If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? (7 page)

Probably the most blatant contradiction between what a child is at home and what he is at school manifests itself at the annual Athletic Banquet.

Next time you attend an athletic awards banquet, catch the look on the faces of mothers as the accomplishments of their sons and daughters are revealed. It is as if they are talking about a different person with the same name as your youngster.

By intense concentration, you can sometimes read the parents' thoughts, as the coaches pay them homage.

“Mark is probably one of the best sprinters I've had in my entire career here at So. High. Hang onto your hats, people. Mark ran the hundred-yard dash in nine point nine!”

(Had to be nine days and nine hours. I once asked him to run out the garbage and it sat by the sink until it turned into a bookend.)

“I don't know what the baseball team would do without Charlie. We've had chatterers on the team before who get the guys whipped up, but Charlie is the all-time chatterer. There isn't a moment when he isn't saying something to spark the team.”

(Charlie speaks six words to me in a week. “When you going to the store?”)

“For those of you who don't really understand field events, I want to explain about the shot-put. It's a ball weighing eight pounds that was thrown a hundred feet by an outstanding athlete here at So.... Wesley Whip.”

(That's funny. Wesley looks like the same boy who delivers my paper and can't heave a six-ounce Saturday edition all the way from his bike to my porch.)

“Wolf Man Gus will go down in football annals as one of the all-time greats here at So. High. In the game with Central, Gus scored the winning touchdown despite a chipped bone in his ankle, a dislocated shoulder and a fever of a hundred and two.”

(So how come Wolf Man Gus stays home from school every time he has his teeth cleaned?)

“I don't suppose anyone has better reflexes in this entire state than our outstanding basketball rebounder, Tim Rim. When the Good Lord passed out coordination, Tim was first in line.”

(Tim is seventeen years old and I can still only pour him a half-glass of milk because that's all I want to clean up.)

“Tennis is a gentleman's game. This year's recipient of the Court Courtesy award is none other than So. High's Goodwill Ambassador, Stevie Cool.”

(He's certainly come a long way since he tried to break his brother's face last week when he took a record album without asking.)

“The swimming team would never have made it this year without our plucky little manager, Paul Franswarth. Paul picks up those wet towels off the floor, hangs up the suits to dry, and is responsible for putting all the gear back where it belongs.”

(Let's go home, Ed. I feel sick.)

It seems the more I talk with my children, the less I understand them. Take the subject of Coed Dorms.

Of all the changes parents have had to adjust to, coed dorms has probably been one of the most difficult to understand. Some dormitories have even conducted parent-student seminars where the student explains patiently, “We need a freer atmosphere where boys and girls come to know one another as friends, rather than sex objects,” and the father of a freshman daughter laments, “That can't be done in a coffee shop?”

I was against coed dorms from the beginning. Not because it was a sensuous supermarket, but because I felt if anyone ever saw my son's bedroom in its natural state, I'd never get the kid married off and now my worst fears have been realized.

At Stanford, male and female students (although not given permission by the school) are using the same bathrooms. Take my word, when you see a man dribbling toothpaste and hair into a washbowl each morning and gargling like someone just pulled the plug on Lake Erie, love goes right out the window.

I know the trend is for young people to go the frankness and honesty route, but premarital clutter could stamp out marriages forever.

Men! Could you establish a meaningful relationship with a girl who put an angora sweater to dry on your last bath towel? Can you shave in a room full of steam with your face framed in a dripping pair of pantyhose? Do you really want to know how often she has to shave her legs? Could you ever be important enough to a girl to have her take the rollers out of her hair? (I swear I saw a teenage bride at her own wedding with her hair in rollers. When I asked her why she said, “We might go somewhere afterward.”)

Women! Could you have a. meaningful relationship with a boy who entered school in September with thirty-eight pairs of sweat sox and is just getting around to asking where the Laundromat is? Could you afford a man who uses a can of deodorant a day under each arm? Who belches before breakfast and hangs his trousers under the mattress?

As my house mother once told me when I was in college, “There is nothing that attracts the opposite sex like a busy signal... a locked door... and the word 'No.' If you want a friend... buy a dog.”

According to the experts, if we didn't talk to our children and appreciate them every minute of the day, when they were gone we would sit in a recliner with a phone in our lap and hum all day long.

There isn't a mother alive who has not lived in dreaded terror of “The Empty Nest.”

It was a long time in coming. First, you had to get the child out of bed and into a line of work.

For kids who are the most educated, well-read, best-informed people in the world, their attitude toward work is not to be believed. Next to an oarsman on a slave ship whose captain wanted to water ski, the most maligned person on the face of this earth is the teenager who has just landed his first full-time job.

No one suffers more and is appreciated less.

My son considers himself a “human sacrifice on the altar of the Church of the Establishment.” He was fifteen before we could use the word “employment” in front of him. The word broke his face out and he preferred we spell it. The way he explained it to us on the eve of his marriage to a pay-check, “This is an exercise in group persecution, isn't it? All of you have run the course and now before I come of age, I have to prove that I can hack the nine-to-five number, is that it? Okay, you win. If I have to prove that I'm mature, I'll get the dumb full-time J-O-B... jjjj... jjjooo... jjjjjooooob!”

Maybe a lot of you know my son... or at least have heard of him.

He's the only employed person who has to work all day and then come home and feed himself.

He's the only dedicated teenager in North America to work when the “gang” went tubing down the river one Wednesday afternoon.

He's the first person to ever have half of his paycheck withheld for some service that he has never requested (federal income tax, hospitalization, social security, etc.). As he stated, “Someone is going to hear about this.”

He stands alone as the only worker who is dominated by a senile boss (age thirty-five) who engages in office brutality by insisting he arrive on time in the mornings and after lunch.

He's the only full-time worker in the country who has not gained the respect of family and friends for his contribution to labor.

Last Saturday, I tapped him on the shoulder, “Hey, George Meany, out of the sack. It's the crack of noon.”

My son rolled over. “I do not believe this is happening to a working person,” he said. “All week long, I work five days a week, eight hours a day and what do I get for it?”

“You get all your meals served like a sultan, your bedroom cleaned, your clothes washed and ironed and a full-time old family retainer... me!”

Something tells me I'll have the first kid to retire three years before he has anything to retire from.

Once employment is attained, however, you are for the first time in your life... alone at last. The family structure as you knew it will never be the same again.

You have weathered loose teeth, stolen bikes, team teaching, bunk beds, baton twirling, G.I. Joe, Driver's Ed., lost billfolds, Sunday night term papers, the draft, and the Doobie Brothers.

Cue the recliner and the phone... the Empty Nest sequence is about to begin.

As I walked into my son's empty room, I felt I was in the presence of a shrine.

Everything was intact, just as he left it. I fondled the sherbet glass with the petrified pudding under his bed... ran my fingers lovingly over his drum that leaked oil on the carpet... and cried softly as I tiptoed around the mounds of dirty underwear that didn't fit him anymore.

I made plans to preserve the room as a living memorial where I could go in the heat of the day and be by myself and reflect on the past.

Then one day as I meditated, I noticed he had an entire wall with nothing on it, so I moved the pump organ from the hallway into his bedroom. Noting the light was pretty good in his room, I also discovered by moving out his drums and storing them I could put my sewing machine in the corner with a table for cutting.

As we were making the change, my husband observed there was an entire closet free, so why shouldn't he move his clothes into the closet? By discarding five years of Sports Illustrated my son had saved, we found room for the Christmas decorations and the carton of canceled checks.

More and more of the family began to visit the “Temple.” It became a haven for camping gear, pictures that needed framing, storage for summer lawn furniture and newspapers awaiting recycling.

The shelf of tennis trophies gave way to a supply of bleach bottles to be used by the women of the church for a project, the chest of drawers for my bicycle exerciser, and the bed was moved out of the room to create space—stored to make way for a rocker and a TV set.

Naturally, the walls were too masculine for the room, so we painted them yellow and slipcovered the rocker in a bright pink and orange.

Just before Christmas, there was a knock on the door. It was our son home for a visit.

“Hey, long time no see,” said my husband. “Son of a gun. How long can you stay? Terrific. We've still got the old sofa bed in the den and you're welcome to it as long as you like.”

This morning, my husband said, “How long is your relative going to stay?”

“My relative!” I shrugged. “I thought he was YOURS.”

8

There Ought to Be a Law...

When in the course of human events, one's sanity is in jeopardy, it becomes necessary for a lone voice in the wilderness to cry out.

It is in the name of justice for all... but especially me... that I offer the following declarations that would provide peace of mind for so many.

A Baby's Bill of Rights

Article the first: People who chew garlic shall not be allowed within three miles of a baby under penalty of drowning by spitting.

Article the second: Excessive bail shall be set for turkeys who tickle a baby's feet until he faints, or throw him up in the air after a full meal.

Article the third: Where a crime of the kidneys has been committed, the accused should enjoy the right to a speedy diaper change. Public announcements, details and guided tours of the aforementioned are not necessary.

Article the fourth: The decision to eat strained lamb or not to eat strained lamb should be with the “feedee” and not the “feeder.” Blowing the strained lamb into the feeder's face should be accepted as an opinion, not as a declaration of war.

Article the fifth: Babies should enjoy the freedom to vocalize, whether it be in church, a public meeting place, during a movie, or after hours when the lights are out. They have not yet learned that joy and laughter have to last a lifetime and must be conserved.

Amendment one: No baby shall at any time be quartered in a house where there are no soft laps, no laughter, or no love.

The Hernia Amendment to the National Anthem

Few will argue that the inspirational words of Francis Scott Key are stirring enough to make Jane Fonda enlist in the Coast Guard. But something has got to be done about the melody of our national anthem before someone hurts himself.

I watched a man at the ball game the other Sunday standing tall and proud as he sung, “Oh say can you see.” But by the time he got to the high-pitched, “And the rockets' red glare,” the veins were standing out in his neck, his face became flushed and his voice cracked like Andy Hardy asking the Judge for the keys to the Packard.

Sensing I was looking at him, he gasped and said “I love this country.”

“Me too,” I said sadly, stuffing a program in his mouth.

You take your average citizen. He sings on maybe ten or twelve occasions a year and does not have what is normally called your “trained voice.” He can make “Happy Birthday to Marvin” (if they start low) or “Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot” and maybe a chorus of the “Beer Barrel Polka” with a few beers, but beyond that he is limited.

Me? It is my experience that everytime I go from the “twilight's last gleaming” to “the ramparts we watched” there is pain on the inside of my right leg, so I do everyone a favor by just mouthing the words. Invariably, everywhere I go, I am seated next to Beverly Sills, who comes down on “land of the free” with two notes. (The latter reached only the ears of a springer spaniel in New England.)

As I was setting down these thoughts I wondered who wrote the music to “The Slar-Spangled Banner” and went to my reference book. Ironically, the music was an old English drinking song called “To Anacreon in Heaven.” (Obviously, the drunks could sing the melody, but they had trouble with Anacreon.)

I personally believe there are a lot of patriotic Americans around who would like to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in its entirety, but who are discriminated against because they are bluebirds (singers with a range of one octave).

Would it be unreal to have one national anthem with two melodies? One for the traditionalists who can also sing Bacharach's “Alfie” without fainting, and a simple tune for those of us who sing in the cracks in the piano?

To the 3,085 ball players who chew tobacco, this could mean a lot.

Kissing by Mutual Ratification