Category: Life in these United States

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Send out the masses!

fundraising As surely as winter follows fall, there’s one thing that always quickly follows the start of the school year–no, not new television shows–fundraisers!

It’s that time again; time for all the little chillun to start canvassing the neighborhoods with their glossy brochures hawking pretty wrapping paper, or delicious chocolates–all in the hopes of winning some trinket for their efforts.

Do you remember this when you were a kid? Boy I do. I actually LOVED fundraisers, and I wasn’t one of these kids who forgot to do it and then begged his parents to make up the difference. No, I was quite the little peddler, which is funny considering how anti-new-social I am as a grup (bonus points if you know from whence the term “grup” comes from. And if you can’t figure it out, go here).

Come, walk with me…

I remember sitting in the school gymnasium on the floor (this was before my knees and back made floor sitting obscenely painful) listening to the pitch-man explain the fundraiser, while in the background stood a colorful display of all the wonderful prizes we could win by selling a certain amount of product. The basketballs and Frisbees® sitting alongside wonderful dragon kites and candy, all served to feed the great selling machine that is cute little kids–hordes of them even!

Then, I’d run home and show my mom what I had to sell, almost bursting with excitement to get out there and start selling. I had no idea then that, more than likely, she was rolling her eyes even as I foamed at the mouth and fairly buzzed with pent up excitement!

But I knew my customers! I knew who would buy, and who would not. I knew who would casually look at the brochures, and then come up with an excuse about why they couldn’t buy today. For these people, I was prepared, “Would you like me to come back tomorrow perhaps?”

There was the nice lady with the white Lincoln Town Car, back when they used to have the wheels on the trunk. She was so nice and always bought something. Sometimes,  I would head straight to her house knowing she would get me started right; but other times, I’d wait and hit her last so that I could end my patrol on a high note.

There was also the house near the opposite end of the neighborhood from me who one year put up a sign on his door that said, “No soliciting.” Being only 8, I had no idea what that meant, but figured anything that started with the word “No” probably indicated that he didn’t want to talk to people, so I started skipping his house. It was OK, he wasn’t much of a buyer anyway.

But then I remember the disappointment when, after all my work and after miraculously getting all the money to the school (without my brother stealing it…yeah it happened a couple of times), it was only to find out that all I qualified for was an oversized lollipop. But it didn’t matter. That was one oversized lollipop that my parents would never buy me, so I had earned every lick!

Yeah, I remember those days and so I try and be sympathetic to the kids in my neighborhood. Their wares are usually overpriced and crap, but they’re trying and I give them points for that. But knowing how little of that money is actually going to the school, I’d almost rather they came to me with a list of improvements the school wants to make, and ask me to donate money to my favorite choice.

Course…that would rob them of the same memories that I treasure, and that’s pretty important too.

I therefore proclaim: Children of Wildwood Springs—Bring me your wrapping paper; your chocolates; your overpriced tins of stale caramel corn! I’ll buy something from you. Just promise me you’ll pay forward the favor when its your doorbell ringing!

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A Boy's Life Dad Blogs Family Life in these United States

Big Hair, Leg Warmers and a perfect family life. too good to be true?

My childhood was good, don’t get me wrong. I mean, it wasn’t Huxtable-good, but it was alright. The other day I was thinking about how television has changed since we of the “MTV Generation” were kids, and how big a part of my life TV was when I was growing up.  Do you remember it? Do you remember all of those popular family shows that we all used to watch and how those shows portrayed family life?

Family ties For example, one of my favorite shows growing up was Family Ties. Who could forget Alex and Mallory and whatever those other kids’ names were. I think they were the original dual-income family. The mom was some kind of business woman, as was the dad. Did we ever find out what they did for a living? Well, whatever it was, they made enough money to keep the kids in good clothes and to keep whatever out-of-town family member happened to drop by the house in spending cash until they left, usually after making a mess of home life.

Cosby show The Huxtables were a favorite too. I think my parents liked the Cosby Show because it had actors from their own era, but I liked the show because they were well-off (AKA rich!)…and lived like it! Isn’t it funny how, 20 years ago we didn’t even think about race when we were watching that show? Seems like we’ve gone backwards a bit since then doesn’t it?

Growing pains Who am I missing? Oh, man…Growing Pains! How I could I forget Growing Pains? Now this was the ultimate wasn’t it? Dad was a psychiatrist; mom was a…I don’t know what mom did, but she was hot! They lived in a nice ranch house with a basketball goal in the back. It was perfect.

Now, I knew in my heart that television wasn’t real life; but wasn’t there just a little part of all of us that thought that somewhere, life must be like that? And isn’t that view of family life what we all grew up with in our head?

So is it any surprise to us that we’re often dissatisfied with parenting? For certain, I never saw the Keatons getting up several times a night to comfort an inconsolable baby. Or, I don’t remember the Seavers sitting around the kitchen table stressing over whether or not they could afford to get rid of the 10-year old family car and get a new one.

Instead, according to our 80s television hero’s, life was supposed to be something like this:

  • Everyone suddenly shows up downstairs in the kitchen fully dressed and ready for breakfast
  • Dad sits at the table with a steaming mug of coffee in his hand and a newspaper in the other
  • Mom busily–yet expeditiously–serves everyone a hearty breakfast, while herself looking perfectly made up and coiffed and ready for her busy day as a working mom
  • Maybe dad works from home and while he does so, mom often pops in and out of the house and they have engaging, meaningful conversations about the family, work and life in general–all the while harmlessly flirting with one another.
  • Whatever dad did for a living, he had a LOT of free time
  • The kids would come home in the afternoon and fix themselves something to eat and disappear…off to do whatever they had to do.
  • Homework miraculously got done, or barring that, if one of those rascally kids got a “D” on their report card, they were mildly admonished while grinning winningly, knowing the parents would never follow through with any kind of lasting punishment.
  • At night, dinner was a family affair. Everyone sat down and ate whatever it was that magically appeared on the table. I don’t think anyone ever ate take-out and they certainly never went out to eat. Beef was good for you!
  • And I don’t think anyone ever went to bed, or if they did, it was after the show went off.
  • Vacations were European affairs, or at the very least, uber-exciting trips cross-country where everyone got along and traffic never hampered the schedule
  • Oh, and nothing ever, ever broke in the house.

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Too bad it’s about as far from real-life as you can get. Maybe that’s why Roseanne was such a big hit..it was bawdy and rough, but it was a heck of a lot more like MY childhood than anything Silver Spoons ever televised.

I wonder what my kids are going to glom onto growing up? Right now, I can’t think of any television shows that portrays an “ideal” family life. Maybe that’s a good thing though. Maybe it will help them create their own ideal, and in turn maybe that will help me to remain cognizant of the fact that my actions are the only thing countering the cultural norms today that I don’t agree with.

That’s a tall order.

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Dad Blogs Family Fatherhood Life in these United States

Memories of a Gen-Xer

custom van Every generation blames the one before…no wait…that’s a song.

Let’s try again:

About every 20 years, another generation is born. Or at least, that’s been the schedule up until couples decided they were making too much money and having too much fun by themselves to have kids. I guess now, a lot of people are waiting 30-35 years, so maybe the generation schedule is widening.

Anyway, what with my decrepitude rearing its ugly head again, I’ve been thinking more about getting old. But not in a morose kinda way, but more in a kinda, “How things have changed” kinda way. A few days ago, some of my more enlightened readers and I discussed a bit how parenting has changed and while there is fodder there for at least a week’s worth of blogs, I’m gonna give it a break for a bit.

So today, I’m offering my Top Five list of things that have changed since I was a child in the 70s and 80s. If you’d like to play along, feel free to offer up your top picks via a comment.

Here Goes! The TOP FIVE Things that Have Changed Since Gen-Xers were kids!

breakerbar

5. Water used to cost .0000143 cents per gallon: Do you remember when you could turn on the Slip n’ Slide in the morning and the only thing that got you off the thing in the afternoon was either dinner, or someone sliding into an anthill, or catching a nipple on a hidden rock? These days, water is so scarce here in the Atlanta area that we can’t even wash our cars. I suspect that in certain demographics, this is causing quite a social uproar. I remember when the big thing was washing your car in the afternoon so you could go cruising for doughnuts chics later that night!

4. There are no quotable movies anymore!: Just this morning I heard part of “Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail” on my Sirius radio. It was the bit about burning witches, “…and so, if the witch weighs as much as a duck…then she must be made of wood!” It got me thinking about how movies today, while visually stunning, lack a certain wit that we all grew up with. I mean, how many different quotes can the average Gen-Xer offer from Star Wars, or CaddyShack or any of the National Lampoon series? Nowadays, the best kids can do is offer, “Lucky” (Napoleon Dynamite) or “Tattoo on the lower back? Might as well be a bullseye.” (Ok, that one is actually a GREAT movie, but it was really geared more towards us older folk rather than the kids)

3. Cars suck!: On more than one occasion, I’ve lamented the lack of customized vans today! Oh, do you remember those? We had a blue GMC something or other, with a beautiful airbrushed picture of an old sailboat out on the open sea painted on our van. It had a refrigerator, a huge raised bed in the back (it never occurred to me what that was probably used for when I was a kid), and the BEST! captain’s chairs you ever sat in. Oh, and the windows were tinted so dark, that even if they’d had seat belt laws back then, you could have flaunted them while parading around in your skivvies in the back while driving up I-10! Oh, the good old days!

2. Lack of open space: This is one of those things you hear quite frequently from Gen-X’ers; “When we were kids, mom used to kick us outta the house in the morning and we wouldn’t return till dinner time.” And this was when we were like six years old! Nowadays, if a six year old is seen walking around the neighborhood alone, you can count the minutes before Child Services is knocking on doors trying to figure out who to blame. The problem is not that the kids are out without their parents, its that they are out in plain sight! When we left the house, we disappeared man! We hit the woods, or the drainage tunnels, or the big fields with the massive water ditches. You could stand out on our deck and look out over the back of the neighborhood and all you’d see every now and then is a head pop up out of the sand, or a pine-cone bomb being lobbed towards the enemies’ fort!

And the #1 Change is:

1. Weekend activities expectations: Do you remember what you did on an “average” Saturday? I bet it was something like this:

  •  Get up before 8 a.m.
  •  Eat some cereal while watching some cartoons (but not too   many, “We have things to do young man!”)
  • Do chores for the next hour and a half
  • Eat lunch
  • Maybe go grocery shopping with mom, or get some new shoes. Or maybe dad had you hold the flashlight while he worked on the car, or in the attic or something
  • Free play time till dinner
  • Help mom cook dinner (well, I did this anyway)
  • Maybe watch a movie in front of the TV if dad is feeling magnanimous. A Disney special perhaps, or maybe “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” ( sponsored by: Mutual of Omaha, is people…you can count on, when the going’s rough…)
  • Do the dishes
  • Take a bath/ brush your teeth
  • Off to bed

Nowadays, by 7:30 a.m., my kids are asking, “What are we going to do today?”

What are we going to do? I want to say, “We’re going to catch up on all the daddy chores that we didn’t get done this week because we were too busy working in the day, and playing with you kids at night.” But what really happens is that we parents end up dragging our kids from one activity to the next in a vain attempt at wearing their little butts out so they’ll go to bed early, so that we parents can have a few minutes alone that doesn’t cost $15 p/hour in babysitting fees!

So this was probably waaaay too long of a post, but I hope you at least scanned for the good parts. And I’d love to hear your Top 5 or Top 10 changes. It’d be interesting to compare childhoods!

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Another church bites the dust…hey hey!

church“Dear Lord, thank you for this day, thank you for this summer season; a time when we slow down with family and friends and we remember you…”

After the Assistant Pastor spoke this bit o’ prayer this morning during church, I wrote it down on the back of a tithing envelope during (as shown here) because I felt it quite succinctly illustrated the vast chasm that we have discovered at our current church. With our busy schedules, we find that the early service is the way to go. Unfortunately, this means we’re in there with all the lil’ blue haired ladies and the organ music. I think the later service is a bit more up-tempo, but not by much.

What struck me about this opening prayer this morning, and what I whispered to CareerMom, much to the chagrin of the worshiper behind me was, “Slow down in the summer? What are they talking about?” But I got to looking around and realized, “Hey, when you’re 65, and the heat rises above your age, you probably DO slow down.”

So anyway, I guess this means we’ll be church hunting again. We thought we’d found a quasi-home in this new Baptist church, but small issues with the children’s rooms (waaay too young for our kids), coupled with their trying to pull the wool over unsuspecting folks’ eyes today by supposedly broadcasting the pastor’s message from Israel while a bunch of people are there on a mission, has just done it for us.

I mean, they didn’t come right out and say the service was “Live from Israel,” but they didn’t say it wasn’t either, leaving those who are geographically challenged to believe that 9 a.m. Atlanta time, is also roughly breakfast in Israel–an oversight I had a hard time swallowing as completely honest.

Oh, and the pastor’s reading the entire “Sermon on the Mount” from Mathew, since he was standing roughly where Jesus was supposed to have preached the sermon, was just too much.

It’s all good though, being raised a Pentecostal of the “X of God” sort (e.g. “Church” of God, “Assembly” of God, etc.) and CareerMom being a reformed Catholic, these Baptists beliefs were sometimes difficult to attenuate to, so it’s probably all for the best.

But man, I do seriously hate trying out new churches. Guess I’ll put on my fake smile and my, “I’m so glad to be here” pants and give it a whirl!