What the h***?

Luke said a bad word today.  Mrs. B texted me at work to inform me.

I was shocked.  Disappointed.  Angry.  Crushed.

I spent the next few hours at work trying to figure out how to deal with his transgression.  Where did he even hear something like that?  Probably from one of the boys at school, I figured.  I had to punish him.  Didn't I?

I had stopped by the grocery store on the way home.  Three bags.  Sixty-seven dollars.  He came outside.  Possibly to gauge my mood.

"Do you have anything to tell me?"  I asked.

"Um... I'm sorry?" he offered.

"For what?"

"For saying a bad word."

"Did you know it was bad?"

"No.  A girl in my class said it, and she said it was okay to say."  

Tears were welling in his eyes.  I softened.

"Well, we don't say that, ok?"

"OK."

"And if you're not sure if something is ok to say in the future, just ask me, okay?"

"OK."

Mrs. B informed me that he was worried I was going to be mad at him.  I know from long ago experience that was punishment enough. And I believed him that he didn't know it was something he wasn't supposed to say.  This is a kid that very recently still admonished anyone who said, "Oh my gosh," with a quick, "We don't say that."

He is eight-and-a-half.  Four-foot-six.  His life filled with chicken nuggets, football, basketball, YouTube videos, and questions I rarely know the answers to.

His sister is six.  Three weeks from turning seven.  Going on fourteen.  Her world full of Barbies and Disney princesses and possibilities.

Almost every day, I find moments to simply sit and watch them.  To take in their cuteness and innocence. 

I try to appreciate these moments, these days.  And yet, I can feel them slowly walking from me.

Time was I had a vice grip on them.  Times when they were completely dependent – for food, milk, diaper changes, to simply hold their head up, survival.  

I think what I was most sad about when I received the text from Mrs. B was that inevitable loss of innocence.

But as I spoke calmly to him this afternoon, even as it broke my heart to see him on the verge of tears, it also provided comfort in some strange way.

I saw a scared little boy, so afraid of disappointing his dad.

I saw innocence.  If only for a little while longer.  And I hugged him.  Tightly.  

And maybe a little longer than normal.

johnny

Used to steal my pencils in second grade
Made fun of him for always missing school
Sometimes he'd be out a week at a time
Come back laughing like everything was cool

His old man sold rebel flags and t-shirts
From the back of an old truck, side of the road
We all just thought Johnny was a bully
But he knew a devil that we didn't know

Johnny found his voice when he was thirteen
Cried as he talked about what he'd been thru
The old man would get drunk and beat his mother
When she'd had enough he'd beat Johnny, too

I read somewhere remember everybody
Hasn't had the same advantages as you
I thank God that I never and I pray for
The souls who know the devil Johnny knew

It's easy to lose track after high school
Everyone kinda follows their own road
Years later I heard Johnny had a nice car
And a brand new devil he had come to know

These days he makes his living off the users
And the sheriff always leaves him alone
But he don't hit his wife or his children
So who am I to judge what's right or wrong

Why did no one help him while they still could
When he was still a scared and long-haired kid
How does God decide who has to endure
The awful real-life nightmares Johnny did

I read somewhere remember everybody
Hasn't had the same advantages as you
I thank God that I never and I pray for
The souls who know the devil Johnny knew

Used to steal my pencils in second grade
Made fun of him for always missing school

B HAPY

It was Friday morning.  It was going to be a good day.  And I needed it, after Thursday afternoon's Four O'Clock 400 turned into the 24 hours of Le Mans when the interstate closed due a motorcyclist crashing.  OK, it was only two hours, but work with me here.

As I merged from my first interstate to my second, I found myself following a navy blue Nissan Murano who was happily plodding along, in the fast lane, at approximately 72.5 miles per hour.  (I was going to use kilometers here, but 116 did not seem to convey the tortoise-like pace I was going for.)

Did I mention this was all going on in the fast lane?

As we plodded along, I had plenty of time to notice the Nissan's vanity plates: B HAPY.

Hmm, I thought, and so I will.  Pulling into the middle lane, I gassed it up to 137 --. kilometers, relax!  But my 'hapyness' did not last long.  No sooner had I cleared Mister Life in the Fast Lane (or Miss, I don't like to make eye contact) when lines of brake lights caused me to come to a stand still.

Over the next hour and five miles, I lost track of the navy blue Murano, as I alternated between zero, three and, on the rare occasion, eight miles an hour.

As I looked at the fellow drivers around me and screamed indiscriminately, I thought to myself, this is where we are as a city.  As a society.  Just complete gridlock virtually every morning and afternoon.  And yet we all just accept it.

Watching a handful of extremely sensible and intelligent drivers jet back and forth from lane to lane, risking life and limb, all to gain one or two positions in traffic, I was reminded of one of my better entrepreneurial ideas.

You may want to sit down for this.

Turn signals and brake lights that have the ability to display a scoreboard-like message to fellow drivers.  

Think about it.  For starters, the thank you wave has become virtually indistinguishable from the I'm sorry wave.  So you could pre-program commonly used messages such as these for quick access.

This would help clear up any communication issues that may arise between drivers.  For example, now when someone honks at me I have no idea if it's someone I know, if I cut them off, or if they have seen my "Honk if you love binary numbers -- that makes 10 of us!" bumper sticker.

To be safe, I usually just assume it's the bumper sticker.

Message lights would clear everything up!  No more silly "Sorry I shot you, I mistook your peace sign for a one-finger salute" misunderstandings.

These highway hellos could range from the life-changing ("Will you marry me?") to the life-saving (Help! I'm being kidnapped.). The possibilities are endless.

I could have used a brake light message system on Friday morning.  

As traffic cleared and I began to accelerate, I once again found myself in the fast lane.  Approaching the slower vehicle in front of me, I blinked my eyes to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing.

Could it be?  Surely not.

But it was.

The familiar navy blue color.  Squatty shape of the Murano.  With the tag that now seemed to be taunting me:  B HAPY.

Good one, universe.

I accelerated to eighty-five and smiled the rest of the way to work.  

If only my vehicle was equipped with message lights, I could typed, "Move Over!"  

Or any of a variety of other two-word phrases drivers sometimes like to use as freeway greetings.

Uphill, both ways

As a child, my father walked five miles to and from school every day of his life. In the snow. Uphill both ways. I know this because he told me. Many times.

Whatever hardships I faced as a youngster could never compare to his chain-gang-like days of yore.  Likewise, nothing my children will experience will ever match or exceed (in my mind) the travails of my youth.

I walked home from school, sometimes.  But the elevation changes were fairly modest.  And there was never any snow.  

My kids will likely never walk to school and probably only see the inside of a school bus on field trips.  Or in some transportation museum.

These thoughts crossed my mind following Luke's last soccer game.  After yelling at him for the better part of the hour to hustle, be more aggressive, help out his goalie, scoot back, etc. I watched as each child received what basically amounted to a gift basket from the designated Snack Mom of the week.  These baskets typically feature a couple of snacks, a drink, page of stickers, commemorative Stanley, and the like.

I exaggerate.  Barely.

Of course, being a member of Generation Participation Trophy, they receive these parting gifts win or lose.  Now on this particular night they happened to win, so I didn't rip Luke's from his arms and make him cry by telling him he didn't deserve it.  But it caused me to hearken back to my schoolboy days.

First of all, it was BYOS  -- bring your own snacks, in my day.  That normally consisted of a pack of Big League Chew or M&Ms.  If we won, we got to ride in the open bed of a pickup truck driven by our chain-smoking coach to the Sonic where coach would buy us a small milkshake or slush.  Second-hand smoke from an unfiltered Marlboro mixed with mosquito truck spray.  If you've not experienced that, have you even lived?

Guess what we got if we lost.  A big, fat hunk of nothing.  Other than a few disappointing glances from my mother.

This all got me thinking, what will my uphill both ways be to my kids?

Perhaps it will be having to listen to the radio with no control over what song it will play.  Or putting a quarter in the jukebox hoping to hear Def Leppard only to find out Bart already put in twenty bucks because he and Leigh Ann just got back together yet again, so you'll be listening Lady in Red for the rest of the night.

Not being able to pause, or rewind, or fast forward through whatever you're watching on TV.  Having to go to the bathroom or make snack runs only during commercial breaks.  Or worse yet, sitting through an entire commercial break.

Up until a few weeks ago, the extent of my kids' knowledge about commercials were the ads they skip after five seconds on YouTube.  I forget what it was we were watching, but a commercial came on.  After a few seconds, I hear, "Daddy.  Skip ad."

And I realize they almost never have to sit through a single commercial.  So we had to have "the talk."  No, not that talk.  Pretty sure I'll keep pushing that one down the road to some nebulous faraway day.  

I had to explain to them about commercials and advertising and how TV and radio stations make money.  And that daddy used to work in radio and if it weren't for commercials he wouldn't have had a job.  And about how Clear Channel and Sirius have destroyed local radio which is why you hear the same twelve songs over and over on many stations, and.... well, I could tell I was losing their interest at this point.

Perhaps my uphill both ways story will be how we used to have to use a big, heavy book to look up someone's phone number, then carefully dial the number on a rotary dial phone, which would take like forty-five seconds.  And God forbid you misdial a number and have to go back and start the long, arduous process all over.  

Although we did get the now-extinct pleasure of slamming down the phone and hanging up on someone, which today has devolved into an unsatisfying click which no one knows if it's accidental, on purpose, coverage just dropped or what.  It's not the same.

Or maybe it will be how we used bar soap, shared with other family members, to clean our nether regions.  Yep, that’s probably the one.

Pay phones .  55 mile per hour speed limits.  Texting on a flip phone with no qwerty keyboard.  Getting paddled at school and whipped with a belt at home.  My choices are pretty much endless.  

And don't get me started on dial-up internet.  EEEEEE-AAAAAAHHHHHH-SHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

So yeah, enjoy it kid.  Because while the proliferation of natural disasters, shrinking middle class, and resurgence of fascism may seem (air quotes) "hard," just be thankful you never had to use a pair of pliers to twist the TV knob from channel 13 all the way down to 2 on the ol' carpal tunnel special Zenith.

Or learn to program a VCR and then subsequently have to program it every single time your parents wanted to record a show up until and beyond the day you moved out of the house.

Or worst of all, had to try and correct a mistake on a manual typewriter.  I can already see how that conversation would go:

"What's a typewriter, Daddy?"

"Uh, it's like a keyboard that clicked and dinged.  And didn't have internet access."

"Like they used back in the 1900's."

Sigh.

"Yes.  In the 1900's.  Back when kids regularly scalded their legs on metal slides and jumped on trampolines with no net.  And got 12 cassettes for a penny from Columbia house hoping they would have no legal recourse against a 10-year-old when you didn't purchase four more of your choice at full price.  And made rad mixtapes."

"Daddy, what are you talking about?"

"The good old days, Junior.  When you had to go to an arcade to play video games, the news was a thirty-minute program that came on twice a day, roundabouts only existed in the mind of some deranged engineer, and daddy still had hopes and dreams, and spare time."

"Uh, Daddy, can we watch Barbie?"

"Sure.  What's it on?"

"Disney Plus."

Sigh.  

Sometimes I miss when TVs weren't so smart.