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.

I Can't Wait Until...

Quite often I hear people say something like, “I can’t wait until…”, where the “until” is somewhere in the future, sometimes many months or even years. I hear people say at Thanksgiving that they can’t wait until Christmas (like I did last week) because it’s the most wonderful time of the year. I hear people say at Christmas that they can’t wait until New Year’s because with the new year is a new start, resolutions and all. I hear people say in January and February that they can’t wait until spring when it starts getting warmer, and the trees and flowers come back to life. I hear people say in April and May that they can’t wait until summer when the weather gets really nice and they can take a vacation. I hear people say in August that they can’t wait until the fall when it’s a little cooler, the kids go back to school and the leaves on the trees turn amazing colors. I hear people say in October that they can’t wait for Thanksgiving because… On and on it goes.

What’s the matter with right now? It seems that we as humans are always looking to the future, looking forward to something further on down the line, something that isn’t… now. Whatever it is, it can never come too fast and it always takes too long to get to that point. Too many times, the things we’re so looking forward to finally come and they disappoint us because they don’t live up to what we built up in our minds. What then? Well, we already have the next thing to look forward to.

I remember growing up and looking ahead to many things and feeling like it was taking so long to get there. As I’ve mentioned before, I always looked forward to the day I could beat my older brothers at something, or at least be as good at something as them. When I finally got there, it didn’t matter because they had moved forward just as I had. Around 4^th grade I started looking ahead to the day I’d leave elementary school and go to junior high school (what’s now middle school) in 7^th grade. While it was nice to leave the “little kids” behind, I quickly found out how much I missed, and never appreciated, recess. When I was in junior high I looked forward to the day I’d go to high school because that meant I wasn’t a kid anymore. But when you’re a freshman and the low man on the totem pole, you’re still a kid to all the upper classmen and you’re treated as such.

When I was first in high school I couldn’t wait until I got my license and could drive, then I would have true freedom! However, there was often not a car available and when it was, most times there was an errand that had to be run as part of being able to use the car. So before I could go out with my friends I had to run to the store and get some milk or bread or something. Oh, yeah, don’t forget to put some gas in the tank, too. I guess I learned that with freedom comes responsibility – and expenses. When I was in my junior year of high school I couldn’t wait until senior year when we would be top dogs of the school. Then senior year went by so quick that we never really got to savor our lofty position and it was on to college.

After two years of college I couldn’t wait until college was done. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, I truly did. I loved the schedule, the way you didn’t have to go to class, the way the professors treated you like an intelligent young adult, not a kid. But I was tired of the homework, the studying and trying to get everything done while working 30 hours or more a week. Two years later, my last final finally arrived and I whipped through it feeling elated as I passed it in to my professor, thinking that I’d never have to do this again. A few of us finished at the same time and talked in the hallway as we went to our cars. One person was going to grad school, another person already had a job and the rest were going to start looking for a job. However, I had never thought that far ahead; I just wanted to be finished with college. I got to my car and just sat there thinking the same thought for ten or fifteen minutes, “Oh my gosh. I’m done with college and I HAVE TO GET A REAL JOB!” I felt like that was it, my carefree, young adult days were over and now I had to get a full-time job and be an (gulp) adult. I turned the key, took one last look around and started driving home. That ride home was the longest, most depressing ride I had ever been on. In a short amount of time, maybe half an hour, I had gone from the highest elation to the lowest depression, all because “I couldn’t wait until…”

Now that I’ve hit the half century mark I have a bit of a different attitude, or maybe perspective. I feel like the passing of time is going faster and faster every year, not staying the same and definitely not slowing down. If there were a Father Time, I’d find out where he lives and tell him to knock it off, to stop speeding up time for me. I’d tell him I want time to pass as slow as it did when I was in elementary school, when it seemed like the school year took forever; like it did when my brothers were always bigger, stronger and better at sports than me; like it did when eighteen seemed like it was so far away that I’d never get there. I’d tell him to ease back on the throttle a bit; that it’s OK, because I CAN wait until Christmas and New Year’s and spring. I like right now and want to enjoy it a little longer before it’s gone.

Did It Really Happen?

A couple people have asked me if some of the things I write about really happened or was it really like that growing up. And another person asked me how the heck I remember all this stuff. OK, you got me. I’m really an only child from a wealthy family and every story is made up. I don’t really have six brothers and two sisters, and there were never card games and board games; I didn’t have to learn to get along with others, or how to share things, or how to wait for things; I got everything and anything I wanted, especially at Christmas; my yard was not the football field or the wiffle ball field where we played for hours; I went on luxurious vacations every year; I didn’t have to count out M&M’s in a Dixie Cup. Well, maybe in some parallel universe or imaginary world that is true, but not here in the real world. All I can say is, I write things as I remember them. Does that mean that everything I write is exactly how it happened? Probably not, but what I write is how I remember things and so far no one has come forward and said, “That never happened.”, or “This is what really happened.”, or “This is how that really happened.”.

I know I have a pretty good memory because there are times I bring up situations and someone doesn’t remember it, but as I fill in the details they’ll say, “Oh, yeah. I remember that!” Then we’ll talk about it for fifteen or twenty minutes and laugh about things that happened. Oftentimes it will lead to the retelling of other situations that happened, some even funnier than the original one we talked about. I don’t know why I have such clear memories of occurrences from decades ago – but can’t remember where I left my cell phone ten minutes ago – but maybe it’s because those were some great times and I drank in all the details.

I try not to make it sound like everything was wonderful when I was a kid, because it wasn’t. We weren’t The Brady Bunch or the Huxtables on The Cosby Show. My family went through some hard times, especially trying to feed, clothe and provide for nine kids. I could focus on the struggles I had as a kid, or that we had as a family, but as I look back on my childhood I don’t see the tough times as much as I see how those times taught me something about life, myself or family. In many instances, those tough times taught me what was really important as opposed to what just seemed to be important. That doesn’t mean I always made the right decisions, I made enough bad ones in my life to last ten lifetimes, but I’d like to think that I learned from my mistakes and grew and changed because of them.

My parents and family were by no means perfect. However, my parents raised nine kids, all who are reasonably successful adults. Not one of us is a criminal or a derelict. Trust me when I say that there were other families we knew that had as many, or almost as many, kids as we did and that cannot be said about them. I’m not bragging or trying to put anyone down, but it would have been easy for any of us to turn to a different lifestyle than we did in order to get the “things” many of our friends had. That we didn’t is a testament to our parents and how they taught us to live.

So did this stuff really happen and was it really like I say it was? As far as I remember, yes and yes. I remember it from my perspective and through the lenses of 30 – 40 year old glasses. Things may be a little fuzzy around the edges, but the main part is very clear. I had parents who loved me, and brothers and sisters that I loved (well most of the time anyway). As my Dad used to frequently say, we always had “a roof over our heads, food on the table and clothes on our backs”, despite some fairly hard times. It’s not all flowers and rainbows today either, but I often think that if my parents got through challenges with nine kids, I can do it with two.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Waiting

I was on my computer the other day, waiting for a web page to load. Or should I say I was getting ticked off waiting for the web page to load. Mind you, this took all of about seven seconds. Why is it so hard for us to wait?

In the not-so-distant past, we would have been ecstatic if a web page, program or a file opened in anywhere close to ten seconds. Think back about five or ten years ago. How long did it take to get to your email so you could read your messages? I’m pretty sure it took longer than ten seconds. How about saving a medium sized document in Word? Take a break, come back and it still was saving.

How about driving? How many times has someone cut out in front of you, causing you to slam on the brakes, when there was no one behind you for a mile? Those people just couldn’t wait another five seconds. The light turns from green to yellow – do you stop even though not doing so will mean you go through a red light? Probably not. Because we don’t want to sit at the red light and wait.

Waiting in lines, waiting in traffic, waiting in the doctor’s office, waiting to buy something until you can actually afford it. As Tom Petty said, “The waiting is the hardest part.” We hate to wait; even though we’ve all been taught since we were children that “good things come to those who wait”.

Growing up in a family of eleven (nine kids plus my parents), sometimes we just had to wait. We had only one bathroom. No, you didn’t read that incorrectly. We had ONE bathroom. When someone was in there, you had to wait for your turn. Whether it was showers or just having to do your duty, you had to wait. When we went on a road trip and came home, we were calling spots in the queue as soon as we turned onto our street. “I get the bathroom first!” “I’m second” You had to be quick and you had to be bold or you had to…wait.

If I wanted something new, most of the time I had to wait. I still remember getting my first brand new, never used before, not a hand-me-down, baseball glove in my fourth year of Little League. I got it from my family saving S&H Greenstamps. It took time to accumulate enough of those stamps and I had to wait. I loved that glove, even if it was blue.

What’s my point? Just that, sometimes, it’s OK to wait. It may even be beneficial. Pulling out in front of someone not paying attention could cause an accident and land you in the hospital. Barging into an occupied bathroom could cause much embarrassment and burn images of your older aunt or grandmother into your brain that can never be erased. Or waiting just may help you to appreciate something so much that you still remember it, and all the good feelings surrounding it, thirty or forty years later.