No School

As September turns to October and summer slips away, something just doesn’t feel right. The baseball season is winding down, football season has kicked off, and hockey training camps and preseason games are underway. The leaves are starting to change colors, the days are getting shorter and there’s no need for an air conditioner anymore. Then I see one of those silly commercials about who is happier about going back to school, the parents or the kids, and I know what’s making feel out of sort. School is back in session, but not in my house.

For the first time in about seventeen years, I don’t have a child in a public school. That feels very strange, almost disorienting, because from September to June, the schedule always revolved around the kids and their schedule. My wife and I worked our appointments, errands, and dates around the kids’ schedules that were defined mostly by school. We had to pick them up from their after school activities, run to the store to get supplies for a project (usually the day before it was due and ten minutes before the store closed), and make sure we didn’t stay out past 9:00 on a weeknight during school. We don’t have to do that anymore.

I saw the few young neighborhood kids waiting for the bus the first day of school. They were excited, they were smiling, and they were happy, probably looking forward to learning a whole lot of stuff and meeting new kids. I loved it, because whether it was their first year of their third, they still liked school. Their optimism and joy hadn’t been snuffed out yet. If only they could stay that way forever.

I thought back to my first day of school and how excited I was to be going. I was moving up to the “big” kid level, going to the place my older brothers and sisters had gone. I didn’t go to kindergarten, so Elementary school was a big step for me. We lived close enough to the school that we didn’t take the bus; we were Walkers, as they called the kids who didn’t take the bus. I don’t really remember if Mom walked us to school on the first day, or if she drove us, but I do remember that first day.

Mom was holding my hand as she walked me to the classroom. I was nervous, excited, and a little scared because the school was a lot bigger than I thought. As a matter of fact, I liked the look of it from the outside better than the inside. When we got to the classroom, I suddenly realized I was going to be here at school all day, with all these strange people, WITHOUT MOM! Now I was really scared. I decided that, no thank you, I don’t want to be here and refused to go in to the room. I started crying, probably thinking that would get me off the hook, but Mom and this “Miss Zona” lady were doing their best to calm me down and get me into that room.

Unfortunately for them, nothing was working. That is until I heard the sweetest words ever. “At snack time you can have milk and peanut butter cookies,” Miss Zona said. Wait. What? Peanut butter cookies if I go into the room and stay for a while? And some milk to go with it? I let go of Mom’s hand, turned off the water works, and gave her the brush off. Why hadn’t they told me this earlier? We could have avoided the little misunderstanding at the door. I went into the classroom, looking forward to snack time, figuring I could hold out until then. The amazing part of all this was that I actually enjoyed the whole day, not just snack time, and Miss Zona turned out to be an awesome teacher, having just the right balance of motherly kindness and teacherly sternness.

I’m still getting used to not being involved with school, teachers, homework, projects, plays, and chorus. I don’t have to make sure the kids are getting enough sleep and eating something before rushing off to school. It’s wonderful in many ways, but there’s one thing that’s nagging me: What am I going to do with all this extra time?

What the Heck

A town near where I live has decided that they’ve had enough of profanity in public and has passed a law that could get you a $20 fine for using off-color language while out and about. According to the local newspaper, “Officials in Middleborough say it's not intended to crack down on free speech or censor private conversation but, instead, is in response to the loud, profanity-heavy language used by teens and young adults in the town.” I’m not sure how I feel about this.

On the one hand, I agree that many teens and young adults can be loud and can use “profanity-heavy language.” I also agree that it can be offensive at times and I was especially sensitive to it when my kids were younger. Unfortunately, I learned they were hearing this stuff every day on the school bus and in the hallways around school. Most PG and PG-13 movies have some kind of profanity in them (a PG-13 movie can drop the F-bomb up to four times as long as it doesn’t have a sexual meaning), so kids hear it in movies, too. Let’s be real. Kids are hearing it at home from their parents, too, and quite a few, let’s say “more mature” adults, can use as much profanity as younger people.

On the other hand, I don’t agree with a law like this because you cannot legislate morality, just like you cannot outlaw stupidity. Teenagers have always had their own sayings, phrases, words and terms of profanity. I’m not going to lie; we did, too, when I was a teenager. Here’s the difference between now and then: we were respectful to adults around us, especially elderly people, while today kids just blurt it out without thinking twice. When we used to take the bus to the mall in the next town, we talked amongst ourselves and goofed around, but we never swore in front of an elderly woman, let alone dropped the F-bomb.

I remember one time during the winter when we went to play ice hockey and I got asked to play with the older kids. I knew it was only because they didn’t have enough players, but I didn’t care. I was playing with the big guys. However, I wasn’t doing that well and at one point I gave away the puck to someone on the other team who then scored a goal. In the meantime, I did one of those moving-every-part-of-your-body-moves to try and keep my balance, succeeded for a brief moment, then failed and went crashing down. Needless to say, everybody laughed and I was embarrassed. To compensate, and to make myself look cooler, I let out a string of profanities containing everything I could think of. One of the older kids looked at me and asked me if I even knew what half of the swears I just said meant. I mumbled that I didn’t, and he told me to go sit on the side for a few. I looked to one of my brothers for help and he just shook his head and told me to go. I don’t think I ever got back into that game again.

Later that day on the way home, my brothers talked with me about the incident. I learned that you can’t just blurt out a string of profanity in public any time you want, that you have to exercise a little self-control and watch what you say. I got home a little wiser; humbled, but a little wiser. Things like this happened occasionally when I was a kid, in organized sports leagues, around the neighborhood, and at school. It didn’t take a $20 fine to curb our profanity 40 years ago. All it took was someone willing to speak up and tell us to watch our language, or to pull us aside and ask us how our Mom would feel if she heard us speaking that way. The look on her face would have hurt a hundred times more than shelling out $20. That would have been too high a price to exercise my right to free speech.

Outdoor Hockey

I’m a life-long hockey fan so on New Year’s Day I watched the NHL Winter Classic. For those of you who don’t know what the Winter Classic is, it is a professional hockey game played outdoors, either in a football or baseball stadium. The games have been played in Buffalo, Chicago, Boston and this year’s game was in Pittsburgh. There’s been snow (in Buffalo, of course), cold (Chicago and Boston) and now rain. Maybe it was the rain, maybe it was the teams involved, but in my opinion this year’s game was the least entertaining of the four.

I usually don’t watch the pregame shows for sporting events as I find them a little a boring, but I have watched the pregame show for the Winter Classic in previous years. If nothing else, they always run a time lapse video of getting the rink ready to play. In a geeky way, I find it very interesting. They also interview players from each team about playing outside and most of them look back to their childhood, reminiscing about simpler times when it was still just a game. Their thoughts and memories brought back a lot of memories for me, too.

Growing up in Massachusetts in the late 60’s and 70’s, spurred on by Bobby Orr and the Big, Bad Bruins, the men in my family were huge hockey fans. We watched hockey, talked about hockey and played hockey. As soon as the ponds froze over, we were there playing hockey. During the week, a group of us would run home from school, grab our skates, sticks, gloves and a puck, and hustle to the closest pond to get in an hour or so of hockey before darkness set in and we reluctantly went home. As far as we were concerned, the game was on and the homework could wait.

The only thing better was the weekends. Me and my brothers had chores to do before we could go out on Saturdays (mine was to wash the kitchen or dining room floor), but then it was off to the ponds. We’d get there by 9:30 or 10:00, skate until about 1:00, go home for a short lunch and then skate until it was too dark to see a foot in front of you. Then, and only then, we’d begrudgingly trudge home, tired and hungry (again). We might have had a few bumps, bruises or nicks, and we were usually numb from the cold, but we were a happy bunch of kids! If we were lucky, the Bruins were on TV that night and we’d watch the game, imagining ourselves out there on the Garden ice.

One of my all-time, favorite memories of those times was when my friend Bruce decided to go to the pond with us. Now Bruce played street hockey with us, but he wasn’t much of an ice hockey player. So Bruce showed up with his stick with a plastic street hockey blade (using a baseball metaphor, Strike One) and since he didn’t have hockey skates yet, put on his figure skates (Strike Two) and went out on the pond. I think it was one of my older brothers who, noticing the plastic street hockey blade, told Bruce that his stick was going to break because it was so cold. Bruce, however, would hear nothing of it. We started the game and the first time someone passed the puck to Bruce, you guessed it, the plastic blade snapped right off his stick (Strike Three, yer out)! After a few minutes of uproarious laughter and some I-told-you-so’s, the game went on, with Bruce borrowing someone’s spare stick.

That was about the biggest problem we faced back then, broken sticks or dull blades. I can see why the pros had that little twinkle in their eyes when they talked about it. I probably have that twinkle right now, too.