My daughter rarely cries.
A week ago, though, after I picked her up from high school tennis practice, she sat in the minivan and sobbed.
She had made the varsity tennis team, not just as a freshman but as a 15-year-old who really had only held a racket in earnest for about six months.
Li’l Diva’s coach just told her she needed to be in uniform and ready to play in the next day’s match. And in the one on Monday. This Monday. As is today.
Note: I wrote this last year when the girl turned 13 but I never hit publish. I don’t remember why. This week, she turned 14.
This dreaded day has come, Li’l Diva.
I’m not kidding myself. It’s the first of many scary moments in my future.
Your first date. Your first heartbreak.
Your first solo outing with the car. Your first prom.
Leaving for college. Moving out.
Marriage. Children of your own.
What happened to all the time in the world we had?
The exception was Excitable. He punched remote buttons for the Flatscreen of Awesomeness and maneuvered the drop-down menus to dip into the raging stream of online videos. He called up one of my favorites, Mythbusters, which he also enjoys even if it not for all the same comely, red-headed nerdy reasons as his old man. But the rest will come soon enough.
Together we sat and laughed and learned with Adam and Jamie as they explored the scientific truths behind legends such as “Can a penny thrown off the top of The Empire State building kill a pedestrian on the sidewalk?” and “Could a person be buried alive and live?”
Then came the episodes on “cola myths.”
In particular, I think of Sgt. Matthew A. Proulx of the New York State Army National Guard.
Never learning to play an instrument with any proficiency is one of my greatest regrets in life. Now it is yours, too!
I sang in a band in high school for about six months.
Our repertoire consisted of a few ‘80s Who songs, a crappy number by prog-rock supergroup Asia, “Rock This Town” by the Stray Cats, the Van Halenized version of “Oh! Pretty Woman” and “Hungry Like the Wolf” by Duran Duran. (We briefly brought in a female classmate to stand next to me and do the moaning at the end of “Wolf.” Absolute closest I came in high school to losing my virginity.)
We went through guitarists like Spinal Tap went through drummers, just without the bizarre gardening accidents. Shortly after we finally found one who was really good (that would be him on the left in this video playing with ‘00s Top 40 alt-rock band Splender), they realized they needed a singer with a vocal range exceeding four and a half notes.
In college, I taught myself to play some basic blues harmonica riffs so I could jam with my roommate, a nine-and-a-half finger guitarist, while we drank too much Keystone on Thursday nights. You can image how that went.
I took piano for a few months in my 20s through an adult education class. I was at the top of the class. Sound impressive until you learn my competition was all grandmothers. With arthritis. And periodic gout.
I took bass guitar lessons for about nine months from one of Bob Dylan’s first electric sidemen. Result, I can play bass guitar like I’m wringing a neck. Not confirmed but I may have been the student who drove him to move to Israel.
So when Neil of Citizen of the Month asked me last year if I would contribute something to his next Christmahanukwanzaakah Online Holiday Concert, a joyous annual post of bloggers singing and playing their eggnogged noggins off, I immediately said yes. Never let it be said that I let my lack of talent stand in my way.
Below you will find my solo musical debut, but I encourage you to visit Neil’s site and enjoy the entire Sixth Annual Christmahanukwanzaakah Online Holiday Concert. It’s a blast:
My Love’s unvarnished reaction when I finally showed her this yesterday: “So is this why the ladder was in the living room last week?”
She hastens down the aisle to Vivaldi. Joins in the chorus of voices singing In My Life and Lean on Me, her eyes and head swiveling with impatience.
Her name is called. She stands and I resist yelling her name to show her how proud I am in front of the hundreds of others there because it will only embarrass her at the moment and me in the reassessment.
She’s not the star pupil, not by grace of her report card or test scores or attitude or ambition, but she’s as bright and luminescent as they come to me even when she greets my “Morning, Sunshine!” with a grunt or answers an inquiry about how something went with her default adjective: “good.”
She is the third to last student to leave the elementary school stage, the ironic end for one always in a hurry to finish every assignment every given to her.
Much like these six years gone by.
Congratulations, Thing 1. Please, take your time.
+ + +
As of this morning, our family needs less than $650 to meet our fundraising goal of $20,000 to help The Cure JM Foundation in its mission to find better treatments and a cure for juvenile myositis, the potentially devastating autoimmune disease Thing 1 continues to battle. Please be consider giving a small charitable, tax-free donation to help our daughter’s cause.
Visit our FirstGiving fundraising page to donate online by credit card or to find instructions on how to donate by mail-in check.
Thank you, all.
Thing 2’s Little League team started the season 0-8 this spring and the only bright side to that is that I’m not to blame.
You can look it up. My name is nowhere on the official league coaching roster.
I put in for the job but, as seems to be the case every year with our Little League, the folks on charge passed on me. They obviously aren’t aware of my work in the dreaded local youth soccer league where I have proven my obvious talents for coaching youngsters, a deep respect for authority and, most importantly, my patience to tolerate the little nosepickers week after week.
Instead I’m one of those dads. You know, the fun and helpful ones trying to relive their childhoods. I show up at practice in my old softball cleats, wad of top-shelf Bazooka in my cheek and a load of ultracheap Dubble Bubble in my pockets for the kids. I pitch batting practice, shag flies and try to impart wisdom about the finer points of the game like everyone lining up in parallel lines to play catch so an errant throws doesn’t clock one of your teammates in the back of the head.
I also try passing on the wisdom learned from my many years of playing ball. However, since I spent most of my time in high school warming up pitchers in the bullpen, I’m pretty much out of material once I explain the importance of a proper fitting protective cup.
One principle they teach in hitting is the need for the batter to shift his weight get more power into his swing. The best way to do this is for the batter to bring his hands back a bit before swinging to gather his energy and strength, as they note, like a cobra that is about to strike recoils before attacking.
You have to “go back to go forward,” they each repeat several times.
I’ve been thinking about that mantra a lot lately, but it has nothing to do with baseball.
I spent this past Wednesday driving 70 minutes each way to the children’s hospital with Thing 1 asleep in the backseat most of the way. In between her snoring and my skipping back and forth across the tracks of a Stone Temple Pilots compilation CD I made 10 years ago, we visited our local specialist to update him on her juvenile myositis flare.
While the rash on her body looks better, Thing 1’s neck and trunk muscles have grown weaker in the past few weeks even with all the IV steroids and other meds coursing through her veins. She’s not falling over when sits on the couch, like she did at her worst at the tender age of 33 months but she’s not quite the spunky tween I knew only three months before.
The local doctor consulted with our specialist in Chicago and they agreed Thing 1 should go back on methotrexate, the foul yellow liquid I injected into her thigh every week for six years. It was the medicine that made Thing 1 puke simply by me telling her it was time for the injection.
“Go back to go forward,” Cal Ripken Jr. said into my left ear.
Through all that Thing 1 has gone through since this relapse two months ago, the news of weekly injections was the first to bring on a full-fledged meltdown.
“No no no no,” she cried, bawling into a pillow on the couch. “I don’t want shots. No no no no no. Don’t make me get shots again.”
“It’s only for a little while, sweetie, it’s to make you better so we can get you off all these other medications.”
“No no no no,” she wept, refusing to pull her face out of the cushion. “No more shots, Daddy.”
Thing 2, like any little brother, is normally his big sister’s mortal enemy. But there he sat on the lounger across the room, his lips curling and eyes welling. Then he ran into the kitchen and offered to his sister the Whoopie Pie dessert he had been hoarding.
He even offered to take some of the shots for her. I think he would if he could, at least until he saw the uncapped 27.5 gauge needle in my hand.
“Go back to go forward,” Billy Ripken said into my right ear.
I wish I could go back, even if it was just to two months ago. We wouldn’t need to go forward after that. We could just stop time and live forever in the moment.
# # #
DONOR TO MATCH YOUR CURE JM GIFT
DOLLAR FOR DOLLAR
If you haven’t donated to help Cure JM Foundation put an end to this disease that Thing 1 can’t seem to shake, then I have good news.
A special donor has come forward with an offer to match every dollar our family raises between now and race day (June 25), up to a total of $3,000.
So your $3,000 plus the donor’s $3,000 would put us just shy of the $20,000 fundraising goal our family has set for this year.
What are you waiting for? Give to Cure JM now!
Under the "STORE CLOSING" sign rested a stack of books with hemorrhage-red covers bearing the title "Too Big to Fail."
The irony had to force a smile.
Borders enraged area owners of small, independent bookstores. Volume dealing of volumes! How gauche! A few of these little shops closed quickly without much fanfare, including the tiny Barrett Bookstore in that same shopping plaza. I had treaded Barrett’s industrial-white tile floors many times in those previous years, searching mostly for my school-required literary classics as well as the necessary CliffsNotes that explained why, for example, Moby Dick should enrapture rather than task and heap me. (Damn you, Kirrrrrrk – I mean, MelVILLLLLE!)
Ahab may not have gotten his revenge, but surviving independents did.
Earlier this year Borders' parent filed for bankruptcy, done in by even bigger retailers like Target and Amazon.com. However, I think even those early chain-store foes would agree any bookstore going under, regardless of ownership, is not a time for gloating. Forget the intellectual aspect of it; people have special bonds with bookstores and, (uses cranky old-timer voice) back in my day, those melodious places where we bought our Victrola 78s. These were shelters where you went in your times of joy or need or loneliness to see your old friends and meet new ones who would always accept you into their magical world.
However, I had other reasons to feel wistful about this past weekend's closing. Yes, one is the fear of yet another CVS/pharmacy or -- worse -- bank moving into Borders' shell. Most have to do with my growing up, to some degree, within those brick walls.
For 25 years prior to it being Borders, for my entire lifetime at that point, this place had been a supermarket, the locally owned and operated GranCentral. Not only was it the market my mother hauled me to nearly every week for groceries as a kid, but it was also the one where I lost my innocence to the working world.
For nine months following my 16th birthday, I donned a paper-thin GranCentral green jacket and served.
I combed the parking lot in rain, cold and heat gathering wire-framed carts and cursing the lazy shoppers who abandoned them.
I sorted and stacked sticky piles of returned bottles in the basement, building a fort from the filled cartons where I would eat my lunch and read the latest copies of People or US Weekly.
One time, I spent three hours on a Sunday restocking the freezer aisles without wearing gloves. I recall that day whenever my fingertips go numb, as they sometimes do, when the mercury just barely dips below 50. Consequently, from November to April, My Love often refers to me as "Mitten Boy."
At GranCentral, I learned about unions from the cut they took from my meager check. I also learned about them from my fellow teen wage slave, Pasqual, an impossibly scrawny and heavily accented Frenchman who would skulk and complain until he got his mandated break so he could go outside for a smoke.
I discovered profit margins when I found a pricing sheet that showed how much those rolls we baked in the deli really cost.
I also figured out how to use a box cutter to make end-cap displays without slicing into the product or my fingers. Well, most of the time.
But my best memory (outside of my one date with this totally fine cashier who dumped me with barely the pleasure of gliding over her rolling hills) is of the full-time guys who worked in the deli department. They tended to mismark the prices on our sandwiches so it didn’t cut too much into our meager pockets. On some Sundays after the freshly clipped coupon crowd thinned, they’d cook an extra rotisserie chicken or errantly make an extra cheese steak for whoever had the shift.
For years afterward, I’d run into some of the deli guys around town or while they were working at their second jobs. There was Red, who was also a typewriter repairman; Mark, an organist at a local church; and Mike the Greek who, well, was Greek. They always remembered who I was just like they always remembered their regular customers' orders.
After waiting in line for several minutes to make my final purchases from the local Borders, I helped the cashier peel off the dozen or so price stickers from my new books and then pack them into plastic bags. I asked about her plans.
"This is it for me," she said. "And I'm doing my book shopping online from now on."
On my way out, I took solace in the fact I didn't need a shopping cart to get all these tomes back to the minivan. The thought of some poor kid slogging through the parking lot because of my laziness, to this day, still gives me pause.
* * *
THING 1 UPDATE: Rash improvement
The first IV infusions of steroids went well over the weekend. Her rash is already looking less angry, as My Love says. This weekend will be two more doses of IV steroids plus a 6-hour-long infusion of IVIG. Oy.
Thoughts and prayers welcome as are your donations to Cure JM to help all kids with juvenile myositis diseases.
Cheers … U
Baseball is as much a game of history as it is of skill. That's why I'm putting Thing 2’s recently retired first mitt in our safe deposit box.
I want to lock up his mitt for a selfish reason: I wish I still had my first ball glove.
That long-gone relic had been given to me the spring I turned 7. My mom passed it to me from a friend whose own child had graduated from wanting to learn to turn the perfect double play to wanting to teach how to turn the perfect pirouette.
Yes, my first mitt was a hand-me-down from a ballet teacher.
Specifically, my sister's ballet teacher.
I had recently followed the light to the Church of Baseball so this was quite the baptismal gift. I accepted it without hesitation, too excited to worry that the cowhide might be a carrier of girl cooties. As a quick study of the game, I was prepared should anyone peer under the wrist strap to discover the name of my glove's original owner. I would say that if Shoeless Joe Jackson could hit .400 with a bat named "Black Betsy" then I could win a Gold Glove with a mitt called "Sheila W."
Most people wouldn't bother with my mitt anyway. The lining of the ring finger turned slightly inside out, causing borrowers to complain about the awkward fit. To me, though, it felt just fine.
We spent many hours together that year. Catching sky-scraping flies my dad threw until his shoulder ached. Snaring imaginary line drives as I lay on the playroom floor listening to Bob Murphy describe the play of another pitiful Mets team. Snagging tennis balls off the wall in my parent’s basement, which today still bears a strike zone I fashioned from masking tape.
Spring turned to summer, summer to autumn. The air turned crisp and others turned to football, but I stayed in my backyard, single-handedly catching all 27 outs to win another imaginary World Series until I was called in for lunch. I dropped my mitt next to the tree serving as the Green Monster and went inside.
That was the last I saw of it.
When I returned 20 or 30 minutes later, ball and glove had vanished.
Since we lived in a town where zoning and woods hamper most contact with civilization, my first thought that desperados, hell bent for third-hand leather, rode though and swiped it while I downed a grilled cheese didn't register. My parents concluded that a never-before- and never-since-seen dog wandered through and took it home as a chew toy. As I grew older, I started suspecting convenient scapegoating to counter an early request I made to Santa for a puppy.
Instead, for Christmas I received another glove and it was good, serving me through Tiny League and my first year in Little League. That one is gone, too, though I suspect it fell as a silent and unmourned victim during a zealous spring cleaning.
Also gone are the baseballs from my only two home runs in organized ball and the one from the night I went 5-for-5 with the game-winning RBI single in a 13-year-old All-Star game. Someone broke into my parents' house several years ago and stole those, along with some of my mom’s costume jewelry, and some other odd items of relatively little value.
Maybe it was not someone. Maybe it was something.
Maybe the same mysterious hellhound who visited our backyard years before made a return visit. Who knows? I just hope those old baseballs and memories eventually found their way to the comforting leather pocket of my old reliable Sheila W.
All this snow that's been relentlessly pelting us here in the neutral zone between New York and New England has made this 39(ish)-year-old feel nostalgic.
Oh, it was a golden time. Golden! The adults would just sit around all day, warming their hands around some brown dishwater they called coffee back then, complaining about how the weathermen had overhyped a storm that never materialized.
Yes, whippersnappers, I said "men." None of these zaftig chippies thrusting their occluded fronts all up in your face like today, no siree, Bob!
(What? You're name is Madison? Your folks name you after the mermaid in Splash or something?)
Back in the olden days - you know, the early 1980s - to be a TV weather prognosticator in you had to be male. You also had to be either portly or have a goofy nickname -- often both.
`Course we only had seven channels back then. Moreover, news was only allowed to be reported at meal times or right before bed. That's how we stayed so thin in those days: highly concentrated doses of media-induced agita.
After the weather liars frightened the bejeezus out us all, we'd scurry down to the Finast and purchase every last loaf of bread, carton of eggs and gallon of milk we could find. Why? Why to make the French toast, wisenheimer! Mounds of it!
What for? Why we'd toss it onto the streets so our rear-wheel-drive cars could get some traction. Yeah, you yungins don't know how lucky you are these days, what with your fancy 4x4s and your SUVs and your microwavable Aunt Jemima.
Broadcasters weren't always scaring us, though. Other times, they’d magically transmit through the air only the most wholesome entertainment like post-Somers "Three's Company" and pre-McGinley "Love Boat."
Huh? What do I mean “magically transmit”? Well, we had these oversized potato mashers screwed onto the roof that would transmogrify these invisible electrostatic streams of Technicolor down into a big honkin' cathode ray tube housed in a wooden crate the exact size, shape and weight of one of those Acme safes that were always dropping on Wile E. Coyote's skull. Ah, they don't oversaturate afternoon programming with genuine cartoon violence like that anymore, Junior. That's why you're so soft.
Then the cable TV came to town. That was the end of it. In came the HBO. The Cinemax. The sticking of the tin foil through the vents in the back of the box to sneak a peek of a partially descrambled Playboy Channel movie. Shocking. Literally. I've heard.
All the children started staying in at night. They were glued to the front of the tube instead of out loitering in the Friendly's parking lot, hopped up on hormones and strawberry Fribbles, or holding keg parties on one of the back holes of the golf course.
Bah, that's what passes for progress nowadays.
What's that? Oh, right. Winter when I was a kid.
After all that "storm of the century" talk on the airwaves, you know what? We'd get six flakes of snow. Six!
It'd stay so warm none of the ponds would freeze, not that they could anyway, what with all the chemicals from the old Big Mac clamshell containers we used to toss in there. But instead of thanking our lucky stars, we'd just grumble about those nincompoop forecasters who got us riled up for nothing.
Good times, good times.
Well, looks like another 18 inches has fallen outside. Now you kids -- get off my lawn! I mean it. Unless one of you wants to dig out the old Christmas tree I left there last week for the men to pick it up for recycling.
If you do, I'll give ya a shiny Susan B. Anthony dollar.
Dear Little Girl I Used to Know,
You just started your first day of fifth grade. I know that in six hours this peace enveloping me at home for the first time in two months will again be pervaded by the forced studio laughter of the Disney Channel or the bubblegum reverberating from your boombox, but it will be different even though they are the same sounds we shared together all summer.
Today is your last first day of elementary school. You’ll have many more first days, academically speaking. There’s middle school and high school, definitely. Maybe a first day of college if I can ever convince you that reading is, while boring from the prospective of a 10-year-old fueled by the swooning pleas of Justin Beiber, still pretty essential to getting somewhere beyond definitively average.
But this was the last first day that I will ever walk you through those doors and into that alternative reality of homeroom.
The last one at which I’d personally hand your teacher a note about why your need sunscreen and a hat when outdoors while trying to quickly explain what sets you apart from all the other kids medically but pretty much not in any other detectable way.
The last one where you’d really be a little girl in more than just my memories. You and I and Mom all know this.
Middle school, sweetie, it changes a kid. Girls, especially. The meanest classmates I ever had were in middle school and most of them were girls. They say girls mature faster; I say they grow up too soon for their own good. We boys, we like to stay boys well past our due date. That, you’ll learn, can be a good thing. Within reason.
I wish I had a photo from your first day of preschool after we moved here. You were so excited to be with kids your own age again after two years of hanging around with nannies and nurses and doctors. You were only supposed to be in preschool for half a day, to get you acclimated to your new surroundings, but when I came to pick you up, you asked if you really had to leave all your new best friends in your whole wide 5-year-old world. So you stayed. Your brother, he cried when he saw me a few minutes later and pleaded to come home for lunch and a comforting heap of Nick Jr.
It’s been so long since I’ve seen you all pudgy faced and stuffed with the wonder you readily ate out of the everydayness of life. Remember that Disney Princess backpack from kindergarten? You transported a zillion paintings and drawings and scribblings home with you in that pink and purple nylon time capsule. You said you wanted to be an art teacher. I said even art teachers need to learn to read. You shrugged and Crayola-ed on.
This moment from the first day of first grade might have be the happiest you had all year. Through some quirk, not one of your 20-odd kindergarten classmates ended up in your new class. A bully refused daily to let you play “Family,” telling you you couldn’t even be the family’s dog. In class, several other kids always required too much of the teachers’ attention. You suffered for it. We laid on your bed one night way too late into the school year and you cried – one of the only half dozen times you ever cried from something other than physical pain. You hated school. Hated those kids. You didn’t fit in and you didn’t know why. I wish I had a better answer for you then. Or now.
And that bully? When you saw him on the playground, you put him in his place by chasing him around under the threat of being kissed. I laughed when you told me this then, but sweet thing, this was the first time you struck fear in my heart for the teen years ahead.
But note the crossed arms in the photo. The rebellion had begun.
By the next year, while your brother still needed to physically push Mom and me out of his second-grade classroom to make him feel empowered about the whole going-to-school thing, you wanted us out of sight as soon as possible. You stopped kissing me goodbye when I’d drop you off at the side door in the morning this year. Some days, I couldn’t even get you to kiss our dog goodbye.
I knew it would happen. I knew it would hurt. I understand it, though, and I’m over it. That doesn’t mean I still can’t miss the way it used to be.
And here we are. We had to bargain with you for this last photo. Mom promised not to talk to anyone once inside the school and I promised not to cross the homeroom threshold.
We have officially become the enemy that loves you from a distance so your friends won’t see and that loves you quietly so the world won’t hear.
Loathe us publicly as you must, remember we are still your parents and we are always there for you, our sweet little Pumpkin Head: then, now and forever.
Daddy
“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
- Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
I never knew Robert D'Aquila, the high school principal who died unexpectedly earlier this month at age 56. I only knew him as Mr. D'Aquila, the math teacher from my high school in the mid-1980s.
In the four years I spent at Stamford Catholic High School, he was never "the popular teacher" or "the cool teacher." Those types came and went during my time served. But he was always there, always paying attention and always quietly helping. That's what some of my classmates and I remember most about him as we reminisced via Facebook a few weeks ago.
Sean Barry wrote that he especially remembered the "pretty well rust-eaten" car his teacher -- and for a few years, neighbor -- drove during those years.
"I realize now how grand a gesture that car was," said Sean, a teacher and writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y. "Genuine teachers, the selfless, self-effacing, committed kind, are those who drive a car like that not from neglect, but from a sense of priority. What mattered to Bob was his school and his students. The rest appropriately would take care of itself."
Alan Chapell recalled the first meeting he had with Mr. D’Aquila while he was taking summer school classes in 1984 to try to get into Stamford Catholic after "literally failing out” of another local high school. After Alan had a run-in with another teacher and was kicked out of class, Mr. D'Aquila confronted him.
"He said, ‘When they decide whether they're going to accept you to SCHS, they're probably going to ask me what you were like in summer school. And I'm going to have to be honest. So, it's really up to you.' No drama. No judgments. Just an honest assessment that empowered me to decide my own future," wrote Alan, who credits Mr. D'Aquila for helping him boost his math SAT score enough to get accepted into the University of Connecticut. Alan graduated, went on to get a law degree, and now heads his own company in New York City that consults with interactive media companies on public policy issues.
"He was easily the best math teacher I have ever had," wrote Deborah Anzalone Esposito, whose father Joe Anzalone was the varsity football coach during most of our tenure. "He explained concepts very thoroughly and precisely without ever getting annoyed with the class for `not getting it.' He would simply smirk and go through it again."
Now a social studies teacher at a middle school in Seymour, Conn., Deb credits Mr. D'Aquila as being one of the people who most inspired her career choice.
"When I was a senior, he simply wrote (in my yearbook), ‘It's been a pleasure,' because I used to always tell him that he was my favorite teacher," she added.
As for me, I have three distinct memories of Mr. D'Aquila from my Green and Gold days.
I remember him always being the person operating the clock at our home basketball games: freshman to varsity, boys and girls.
I remember that whenever our Math Analysis class discovered that he had made a mistake in the calculations he chalked out on the blackboard, he would take a good hard look at his work then say, "Good! I did that to see if you were paying attention."
Finally, I remember one teacher, one of those more popular and cool ones that we students flocked to, telling a few of us how lucky we all were to have Mr. D'Aquila at our school. "He could easily get a job with IBM or GTE and be making real money," the teacher said, "but he chooses to be here because he believes in education and he believes in all of you. That's a gift."
For that gift, Mr. D'Aquila, many of your former students owe you a lifetime of thank-you cards.
* * *
What teacher do you remember most and why?
I saw the green ribbon, all imitation silk and faux gold-leaf lettering, buried on a cluttered table. It had the telltale crinkles and creases of surviving amid the worksheets, Pokémon cards and snack wrappers in my son's backpack. It bore, in capital letters, a single word that would wound any serious athlete: "PARTICIPANT."
The potato sacks were too small for his extra-tall frame, he said. The tire he had to roll around an orange traffic cone went wobbly and out of control.
"So you didn't win any events, huh?" I said, bracing myself for tears but hoping for a flash of determination followed by a vow to chase chickens and chug raw eggs Rocky-style to get ready for next year's three-legged races and water-balloon tosses.
"No, our class beat three others in the tug of war," he said. "We were really gooooood."
However, there would be neither blue ribbons nor empty hands. Every second-grader would leave the playing field an equal -- a green-ribboned member of the indistinct middle. In a few days, my son’s ribbon had disappeared without a trace and without any saddness on his part.
I'm not a subscriber to the Vince Lombardi-isms about winning being the only thing. But I do sometimes wonder if we do right by handing prizes to our children for simply showing up rather than actually excelling. How can they learn the value hard work and practice bring to success when results are irrelevant to reward? Has modern society's focus on preventing our children from ever feeling inadequate bred out the competitive gene by instilling a sense of entitlement for just being?
"It's psychotic!" I kept hearing the superhero father say during The Incredibles movie. "They keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity ..."
I prepared many weeks in advance for my first field day when I was a fifth-grader (yes, son, back when dinosaurs and imitation wood-paneled station wagons still roamed the Earth). My event -- the softball throw. I spent hours heaving the one cement-hard gray softball we owned back and forth across our yard. Victory, I knew in my bones, could be mine with practice, attitude and stalling for a good gust of wind at my back.
When field day came, I was ready. Unfortunately, so was Millard. Millard was an impossibly tall classmate whose preference for unbuttoned cardigan sweaters optically enhanced his vertical superiority over not only the entire student population but also most of our teachers. Legend was he had stayed back a year. Or three. Reality was that on that spring day, he threw a softball clear across the entire asphalt back lot, the orb nearly clipping the metal backboard at the far end before hitting dirt on the edge of the woods.
My throw that day proved only good enough for third place. However, I came home with a yellow ribbon, proud I had showed given the missile launch I had witnessed. The ribbon hung on the corner of my bedroom mirror, holding a place of honor for more than a dozen years before I packed up my childhood for adult pastures.
This reminded me about the upcoming second-grade spelling bee my son had been prepping for lately. I found his vocabulary lists and the note the school had stapled atop them about the bee.
It concludes: "We will be handing out prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners!"
Maybe the competitive gene hasn't been bred out. Maybe we're just making it more selective.
* * *
Postscript: To the best of my knowledge, Millard, the softball-throwing machine of my youth, is dead. He was stabbed or shot while he robbed someone or was being robbing himself. He was in his 20s. I cut the article out of my hometown newspaper many years ago and tucked it away because I knew one day I would need to write about him. It was while searching for this clipping (which I still haven’t found) that I happened upon the ribbon I won that day. Winning isn’t everything or the only thing. Sometimes it’s just a flash that leaves a ghostly imprint you see when you close your eyes.
And who finished second in the fifth grade softball toss of 1979? Hey, Ms. Picket: I could be wrong, but you might want to check with The Kid.
Click the logo and check out some other fatherly words.
When it comes to telling me about her day at school, Thing 1 stays fairly tight-lipped because, as dictated by Angst and the Art of Pre-Teen Disgruntlement, that’s the proven way to produce a grunting sound most appropriate to respond to any inquiries by a parental unit.
“Thing 2 one came into my classroom today,” she said between handfuls of lime-flavored tortilla chips. “His teacher had to come get him out. He started crying. Is he in trouble? You should punish him. Now. Chop chop.”
In the basement, Thing 2 lay sprawled on the couch, thumbs spastically waging another violent Pokémon overthrow on his Nintendo DS.
“So, Thing 2, son,” I said as I tried not to inhale the stench rising from the dirt-encrusted shreddings masquerading as his socks. “What were you doing over in your sister’s classroom today.”
“We were doing math and I got all the answers right, so Ms. Kowalsky said I was so smart I should skip the next grade and go right to fourth.”
“And that’s what you did. You walked out of your second grade class and went down the hall to Thing 1’s class.”
“Yeeeees,” he said over the beeps, blips and electronic death wails.
This was a serious step up. During our parent-teacher conference in March, his teacher told me she usually only told him to “get out of here and go right to third grade.”
Which, of course, he also would do.
“You know, dude, she’s kidding you, right? It’s a joke.”
“No. It’s NOT!” He lowered the DS and made … eye contact.
“Yes, it is. C’mon, why would you want to skip all the way up to fourth grade aside from the fact you’d finally be among kids closer to your own gargantuan height.”
“Because I already know everything,” he said before setting his jaw and roaring with a steam engine’s force of conviction, “and I WANT TO MOVE ON WITH MY LIFE!”
Son, my, son. So big of body, big of brain and short of patience. Some day, you’ll want to reverse all the clocks whose hands you have whirled forward with childish haste, but you won’t be able to.
If you’re lucky, though, you may be able to slow them down just a tick or two.
In the meantime, I hope what I can teach you about long division and complex fractions will do the trick.
The phone rings with a subliminal tone begging me to answer it instead of letting it go to the machine as usual. It’s Thing 2’s teacher.
“I need to talk to you about an incident that happened at lunch today.”
The first warning sign came in the autumn under a canopy of decaying leaves and bitterly cold drizzle. Thing 2’s class came to tour the local arboretum. I played chaperone while they learned about the circle of life in the vegetative world.
Instead I witnessed the embryos of birds and bees.
Thing 2 was holding hands with a girl.
Well, it was really more the other way around. I saw her make the grab, and she saw me see it, giving me a coy smile before she turned away.
She was his assigned “buddy” for the day. Maggie. A stick with a blonde ponytail. She had been giving him the googly eyes since that first day she joined his class, mid-semester, last year. I know. I helped out in the classroom that day.
“The children were playing a game of spin of the bottle.”
A month or so later, while I helped sell pencils, erasers and things of far more plastic and far less essential nature at a school function, a teacher passed on a sighting of the second warning sign.
“Oh, your son is so cute. And with the girls! Thing 2 and Libby are always together on the playground. They are best friends.”
Libby? Who’s Libby?
“When I asked, Thing 2 quickly owned up that it was his idea and he was the one leading the game.”
Libby is a classmate. In February, while others were passing around glossy index-card Valentines from the drugstore that featured the latest hip cartoon character or superhero on them, Libby presented my son with this 9-by-12-inch homemade beauty:
“He said when the bottle landed on someone …”
“… you had to dare that person …”
“… to tell someone that he or she loved them.”
Huh?
That’s it?
“So,” I say into the receiver. “You’re saying that no spit was swapped?”
His teacher laughs.
“Yes, that’s correct. … Tomorrow at lunch, some of the assigned seats will be rearranged.”
* * *
Thing 2 clamors into the minivan that afternoon. He vibrates with the unharnessed energy of the nearly 8-year-old boy he is.
“Hey, buddy,” I say over my shoulder from the driver’s seat. “Anything interesting happen at school today.”
I catch his expression from the corner of my eye. No fear, no deception, just pre-adolescent exuberance. “Nope. Is it taco night?”
“Yep. Taco night.”
“Yeaaah! Taco-taco-TAAAAAAA-cooooo!”
* * *
Thing 2 sits at the counter and asks a question of no consequence.
“I don’t know,” I say, the corners of my mouth rising to devilish points. “Maybe will should spin a bottle for it?”
“OK,” he says. His expression and body language stays unchanged.
As opposed to My Love’s. She has been apprised of the phone call and her eyes speak to me in deafening volumes.
“Not now,” she pushes through gritted teeth that sharpens each letter before it hurtles toward me. Her head motions to big sister, Thing 1, snacking at the other end of the counter.
I duck, roll my eyes and mouth “I know” because I do know.
Geez. Let a dad have a little fun, woman.
A short while later, when big sister is miles away at dance class, My Love and I flip on the klieg lights. We don shades, fold arms, tilt heads all David Caruso like.
We confront. He confesses. Rubber hoses limp back to their lockers.
“Don’t sweat it,” I say. “Just understand that that game is not appropriate for school, OK? No biggie.”
But My Love, she wants more. She wants details. Nay, she wants …
Names.
“Who else was playing?”
They spill forward monosyllabically. I know most of them, if not by sight, by reputation. But of the girls in his list, conspicuous by their absence, are two.
Maggie.
And Libby.
* * *
The day after.
The sun creeps over the backyard tree line, bathing the kitchen counter in tangerine and lemon just to Thing 2’s left. He polishes off his bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch then hurries down to his laboratory.
He’s been cutting and pasting and taping off and on since Tuesday afternoon. He has a project of the highest importance on the second-grade Richter scale due this morning.
“Two’s still asleep!” falsely tattles Thing 1 when she arrives in the kitchen half an hour later.
“No, he’s not,” I say. “He was up before you and he’s downstairs putting the final touches on his lid. Today’s Crazy Hat Day at school.”
“Oh,” she says. “How was I to know?”
Minutes later, as I scrape the plates, from the basement, my son arises. This is what he looked like:
Amazing.
Overnight, my son has transformed from stud to pimp.
The first carcass appeared the day after New Year's in my neighbor's front yard.
The next morning, a second victim lay smack in the northbound lane of street outside my neighborhood. An elderly man inched his rust-colored sedan toward it, attempting to either drive over the dead or push its remains aside. The rest of us drivers looked on -- some in anger, some in disbelief, but none shedding a tear -- as we looped around this awkward dance.
The body count has grown considerably since then. I even added to the tally this past weekend, humming to myself:
"O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree.
Your branches brown and shedding."
Despite all the 
My Love delays this annual misery as long as possible because she hates to see all the festiveness she's hung, strung and displayed in our house disappear. Though I usually have my fill of snowmen singing "Winter Wonderland" in our foyer and shriveled poinsettia leaves crunching under my feet well before New Year's, I relent.
"The house always feels so empty after we've put everything away," she sighs every year, helping disengage my grip on the green snap-lid tote bins for another week.
We compromise with a day of undecking our halls sometime between the season's traditional end on January 6 (The Epiphany to Christians, Twelfth Night to the Shakespeareans) and the third Monday of the month (Martin Luther King Jr. Day to the federal government, Trip to the Indian Casino Day to My Love). Our lone exception is the miniature lights strung around our bushes and railings outside in accordance to the ancient proverb: Better to light a walkway than curse the dark ice.
My main role is tree disrobing and disassembly. Breaking down the artificial conifer in our living room always amazes me because, compared with my childhood memories of the 624 dangerously sharp metal and plastic branches on my parents' old faux tree, this one is a three-piece model of scientific ease. It even fits easily back into the mammoth plastic duffle bag it came with. This probably explains why JCPenney discontinued our particular model.
The live Fraser Fir in my office goes last. This year it was under-lit, owing to my switch to more efficient LED (or Less Exciting and Dimmer) bulbs, but it had lots of character.
The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Cosmo and Wanda from The Fairly Oddparents and other cartoon folk to be exact -- all ornaments picked out over the years by The Things during the annual tree trip to Stew Leonard's in Norwalk.
Then there were the handmade trinkets from pre-school and school years past.
Popsicle sticks with glitter glue.
Die-cut foam and construction paper.
A few made of some strange hardened dough that unbelievably have never been discovered by the dog.
Back into plastic bags and boxes they all went. But not without me giving each a final look in an attempt to recall the initial excitement and wonder that holiday magic brings, only to disappear as soon the wrapping hits the trash bin.
This sentimentality stopped with the final closing of the bin, which for the next 10-and-a-half months -- along with a dozen other bins like it, several yards of artificial evergreen roping and many other seasonal items that hang, light or sing -- will be the sole occupants of our attic.
If, of course, you don't count the dust bunnies.
My wife and I then hauled the fir out the front door and set it next to our mailbox, where I see it now every day alone and cold.
So long, pal. Mulch luck in your future endeavors.
I don't recall why I came into the newspaper office on a Saturday morning, but it wasn't because I was planning to meet anyone of note.
