Ladies and gentlemen, we have Bluebirds!

Years ago I bought an eastern bluebird house, mounted it on a pole in the backyard and aligned it with the stars, moon, planets and the noon day sun exactly as instructed. I put special bluebird food in my feeders, thought about putting up little red white and blue banners all around the yard that said “Welcome Bluebirds. We are blue for you!’’, maybe have an open house tour complete with hors d’oeurves of white grub dip and some meal worm pâté.

I waited and waited—and waited. But for years all I got was wretched dull colored wrens that knew a good deal when they saw it. They would move in, trash the place and slip away come fall.

So I thought about flying in a decorator from Paris for the bluebird house—do everything in pastels, install granite countertops, build a sauna, have parquet floors, maybe add a sun porch and an upstairs studio , new plumbing—even a home theater system. I’d offer exemption from zoning laws (I know people) and provide pole side garbage pick-up. But time passed and no bluebirds ever came. I felt shunned.

I went into an emotional spiral. I spent a lot of time in the house with the curtains drawn closed, an unshaven man sitting in a dim corner of the room thumbing through a Duncraft bird supply catalogue and lingering over pictures of happy bluebirds coming in and out of houses made of recycled material. Some pictures were an entire page and the man that owned the bluebird house would be standing beside it, an arm draped over it as if the house was a close friend and he would be smiling into the camera-- a Great. Big. Giant. Smile. His pose seemed to say ‘I shave twice a day and my golf handicap is 2. I’m not a loser.”

I would hurl the catalogue across the room and go into deep mournful sobs and reach for a box of tissues I kept beside my chair. My nose stayed red and my eyes swollen. I felt rejection and low self-esteem-- it was high school all over again.

Then one day while taking a load of empty tissue boxes out to the garbage container I happen to see a flash of blue. Two bluebirds had just swooped into the yard and landed on my bluebird house! The female went in ---then came back out. She glanced at the male. You could tell he wasn’t sure. He kept looking at a nearby oak tree as if he didn’t like it.

I was thinking two thoughts: 1. I hoped the tree wasn’t a deal breaker and 2. I wondered if they would like some housefly pâté?

The female bobbed towards the male who looked resigned, like he could use a cigarette. Later that day I observed them moving in—at last! Woo Hoo! I could just imagine their little bluebird suitcases and bluebird furniture with little bluebird knick-knacks--souvenirs from Florida and Busch Gardens.

That night I dreamed of a great hall where they give awards to people who have bluebirds. The president of the Audubon society was there, the Mayor, dignitaries from around the world all gathered in tuxedoes and formal dresses. I stood behind the podium and told how I was once bluebird challenged but achieved success through the use of quality worms and prejudice based on bird color--- I got two standing ovations.

After my speech everyone was turning to go when I leaned into the microphone, beamed at the audience and said, “Before you leave, I made pâté!”

An upside down world

I’m leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when I’ll be back again, oh babe I hate to go—but it’s okay because my expenses will be paid and I get to enjoy the company of the rest of the worlds traveling people who spend hours in airports talking on cell phones, hustling their wares, advising clients on strategy, people with laptops, Blackberries and voices like machine gun fire.

Traveling people tend to be cynical and grim, which you would be too if you were trying to peddle your widgets in today’s market. They usually don’t sit at the departure gate and gossip. But lately I heard several people talking about a kid in Connecticut, James Tate, who was banned from going to his prom because of the way he invited the love of his life to join him on the dance floor.

James, motivated by passion, pasted in large letters a prom invitation on his high school’s entrance. The message read “Sonali Rodrigues, will you go to the prom with me? HMU (hit me up)-Tate”. The school system went ballistic, claimed he committed an unsafe act (he used a non-approved ladder—alone), trespassed on school property and used non appropriate signage and so was declared Prom non-gratis. Someone put this on the internet and it made CNN news which caused two state representatives to draft legislation to allow school administration, along with parents and the student, to create a community-service option to determine the best course of discipline. Then finally after weeks of pressure the school system was recently forced to completely reverse it’s decision. Oh the complexity, the contortions! People, get a grip!

Love crazed males have been doing dumb things ever since Adam looked and saw that Eve didn’t have a thing to wear to a garden party.

"Va-Va-Voom!" he said ( a loose translation).

The world has turned upside down when the high jinks of a love struck kid, under the influence of testosterone and emotion can make big time school officials and state representatives quake and react with the finesse of a bull in a china shop.
How does this happen you ask?

The internet is fundamental to social life as we now know it. You can sit anywhere---I’m sitting in an airport right now next to a cafeteria—and blitz the world with emails and check Facebook to see where your friends are, what they had for lunch and download anything you care to look at or read. You just need a laptop and a little plug-in wireless antennae and you can broadcast anything you want which can pressure big people like CEO’s, Senators and school superintendents to jump to absurd reactions. Small acts are amplified way out of proportion and context.

The internet has a way of putting steroids to the trivial and forcing a non-event to threaten people’s careers and so we go into overkill on rule making and over-the-top on reactions. The result is we have been conditioned to be too serious about everything-- a small prank and you’re banned from the Prom, hurricanes have to be named for both genders now and God forbid a person makes an honest mistake about ---anything. We’ve lost our sense of humor.

In the real world the sign prank was adolescent-- a cute silly expression of a boy’s feelings. It didn’t require banning from the prom or state legislation---his homeroom teacher should have just said, ” Don’t do that again kid. Now go help clean the toilets.”

Let’s find our lost humor. Tell someone a good joke or run some underwear up a flag pole. And just laugh.

You can End-of-the-year- test this!

The end of the school year and weary North Carolina teachers pull the wagons in a circle while administrators and whining parents apply stress to the besieged educators. There will be accusations of some child left behind even though the village that was suppose to raise the little darling was too busy to attend parent/teacher conferences. But the ultimate stress maker is the flawed EOG or End of year/Grade test.

A teacher and a child’s school career depend on this one test—an academic roll of the dice. According to the Raleigh incompetents ( RI’s) running the NC Department of Public Instruction the EOG alone, given at one moment in time and ignoring the rest of the year, accurately measures the entire year’s performance of the teacher and student. You may as well plan a teaching career by looking at tea leaves. When determining if a child should advance it would be as accurate to just roll dice. Other tests are apparently just for giggles.

By the time your child’s schooling is done they will have endured the EOG, SAT, COGAT and possibly the EPA, a CATSCAN, U2 and the 3 Dog Night.

Recently after talking a stressed teacher down from off a high kitchen countertop and asking her about the EOD (End of Day meal) I decided to offer an equally reliable alternative to the EOG.

So I sat down with three bags of pork rinds and a diet cola and developed an exam to replace all the others. This should allow me to sell a five pound study guide, hit the talk circuit and make a boat load of cash. I call it the Standard Annual Information Test for Youth or SANITY.

Here are a few sample questions:

1.Which of the following is true about the American Civil War?
a.Rhett Butler was bipolar
b.You can say what you want, but they wore great hats!
c.The Ken Burns PBS special was better
d.For the first time the word “Duck!” was not used to describe water fowl

2.What is meant by the phrase “She broke my heart”?
a.The surgeon was an angry woman
b.There will be no EOD today
c.The woman knows how to use a baseball bat
d.Menopause can be a bear

3.Edgar Allen Poe wrote stories pertaining to the darker side of human emotion. Historians now believe that he:
a.Scarfed down tons of anti-depressants
b.Wrote “The Raven” while simultaneously inventing the game “99 Bottles of beer on the wall”
c.Egged the house of his friend Usher
d.Invented Halloween

4.The equation 2 (x+y) = 2x + 2y is indicative of:
a.Stuff
b.What-- I’m a calculator now?
c.I was never very good with angles
d.You should never mix numbers and letters—you don’t know if you should read or do math

5.350 x 570 x 800 = 800 x 570 x a. “a” has a value of:
a.Don’t know but it was a lot more in ‘05
b.Yea, like I’m Einstein
c.I always hated geometry
d.Soooo—you read this or just do the math?

6.What was the “The Great Depression”?
a.The pothole that was recently fixed at the Crossroads Shopping Center
b.Louisiana after hurricane Katrina
c.President Obama’s latest speech
d.That Tuesday your dog died, the IRS called, your momma got ran over by a train and you opened the medicine cabinet and found you were out of Lexapro

So contact your state school officials and suggest they try SANITY. I’m sure they’ll be delighted.

My Mother is an Iceberg

Recently one Saturday morning I went out the front door to pick up the morning newspaper and noticed someone had left us a bag of apples. Now you can’t let a bag of apples go to waste so I figured I’d do a little cooking. I checked my favorite cook book, an old Betty Crocker 1st edition with the spine coming apart and settled on deep dish apple pie.

This is like anything else someone brings you such as a box of oranges at Christmas. You stare at it for awhile and think of decent ways to get rid of it. Last December I put half a box of oranges in the refrigerator and the other half I scattered out back. Dozens of gentle birds descended into my yard----and then began to fight. It turned into a bird Armageddon.

So I’m in the kitchen wearing my grilling apron that has a picture on it of Mickey Mouse holding a spatula. It was a gift to me from my sons bought long ago on a Disney vacation. I finished making my pie crust (yep, I make my own), filled the pan and placed the pie in the oven.

Out of three siblings I was the only one that hatched wanting to cook. As a boy I loved to hunt and brought home rabbits and squirrels. Mother taught me how to fry meat and later to make biscuits and stews. She nourished my love for cooking.

Suddenly I missed my mother like crazy.

So I grabbed the phone and called and got her usual “Hi, how are you!?” and “What a pleasant surprise!” and “Doctors don’t know everything. Keep putting baking soda on it.” I listened to her tell me about the weather (it’s not normal) and the list of all she was cooking for the church’s Homecoming meal. I laughed and quoted scripture about gluttony and lascivious living and told her I could picture her dancing around a golden calf and waving a stick of butter in the air. She sighed and said that she’d always regretted not spanking me more.

Then without skipping a beat she went on about people who had recently died. She named a lady I was not familiar with. Who?

“Oh, she was sweet. She was an administrator for the City. When I graduated high school she offered me the City Clerk position.”

“But momma, you never went to college. How did you know people in city government? You lived on a farm.”

Well, it seems my little mother had been a “brain” in high school and was offered financial assistance to obtain a college degree. Trouble was she fell in love with my father, it was the late 1940’s and he wanted her to stay home.

Why?

Because.

She told me she had always wanted to study law. Even now at 77 years of age she thinks about that decision. For over an hour she told me about the lost dream of having a professional career.

I never knew that about her.

I smiled and imagined-- Momma Esq., of Baptist, Bible & Hudson. She would have made judges sit up straight and felons eat soap.

It occurred to me that people are like icebergs. We see only a small part and we would swear we’ve seen all there is yet there is so much more unseen below the surface. What a delightful surprise to discover a new dimension of someone you love. Those are the things that make life the wonder God intended it should be. I was tempted to take her a pie—as a retainer fee.

Throw out everything but the basics--politically

Can’t help it-- I shudder when I pick up newspapers. The 2012 presidential race has already begun in our beloved I-Me-Mine republic. I dread the parade of carnival-like characters with their fake smiles pontificating on the obvious while they promise a demanding public whatever they think we want. But that being said-- a round of applause to all the candidates that have stepped into the ring----without them there simply would be no show. The political big top is up and I can already smell popcorn.

It’s a wonderfully designed system that every four years can look the American president in the eye and hand him his hat. I look back on the beginning of this administration when they thought they could get by on image and marketing by dancing with Barbara Streisand, showing the latest dress the First Lady was wearing and flashing confident smiles that produced a five minute round of applause. But like most presidents the more people saw of him the less they liked him and he had to spend even more time on marketing and spin control. Now contenders for the office begin to emerge from the mist.

There is Donald Trump--- yes, apparently it has finally come to that. Newt Gingrich slogs out of the Great Dismal Swamp of Memory and rumor has it that a lady from Alaska who shoots caribou and cooks walrus meatloaf is putting luggage on her dog sled and packing trail mix. There’s a lot going on.

But in my house the race for the presidency is small potatoes; the much needed business of spring house cleaning is occupying our gentle minds. We are decent Christian people but Yea, we have walked through the valley of the shadow of a county dump. We travel narrow foot paths through accumulated debris. We live and walk among piles of old magazines and stacks of books. What we believe is a kitchen countertop is covered by piles of driftage washed up with each monthly tide--the flotsam and jetsam of misspent lives. Another month of this and I’ll become a recluse who spends the day in his ratty bathrobe with the drapes drawn ferreting away paper clips and bread ties and cooking spam on a hotplate in the bathroom. Our ship is sinking. We need to throw some cargo overboard.

I go through stacks of paperbacks that I have no desire to re-read and I throw them out. Then there are CD’s but my ears are not eager to listen and so I declare them garbage. I keep “Alabama’s Greatest Hits” and “Chant” by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo and I keep the CD “Greatest Country Hymns”. The first song, “Life’s Railway to Heaven” summons memories of friends singing hymns around the old piano in my mother’s living room. Later we’d move to the kitchen to eat a meal of fried chicken after saying grace.

I remember college when most of my possessions could be put into three cardboard boxes plus a navy sports coat, five pairs of jeans, Webster’s’ Third Unabridged dictionary and a slide rule. I am not that guy anymore but sometimes when life collects around me I want to pack a few boxes, leave town and start all over again somewhere else.

America is looking for change and so am I. That’s how I feel about this coming election. Clear out all the old stuff and let’s start over again. The basics would be a good place for all of us to begin-- like maybe a nice hymn, a home cooked meal and especially a prayer.