False Phrases

Recently I was thinking about things my parents used to say when I was a kid to make me feel better, or get me to do something, or pump me up to attempt something. There were a lot of things that turned out to be true, but there were a lot of things that turned out to be inaccurate or flat out wrong. Every family had their own sayings, but I’m guessing that many of us heard the same ones.

Here are a few sayings that were supposed to teach us life lessons:

• Good things come to those who wait. Mom told us this to cheer us up when we didn’t get something we wanted. We heard this one a lot in my house. Somehow this was supposed to make me feel better about not getting something, when in reality I would have felt much better getting what I wanted right then. Now that I think about it, nothing comes to those who wait.
• Work hard and you’ll get ahead. Mom and Dad told us this so we’d do our homework and do well in school so we could go on to college. I think it was supposed to motivate us to give our all to tasks and persevere. Sadly, in today’s world you work hard and you get a pat on the back. That is, if your company is being downsized, in which case you get shown the door.
• The cream always rises to the top. This goes along with the previous phrase. It was supposed to teach us that if you do your very best, you’ll magically rise to the top. I’ll tell you what rises to the top – dead bodies…unless they have a pair of cement shoes.
• Cheaters never prosper. Ha! Professional athletes and politicians have turned this one on its head. We heard this one a lot, too, because Mom and Dad wanted us to always play fair and follow the rules. As with most kids, we didn’t always live by this rule.

Here are a few sayings that Mom and Dad employed to get us to eat stuff we didn’t like:

• Carrots are good for your eyes. Which was followed by “Have you ever seen a rabbit with glasses?” I have to admit, I never did see a rabbit with glasses. However, I did see a lot of people who ate carrots and still had glasses, Mom and Dad included. I didn’t eat carrots much and I never needed glasses. That is, until I hit my mid-40’s and now I can’t read anything without my goggles.
• Eat all your vegetables and you’ll grow up big and strong. I am Exhibit A that this was false. We had vegetables almost every night with dinner, along with salad, and we had to eat all that we were given (or took) and I never did make it to six feet. I know, I know, some will say I did grow up big and strong – big headed with strong B.O.
• Fish is great brain food. I’ve never been a big fish fan and yet I was still pretty smart growing up. I still remember Moe telling Larry, in response to his declaration that fish was great brain food, that he should fish for a whale! I heard that one from my brothers a few times, too.

Lastly, here are a few sayings that Mom and Dad used to get us to stop doing things they didn’t like:

• Your face will get stuck like that. Mom seemed to always catch us making goofy faces at each other and said this to get us to stop. Guess what? It didn’t work. We still did it and our faces are perfectly normal, some may even say handsome. Though I must admit, in a few moments of insecurity I did check my face in the mirror just to make sure I wasn’t cross-eyed with my tongue hanging out of my mouth.
• If you sit too close to the TV, you’ll ruin your eyes. Since the advent of TV, kids have sat as close to it as they could. In my house, we sat close to the TV so we could hear it because someone was always goofing around and making noise – many times it was me. However, I don’t think there was ever a scientific study that proved that if you sit too close to the TV, your eyes are adversely affected.
• If you listen to music too loud, you’ll go deaf. There was only one reason for this, and it was because our parents, mine included, hated the music we listened to. My brothers and sisters and I listened to rock, from the Beatles to Zeppelin, until a couple of family members lost their minds and went disco on me. There was only one way to play it and that was loud! Meanwhile, Mom was playing her Englebert Humperdinck and Tom Jones albums pretty loud herself.

There you have it, things our parents told us that weren’t true. Maybe in twenty years my kids will have a list of phrases that my wife and I told them that weren’t true. That is, if they can come up with any.

PBJ

I bring my lunch to work almost every day. Part of the reason is because it is much less expensive to make your own lunch than it is to buy it somewhere every day, but another part of it is that I don’t want to have to go out and get it all the time. However, there are some days, like this morning, that there are no leftovers and nothing to make a sandwich with. So on some of these days, I just make the old standby – peanut butter and jelly. I don’t want to have a PBJ sandwich every day, but every once in a while is alright with me. Actually, there are times in the winter on a Saturday afternoon that a toasted PBJ just hits the spot. The peanut butter a gooey, melty mess and the jelly nice and warm – yum!

There was a time when I was a kid that I had a PBJ sandwich almost every day for lunch. The only times I didn’t, I had a peanut butter and fluff sandwich (a fluffernutter). That’s how much I loved peanut butter. Even when I started elementary school (I didn’t go to kindergarten) I still had PBJs or fluffernutters for lunch because I brought my lunch to school most of the time the first few years. It wasn’t that the school lunches weren’t good; they were much better back then than they are now. They actually made the food in the school kitchen in those days.

To this day, I still vividly remember a day in second grade when I thought my lunch was ruined – and probably my life with it. We used to get to school a little early and hang around outside, playing with our friends. Sometimes we played with a football or played catch with a baseball. This particular day, there was one guy throwing a rubber ball off the brick wall of the school to a pack of us to see who could get “three outs” first and become the guy to do the throwing. It was intense and we were going after the ball like there were two outs in the ninth inning of the seventh game. Guys were getting run into, pushed out of the way and even knocked down. We were having a blast!

The bell rang, signaling the end of our fun and the start of classes. My teacher, Mrs. O’Reilly, was an older, no-nonsense teacher, so when she came out to get us, we didn’t mess around. It was near the beginning of the year, but I already knew to do what she told you. I quickly went to pick up my jacket and my lunch and then I noticed it. My lunch was squashed. Someone had stepped on it and flattened out my brown bag lunch. I picked it up and slowly opened it to see a PBJ pancake. The tears started welling up in my eyes as I contemplated my poor, flat, mutilated PBJ sandwich. I held it out in front of me, finding Mrs. O’Reilly through my tears. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked. I was in such a state of shock I couldn’t even speak.

She was looking at me, probably trying to figure out where I was bleeding. I just held my mangled lunch bag up to her. She looked at it, looked at me, and said in a slightly annoyed manner, “What’s the problem?” What’s the problem? WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?!?! Was she blind? I thought it was pretty obvious.

Between heaving breaths I managed to get out the horrible truth, “Someone stepped on my lunch!” Again, she looked at my lunch, looked at me, and in a noticeably more annoyed manner said “You can still eat it, it’s just a little flat!” She handed it back and I stared at her in disbelief. Couldn’t she see that my lunch was ruined? Heck, my whole day was ruined! Obviously she didn’t understand, because she started to push me toward the door and into the school. My classmates were all looking at me, wondering if I was OK, that I must have gotten hurt. But the only thing that was hurt right then was my feelings. I remember thinking something to the effect that my Mom would NEVER have done that.

Lunch time came and I took out what was once my wonderful PBJ sandwich, trying to conceal it from everyone else. I was embarrassed to have to eat such a pitiful sandwich, but eat it I did. I think I even fought back a few tears from my eyes at lunch, too. When it was done, Mrs. O’Reilly came by and asked me if my lunch was OK. I hated to admit it, but my sandwich tasted just fine, even if it was about an eighth of an inch thick. She smiled at me and patted me on the head the way adults do and I couldn’t help but smile back. That day I learned that Mrs. O’Reilly wasn’t such an old Meany after all, that she was actually pretty nice.

I also learned something else that day. Call it a life lesson, call it a metaphor for life. Sometimes your lunch is going to get stepped on and squished, and you have a choice to make: you can sit there and cry about it, or you can pick it up and eat it anyway. That day, for probably the first time in my life, with the help of a wise teacher, I chose to eat it anyway.

An "A" for Effort

I am totally amazed by the number of people on Facebook, YouTube, and the internet in general, during work hours. There are a number of people where I work that are constantly doing anything but the work they’re getting paid for. They’re uploading pictures, videos and news items to Facebook or commenting on their friend’s status or pictures they just uploaded; they’re texting or chatting with friends; they’re shopping or at least looking at stuff. Yes, these people are younger, in their 20’s or early 30’s. No, this is not about me being older and being cranky or grumpy. The fact that we have a looming deadline doesn’t seem to matter to some people, or the fact that what they’re supposed to be working on is holding something or someone else up doesn’t seem to bother them.

I’m not saying I never go on the internet at work. I take about 30 minutes at lunch and check out Facebook, the latest sports news and read what I think are important emails. I even occasionally check my emails at other times, but I don’t read them if they’re not important. And by important, I mean something that can’t be taken care of once I get home or a family matter. That rules out 99% of my emails. Before you start pasting a big “SELF RIGHTEOUS” label on me, I am the first to admit that I am far from perfect. I’ve already admitted that I sometimes go on the internet during work hours. However, I don’t do this when we’re under a work avalanche and we can barely keep our heads above the surface. There are times when you just need to bust your tail for 8-10 hours straight. I think it is the time-appropriateness (if that’s even a word) of the actions that bother me. Or maybe it’s just that it appears that the people I’m talking about just don’t seem to care if they do a good job or not, even though they know they’re being watched.

When I was a kid, we had chores to do. There were daily chores, such as setting the table for dinner, clearing the table after dinner, washing the dishes, drying the dishes and sweeping the floor. All of us had a responsibility each day. We also had weekly chores, which included vacuuming, dusting, washing the kitchen floor and washing the dining room floor. All of us had a weekly responsibility, too. In addition, some things not included in these categories are shoveling snow, cutting the grass when we were old enough and cleaning our rooms. And these are the ones I remember, there were probably more. We all learned to pitch in and do our share. But no matter what our assigned chore was, we were expected to do it right. It’s called responsibility.

I remember having to wash a floor a second time because I did a half-baked job the first time because I wanted to go hang out with my friends. Dad took one look at that floor and knew I didn’t do it right. He didn’t yell at me or make a big scene, he simply asked me if I thought the floor was truly clean and if I had done the best I could in washing the floor. I said “No” to both questions, figuring he’d let it go and let me go hang out with my friends and do a better job next week. But that’s not what he did. He actually made me do it again, do it right, before I could go and hang out with my friends. I’m glad he did.

That lesson was reinforced throughout the time I lived at home. Both my parents taught all nine of us to do the best we could no matter what we were doing. They did not expect perfection, but they did expect our best effort. Win, lose, pass, fail – it didn’t matter; what mattered most was that we gave our best effort. I remembered that lesson all through school and tried not to worry about grades. I remembered that lesson when I got my first job when I was in high school, working in the kitchen of a function facility on what was called the “slop table”. It was as good as it sounds. I remembered that lesson when I was in college and worked in the local skating rink, making the ice and sweeping up the place at the end of the night. No one would have known that I didn’t sweep everywhere, but I would have. I remembered that lesson when I got my first “real” job after college, doing something I hadn’t planned on and for a lot less money than I expected. I still gave it my best effort. I remembered that lesson at every job I’ve had since then and I still remember it today.

My wife and I have taught our kids the same lesson: to always give your best effort and do the best you can. As long as they can honestly say they gave it their all in school, I’m OK with whatever grades they get and they are, too. In their extra-curricular activities, as long as they give their best effort, I’m OK with their performance or outcome and I hope they are, too. Sure, you can pretty much always improve on something, but perfection is not the goal. People much wiser than I am have said something to the effect that it’s the journey not the destination that matters. I just think that if you give everything your best effort, the destination will be that much sweeter.

Life Lessons

Sometimes when I try to explain something to my kids, especially when they’ve made a mistake, they really don’t want to hear it. In all honesty, they just want to get as far away from me as they can. Or they just want me to shut up. As my son says at these times, “Dad, I don’t need a life lesson.” I remember the first time he said that to me. I was shocked, I was surprised, I was hurt. Yes, I was hurt.

Part of my job as a father is to help my kids not make the same stupid mistakes I did. Isn’t that what all Dads (and Moms) want for their kids, to live a better life than they did? And to not learn things the hard way. Because of this, there are times we just want to explain a little bit and make sure they make the connection between what they did or did not do and what came out of it. As my kids have gotten older I’ve learned that they’re actually very insightful. They already see the connection that I’m trying to show them, to explain to them. I’ve come to understand why they don’t want another life lesson. Not that it always stops me – sometimes you just need to say what you need to say. Just sayin’.

I remember one of the first times my dad gave me one of those true life lessons. I was probably about 12 years old and told one of my friends who had totally aggravated me to screw. No, that’s not a nice substitute for the F-Bomb; it’s really what I said. Now that may seem tame by today’s standards, but telling someone to screw, and a friend at that, in those days was pretty strong. When I turned to go into my house my Dad was standing there, not looking very happy. Apparently, he had seen and heard the whole situation. The first thing Dad did was make me apologize to my friend, which I thought was totally ridiculous after how he had been acting. Then came the life lesson. Three decades later, I don’t remember the exact words he used or even everything we talked about, but a couple of things have stuck with me. One thing I remember clearly was that my father didn’t yell at me once during the conversation. The other is that he reversed the situation and it was me being told to screw, and he asked me how I’d feel in that situation. I totally got what he was saying: you treat people as you’d like to be treated. It’s the “Golden Rule”.

I know there were plenty of other life lessons from my parents, some so important that I still remember them today. But here are some other things I also learned from my family:

·     Never let someone convince you that something will taste as good as something else, when you know that their having to convince you means something is wrong. Nine kids from my family can tell you that powdered milk does not taste just like regular milk, liver does not taste just like steak (even with ketchup) and carrots mashed up do not taste just like squash.

·     Always check the toilet paper roll before you sit down. Once you’ve done your duty, it’s too late. You’ll be at the mercy of others who may not have your best interests at heart.

·     If your older brothers do something to help “toughen you up” or teach you a lesson and tell you “Don’t tell Mom!”, then don’t tell Mom. Otherwise the next time will be much worse. Besides, later in life when people give you a hard time, you’ll laugh at their pitiful attempts to intimidate you.

·     If you’re a little wary of doing something but your older brothers are encouraging you to just do it, that “nothing bad is going to happen”, something bad is going to happen.

·     If your girlfriend has pet names for you, such as Snookie Wookums or Pookie Bear, never let her call you that in front of even one of your brothers and sisters. That is, unless you want to be called that by your whole family for a long time, even after she’s not your girlfriend anymore.

Your family can teach you a lot, things that will help you through life. The important thing is that you take these life lessons and pass them on. Your kids might act as though they don’t want to hear it, but some day they will thank you for sharing those gems with them. Well, maybe not, but at least when they’ve gone to college or moved out on their own they’ll check the toilet paper on the way in to the bathroom.