Don’t Be a Jerk

It’s been hot here. Sticky hot. The Queen takes the children to the beach each day. It’s at the end of the street we live on, just a few miles. The beach in our town is an afterthought, really; the town’s anima is centered around being on the water, not in it. But the Big One has swimming lessons at the beach, and the Wee One sits in the gentle lapping waves, up to his waist, and dredges sand through his fingers and is content.

The beach has a lot of rules. I think the beach should have one rule: DON’T BE A JERK. That would about cover it. But things are never that simple anymore. People get together and start laying out the rules landscape, and forget when to stop. After a while, the rules, and especially the impetus behind the rules, starts to conflict with itself. And after a while, you could sum up the rules as: DANGER -WARNING -NO FUN ALLOWED. GAMBOLERS WILL BE CHASTENED.

Safety is paramount, to an idiotic degree. There’s a float you can swim out to, and rest a spell, and swim back. Woe be it to anyone who dives off the float into the water. This is strictly impermissible. A few years ago, a youngster broke his neck diving into the water, and the town, with an eye towards lawsuits, forbade diving. But as I understand it, the poor fellow that hurt himself did so because he didn’t dive off the float, he dove off a rock near the shore, into shallow water. If he had done what is now proscribed, he would have been fine. It’s curious.

Judgment and reason are assumed to be beyond the capabilities of the average person here. And the idea that children should be policed by their parents is apparently no longer current. Any plastic device for amusing yourself is not allowed. Now, I understand why the sign says: No Glass. Accidents happen, and broken glass at the beach I can live without. But glass is easily replaceable by other containers, and so no ox is gored. But the interdict against boogie boards, and inner tubes and so forth extends to water wings. They’re plastic, so no dice. In other words, safety is paramount to the nth degree- someone might get hurt!, so everything is banned, but taking a chance on a tot drowning for the lack of two little rings of airfilled plastic is preferable to allowing some barbarian to show up with anything so declasse as, well…plastic anything.

Dogs are banned, of course. But why? It’s not because the dogs really can’t go to the beach and coexist with bathers; it’s because civility has broken down to the point where people can’t be expected to take responsibility for their animals. People bring really mean animals to public places now, and take pleasure in menacing people. They always put you off with a “My dog doesn’t bite,” if you ask them to restrain their pit bull named “Satan” because he’s menacing your children. And he leaves the brown, cylindrical objects in the sand that smell disagreeable when you step in them, and his owner can’t be bothered to clean it up, or bring the dog off the beach when he’s in the grunting mood. So no dogs. More rules, because no one remembers the Golden Rule. No not that one, the one I just coined, the new one: DON’T BE A JERK.

The beach is mostly empty these days, although the steamy heat has driven that Demosthenes of Boston, Hizzoner Mayor Tom Menino to the radio each day announcing a weather alert and telling us in mumbled spoonerisms to drink lots of water and look in on shut-ins. Thanks for that, really. I was planning on sitting in front of the open oven door all day in a ski parka until you warned me off it.

Note to Tom: After Demosthenes cured his faulty speech by filling his mouth with pebbles and yelling over the sound of the surf, he took the pebbles out. You seem to have left a few in there.

I read in the paper that eleven people have died of heat related causes in Phoenix this week, and it reached 116 degrees on the thermometer there. If you investigated a little further, you found that ten of them were homeless people, and you can’t force them to stop drinking dehydrating liquor and come in out of the sun, there’s a rule against that, and they died of heatstroke. The eleventh person was an elderly woman who was found in her apartment, which was equipped with air conditioning, which she had turned off. Waste not, want not got her.

So maybe mumbling Tom has a point. But people who used to look after the elderly, like their friends or relatives, did so because it was the right thing to do, not because the Mayor told them to. We live in a time where the national legislature feels the need to pass legislation called “Good Samaritan Laws,” making it a crime to see someone in distress and refuse to help. But isn’t it all the other laws and rules and codes and statutes that they passed, and the insane litigation that they turn a blind eye to, and sometimes encourage, that made us so distant from one another in the first place? People are afraid to interfere in anybody’s affairs, not through an aversion of being a busybody, but because they’re afraid of being sued. Or assaulted.

The Queen and the Wee One and the Large Child settled themselves on the blanket in the sand yesterday, and tried not to break any rules. Another party settled down beside them. They had brought a nuclear powered boom box, and felt no compunction to respect the wants or wishes of others a few feet from them, and blared rap music at flight deck volume. No one ever seems to blast Respighi at that volume, I’ve noticed.

Now my wife could go to the authorities in town, and dutifully, in a few days, the DPW would come on down to the beach, and add another line to the “Prohibited” sign, to specify music. And so the worst of us will make it impossible to have any music at the beach, which is unfortunate. That’s not the way it should be done, and they’ll find another way to annoy everybody next time, anyway. Besides, rules are for squares, you know, the people who don’t need rules on civility and parental probity in the first place. You know, people that don’t want to listen to hateful misogynist singsong or death metal at the beach. Rules only apply to the people that need them least.

I say, take down the sign with the laundry list of real and imagined threats to civility and safety. Replace it with a smaller one:

DON’T BE A JERK

And give the lifeguard a pistol. Problem solved.

Seven Years

Buon Giorno.

I’ve done construction of one sort or another at a lot of houses. I’ve seen good, bad, indifferent, and superb architecture. I’ve worked on brand new stuff, as well as houses where people hid during King Philip’s War to avoid a severe haircut, and everything in between. And I’ve seen the march of events in housing, framed with the perspective that comes with experience with what came before. And I have a library card.

Anyway, I think America has the best housing in the world. In almost any category you wish to measure, we live in the most comfortable and spacious digs on the planet. The average person in America has better and more reliable services to support that house to boot. Potable water comes out of the tap. Losses of electricity are rare, and usually of a short duration. When you flush the toilet, it goes somewhere. The phone always works. And we take these things for granted, and woe be to anybody who lets that reliability slip. A California governor tried an experiment a few years ago in intermittent electricity, and he’s standing by the side of the road now holding a sign that says: “Will Run A State for Food”

The way Americans seamlessly integrate the manifold blessings of the world’s factories and laboratories into their lives exceeds even the Victorians. Computers, voice mail, cable television, satellite television, satellite radio, game consoles, e-commerce, e-mail, flat screen monitors, i-pods, compact disks, DVDs, and on and on. People find useful things, well, useful, and, well, use them, and don’t give them much thought. Things are not the same everywhere.

When I visited Italy six years ago, we visited some long lost Italian relatives, who were considered very middle class by Italian standards, had no where near the creature comforts we enjoy here in the States. They had one little 21 inch television. He drove what was considered a big car in Italy, a four door Peugot that I could put in the back of my truck. My Italian cousin’s teenage boy coveted a cell phone, and peppered me with questions about how much a cell phone cost in America. Now, something may have been lost between my pidgen Italian, and his third language English, but the gist of the conversation was that a cell phone cost a fortune in Italy, and there was an involved procedure to get one. I explained to him that not only was the cell phone I had free, but the person who gave it to me for signing up for a monthly pittance of a service delivered it himself, to my home, for free, the day after I ordered it.

He looked at me like I was Baron Munchausen, telling tales. I think they counted the spoons when we left.

I invited my relatives to visit us in America, to try to reciprocate for their hospitality to us, but they weren’t interested, and seemed to have the impression that America was something along the lines of the Wild West, and was too scary somehow. Not violent scary exactly, although there was a hint of that too, just too rollicking, or fast, or big or something.

Yes, yes we are.

How fast do things move along here? Here’s some perspective:

Seven years ago I worked on a new big house near here. It had about 15,000 square feet of living area. That’s big, isn’t it? And it wasn’t just a big old plastery space inside either; it was elaborately appointed as well. The owners were people I had worked for many times over the years, and are terrific people, generous and pleasant, and were raising a big crop of delightful children. The father of the brood had made a pile for himself by excelling in his field, and they decided to build a big old house with all the bells and whistles. It was pretty opulent.

The wife supervised the day to day activities as the house took shape, and we’d see the husband from time to time when he arrived home from work and looked in. One day, when the house was nearing completion, he visited the site, looked over the progress and the bills for that progress, and joked to us: “I gave my wife an unlimited budget for this place, and somehow she exceeded it.” We all laughed, and he did too. Such is construction, no matter how much you’re spending.

I never saw him really irate about any aspect of the proceedings, except once. The kitchen cabinetry was being installed. It was extremely well designed and made, and won’t be out of style or worn out anytime soon. The kitchen featured everything kitchens in a house that elaborate always had: Granite counters, Jenn-Air grill, SubZero refrigerators- two, side by side; trash compactor, two dishwashers, big stainless range; in short, the high end of the spectrum, and lots of it.

The architect was there. He and the wife were planning on a location to add a wine refrigerator. The husband became perturbed, and then visibly and audibly angry. He considered a wine refrigerator an expensive and superfluous item. He said it was extravagant, and he had ten thousand dollars of refrigeration available already, and his wine could go in there. The house had a mahogany paneled dining room, a library, a conservatory, and murals on the ceilings, but it wasn’t going to have an extravagance like a wine refrigerator. And so it was excised from the plans.

I was in Home Depot the other day, and I noticed a pile of wine refrigerators stacked to the ceiling. They were having a special on them. They cost well under $200.00. Here’s a link to Price Grabber.com; they have one for $99.00. I am beginning to see them in two bedroom ranches now.

Seven years.

Untitled Post

Howdy.

I wish to tell you a story about humility. It won’t take long.

The Big One was in the fourth grade this last year. By a trick of the calendar, he wass the youngest there. If he was born three days later, he would have been in the third grade this last year. He’s bright, and a tall drink of water, you know, so the 11 months between him and many of his schoolmates doesn’t show that much.

He attends what we used to call a parochial school. They’re a little more interested in academic excellence than in the local public school, and a lot more interested in the character of their charges, so we pony up the money and his mother schleps him the ten miles or so to school every morning, and back in the afternoon. The building he sits in all day isn’t much to look at, and if it was the public school, it would have been replaced by now with something more elaborate. The world is upside down from when I was a child; the private school just scrapes by, and the public school is palatial and new.

This might sound a little simplistic, but I asked my wife only one question about the school after she first found it and toured it with an eye to enrolling our boy: Are the desks in rows, or are they arranged in circles? Rows, she said. Case closed.

He likes it there, and he thrives.

Now, The Large One got excited about his science fair. It’s a big one, he intoned. In the gymnasium. The whole school displays at once. Judges of knowledge and stature from the surrounding environs, including engineering students from the local college. I must win.

Winning’s hard, I warned him. Everyone wants to win. It’s in the trying, that we learn about winning, I told him, and pulled up short before lapsing into “giving 110%” and “stepping up,” and so forth.

He’d have none of it. He had to get the ribbon, or perish trying.

He really did exert himself. I’d never seen him pay attention to anything except Playstation like this project. He went to the library, and picked his topic and books. He had his mother cart him over to Staples, to get poster board and such, and then to the supermarket, where he bought cooking oil, and molasses, and drew a few stares at the checkout line. He returned home, and went over his experiment. What in the blue sky are you doing I asked?

Why, exhibiting and measuring the miscibility in water of various common substances, father, he said in the tone of profound condescension I didn’t expect ’til he was shouting in my ear trumpet, after he put me in a home in forty years.

What made you pick that?

Idunno.

I wish I could spell out the way he says I don’t know. It’s all one word, said in a comic fashion, and sounds approximately like I ugh no or perhaps ightno, if it was pronounced by a slav with a sore throat. It’s his all purpose term for “I dunno,” and “whatever,” and” so be it, “or perhaps “que sera, sera,” as well as occasionally: “Don’t bug me about whatever you’re buggin’ me about any more. “

But he usually says ightno when you ask him how his day at school was, while he’s conquering the universe with his thumbs. It was jarring to hear him tell me, by inflection, that he was busy with his experiment, and wasn’t interested in being questioned about it right now.

And he showed how the oil and the water didn’t mix, and the density of the molasses made it fall to the bottom of the glass of water, but eventually dissolve, and something about emulsification I can’t remember now for the life of me, that makes me think it won’t be as many as forty years before I’m in that home. He did it all himself.

The he took out the poster board, made a triptych, and started scrawling all over it in his childish hand. The Big One’s smart, but his penmanship is AWFUL. He showed his hypothesis, and his procedure to test it, and his data, and his results and conclusions, it was all quite impressive, but you needed a sort of infantile Rosetta Stone to decipher it. Is that an A, or an N?
My god he was proud of it, and we couldn’t help being touched by his earnestness. And then I forgot all about it.

The Science Fair is tonight Dad! You forgot. You have to go! I’m going to win!

I had forgotten, and had to rush around to make myself presentable and get him there on time. The Queen stayed home with the Wee One. The Wee One, who is two, would have performed a different kind of experiment at the science exhibit: What happens when I tear all these things into little pieces and break them all into bits, and stomp on them, I wonder, and run around like a cave man troglodyte woad raider?

So it was me and The Big One.

We entered the big room, and I was taken aback. Every exhibit looked like it was made by PHDs, with help from a team of Fine Art Majors, and a Computer Graphic specialist on standby. Well, every exhibit but one. My boy’s stood out, that’s for sure. Someone had slaved over choosing the fonts on the laser printed charts on the surrounding exhibits, and it showed. Miles still had magic marker on his fingers from scrawling his runes on the cardboard backboard. He had performed his experiment multiple times for his peers and the judges, and I leave it to your imagination what it looked like after a nine year old boy had mixed cooking oil, molasses, and water, over and over again, with his own unsteady hands. It looked like someone had been testing all natural hand grenades at this exhibit, and had to hose it down afterward.

The principal got up and started reading the list of winners. The winners would have their pictures taken for the local paper. The Big One was electrified. I’m going to get my picture in the paper!

The Principal droned on. The prizes were being distributed lickity split.

I looked at my son’s Great Molasses Disaster of 2005, and glanced up and down the aisle at the other exhibits. They were all magnificent. Someone had an entire solar system, in a slick black box, with each planet rendered beautifully in full color, and had managed to get the strings suspending the orbs to disappear. I couldn’t see how they had done it. Another produced static shocks for the participants, and looked as though it could charge a quarter a play, and people would line up for it.

I thought I’d better temper The Boy’s enthusiasm, lest he be too disappointed. Before I could say anything, he says: “Dad, only the blue ribbon for the best of show overall is left, we should stand down front so I can go up to get it right away!”

And he took off, leaving me standing there with:
“Son, you know there’s no shame in …” half formed on my lips.

I hustled up to the front, amongst the scrum of expectant children and parents, and my boy.

Of course he won.

I was agog. More exactly, I was sticky from molasses, and I was agog. The Boy walked up and got his prize, and said a few inaudible words two feet below the microphone, and I was, well proud of him, but humbled.

Because the judges had seen what I should have seen and didn’t. My boy had done it himself, and it showed. Boy did it show. But no matter. His experiment worked. It showed the properties he was trying to show. He drew the right conclusions, and scrawled them on his display. In short he did it, when others had it done for them, and the judges recognized it.

But the real lesson was learned by his old man. I’ll never doubt that little urchin again.