’t much better:

http://www.letsmove.gov/index.html

It’s basically a lot of drivel about eating better, and exercise and a new food pyramid.  Again, I am all for honesty in food labeling (do not tell me that my bottle of coke zero is 2.5 servings.  I am drinking that sucker in one serving whether you want me to or not) but I am not really convinced that the problem is that parents are unaware that fruits and vegetables are good and that potato chips are bad. 

I think we all know that, we just don’t care.

It’s also a money thing.  Fresh fruits and vegetables are very expensive.  I can cook a meat and potatoes dish for my family for under $15.  A salad alone, usually costs me $20.  I bought a bell pepper yesterday that was $2.69.  For a single flippin’ bell pepper! God forbid, I want to make a salad with 2 bell peppers, some green onions, carrots, tomatoes, and walnuts.  I’ll have to take out a third mortgage (2^nd Mortgage went for the first bell pepper).

At my grocery store fresh fruit regularly runs $3 or $4 for a pound of grapes.  Apples are sometimes a dollar a piece and don’t even try to buy some kind of anti oxidant stuff like cherries.  You better cash in your 401K first. 

These prices can almost double in inner cities where grocery prices, particularly on produce are far more expensive than in the suburbs.  And, having lived in this kind of area, the produce is almost universally wilted, mealy and sad looking.

No wonder people just buy Beefaroni and Fritos.

If you want to really make a change in people’s eating habits, then inject a little capitalism into it.  Make eating fresh fruits and vegetables economically sound.  Why doesn’t the government subsidize the growing of fresh fruit instead of subsidizing corn to make corn syrup?  If a bunch of nutrient rich green leaf lettuce cost $1.00 instead of $3.00 or $4.00 we’d probably have salad a lot more.  If fresh green beans didn’t cost 4 or 5 times as much as frozen, I might buy them more often.

In related news, the “Let’s Move!” website points out that over 23 million people in poor neighborhoods are not close to a supermarket.  But, not to worry!  The government is allocating 400 million dollars to fix this.

400 million?  That’s nothing.

I’m not good at the maths, but that comes to $8 for each of the 23 million people they are trying to serve.

Maybe we should just mail each of them a couple of bell peppers.

But enough of me ragging on the silly things Michelle Obama is doing, it’s time for me to start telling her what she should be doing instread.  (one of my favorite past times).

This program is focused on child hood obesity.  Now, for the most part, kids don’t cook for themselves.  Sure, they buy sodas and hot fries for themselves at the corner store, but they don’t usually prepare a major meal for the day.

You know who does prepare a major meal for the day?

Your local school…. Or at least they used to.

When I was a kid… (this is where I start to sound like Wilford Brimley) there were real people in the kitchen’s of my school cooking real food.  Now, granted, I grew up in the South, so it was a lot of chicken fried steak and green beans with bits of ham in it and such, but it was real honest to God food.    And the thing is it doesn’t take much to get someone who is already cooking food to slightly change the food they’re cooking to make it a little more healthy.

However, it is quite a different chore to change processed food that is prepared at a factory and then delivered in boxes to your school into something that won’t kill you.

One of my big shocks when I started teaching in Detroit was that there was no kitchen at our school or (so I was told) at any other in the district.  All of the schools had food delivered by some huge off site corporation and then it was simply heated up by the people in the cafeteria.  And I have got to tell you, this food was not even a step up from McDonalds. 

Pizza, hot dogs, lots of things in “packets,” chicken nuggets… there were virtually no fresh vegetables and the only fresh fruit was canned peaches.  (We can thank the Reagan administration for cutting 1 billion dollars out of school lunch funding and labeling ketchup as a “vegetable” for a lot of this.  Bush also cut the free and reduced lunch program… tax cuts don’t pay for themselves, people!)

Right now, my daughter attends a school where the food is absolutely atrocious.  Here is a recent week’s menu:

Chicken nuggets, Fiesta Mac and Beef, Chili Dog, Tacos, Spaghetti with Meatballs, Crispy Chicken on a roll, Corn Dog, Pizza, and Pork Dippers.

Pork Dippers?

What the hell is a Pork Dipper?

Honestly, look at that list.  What is the healthy item that they served last week?  When the healthiest thing you served was “Fiesta Mac and Beef,” there is something seriously wrong with your menu.

If Michelle Obama wants to make some real changes in the way kids eat.  She should start with the one thing the government has some control over:  School lunches.

Start incentivizing schools to cook their own food instead of ordering it from some company that does little more than reheat a frozen pizza and tell you that they just served you all of the food groups in a single dish.

Start insisting that the food they serve is healthy and includes truly fresh fruits and real vegetables and then subsidize the schools and farmers so that can really happen.

And this doesn’t mean that every meal needs to be Tofu and beet salad with a side of celery and goat cheese.  You can make healthy meals that kids will eat, but it does take some thought and some effort.

Just because kids like tacos and hot dogs doesn’t mean that’s what we should feed them.  Kids like video games and TV but we didn’t just give in and stop teaching math because they’d rather veg out in front of their DS.  (“veg out”…. ah, the irony)

The whole point of school is that we are teaching our kids.  We teach them fractions and alliteration and historical perspective.

We ought to teach them what a healthy meal looks like.

Think what would happen if kids ate one healthy meal every day for 13 years before they were released into society.  Don’t you think some of them might continue?  It’s a lot more likely than the government feeding them pizza and pork dippers every day and then yelling at them for being fat and becoming a drain on our national resources.

I’m not the healthiest cook in the world.  I use a lot of butter and I’m fond of cheese.  But we do have a lot of fresh, home cooked meals, and our kids eat them.  It’s what they’ve grown up with. It’s what they expect.  They are not freaked out by garlic or basil or broccoli.  Kids learn to eat and to appreciate what they grow up eating.

At our school, the “good parents” (and I don’t count myself among them) send their kids to school with a sack lunch because the lunches served at school are not deemed healthy enough for their kids.  Wouldn’t it be great if parents had to send their kids to school with pork dippers because the school only served healthy food?

Now, of course, none of this is free, but I have no doubt that it would pay dividends down the road in healthier kids and less of the many medical problems associated with obesity.

Besides, in this flailing economy, I can think of worse things to do than support local farmers, provide jobs as cooks at local schools, and feed our nation’s children some food that we could actually be proud of.

Come on, Michelle.  Roll up those sleeves, show off those arms and let’s see if you can get some real work done on this issue.

Our nations’ kids don’t need another photo op or another visit to a sit-com.  They need change.

Maybe that would be a good slogan:  Change.

You should ask your husband about that.

Or better yet…. Oprah.