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?

The Pomp and Circumstance Is Over

The pomp and circumstance is over, the ensuing party complete. My son has graduated high school! The last half of the year was a battle, not because the classes were hard, but just getting him to get up and go to school was difficult. Somehow, even though he had zero motivation to be there and he put in as little effort as possible, he managed to graduate Magna Cum Laude. Much to the horror of his guidance counselor at school, he has no plans to go to a conventional four year college. I find this quite refreshing and courageous.

There is a sort of unwritten rule these days that you MUST go to college, especially if you’re considered smart in school. Kids are told from the time they hit middle school that you have to go to college if you want to make a decent living and not end up flipping burgers your whole adult life (no offense intended toward any burger flippers out there). There seems to be no choice; you go to college and you’ll get a great job, or you don’t go to college and you’ll be a loser. Granted, you have a better chance of getting a higher paying job with a college education, but as adults with a brain of our own we know this is not an absolute truth. We all know people who went to college and barely scrape by, and we all know people who never went to college or dropped out and are fairly wealthy. Besides, it’s not all about how much money you make, but about how much you like what you do. That seems to be missing in the discussion today.

When I was a senior in high school, I wanted to take a year off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. It’s not that I didn’t want to go to college, I just didn’t have the money to go where I wanted, as my parents had told me in my senior year that they couldn’t give me any money for college. I also wasn’t sure what I wanted to go for. Well, actually, I did know what I wanted to go to college for, but it wasn’t what my parents, some of my family and friends, most of my teachers and my guidance counselor thought I should be doing. I wanted to be a writer, preferably a sports writer. I thought that would be a great career choice since I loved writing and I loved sports. Plus, I figured if I ever got married, I’d still have to go to the games (Sorry you don’t like me going to the Bruins game, dear, but I have to go. It’s my job!).

I was constantly being told I was too smart to be a writer, that I should be an engineer or an architect because I was very good in math, or I should go into accounting or finance. My thought was that I didn’t want to do any of those things, but I felt pressure from all sides to do something like that. I was also one of those kids that did what my parents told me to do – well, sometimes, but I didn’t like to go against them. I thought if I took a year off, maybe my parents would forget about what they thought I should do and just let me go for what I wanted to do. However, we all somehow came up with the money to pay for my first semester’s tuition and I never took the time to truly explore what I wanted to do.

Fast forward 35 years and here I am doing a job I like but don’t love, and thinking about writing most of the time. And I’ve felt like this for a number of years. So when my kids were small, I swore I wouldn’t push them to do something I wanted them to do or thought they’d be good at, and I would let them choose their career and be what they wanted to be (within reason, of course, I wouldn’t let them be an axe murderer or a drug dealer). So when my daughter told us that she wanted to take some time to figure out what she wanted to do after 3 semesters of college, we totally supported her decision. When she decided to go back to school after a year, we totally supported that decision, too. She’s going for what she wants to do, not what we told her to do. Now my son wants to pursue a career in the music field and I’m totally for it. He may be a musician or a producer – it’s what he wants to do and has a passion for.

I’m proud of both my kids as they make the transition to full-on adulthood. They’re exploring what they want to do with their lives and not letting the masses make them conform to some artificial norm. I wish I had had that kind of strength and courage when I was their age. Who knows, maybe I’d actually love what I do and you’d be reading my book instead of my blog!

Prom Disasters

As my son hurtles to the end of his high school career, barely motivated to get out of bed to go to school, I can’t help but think back to my senior year of high school. Like him, I really had nothing to go to school for. I didn’t need to pass any classes the second half of the year and I could still graduate. Passing wasn’t an issue, as I had taken fluff classes all year. I took a class called Tales of Mystery and Intrigue, where we read books, like Serpico. I took a class called Comedy and Satire, where we talked about things like The Three Stooges. I had no Math class, no Science class, and no French class. My senior year was pretty much a waste of time.

He’s also coming up to Prom season, and because he’s dating a girl a year younger, he’ll be going to the Junior Prom and the Senior Prom. Let’s be real, the girls think about it all the time and the guys for the most part couldn’t care less. At least that’s how it was when I was in high school. Maybe I’m just bitter after all these years, because both my Junior and Senior Proms were horrible. To say things didn’t go well would be an understatement.

The girl I was dating Junior year couldn’t wait for the prom. It was all she talked about for weeks. On the evening of the prom, we met up with another couple (her best friend and a guy that I had played soccer with, whom I’ll call Mike), took some pictures and then hung out with some other people for a while. We had one or two drinks with alcohol and Mike purposely made all the drinks kind of weak because none of us were big drinkers, especially the girls. Heck, I don’t think I was even slightly buzzed after two of them. We went to the Prom and after a short time my date went to the bathroom – and didn’t come back for over an hour. Apparently, she was getting sick…from the alcohol. I can’t even tell you how many dirty looks I got that night from outraged females, all suspecting that I had got her drunk for nefarious purposes. Disaster #1 in my Prom experience.

Senior year was no better. I had a girlfriend whom I liked very much and things seemed to be going pretty well. I honestly don’t even remember exactly what happened, but I think we had had an argument one night, and the next day a friend of hers overheard a comment I made, took it out of context and told her I didn’t want to go to the Prom with her. Me, being the dim-witted clod I was, didn’t realize anything was up until a day or two later when I talked to her and found out about what had happened. To make matters worse, she was going to go to the Prom with her old boyfriend because she thought I didn’t want to go with her. Disaster #2 in my Prom experience.

Feeling like I was going to be one of the few not going, I found out that a girl I had been friends with since Elementary School wasn’t going to the Prom either, so we ended up going together. We had been good friends, but not romantic, over the years so I figured we’d have a good time. Boy was I wrong. About ten minutes after we got there, she totally blew me off and left me to myself. I was a third wheel for most of the night, hanging out with people here and there until they went to dance …or whatever. On top of that, I had to see my now ex-girlfriend looking very pretty at the Prom with another guy (who, by the way, wanted to kick my butt). Disaster #3 in my Prom experience.

So as my son finishes up his last couple of weeks of high school, I hope he has a much better Prom experience than I did. Then again, it couldn’t be much worse.

Pranks

The other day at work we were discussing some pranks that have occurred there. In one of them, a stuffed moose from the Holiday Party Yankee Swap was kidnapped and held for ransom. In another, the Manager of Development came in to work to find his office filled with white and pink balloons, wall-to-wall and almost floor-to-ceiling. He could barely even get in the door to his office. In the most recent prank, everything at one guy’s desk was covered with plastic wrap. His chair, his laptop, his monitor, his pens and even his sticky notes were all individually wrapped in plastic cling wrap. Though there were suspects for all these pranks, no one took credit for them.

I’m not against pranks as long as no one gets hurt and nothing is broken. Growing up in a family with nine kids, including seven boys, you either have fun with pranks or you cry and whine all the time. My older brothers played a great prank on my younger brother and I. Three of them would be in their room and they would have us wait in the hall outside of it, then they’d let us back in and one of them would be gone! We’d look under the beds, under the blankets of the top bunk bed, in the closet, and out the windows in case he was hiding outside. He was nowhere to be found. Then they’d have us go back to the hallway for a minute and when we returned to their room, there he was! They did this multiple times and every time one of them was gone. It took us a few years before we realized that there was a trap door to storage space in their closet and that’s where the “missing” brother was going.

Being taught well by my older brothers and being a bit of a wise guy myself, I participated in far too many pranks over the years to detail here, but here are a couple that I remember like they happened last week. 

I used to have an obsession with throwing things up on the ceiling that I think came from The Three Stooges episode where Moe throws a pie up on the ceiling, which then falls onto the face of a rich woman when she looks up. In the fourth grade, Ms. Silverstein, my teacher, stepped out of the room for a moment and I promptly took a Fudgie (a piece of chocolate candy for those who don’t know what I’m talking about), rolled it in a ball and threw it up at the ceiling, where it stuck – just above the door. Most of the kids thought it was funny, so I did the same thing with another, which was followed by more laughter. Ms. Silverstein, sensing something was wrong, came back in and looked around the room trying to figure out what was going on. Meanwhile, the first piece of chocolate was loosening up and barely hanging on to the ceiling right above her head. Just after she turned to go back to her desk, it fell to the ground, missing her by about an inch and landing on the floor. Luckily for me she never did figure out what happened.

You think I would have learned from that near miss, but no, I did something similar in eighth grade. We were doing an “International Week” in Social Studies where each student gave a report on a different country. Someone’s choice was Italy and the person brought in some cheese to share with everybody. While most of my classmates tasted their cheese, I rolled mine into a ball and threw it at the ceiling where it stuck just above my desk. Too many of my classmates were looking up at it so I thought I better get it down before the teacher, Mr. Lown, saw it and gave me detention. I hit it with my pen, but it didn’t move. I waited a minute, so as to not draw attention to myself, and threw my notebook at it, but it held on tight. I figured I needed something bigger, so after another minute I threw my text book up at it and knocked it down – along with the whole ceiling panel that was then all over me, my desk and the floor around me in about a hundred pieces! Needless to say, I got caught.

Looking back all these years later, the pranks I did in school were stupid, as was shutting the classroom closet door on my friend Smitty. Many pranks are kind of stupid. They’re fun at the time, but not so much later. Thankfully no one got hurt in any of the pranks I was involved in, although I did have to sit below a gaping hole in the ceiling of my Social Studies class for about a month. That was painful.

Pictures in Time

Last week we had to submit pictures for my son’s high school yearbook, which included his senior picture and a picture from when he was a baby. As usual, we waited until the last day, so we spent the night before going through albums and boxes with an assortment of pictures. As much as it was kind of annoying to have to do that when I could have been getting my beauty rest, it also made me really happy. 

As I was going through the pictures of my kids when they were little, there were a few things that really stood out to me. Foremost, was that both kids were smiling and happy in almost every picture. I’m not just talking about posed, “say cheese” pictures, but also unplanned, unscripted pictures. That is how I remember them; smiling, laughing, playing, just doing the funny, goofy things kids do. Another thing that was quite noticeable was that my kids did a lot together. It was really hard finding a picture of just my son, all by himself. In almost all the pictures of him, my daughter was right there with him, both of them smiling and laughing. Somehow there were also quite a few pictures that included me with the kids, which amazed me since I don’t remember my wife taking all those pictures. However, I’m glad she did, and I was glad to find there were also a number of pictures of my wife with the kids. At least they can’t say we never spent time with them, because we’ve got the proof!

The sad part is that they probably don’t remember many of those times. I know I don’t remember much before first grade. Sure, I remember a few things here and there, but not a whole lot. Even when we’ve broken out old pictures with my family and talked about what was going on when the picture was taken, I either vaguely remember or I don’t remember at all. I’m in the pictures, so I know I was there, but the memories are gone. In one way it’s sad that I can’t remember those times, but in another way it’s nice to hear my older brothers and sisters talk about something that they remember so vividly.  

One of my uncles once took a bunch of pictures at a family party in our backyard when I was just a little guy, maybe about six years old. There were aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, parents and grandparents at that party. He had them made into slides and years later he brought them and a projector to our house to show us. As we worked our way through the slides, I realized that one way or another I managed to get into a large percentage of the pictures. Here’s a picture of all the adults standing together as couples – with me lying on the ground, peeking out between someone’s legs. Here’s a picture of all the older kids – with me sticking my goofy face in from the side. Here’s a picture of random people standing around talking, unaware their being photographed at that moment – with me facing the camera with a cheese ball smile a mile wide. Strange, but I have absolutely no recollection of that event.

I’m sure that someday we’ll sit down with the kids, maybe even the grandkids, and look through those pictures and reminisce about that birthday party, or the time that my daughter made a whole snowperson family, or how my son always wore a hat or a visor, or the summer vacations on the Vineyard, or the first day of pre-school or kindergarten or first grade. Or hundreds of other things that my kids barely remember but I happily remember like they were just yesterday.