Back to life.. Back to Reality..

I know those are song lyrics, but I couldn’t tell you the song or who sang it. Can someone fill in the blanks without looking it up?

School is starting again. We have a couple of weeks or so to go since we start later than most, and later than before. When we moved here at the start of my son’s Freshman year,  he started several days late because we didn’t get here until the end of August and they’d already started. Poor kid had to be a new student and a late new student at the beginning of his HS career. But then, they were out by the end of May, as most are.

The next year, my sister planned her wedding at the beginning of June, in Illinois (my home state). No problem, I said. School ends the end of May.

Ah well, that year they decided to change dates and didn’t start until after Labor Day, which meant they weren’t out until the first week of June, which meant I had to pull him out to miss the last days of his second year of high school. (It’s an all day drive to get there from here, and as one of the matrons of honor, I couldn’t pull in last minute.)

At the time, those events caused me some deal of stress. I’m a rule follower. If school is in session, it means you’re there unless ill enough you can’t stay on your feet (“You’ll feel just as bad at home as you do at school/work.” – a family motto of sorts).  Same with work. I heard a song on the radio this morning about calling in with a fake illness in order to take the day off. I literally cringed. Unless I can’t stay on my feet, I’m where I’m supposed to be, even when it’s just at my desk at home trying to stay upright just to get that chapter finished by my self-imposed deadline.

Okay, maybe that is pushing it too extreme, but in these times when our social services don’t get taken care of because the county’s budget hasn’t been passed yet, and those in charge are still leaving at 1:00 in the afternoon to go play golf or whatever (maybe a slight exaggeration – they might stay until 4, and I mean lots of places are doing the same, not only my own), I miss the days when more people had that “get it done” work ethic.

The other day, I picked up a children’s book. The reason I picked it up is because when I checked out the few I was buying for myself, the clerk asked if I’d like to donate a book to the children’s drive to help them learn to read. I’m a sucker for those and one of the books put up to select from was “The Little Engine That Could” – what better to provide to a child learning (likely behind schedule) something that can be difficult for many of them?

As I left the store, I realized I didn’t have that one on my children’s shelf at home. I have quite a few, mainly from the discount bins (where they were rescued cheaply from a certain fiery death) in preparation for future grandchildren. (Future, as in not expected for some time, with any luck.)  So I went back to buy it. (I’m not much of a shopper until I find a book, music, or office store, so I let myself splurge on those.)

I was asked once, if I could choose one book to have the whole world have to read, what would it be? I think I said “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran (“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s yearning for itself.”)  Maybe I would change my mind now, though. Maybe I would have to answer:

The Little Engine That Could

Yes, it’s an optimist book. Yes, I’ve been called Pollyanna more than once. *shrug* But I’ve also recently been looking through my old high school things and shook my head at how often I used to attempt things I should have known wouldn’t happen. Cheerleading (much too shy), Homecoming court (laughing out loud at that one: too much of a nerdy bookworm), Basketball my senior year though I’d never played before (yeah so as a senior, I barely played JV), Asking a couple of guys to a dance (Ha! again, shy enough I didn’t even speak to them otherwise)…  and the list goes on.

Did it matter whether or not I was there for the first or last days of school or how many sick days I had? I couldn’t even remember those things. I did find a report card showing a D in social studies one term (I HATED memorizing dates!)  and then winding up on the honor roll with a B in the same class later that year.

Most of all, what I got out of looking back was that I kept trying despite the odds. It’s horribly hard for a very shy girl with unknown ADD to accomplish much in school. And yet, I ended up on the Top Ten with a ton of activities under my name in the yearbook.

The Little Engine That Could was always one of my favorites, and I took it to heart.

Those days don’t seem real to me anymore, at least not very. I’ve done things since then I never could have imagined doing. I went from horribly dependent on my family to being completely on my own with my kids much of my life while my military husband was away doing as his country asked. I’m still away, and still doing much on my own as he has the same work ethic I have and is still doing as his employer asks (well past 4pm, btw). For me, this is reality. It’s not good or bad; it just is. I now have the advantage of seeing things from both viewpoints, dependent and independent, and I try to use it all in my work to share, as well as passing as much as I can to my children, and later to my grandchildren.

This year, my son (my baby) is a senior. As he begins this transitional year toward what he will be, I can’t help wonder what he will take with him most. How will he look back and see these days? What will happen to define him? He’s much more social than I was, and yet has taken part in only two school activities, one of which he gave up last year. He’s more of a rebel than I was, and much more confident. I find it amusing that he’s in that “group” I couldn’t begin to understand during my own HS days, and yet, now I do, at least to an extent. I admire them more now than I did then.

All around me, I see adults who I’m sure have remained the people they were in high school, who still view everything from that one perspective, whose kids follow in their own footsteps. I suppose that makes it easier to figure them out and help them along, but I enjoy this widened perspective, even if many days I think Zeller Zone sounds like a good idea.

So what about you? Are you the same person you were in school?

If you could choose one book for everyone to read, what would it be? Maybe I’ll check it out.

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as the turntable spins

How many of you used to sit beside your record player and repeatedly lift the needle to set it back to just the right spot in order to hear that first or second or third verse again? It was the easiest way to learn a song’s lyrics, wasn’t it? When you repeat one verse at a time without the rest of it distracting you, it’s quite simple to memorize one song after another. I can’t even imagine how many songs I learned that way, or when cassettes came along, by learning how long to let it rewind to go just far enough.

If those songs come on the radio now, I still remember them pretty well.

Of course these days most lyrics are printed on the CD pamphlet, and if not, they’re all over the net to find. Way back in the days of LPs, a few companies did print them on each side of the big square envelope made to protect the album from the cardboard cover. As time went by, more of them did. Still, learning that way was never as satisfying as sitting by the record player returning the arm to exactly where I wanted it.

Try doing that with a CD or with a song on an MP3. You have to go all the way back to the beginning, even though you have that down already, and wait to be where you want to be.

Maybe others don’t need the separate repetition of each verse, but I was taught in school to do my vocab words or times tables 10 times each before moving along. It was the only way it worked. (I tended to need fewer for vocab and more for arithmetic, but you get my point.)

It seems to me that the more they make things “easier” and more “convenient” the harder it actually becomes when you look beyond the convenience.

Look at phones. We went from simply picking up a receiver and dialing a number from the same kind of phone everyone and her aunt had and knew how to use to having 50 different types of phones that do so many things most of us don’t even use their full potential since we can’t figure out how (or we’re too busy to bother). The biggest issue with the phone used to be remembering whether or not you needed a “1” in front of the number. Of course, we had to stay within reach of the cord, but that was a big plus for our parents. If we were on the phone, they darn well knew we were. If we were some of the lucky few with a phone in our room, we still had the knowledge that the receiver in the main room could be raised at any time and … “busted!” It was much easier for parents to keep track of phone time.

It was also easier for parents to know who their kids hung out with. Simple. If you didn’t want your kids to know half of the US, you didn’t put them on a train by themselves and let them hop on and off. With social networks, parents have no means of controlling … well, too much of anything. Block your kids at home from being on the computer, and they’ll use one at a friend’s house, or at school, or on a friend’s iPod on the way home on the bus.

Wait. How is this making things easier or more convenient? How can anything be easier when all control is being grabbed from you? When the videos on Youtube are filled with images you’ve protected your children from most of their lives only to have friends download them and share willingly?

Yes, I’m showing my age. I long for the days of record players and real phones and knowing who is calling the house for my child.  I sigh for the loss of days when a kid could tell time from a clock with hands (numbers or not), write out arithmetic problems on paper without $100 required calculators, would actually read a book since there were only 3 channels on television and reading was better than the fourth rerun of Gilligan’s Island, and it was totally cool to get a video recorder where you could actually put a tape in to capture that one show you just had to see during the only time and only method you had of seeing it.

Or maybe I just long for the brain of a teenager who can actually figure out how to use her cell phone or digital music device without giving herself a headache.

Records were so easy.

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