When I started this blog I made a conscious decision that my primary audience for this thing would be me. I would write about what I wanted to write about, when I wanted to write it, and if I liked what I wrote then I had succeeded.
Not that I had any objections if other people read what I wrote and liked it, or at least found it interesting enough to challenge. I like telling stories, and since I already know how my own stories end it’s a wonderful thing that new people might come along for the ride as well.
And within the heart of every blogger is the hope, however unexpressed, that they will be Discovered – that eventually a lot of people will begin reading the blog, perhaps even commenting on it, and with any luck enjoying what they find. And, perhaps, that this will lead to larger opportunities to write for more people.
I was offered this opportunity recently.
Our local newspaper has a “Community Bloggers” section, where they invite people to park themselves in one of their slots and write for such masses as we have in Our Little Town. It’s not a paid position, but it is a platform that you can use to make your voice heard in the community. Some months ago I was contacted by the guy who runs this section – how he found this blog and knew to ask, I do not know – and invited to be one of those bloggers. And I said yes.
So we started working on just what my new blog would look like.
It had to have a theme, for one thing. Newspapers like to have things in convenient little boxes, so their readers have a sense of what to expect when they look for specific things. This did not present a particular problem to me on an ideological level – it’s their paper, after all, and presumably they know what attracts readers. Further, within that theme I would be given fairly wide freedom to write about things provided I kept it to PG or less.
This turned out to be more of an obstacle than I thought it would, though.
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you understand that my subject matter is rather broad, which is a nice way of saying “random.” I never know what will occur to me to write on a given day. Sometimes I don’t even know how to classify what I’ve already written. So I came up with a theme. He told me to narrow it down. I’d come up with a narrower theme. Then I’d try to write six sample posts on that theme. And when that didn’t work I’d try to come up with another narrower theme. Repeat as necessary. It got tiresome.
Also – and who would have guessed this, given that this was for the local newspaper and their section is labeled “Community Bloggers”? – they wanted me to maintain at least some focus on the community.
I know!
I don’t remember the last time I really felt connected with the larger community in which I live. It was probably my dorm in college, which was a peculiarly intense place, way off on the corner of campus. Since then I have spent the bulk of my life either in graduate school – which for all its benefits is a remarkably insular way of life – or as an academic, which is a form of migrant labor.
So after much thought, I have decided to let this opportunity go by.
It was nice of them to ask, and I wish them luck.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Wristband Day!
The trick to walking through crowds is to lead with your shoulder.
This narrows your profile as you walk and allows you to fit through gaps that are rather smaller than the ones you usually need. It also presents an unyielding surface to any obstacle you should happen to run into, which encourages said obstacle to get out of your way. I learned these tricks as a teenager working my way through the crowded sidewalks of Center City Philadelphia, but they sure came in handy today.
Today was Wristband Day down at the County Fair!
Every year the local 4-H clubs gather up the herds of farm animals that they have been raising all year and bring them into town for a show. There are barns full of these things, all of them, in their way, mysterious to my city-bred mind. Naturally, the girls love them. And Kim, who spent large portions of her childhood on a dairy farm, sees nothing unusual at all about them. They simply are.
So every year we go to the fair and we meander our way through the barns, looking at the animals. There are barns full of cows – big ones and little ones, black ones and browns ones, dairy cows and “beefers,” all of them facing away from the walkway so they can poop at you with greater efficiency. There is another barn full of rabbits of every conceivable size and description, some of them capable of speaking with a Brooklyn accent. There are turkeys, ponies, sheep, and chickens. And there are goats, which are just the most ridiculous creatures ever to walk the face of the earth, and I say that as someone who spent years in theater.
You have to love the goats. They come right up to you looking for a handout, and even if you don’t give them one they’re perfectly happy just to stand there. Perhaps a handout will suddenly materialize if they do. Or not. They don’t seem to care, really. And you can milk them, as the girls enjoy doing at fair time.
But really, the animals are not the main part of the fair. Even if the fair is built around them, even if the fair is designed mostly to showcase them, they’re just not the things most people come to see.
People come for the rides. And on Wristband Day, for a fee that could almost be taken as reasonable, you can ride as much as you want on whatever you want.
I took Tabitha, Lauren, and their friend Grace over around 1pm, after feeding them lunch ahead of time so as to avoid bankruptcy (Kim joined us after she got out of work) and they immediately began a whirlwind tour of all of the rides the midway offered. The Yo-Yo. The Tilt-A-Whirl. The Blizzard. Three different varieties of fun houses. The Giant Slide. Bumper cars. And on and on.
They paid off that wristband in about an hour, so hey – an investment.
People also come for the food, because there are very few places on earth where there are as many varieties of Fried Food On A Stick than there are at a county fair. We did manage to keep that to a minimum (corn dogs – who can resist corn dogs?), but we made up for this with a funnel cake, which is just Fried Food On A Plate. Someone, somewhere, is working on a way to serve it on a Stick, and that person will get rich.
People also come for the various booths that try to sell you things – goods and services, usually, but often politics, religion and healthcare as well.
I had a splendid little time telling the guy from the Constitution Party how utterly wrong-headed and preposterous his party’s position that the Constitution derives from the Bible is, for example. I did not convince him of the errors of his ways – confronted with evidence, such people almost always retreat back into unsupported faith in their own world, which is so much more convenient for them than the reality the rest of us live in – but it felt good anyway. Maybe someday he’ll remember this conversation, when he finally grows tired of bearing false witness.
We also spent some time at the tent set up by the local hospital, which always has the best swag, and I shook hands at some point with a man who claimed to be running for State Senate. He very well might be, now that I think of it. I can say that I knew him when, provided I can remember which one he was.
The girls also found a booth that gave them Dazzle Designs, which as near as we could figure out were simply glitter paint but were nonetheless officially “cool.”
The one thing about the fair that we forget every year is just how loud it is. The noise levels in the midway are enough to sterilize frogs, which – though I am not a frog – nevertheless makes me glad that I have all the children I intend to have in this world. It also makes me wonder about the endless parade of teenagers who ply the midway, eyeing each other and spinning off into ever-changing assortments and groupings. Maybe they’re just immune at that age.
It was a long day when we finally gathered up the troops and went home, but a good one.
Greetings from the county fair.
This narrows your profile as you walk and allows you to fit through gaps that are rather smaller than the ones you usually need. It also presents an unyielding surface to any obstacle you should happen to run into, which encourages said obstacle to get out of your way. I learned these tricks as a teenager working my way through the crowded sidewalks of Center City Philadelphia, but they sure came in handy today.
Today was Wristband Day down at the County Fair!
Every year the local 4-H clubs gather up the herds of farm animals that they have been raising all year and bring them into town for a show. There are barns full of these things, all of them, in their way, mysterious to my city-bred mind. Naturally, the girls love them. And Kim, who spent large portions of her childhood on a dairy farm, sees nothing unusual at all about them. They simply are.
So every year we go to the fair and we meander our way through the barns, looking at the animals. There are barns full of cows – big ones and little ones, black ones and browns ones, dairy cows and “beefers,” all of them facing away from the walkway so they can poop at you with greater efficiency. There is another barn full of rabbits of every conceivable size and description, some of them capable of speaking with a Brooklyn accent. There are turkeys, ponies, sheep, and chickens. And there are goats, which are just the most ridiculous creatures ever to walk the face of the earth, and I say that as someone who spent years in theater.
You have to love the goats. They come right up to you looking for a handout, and even if you don’t give them one they’re perfectly happy just to stand there. Perhaps a handout will suddenly materialize if they do. Or not. They don’t seem to care, really. And you can milk them, as the girls enjoy doing at fair time.
But really, the animals are not the main part of the fair. Even if the fair is built around them, even if the fair is designed mostly to showcase them, they’re just not the things most people come to see.
People come for the rides. And on Wristband Day, for a fee that could almost be taken as reasonable, you can ride as much as you want on whatever you want.
I took Tabitha, Lauren, and their friend Grace over around 1pm, after feeding them lunch ahead of time so as to avoid bankruptcy (Kim joined us after she got out of work) and they immediately began a whirlwind tour of all of the rides the midway offered. The Yo-Yo. The Tilt-A-Whirl. The Blizzard. Three different varieties of fun houses. The Giant Slide. Bumper cars. And on and on.
They paid off that wristband in about an hour, so hey – an investment.
People also come for the food, because there are very few places on earth where there are as many varieties of Fried Food On A Stick than there are at a county fair. We did manage to keep that to a minimum (corn dogs – who can resist corn dogs?), but we made up for this with a funnel cake, which is just Fried Food On A Plate. Someone, somewhere, is working on a way to serve it on a Stick, and that person will get rich.
People also come for the various booths that try to sell you things – goods and services, usually, but often politics, religion and healthcare as well.
I had a splendid little time telling the guy from the Constitution Party how utterly wrong-headed and preposterous his party’s position that the Constitution derives from the Bible is, for example. I did not convince him of the errors of his ways – confronted with evidence, such people almost always retreat back into unsupported faith in their own world, which is so much more convenient for them than the reality the rest of us live in – but it felt good anyway. Maybe someday he’ll remember this conversation, when he finally grows tired of bearing false witness.
We also spent some time at the tent set up by the local hospital, which always has the best swag, and I shook hands at some point with a man who claimed to be running for State Senate. He very well might be, now that I think of it. I can say that I knew him when, provided I can remember which one he was.
The girls also found a booth that gave them Dazzle Designs, which as near as we could figure out were simply glitter paint but were nonetheless officially “cool.”
The one thing about the fair that we forget every year is just how loud it is. The noise levels in the midway are enough to sterilize frogs, which – though I am not a frog – nevertheless makes me glad that I have all the children I intend to have in this world. It also makes me wonder about the endless parade of teenagers who ply the midway, eyeing each other and spinning off into ever-changing assortments and groupings. Maybe they’re just immune at that age.
It was a long day when we finally gathered up the troops and went home, but a good one.
Greetings from the county fair.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Burgers, Cars, Songs and Memories
We seem to have outgrown McDonald’s. Nobody really mourns this except Lauren.
When the girls were little we used to visit the golden arches a lot more than I had ever dreamed I would be able to do and still waddle away under my own power. This is because the folks at McDonald’s are not stupid. They are a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them.
Somewhere along the line they realized that their primary market was no longer teenagers – mercurial creatures always searching for something new and exciting – but small children and their parents. Small children seek what McD’s is best at (comfortable, familiar mediocrity) and parents are willing to indulge this if there is something in it for them, such as menu items with a little more pizzazz than just burgers. So they have salads and decent coffee for the grown-ups, Playland and chicken nuggets for the kids, and everyone is, if not happy, then at least satisfied.
But eventually one must move on, and while I do miss their buffalo sauce, I can’t say I really miss the experience overall.
We have graduated to Culvers for our fast food needs.
The food is better, for one thing, with fresh meat and real frozen custard for after. They also serve a great root beer that kept one of our English friends coming back for more. Apparently they don’t do root beer very well in the UK. Another business opportunity for you the enterprising reader to follow up on, and you’re welcome.
For another thing, they are a Wisconsin chain, so we feel patriotic – Wisconsinites could teach Texans a think or two about jingoism. One of the first things Kim told my parents after arriving in Philadelphia was that their toilet had been manufactured in Wisconsin. That, folks, is regional pride.
Our local Culvers also has an endless soundtrack of Top-40 hits of the Baby Boom Generation playing at all times when we are there.
This has become something of a game with Tabitha and Lauren. “How old is THIS one?” they ask me, and then they are amazed when I tell them. Kim is better at the specific years of specific songs, but I am good at the periods – whether a song is mid-50s, late-50s, early-60s, and so on.
“How do you know all this?” they ask. “I grew up with this stuff,” I answer.
When I was their age it wasn’t music, it was cars.
My dad was one of those 1950s teenagers who used to take cars apart and put them back together with his buddies for fun. He still loves those old cars. This is not an attribute that he passed down to me undiluted – the material world and I have serious issues with one another – but I do think those old cars are more interesting than I probably would have had I grown up as someone else’s son.
We’d be driving along and some cast-iron behemoth from Detroit’s golden age would zip by us and my dad would say, “That’s a 1954 Ford!” or “Look at that 1961 Chevy!” And my brother and I would just be agog. “How do you know all this?” we’d ask. “I grew up with this stuff,” he’d say.
It’s odd how memories get transmuted by time and circumstances, how the experience of dads and cars can be so much like the experience of kids and songs, a thousand miles and thirty-five years away.
I think I got the easier end of the deal, though. Cars come and cars go, but the 1950s are the only decade in human history that can be reliably identified by a bass line.
When the girls were little we used to visit the golden arches a lot more than I had ever dreamed I would be able to do and still waddle away under my own power. This is because the folks at McDonald’s are not stupid. They are a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them.
Somewhere along the line they realized that their primary market was no longer teenagers – mercurial creatures always searching for something new and exciting – but small children and their parents. Small children seek what McD’s is best at (comfortable, familiar mediocrity) and parents are willing to indulge this if there is something in it for them, such as menu items with a little more pizzazz than just burgers. So they have salads and decent coffee for the grown-ups, Playland and chicken nuggets for the kids, and everyone is, if not happy, then at least satisfied.
But eventually one must move on, and while I do miss their buffalo sauce, I can’t say I really miss the experience overall.
We have graduated to Culvers for our fast food needs.
The food is better, for one thing, with fresh meat and real frozen custard for after. They also serve a great root beer that kept one of our English friends coming back for more. Apparently they don’t do root beer very well in the UK. Another business opportunity for you the enterprising reader to follow up on, and you’re welcome.
For another thing, they are a Wisconsin chain, so we feel patriotic – Wisconsinites could teach Texans a think or two about jingoism. One of the first things Kim told my parents after arriving in Philadelphia was that their toilet had been manufactured in Wisconsin. That, folks, is regional pride.
Our local Culvers also has an endless soundtrack of Top-40 hits of the Baby Boom Generation playing at all times when we are there.
This has become something of a game with Tabitha and Lauren. “How old is THIS one?” they ask me, and then they are amazed when I tell them. Kim is better at the specific years of specific songs, but I am good at the periods – whether a song is mid-50s, late-50s, early-60s, and so on.
“How do you know all this?” they ask. “I grew up with this stuff,” I answer.
When I was their age it wasn’t music, it was cars.
My dad was one of those 1950s teenagers who used to take cars apart and put them back together with his buddies for fun. He still loves those old cars. This is not an attribute that he passed down to me undiluted – the material world and I have serious issues with one another – but I do think those old cars are more interesting than I probably would have had I grown up as someone else’s son.
We’d be driving along and some cast-iron behemoth from Detroit’s golden age would zip by us and my dad would say, “That’s a 1954 Ford!” or “Look at that 1961 Chevy!” And my brother and I would just be agog. “How do you know all this?” we’d ask. “I grew up with this stuff,” he’d say.
It’s odd how memories get transmuted by time and circumstances, how the experience of dads and cars can be so much like the experience of kids and songs, a thousand miles and thirty-five years away.
I think I got the easier end of the deal, though. Cars come and cars go, but the 1950s are the only decade in human history that can be reliably identified by a bass line.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
The End of the Beginning of Summer
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. (Winston Churchill)
The first part of summer seems to have come to a satisfactory conclusion today with the Girl Scouts softball tournament. Lauren’s team didn’t play, as the A-League just gets an exhibition game (one of the consequences of not keeping score, I suppose). But Tabitha’s C-League team was in the playoffs all week, and today was the final day.
For those of you who may find yourself in this situation someday, here is a word of advice – when someone asks you if you want to be one of the umpires in a softball tournament, the answer is no. Remember that, and you’ll thank me someday.
Nobody gave me this advice.
So there I was, in my official “Coach Dave” GS softball shirt, which was for Lauren’s team (as that was the one I helped coach) but which was the exact same hot pink color as Tabitha’s team this year. That looked sort of odd to the other team, no doubt. GS softball is also not firehouse league softball, so the rules were somewhat different than I was used to. And not just the “no drinking while fielding” rule that the Girl Scouts impose, either. There is no tagging, for example, and runners can be called out for leaving the base if the batter swings and does not actually hit the ball. There is also a line about halfway between each pair of bases, and bad things happen if you cross that line when you’re not supposed to.
Don’t even ask.
Fortunately I was only asked to judge fair/foul balls down the first base line and call out or safe at the first two bases. Those rules didn’t change much. And there were only two close calls (both fair/foul calls), and I ended up giving one to each team.
It was a good game – Tabby’s hot pink team dominated the white team 27-13 in seven long, hot innings, and my umpiring career was thankfully over. Only one person told me I stunk, and – this being the midwest - he was polite about it.
The hot pink team then got to cram down lunch and immediately play the green team, and it was a tired group of hot pink girls facing the team that had beaten them soundly the night before. Not surprisingly, the green team – a talented squad with very nice girls and coaches – repeated that performance and took home the championship. Tabitha’s team took second place and got very nice trophies that spin, which made them happy.
And then there was ice cream afterward, to celebrate the end of another stellar season, which made them even happier.
But this wasn’t the only milestone achieved this week. The girls have been in various forms of summer school all summer, which has not been the sentence of doom that it would have been back when I was a kid. Back in the Pleistocene the only reason you went to summer school was the rather optimistic notion that the cure for not liking or understanding a subject was more of that subject. But now in our future full of Teh Shiny, they have cool classes.
The public school district kept both girls occupied for about three weeks with great stuff. Lauren has an interest in languages, so she took both Spanish and French. This initially worried me – I took Spanish in high school and Italian in college and discovered that Romance languages in general are close enough to get you confused but not close enough to get you credit. Fortunately Lauren is not as easily confused as I am, and French class had the added benefit of introducing her to Nutella, which we do not have in our house. Mmmmm, Nutella. She also took an Arts and Crafts class that produced all kinds of wonderful things.
For her part, Tabitha took an Arts and Crafts class as well, one that somehow managed to spend the first half of its existence on origami and the second half on what we used to refer to as “gimp” back in the 70s – that plastic cord that you would weave into lanyards when your camp counselor was looking and nooses when she was not. Tabitha also took a class called Amazing Authors, wherein she wrote two books (one about cats – shocking, I know - and the other about dragons), and a class on pottery.
For her masterpiece, she produced a Hodag.
For those of you not from northern Wisconsin, a Hodag is the upper-midwest version of Bigfoot – a tall, hairy, and presumably well-mannered evolutionary throwback that haunts the woods around Highway 8, where Kim grew up. When I was a kid back east we had a similar creature called the Jersey Devil, which has now morphed into a hockey team. When you look at it that way, the Hodag is clearly the one you want to create in a pottery class.
When those classes ended the girls went directly into a week of College For Kids down at Home Campus.
Lauren took two shorter classes and got out around lunch time. The main point of her first class was to create a board game, and – as you would expect in this house – hers was about cats.
She also took a class called Dino Diggers and produced her own fossil.
Tabitha had a couple of longer classes, including one art class where she learned how to make linoleum-cut prints and where they made their own book from the paper up. Seriously – they made their own paper, which they used to bind blank books.
Apparently it has ground cicada shells in it. One assumes they are acid-free.
So now we stand at the beginning of the end – the part of the summer where we don’t really have to get up early anymore. There will be ice cream, no doubt.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
The Conversations Keep Coming
Conversation from the ride home today:
LAUREN: When you were little, what state did you want to live in when you grew up?
ME: Well, I grew up in Pennsylvania, so I guess I always figured I’d live there.
LAUREN: But you didn’t.
ME: No, here I am in Wisconsin.
LAUREN: You lived in that place with the O-fries.
ME: That was in Pittsburgh. That was the other end of Pennsylvania. I started in Philadelphia, at one end of Pennsylvania, and then I moved to Pittsburgh at the other end. And then I moved to Iowa, and now I’m here in Wisconsin.
LAUREN: Iowa?!? What were you doing in Iowa?
ME: I went to graduate school there.
LAUREN: What’s graduate school?
ME: It’s college after you finish with college. When you graduate from college you get what they call a Bachelor’s Degree. And you can go back again to get a Master’s Degree, and if you still want more than you can get a Doctorate. Those last two are graduate school.
LAUREN: What about high school?
ME: That comes before. There’s elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and graduate school.
LAUREN: And then you can have a LIFE!!!
Sometimes it’s like living in your own cartoon.
LAUREN: When you were little, what state did you want to live in when you grew up?
ME: Well, I grew up in Pennsylvania, so I guess I always figured I’d live there.
LAUREN: But you didn’t.
ME: No, here I am in Wisconsin.
LAUREN: You lived in that place with the O-fries.
ME: That was in Pittsburgh. That was the other end of Pennsylvania. I started in Philadelphia, at one end of Pennsylvania, and then I moved to Pittsburgh at the other end. And then I moved to Iowa, and now I’m here in Wisconsin.
LAUREN: Iowa?!? What were you doing in Iowa?
ME: I went to graduate school there.
LAUREN: What’s graduate school?
ME: It’s college after you finish with college. When you graduate from college you get what they call a Bachelor’s Degree. And you can go back again to get a Master’s Degree, and if you still want more than you can get a Doctorate. Those last two are graduate school.
LAUREN: What about high school?
ME: That comes before. There’s elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and graduate school.
LAUREN: And then you can have a LIFE!!!
Sometimes it’s like living in your own cartoon.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
And The Day Gets Better As It Goes
When your day starts with a viewing, it really can’t help but improve after that.
I ran a museum for five years. Our life blood, financially, was giving tours to school kids – most of them local, but some of them from a hundred miles away or more. We ran anywhere between 5000 and 7500 kids through that building every year, which isn’t bad considering that 90% of them came in a seven-week span. This often led to some interesting situations, since the bus drivers didn’t know where we were and generally underestimated how long it would take to get to us, which was a problem when we had big tour groups stacked up one after another. You learn to be flexible in situations like that – to crop your tour to the time remaining, to shovel people into the important areas and leave the “interesting but optional” areas for another time, and to look like you do this all the time so what use is there panicking and you should stop that now.
Tours were my favorite part of the job. Really, they were.
Without a dedicated corps of volunteer guides those tours wouldn’t have happened. We’d hire high school and college kids for the summer walk-in tours, since you had to have someone on duty at all times, but the school tours were scheduled so we could rely on volunteers. Most of them were women, and most of them were long past retirement age. Several were well over 80, and at least one that I know of was giving tours into her 90s, which is impressive considering that the tour involved three different floors of a building that was grandfathered out of all known and even theoretical ADA requirements, plus a tunnel into another building.
Hulda was one of my favorites.
There is an old adage that if you ever want the pure unvarnished truth you should ask an old woman or a young boy, and she was the model for it. You always knew where you stood with Hulda.
She was also earthy, in the way that a woman with seven children could be. She was one of the crew of old women who sprang to the aid of a fifth-grader who was on one of our tours when it suddenly became That Time Of The Month, possibly for the first time. I didn’t inquire too closely on that one. The conversation afterward was revealing, though, and more than anything else, humane. That is one of the highest compliments I can give.
I still give tours, even three years after leaving my job there – it’s a fun museum, and the people there are good people – so I would see her now and then. We weren’t close – I never saw her outside of the museum – but it was always nice to catch up when we did meet there. She wasn’t in good health recently. It was not a surprise to see her name in the obituary column this week.
I really hate funerals and viewings. I would skip my own if I could. But some things you do anyway, because it is the right thing to do. And then the day gets better.
Fare thee well, kind soul.
I ran a museum for five years. Our life blood, financially, was giving tours to school kids – most of them local, but some of them from a hundred miles away or more. We ran anywhere between 5000 and 7500 kids through that building every year, which isn’t bad considering that 90% of them came in a seven-week span. This often led to some interesting situations, since the bus drivers didn’t know where we were and generally underestimated how long it would take to get to us, which was a problem when we had big tour groups stacked up one after another. You learn to be flexible in situations like that – to crop your tour to the time remaining, to shovel people into the important areas and leave the “interesting but optional” areas for another time, and to look like you do this all the time so what use is there panicking and you should stop that now.
Tours were my favorite part of the job. Really, they were.
Without a dedicated corps of volunteer guides those tours wouldn’t have happened. We’d hire high school and college kids for the summer walk-in tours, since you had to have someone on duty at all times, but the school tours were scheduled so we could rely on volunteers. Most of them were women, and most of them were long past retirement age. Several were well over 80, and at least one that I know of was giving tours into her 90s, which is impressive considering that the tour involved three different floors of a building that was grandfathered out of all known and even theoretical ADA requirements, plus a tunnel into another building.
Hulda was one of my favorites.
There is an old adage that if you ever want the pure unvarnished truth you should ask an old woman or a young boy, and she was the model for it. You always knew where you stood with Hulda.
She was also earthy, in the way that a woman with seven children could be. She was one of the crew of old women who sprang to the aid of a fifth-grader who was on one of our tours when it suddenly became That Time Of The Month, possibly for the first time. I didn’t inquire too closely on that one. The conversation afterward was revealing, though, and more than anything else, humane. That is one of the highest compliments I can give.
I still give tours, even three years after leaving my job there – it’s a fun museum, and the people there are good people – so I would see her now and then. We weren’t close – I never saw her outside of the museum – but it was always nice to catch up when we did meet there. She wasn’t in good health recently. It was not a surprise to see her name in the obituary column this week.
I really hate funerals and viewings. I would skip my own if I could. But some things you do anyway, because it is the right thing to do. And then the day gets better.
Fare thee well, kind soul.
Monday, July 19, 2010
The Non-Star Game
Yesterday was the big Parents vs. Girls scrimmage that Tabitha’s softball team decided to stage. You should have been there.
The game was more of a mob scene than these games usually run, which is saying something, but we had a good time. There were anywhere from nine to twenty girls batting, as people came and went and siblings got added in and taken out. Lauren, for example, got to play the entire game. There were even a few boys playing.
As for the parents, well, the immortal words of the Wizard of Oz certainly came to mind out there. Remember the scene where he berates the Tin Man for having the temerity to ask for a heart? “You dare to come to me for a heart, do you?” the Wizard thunders. “You clinking, clanking, clattering collection of kaligenous junk!”
Let’s just say it’s been a while since most of us had taken the field for anything more strenuous than a flea market. I’m not even sure what “kaligenous” means, but it was probably appropriate.
But we had a good time anyway, clinking and clattering away.
The parents had to bat opposite-handed for the first few innings. This was meant to try to even things out, but since we weren’t keeping score or monitoring outs too closely the main effects of this were to increase the chances of injury to everyone involved. For us parents, it meant using muscles in even MORE unfamiliar and unpracticed ways than would otherwise have been possible, something my back really does not appreciate much these days. And for the kids, it meant that the parents did not have as much control over their swings. Tabitha ended up getting nicked by a line drive at one point, though she survived without even a bruise. So we batted normally after that, and the number of line drives plummeted.
Lauren’s team has finished its season and has only the exhibition game at Saturday’s tournament to look forward to. If you’ve never been to one of those, imagine two teams of five and six year old girls, each with about 24 players, all of whom want to take the field, all of whom need to bat every inning, and none of whom really worries too much about fielding. It’s a long game.
Tabitha’s team spends this week in the playoffs. She starts tomorrow. Go team!
The game was more of a mob scene than these games usually run, which is saying something, but we had a good time. There were anywhere from nine to twenty girls batting, as people came and went and siblings got added in and taken out. Lauren, for example, got to play the entire game. There were even a few boys playing.
As for the parents, well, the immortal words of the Wizard of Oz certainly came to mind out there. Remember the scene where he berates the Tin Man for having the temerity to ask for a heart? “You dare to come to me for a heart, do you?” the Wizard thunders. “You clinking, clanking, clattering collection of kaligenous junk!”
Let’s just say it’s been a while since most of us had taken the field for anything more strenuous than a flea market. I’m not even sure what “kaligenous” means, but it was probably appropriate.
But we had a good time anyway, clinking and clattering away.
I am out standing in my field.
Tabitha prepares to exact revenge (see below).
Lauren looks for the pop-up.
The parents had to bat opposite-handed for the first few innings. This was meant to try to even things out, but since we weren’t keeping score or monitoring outs too closely the main effects of this were to increase the chances of injury to everyone involved. For us parents, it meant using muscles in even MORE unfamiliar and unpracticed ways than would otherwise have been possible, something my back really does not appreciate much these days. And for the kids, it meant that the parents did not have as much control over their swings. Tabitha ended up getting nicked by a line drive at one point, though she survived without even a bruise. So we batted normally after that, and the number of line drives plummeted.
Lauren’s team has finished its season and has only the exhibition game at Saturday’s tournament to look forward to. If you’ve never been to one of those, imagine two teams of five and six year old girls, each with about 24 players, all of whom want to take the field, all of whom need to bat every inning, and none of whom really worries too much about fielding. It’s a long game.
Tabitha’s team spends this week in the playoffs. She starts tomorrow. Go team!
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