A little note on compassion and the children who aren’t learning about it
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Not so very long ago, one of my nephews—none are older than seven, yet—asked me a plain and loaded question. We were eating Sunday dinner at Nana’s and he looked up at me and simply said, “Why do I have to be nice to people?” He wasn’t baiting me; he was honestly asking. Granted, the context had been a Valentine’s Day activity of the sort that seems so obligatory in elementary school where everyone gets a card, even the mean kids, but humiliation is reserved for those who are a little too self-aware. That, sadly, is a family trait we unwillingly share. I countered by...
First things first…
Filed under: Deep South, Everyday, family, humor
One thing that seems universal to all children is the idea of what it means to be first. It doesn’t matter at what they’re being the first, either. Being first carries within it all the intended glory necessary. First to sit still, first to get a haircut, first to touch base during hide-and-seek, first to finish dinner. Endless possibilities. My nephews, this past Sunday, case in point, were running neck-and-neck, outside, racing each other from one side of the yard to the other, simply for the bragging rights of saying, “I beat you. I got here first.” Wynn Chandler, the baby who...
After that, I ate my chocolate cobbler in silence.
This past Sunday, my youngest nephew, Wynn, who by the way is a few months shy of three and has already rightfully earned the nickname of “Chunk,” turned to me and asked for coffee. “What…did you…say?” I implored of him. “Coffee,” he responded, and then with a nod of the head as if recognizing that he’d forgotten the magic word, added, “pease?” It’s always precious when the little ones remember that fading concept known as “manners.” But, precious aside, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly. I went in search of his mother. She wasn’t a bit thrown off by what I felt had...
There’s no “I” in Verizon. Oh, wait, Yes there is.
I’m going to tell you why I believe in karma: chewing gum. I have never, believe me, ever been one to litter. I don’t like it. I find it tacky, low-class, and uneducated of people to throw trash along streets, highways, and front yards. I’m sure some of this has to do with the near religious obsession U.L. and I had with his own front yard, when I was growing up. The first beer can I ever saw was face-down in his bed of calla lilies, the ones that sat out near the end of the driveway. People threw trash in the...
Excuse me, did you just call me a fad?
Filed under: Deep South, Everyday, faith, family, life
I learned what the meaning of fad was the hard way. And I don’t just mean having to look it up in a dictionary. Since, I come before the mandatory use of home computers. I had a personal encounter with the word. It’s surprising, though, what one’s personal history of fads says about oneself. For me, in retrospect, my string of passing fancies was equivalent to that annoying solid beep of an emergency broadcast—“ in the event of an actual emergency, contact information will be provided.” That second part there, that never happened. Some of my “interests” were rather unique to me and me alone....
“I’m the freaking boss of TV, just so you know.”
Filed under: Deep South, education, Everyday, family, humor
I’ve made no little secret about the fact that growing up, as I did, the television was not the center of the universe. Not in our house. It was carefully guarded: it and all its wonders of delicious and suggestive programming. The only television station that I was allowed to watch, almost entirely on my own and un-chaperoned, was good, old PBS. And, oh, how I watched it: Letter People, Clyde the Frog, Voyage of the Mimi, and one of my all-time faves, Read All About It. Even learning, early on, how to convince U.L. that some shows were appropriate—How could they...
I daisy-chained the heck out of this head cold.
It was something I’d wondered for years, myself. A.K., bless his heart, was sick with a cold a couple of weeks ago, a cold I should point out that he gave to everyone else. As a matter of fact, Amanda is currently sick with a cold that originated, I would imagine, in the nostrils of some other five-year-old in A.K.’s kindergarten class. Thankfully, it’s a private school. (I really ought to write for 30 Rock; that sounds just like something Jack would say). At any rate, A.K., while sitting at the dinner table two Sundays back, turned to me and asked point-blank: Where does...
Suffice it to say, I was spanked, a second time, OR The 100th Blog.
Filed under: Deep South, Everyday, faith, family, life, writing
I didn’t get spanked, as a child…much.
U.L. didn’t really believe in that, unless you’d done some really horrendous thing, which I never truly did because God, you know, also rented a room at U.L.’s house, and so it was really hard to get away with much of anything between the two of them. And then there was Jesus. He was always like, Hey, we'll fix it later. I liked him the most. I hated that he moved out.
I’m not saying I never got spanked, kids being kids, but I tried really hard to be a good boy. And, for the most...
She said tetherball, and I immediately felt sorry for her.
Filed under: Deep South, education, Everyday, family, language, life, theatre
Before I begin the section on Theatre History, for non-majors, I always start the class off by discussing children’s games. I ask them what their favorite games were when they were little, and then I segue from that into the ideas of exaggerated expression, storytelling, being larger than yourself, and then lead them all the way into that post-adolescent Catch-22 of knowing which parent to ask to get permission to do whatever it is the other parent said No to. Because a lot of those ideas are exactly where theatre’s roots lie, at least coming at it from the...
Why I don’t like a blue cooler, Or, The dangers of making mud pies.
Filed under: Deep South, education, Everyday, food, health, life
I met my first pedophile when I was eight years old. In Clinton, Mississippi. I didn't know what he was, at the time, nor did any in my small group of friends, except Lori, but that comes later. I do however distinctly remember what he did. It's rather scarred into my memory, as you might imagine. Oh, now, he didn't touch us or anything. We were separated by a chain link fence. And, I hadn't even really thought about it since, until yesterday and I don't know what it was but something crossed my mind and Wham!: there he was, sitting in the...
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