My promotion to 5th grade in 1977 must have been a clerical error

“Dad, how do I do this?”

I get this question every time there is a big 4th grade or 6th grade project due.

I thought I had completed both of these grades back in the 1970s. I never suspected I would be made to repeat them, and certainly not after this many years.

Big Brother, now a 10th grader, doesn’t ask my help on schoolwork anymore. Once he got to high school and settled into being a teenager, the notion struck him that he was smarter than me. This notion does not only pertain to scholarly pursuits, but also, and more importantly, to the scope of freedoms and privileges a young man should be allowed while making the most of his parents’ hospitality.

If Buster and Big Man believe they are smarter than I am, they keep dark about it. They realize the unseemliness of asking the big dumb guy to do your homework for you. For now, they let me believe I’m smarter than a 4th or 6th grader. I suppose they’ll let me know how things really stand after they don’t need me anymore.

I don’t mind helping them here and there with a difficult math problem or vocabulary word. It’s the big projects that are trouble. They are both daunted, nearly to the point of paralysis, by big school projects. They hide from the project for five and half weeks, hoping it will fade out of existence in the last three days.

At some point within the last three days, they realize it is still there. This is when the problem gets referred to Dad.

Most of their projects require the reading of a book. They may, or may not, have read the first 20 pages in the previous 39 days.

Dad’s first task is to hound them to read the book, or at least enough of it to know the main character’s name and to be able to make a wild guess as to what the major conflict could be.

That’s the easy part.

Today’s teachers aren’t satisfied with students reading a book and showing their comprehension of its themes. They want pupils to be able to do arts and crafts about it.

“A Book in a Box” Finished with the timely assistance of a crafty neighbor.
We are capable of printing pictures and coloring them.
A dragon head of clay? Nope. Not in our wheelhouse. Thanks neighbor lady!

Buster, Big Man, and I are all creative in our own ways, but rarely does that creativity spill into the realm of arts and crafts. I read a lot of books, yet I can’t recall a time when I’d finished a novel and been inspired to fashion a paper doll in homage to the protagonist.

Perhaps I am out of touch with modern times, because it seems that every book must inspire some diorama or figurine. After stumbling through the book, this is where my boys fall flat. They fall flat on top of me, the man who waits, with his bag of popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue, to memorialize in sculpture every book his reluctant children are forced to read.

I would be a more active blogger, but with Buster so close to junior high, I must devote my time to perfecting Play-Doh replicas of Romeo and Juliet.

Cranky old men aren’t what they used to be

Big Man is in 4th grade, which is weird because, in my memory, he started Kindergarten yesterday.

After school, I strain to contain my impatience with the car line so I can drive him the five minutes to home.

On rare afternoons, we find ourselves driving behind a bus from his school that passes within 30 yards of our house. Whenever this happens, I threaten to put Big Man on that bus the next day.

This is an idle threat, as the amount of paperwork it takes to get a kid onto a school bus these days is another thing beyond my patience.

I don’t know if Big Man takes the threat seriously, but he feels he must provide resistance to it, just in case I do harbor such a crazy idea as putting him on a school bus.

The idea is revolting to him. “No, I will not ride the bus!” he insists.

“You’ll love it!” I tell him. “Bus friends are the best friends!”

“No, they’re not,” he responds. “Bus friends are the worst friends!”

The last time we had this exchange, I asked him what was the big deal? It’s only a five-minute ride. “When is was in school, I had to ride a bus for an hour to school and an hour home again,” I told him. “And I had to do it from Kindergarten until I graduated high school.”

  In my day, we were grateful to have a school bus to ride.

He didn’t care about childhood troubles from the olden days, and he likely thought I was exaggerating anyway. In truth, I was exaggerating; the bus ride was probably only 55 minutes each way.

As I considered this, I realized I had given him the classic, old-man, life-was-much-harder-in-my-day gripe. Making myself a cliché was bad enough, but this was as wimpy an example of the old man gripe as has ever been griped.

I didn’t walk 10 miles, through three feet of snow, uphill both ways. I walked 20 feet from the bus door to the school entrance – on level pavement. Yes, the bus ride was a good 10 miles and more, and there was sometimes snow, and no doubt a few hills, but I was riding the bus for cripes sake!

One time the bus got stuck in a snowbank, but no one died. No one even got chilly. We were inside a heated bus. It was exciting, in a completely non-life-threatening way, to hear the bus driver softly swear as he spun the tires backward and forward until the equally comfortable replacement bus showed up.

And that was it. That was the pinnacle of my hard-luck childhood. I had to sit still for nearly two, non-consecutive hours per day. The horror!

I fear the future of a nation whose old men’s exaggerated stories of childhood hardship are so soft and squishy.

For this reason, and to avoid the administrative headaches involved, I don’t think I’ll try to put Big Man on the bus.

When in Greece, climb something

I’m not much of a traveler. Taking our family to Greece for 2.5 weeks was a big step for us, though my wife was the driving force behind the adventure.

I learned some things in Greece, most of them not very useful in my everyday life at home, but a few of them mildly interesting. Following are some observations made in Greece (your experience may differ.)

Greece is hot. Greece is exceedingly hot in summer. They told me this was an unusually hot summer, but seeing all the habits Greeks have developed over the centuries to avoid the summer heat, I’m thinking Greek summers are always going to be hotter than I can stand. Also, air conditioning is marginally effective when all the doors and windows are thrown wide open.

There are lots of hills in Greece. You can’t fail to notice this when you are walking in 100+ degrees Fahrenheit. Just about everything you want to see is on top of a big hill.

There are lots of neat things to see in Greece, amazing, ingenious, beautiful things. If you survive the walk up the hill, you can see them.

The fruits of surviving the walk.

Ounce for ounce, bottled water is the best beverage investment you can make in Greece. It is inexpensive, which is good, because you will need gallons of it. Beer can be purchased anywhere, from a vending machine in the laundry mat to a kiosk on the beach. I found this form of liberty refreshing. What I found less refreshing was the beer. There are many varieties, from Greece and elsewhere in Europe. Almost universally, I found them to be the continental cousins of Bud Light. If you love Bud Light, you’ll find many beers to like in Greece. Otherwise, bottled water.

The kids could not find any lemonade that wasn’t carbonated (as the locals said, “with gas.”)

Athens is noisy. Traffic is a never-ending game of chicken: the one traffic cop I saw was smoking a cigarette; it would have seemed more humane if they had also offered him a blindfold. There are lots of stray cats. The pigeons don’t give the cats a second thought. Greek bus drivers have nerves of steel.

Island villages are more peaceful, but drivers will still park in the middle of the street to run to the ATM.

Beach can mean a place with sand, or a concrete deck with ladders down into the water.

Greek landscape is beautiful. Greek people are friendly.

I can’t tell if Greeks are whispering sweet nothings or screaming bloody murder at each other. The hand gestures and voice volumes look and sound exactly the same to me. Maybe that’s how they keep Americans from knowing their business.

Travel tip: You can avoid the hill climb by visiting the LEGO version in the museum.

How many reasons do you need?

Our town has its summer fireworks display in late June as part of its annual celebration of itself. I don’t know if this move from July 4th is because fireworks rates are cheaper in June, or if we’re collectively sticking it to Mr. Jefferson, or if we’ve quietly switched over to the Julian Calendar. I’m sure there’s solid reasoning is behind it. It’s a win-win for us; a week later we drive to the next town over (their board members haven’t read the most recent socially corrective scolding from Vanity Fair Online) to watch their morally tainted display.

This year my wife and some friends went to our town’s annual self-congratulation early, to sit in the beer tent. I don’t want you to get the idea my wife is a big beer drinker; she is not. In fact, she never touches a drop of the stuff. Not a single drop. She snuck a bladder of wine in with her.

My job was to bring Buster and Big Man to the event in time for the fireworks. The boys had a friend over, and they were having so much fun playing together, they decided to skip the pyrotechnics altogether.

Just as I settled into the idea of sticking around the house, the friend went home, leaving Buster and Big Man each with only a brother to play with. As any brother can tell you, this is unacceptable. Suddenly steeped in abysmal boredom, both boys decided they would like to see the fireworks after all.

Now we were late. As we drove, we saw the beginning of the display from the car. The boys became eager to get to the action, but we were stopped a particularly long red light.

No other cars were visible. “Just go through the light,” Big Man instructed.

“I’m not getting a ticket so you can see the fireworks you didn’t want to see five minutes ago,” I said.

“Just go through it,” Buster demanded. “Mom would!”

“No. She wouldn’t go through this one.” I know Mom does what she has to do to compress time, but this was a major intersection, quiet only because everyone was at the fireworks show.

“She would totally run this!” Big Man insisted.

“Yeah,” Buster agreed. “Because she’s late, and she has someplace to be, and nobody is here, and she’s grumpy. That’s four reasons to run the light, and Mom only needs two.”

“And Mom’s always grumpy when she drives,” Big Man piled on. “So she only really needs one.”

While they were listing the reasons to run the light, it turned green. We got to see some of the fireworks in the open air.

When we caught up to Mom, she wasn’t grumpy at all – probably because she had no idea just how far under the bus her kids had thrown her.

This might have been worth running a light to see, assuming you could see it in color.

Editor’s Note: There is no admissible evidence that any person named herein has actually run a red light or is a grumpy driver. Any insinuation of either occurrence is merely hearsay.