The frog, the soup and the child

This morning I became a hero. I heard my wife scream, the blood curdling sound you hear when the tall vampire raises his black cape to embrace the bare shouldered woman while lowering his fangs to her milky white neck. I rushed downstairs and there was my wife in her old bathrobe, back to the wall, eyes wide with terror staring across the room and pointing to the monster. I dashed in to see a bloodthirsty undead small green frog sitting on the carpet and saved my family from an eternity of walking the earth at night.

And now I am making chicken soup which my wife says is better than any restaurant could make. She says it’s the caviar of soups. Such is the life of a gentle hero. I quietly chop onions, carrots and celery toss them in a pan with butter then transfer them to a pot of chicken stock with meat from a rotisserie chicken. My wife and our boxer Roxy are entertaining Juliette, one of our grandchildren whom we are babysitting.

Juliette is over a year old, with red curly hair and a smile that melts your heart. She lives in the moment the way the poems tell us to do, gathering rosebuds which for Juliette means putting her hands in the dog’s water bowl. What you and I would feel if we won the state lottery is what Juliette feels each and every morning her bedroom curtains are opened to a new day. The boxer turns and licks Juliette’s face who laughs with such gusto you pause from stirring the soup just to enjoy the sound.

Mmmm, I don’t say that my soup is the greatest in the world but of all the frog-catchers in our city I think mine is as good as any of them. The secret is to carefully sweat the vegetables in butter then quickly put them in boiling chicken stock with dark and white meat, turn to simmer and go read a good book.

I use to enjoy playing golf but golf made me speak in tongues and tennis can be perilous for a man my age. You stretch to stop a fast serve and a groin muscle snaps and for three months you walk around like Charlie Chaplin in the old jerky black and white movies. Cooking is now my sport. It’s indoors, gives you a feeling of accomplishment and then you sit down and consume food.

Last night Juliette awoke at 3:23 a.m. and decided no one in the house should sleep so all of us played with a toy rabbit that squeaks when you squeeze it’s bottom--- a masochistically inspired toy indeed. Morning found my wife and I sitting on the couch, dazed and hollowed eyed like people emerging from a hostage situation, our minds were blank and we could only say the word “coffee”. My wife went downstairs to the kitchen and that’s when she discovered the frog.

The frog sat staring straight ahead and I grabbed it from behind with a paper towel then carried it outside for release. I have a friend who would have used his bare hands but he played football in high school and I played the clarinet. The frog hopped away looking for a voluptuous village maiden with a low cut dress and I went back inside.

Later over a bowl of soup my wife thanked me for removing the Undead. I shrugged. A hero’s job is to serve. Then she said “Your Italian bread is to die for. I wish you’d make that tonight.” And so I will.

Her boots are the first to hit the ground

My wife is a teacher, an elementary grade educator; her boots are the first to hit the ground in America’s offensive to educate its young.

She arises at 5:30 each morning and is out the door and ready to receive busloads of second grade kids by 7:00. Many of these little bodies have not been fed, washed or have clean clothes. They stumble bleary eyed into class, small bundles of life----some have already known abuse and some have homes that have the ambience of a late night bar during a brawl. Little angels bound to the ground.

She returns home and tells me about the 40 pound kid that dumped a load in his pants, the parent that could not be reached at any phone number on file, the timid student teacher ( you must stare the children down or all 30 will bolt for the bathroom like gazelles), the kid that dropped Mr. Snowball the hamster ---cage and all-- in the floor during quiet time and the diva parent who expects the school system to raise her child and demands a conference of which the whining mother never shows up though teacher and principal waited a half hour past the appointed time. And I pour my wife a stiff diet coke on ice that she tosses down her throat, places the glass down on the kitchen counter and says “Hit me again.”

Public teaching is a divine calling and comes with much frustration. Sometimes she grits her teeth. The heat in the building did not work, she got a new kid that does not speak English and neither does the parents and she endures the ill-designed rating of schools that depend on a teacher’s performance judged by the whim of a child. Yet the teacher in her pushes on. Her complaints about pay are good natured; she loves her job, is paid a fraction of what she is worth yet maintains a high level of professionalism.

Professionalism in education is a world apart from mine: mine requires no more than a computer key board, a cocky attitude, a bag of pork skins and interesting underwear.

Three thoughts to all beleaguered teachers:
1.Remember, you are a professional. You are not a paper-pusher at Amalgamated Brooms. Before politicians began telling your profession how to teach, your predecessors built the framework for the world’s greatest country—America. Stand tall.

2.Hang out with other teachers. Never chum around with principals or administrators. They have their own agendas and crosses to bear. You can be nice but not fawning or subservient. Don’t gravitate there, don’t orbit.

3.Do not accept ugly remarks or rude behavior from parents passively. Stand up and leave the room or simply hang up on them if it’s a phone conversation. The problem in education is not lack of money, politicians (What!?) or global warming—its bad parents. Spoiled lazy parents are the enemy of education and when school boards find a legal way to treat them as such these over indulged narcissists will be put in their place and the respect for your profession will return.

Maybe in a hundred years from now teachers will be treated like a holy priestly order akin to the Illuminati or the Order of Melchizedek but in the mean time teachers will arise each day, wipe little noses, endure a myriad of naïve policies yet somehow pour knowledge into an impressionable little mind. And one teacher will come home, gulp down a diet coke on ice and say to her husband “They dropped Mr. Snowball today---cage and all.”

The class of 1971 has my heart--- and my stomach

In 1769 Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot a Frenchman, took off his beret long enough to build the first steam powered car and everybody thought it was totally tres bon until the early 1900’s when Standard Oil of Ohio told everybody that gasoline was better. So Henry Ford said, “No kidding?” and built thousands of gasoline powered cars which created all over America the need for paved roads-- one of which I followed to the Brook Valley Country Club in Greenville, NC. My Forty-year old high school class reunion had begun.

You go to high school reunions not to see old friends as much as to see what our teenage selves became as reflected back in the eyes of those that knew us when. So you can imagine my shock when I entered the room and noticed our teenage selves looked a lot like the teachers we use to have ( Note: I for one always thought we had very nice looking teachers).

The first act of meeting an old classmate can be touching as you go for a warm handshake and realize your stomachs are almost touching too. Your eyes are constantly glancing at name tags even though everybody tells each other that they’ve hardly changed a bit. To be fair some truly had not changed much at all which I found to be as surprising as it was irritating. I tried to hold in my stomach.

The mood of the room was joyous as many could now afford a better grade of alcohol. The bar was doing a brisk business as “Joy to the World” (the one by Three Dog Night) blared out in a room that was a casserole of different conversations and sounds. There was the occasional shrill laughter as a group of women reacted to something said and you heard the hearty slap of a hand on the back of someone who recognized an old friend and a new conversation began.

In 1971 the barn doors swung open, they slapped our haunches with a diploma and we galloped off into the world with our manes flowing and our heads held high. Hawaii Five-O and the Mary Tyler Moore shows were favorites and the first super bowl to be played on artificial turf occurred with the Baltimore Colts defeating the Dallas Cowboys. John Denver sang to us about country roads and the Temptations decided love was just their imagination running away with them. I noticed a woman whom I carried a big torch for in those days had changed little and could pass for a mid--thirty while a former athlete walked with bad knees carrying about 200 additional pounds. I pulled my stomach in tighter.

We showed each other pictures of our kids and grandkids and the photos had to be held very still--- under good light---at arm’s length. Some laughed about it. I was getting dizzy. I really needed to breathe.

You learn that someone lost a child to a terrible accident, someone had beaten cancer three times, some were happily divorced while others had the same spouse they started with decades ago. The mood became relaxed, the lights were dimmed (slightly so we wouldn’t fall) and the dancing began. My stomach resumed it’s natural shape and for a few hours the music carried us back to football games, proms, first kisses and to each other.

They say the young today have everything---the chance of long health and amazing technology. But to never have danced to the Temptations song “My Girl” with someone you love is to miss a wonderful thing. The young---I almost feel sorry for them.

Welcome to Statesville

Welcome to Statesville North Carolina.

We’re a modest little city of 26,000 friends and neighbors located north of the quasi-nation city of Charlotte, which as you may have heard, is a cultural Mecca and one of the greatest banking centers in the free world. Statesville is not.

Statesville was originally to be named the First City, it being the most promising city of growth in the 1700’s for the young state of North Carolina. But being First isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and we are people that do not trust fame nor seek opulence. We like our feet planted in churches, farms and solid businesses not the quicksand of average accruals and corporate mergers. Our ancestors, stoic unassuming people, worried about getting the big head so they decided to let others take the glamorous headliner names like Raleigh or Charlotte and thus decided upon the name “Statesville”. “Statesville” implies we are the ESSENCE of North Carolina but we’re humble about it.

Statesville is an island located in a gentle rolling sea of dairy farms, corn and soy beans. Most people here get their deer every season, the First Pharmacy has hot dogs that even your momma can’t make and churches end their worship service at exactly 12:00 so you don’t have to worry about the pot roast being overdone. We’re caring like that.

Charlotte consumes gallons of vinaigrette dressings and tons of smoked salmon. Statesville is a city where fish is fried (as our Lord intended they be) and a bottle of Kraft French Dressing is good enough for anybody so get over yourself. Oh sure, we have restaurants that can compete with any plate of pâté or crème de menthe cake you would want but to go into detail would be bragging which is unseemly. We’re too modest for that.

We are a hard working gentle city straddling the intersection of two major interstate highways which gives easy access to businesses and beckons families seeking a safe harbor with a need to tie to the docks of good neighborhoods. If you come here looking for a big city life of traffic congestion, loud race car tracks and sushi bars on every corner you’re going to be disappointed.

Someone once said that “life is a show” and our show is better enjoyed one day at a time among friendly people, good neighbors and blue berry scones.

We don’t do a New York show with David Letterman or Jimmy Fallon. Our show does not have:
1. A pre-show guy in baggy pants and suspenders running around the audience for 10 minutes telling goofy jokes to get you all pumped to scream and yell
2. Actresses with low-cut dresses pushing their latest movie or sobbing about the difficulty of trusting people
3. Elephants

Our show of life isn’t the worst you’ll ever see but it’s the best experience you’ll ever have.

Later in the show we have street festivals and outdoor parties with the downtown area closed off for your convenience---and it’s free, Honey Cakes. You have a chance to eat boiled peanuts, drink, get rowdy, sing country or beach music and win valuable prizes for the Most Beautiful Baby, Hog Calling, Corn Leaf Identification, and my personal favorite the Mr. Marvelous contest.

If you’re sick we’ll bring you a hot dish. It’s not about us but you--- as long as you’re with us.

You may now have figured out that we can be passive-aggressive, steadfast but tempered, proud yet truthful but most of all we’re a friendly humble community and we’re so glad you came.

Welcome, you lucky person you!