A Little More Shelf Esteem

Zboysdad
When I finally decide I can’t attend one more faculty meeting or listen to one more my-dog-ate-my-homework-on-the-way-to-my-grandmother’s-funeral-just-before-our-printer-ran-out-of-ink-and-my-mother-gave-birth-to-aliens-excuse, I think I’ll go into the trophy business.

It used to be that trophies were like academy awards and good genes—not everybody got them. But now, kids get trophies just for having parents literate enough to fill out the necessary registration forms and songs like “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” win academy awards.

On a shelf in my house, gathering dust along with all the books, sundry knick-knacks, happy meal toys, and other things of value, sits the one, individual, not-just-for-filling-out-a-registration-trophy that I had ever won. Sure I had a slew of medals and certificates for academic trivialities along the way, but I had no stomped-your-ass-now-you-can-go-home-like-the-loser-you-are-to-suck-on-a-Life-Saver-this-is-sports trophy.

As a member of the men’s volleyball team in college, I had won three conference championships and numerous tournaments, all of which came with team trophies roughly the size of a healthy second grader, but not until I entered a city league volleyball tournament where members of our college team split up to play on multiple teams, did I finally get my own stomp-your-ass-sports trophy, my own little golden statue to love and display prominently in my home or office.

And there that trophy has sat for 19 years, the lone and last Mohican of my athletic prowess—until this weekend.

Tennis used to be just a hobby for me, something I watched on television, played more often than was good for my really-needs-a-good-cleaning-cluttered garage, and something I could do a little better than the average couch potato who doesn’t know deuce from Doritos. But now, tennis is my job. As the assistant tennis coach at the school where I teach, I make up for an anorexic tennis résumé with private lessons from two different full-athletic-scholarship college phenoms, by reading every page of every tennis magazine that comes to my mailbox, and by applying everything I have ever learned about conditioning and competition from three years of conference championships and one trip to the Final Four in volleyball to tennis.

And because those who teach can also do, I found myself on a Sunday afternoon in the kind of heat that melts brain cells and makes even the strongest of sunscreens cry for its momma, on court twelve playing in the finals of Alamo City Adult Open Tennis Tournament. Of course it was the consolation finals of the old-and-not-very-talented division, but it was still the finals. And after sweating through two changes of shirts and surviving an early and late second set surge from my opponent, I walked off the court, reported my scores to the tournament desk, and received my second stomped-your-ass-now-go-home-like-the-loser-you-are trophy.

This year when the high school tennis season begins, I’ll walk onto the courts with a little more confidence and a tennis trophy of my own to love and display prominently in my home or office.

A Six Inch on Wheat with a Side of Cosmic Apron Strings

Zboysdad

Aside from the occasional sleepover and trip to Grandma’s, our boys have led fairly close-to-home and sheltered lives. That all changes this weekend.

On Friday, every Animal Planet, laws-of-nature, mother-bear instinct woven into the fabric of my wife’s genetic tapestry will converge against the push-them-out-of-the-nest pragmatism that also exists in nature to create a schism in the prehensile, cosmic Pangaea that is parenthood because Zachary, first-born fruit of our loins, leaves on his first no parent, non-family, out-of-town-trip-with-people-not-related-to-us excursion. I, of course, have other concerns that have nothing to do with nest occupancy.

Back when I was growing up, in the days when the world was right, one could not officially become part of the church youth group until turning thirteen, or at least making it to the seventh grade. But now with the dissolving of junior highs into middle schools, my harmonic days of Aquarius have become wholly usurped and sullied by a generation that considers Dakota Fanning a star (C’mon, Matt Lauer. What pre-teen girl can’t scream at the top of her lungs on cure?).

Now, at twelve-years old and in the sixth grade, my oldest son Zachary will travel to Waco, Texas on a chartered bus to sing with our church youth group at Baylor University. Zachary, along with two other twelve-year olds and the senior citizen of the group, a thirteen-year old, will share a hotel room and hours alone behind locked doors, free from adult supervision to revel in the joys and smells of machismo. To the hotel maid who clocks in at the Fairfield Inn on Saturday morning, I offer profound apologies and swear by all that is pure to me, Diet Coke and Project Runway, that as parents of these children, we did all we could to instill some modicum of decorum in them—or at least the concept of occasional flushing.

And as the day of fly-the-coop reckoning approaches, and my wife weeps for lost days of Saturday morning snuggles in footie pjs soon replaced by dates with spiral-curled harlots doped up on Ortho Nuveau, I trust that the lessons I’ve imparted along the way, multiple, strung-together-by-hyphens words are better than brevity, Corn Nuts and Pepsi are the curse and urine of Satan respectively, and stupid people should all be cloistered into communities like lepers, will hang on the tablets of his heart forever, I also realize that along the way, some of life’s important lessons, like how to order at Subway, may have slipped our attention.

In his twelve years, Zachary has graduated from Happy Meals to Mighty Kids Meals, mastered the obligatory four-item cross-cuisine kid’s menu (mac & cheese, grilled cheese, chicken strips, or a hamburger—sometimes you’ll see the corn dog pop up on a kid’s meal menu but only at really class places), and conquered the Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet like a Hun off his Ritalin, all the while maintaining his Kate Moss on crack boyish figure, but he’s never experienced the bliss of ordering a sandwich with every condiment concoction and crudités permutation possible, minus all the annoying chopping, spreading, and messy clean-up.

Of course, one practice run through Subway and the knowledge that he can order all the extra pickles he wants and choose cheeses from a panoply of choices, and the second biggest obstacle of this one-step-closer-to-asking-for-the-car-keys-and-his-prodigal son-share-of-the-family-fortune- (my unpublished novel and his mother’s tortilla soup recipe) trip goes into the been-there-got-the-value-meal category.

But more than whether there will be enough adult supervision or if he’ll change his underwear all weekend, I worry about Zachary’s hair. The boy will wash his face, brush his teeth, and bathe with the frequency of an obsessed tabby, but he will walk out of the door in the morning with his hair flying off in more directions than Jet Blue on coupon weekend

This, however, may not be a bad thing. Zachary’s hair hassles make keep him off the Ortho-harlots radars a bit longer, and the chaperones will have no trouble finding him when he goes back for extra cheese and more pickles.


Post trip report: Zachary returned home in one piece and with his hair combed. Chaperone reports state he combed his hair the entire weekend. He came home with a couple of Baylor pencils, a Baylor rubber duckie, and a Baylor track and field t-shirt. He also informed me that on the way back home the group stopped at a mall food court for dinner. Zachary ate at Subway and ordered the usual.

Fruitcake: The Sequel

Restless and anxious, I waited for the Sunday paper to arrive. Peeking through curtains and twisting down the narrow slats of the mini-blinds, I surveyed the tundra in front of me awaiting the delivery of this weekly tome replete with information both trivial and consequential from an intrepid courier sojourning masterfully from subdivision to subdivision braving gate codes and speed bumps to fulfill his duty with precision of an artisan. Actually, I watched in a pair of boxers and a t-shirt while the coffee brewed hoping the paper would land close enough to front door that not everyone on the block would see my faded periwinkle boxers festooned with ornately decorated Easter eggs nine months removed from the holiday.

When the paper finally arrived, I sprang out the front door like a man who had already had too much coffee, oblivious to eggs on my drawers and the eggs on the stove, snatched up the paper and flew into the kitchen with my periodical prize and rifled through the pages, a man in search of his grail.

Usually, I check the sports pages first to see how little Notre Dame coverage will appear, or grab a quick chuckle from the conservative fascists whose loquacious ballyhoos appear daily as letters to the editor, or flip through the circulars to find out who has the best price on Diet Coke for the week, but today, I had other treasures in mind.

Strewn across the kitchen table like a high school biology frog dissection gone horribly wrong, sections of the newspaper lay cast aside until I found them, those glossy Eves of enticement that beckon us to sample of their fruits and save money while doing so—the coupons. Frugality, however, had nothing to do with my quest. Saving thirty-five cents on furniture polish or saving a dollar when I purchase two of my favorite sugar-crusted cereals lacked the requisite pulchritude to lure my concerted gaze. Instead, the glossy-half-page Siren summoning my latent licentiousness came from the Collin Street Bakery in Corsicana, Texas and features the most decadent of holiday indulgences: The Fruitcake.

Each year when the ads begin to appear in the coupon section of the Sunday paper, I lust over the scrumptious offering of compacted cake, candied fruit, and nuts like a 14 year-old who finds his older brother’s hidden stash of nudie magazines. And like the paved-with-good-intentions-person I am, I set the high-gloss enticement aside fully pledging to officially order my Collin Street Bakery fruitcake and thus fulfill my destiny and take hold of this confectioned grail. Except, I never do.

So, let the world scoff at the fruitcake. Let the generic of mind regurgitate the staid holiday cliché of the regifted, rotating fruitcake because I know that others like me exist. Somewhere some other boxer-clad pariah salivates from an urbane palette at the thought of slicing into the cornucopia of color and texture that is the fruitcake. Someday we’ll form a support group but for now, I’ll just let the world think of me as a fruitcake.

By the way, I just put my order in to the Collin Street Bakery. Now I’ll spend my vacation peeking through curtains and twisting down the narrow slats of the mini-blinds looking for the UPS guy and my Christmas gift to myself. I hope he doesn’t mind that I answer the door in my boxers with a knife. He’ll probably just think I’m some kind of fruitcake.

Of Benchmarks, Bikes, and Little Nike Ankle Socks

Today, my students begin their second day of taking a TAKS ELA benchmark test. And with a new school-day schedule of 50 minute classes, it will likely take them the majority of the week to finish. Naturally, I lament the instruction time lost to additionally mandated testing; however, with all that has happened in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, weathering a few days of bubbling, fretting, and exaggerated sighing by my students over a test they feel nothing but contempt for seems not only possible, but cathartic.

With all the uncertainty of displacement, gas prices, and the future of places once called home, the structure and familiarity of a benchmark test is a welcomed reminder of all we have to be thankful for.

After seven years of having my own classroom, I transferred schools this past year and now float into five different classrooms throughout the day. Nothing of me exists before or after I leave the rooms I float into. No more posters reflecting my idiosyncratic likes. No more stuffed cows adorning the tops of computers, and no more sense of ownership as I trudge from room to room. My teaching has been reduced to that of interloper. I am that generic “Occupant” squatting until the true tenant returns. But today as I push my cart, I’m mindful of the fact that I still have a job to go to every day and that everything in my world is just as it was on the day Hurricane Katrina sent the worlds of so many others into a maelstrom of confusion and loss. I may have lost a room of my own, but my place remains firmly entrenched.

Along with losing a classroom space to call home, I’ve also lost a commute beset with traffic and caffeine-crazed drivers and now ride my bike to school three to four times a week with my son. Of course riding my bike to school, along with my new schedule and work assignment as assistant tennis coach, means I have to lug multiple changes of clothing with me when I ride to school. There are the professional dress clothes I carry with me that, I have to re-iron once I get to the coach’s locker room to shower and begin my day. There are also the tennis clothes that I change into after teaching three classes in the morning before sprinting off to my athletic period smack in the middle of the day. Then of course there is the three-minute shower after the athletic period before changing back into my professional dress clothes to teach two more classes. The two classes are, of course, followed by after school practice, which requires yet another change of clothing (putting on clothes not yet dry from the previous workout is a practice I highly recommend avoiding). And then there is the ride home with tennis bag strapped on back loaded with the sweat laden cast-offs of previous days fermenting with micro-organisms that beg for washing and a dousing of Febreeze.

But today, as I cinch my Superman tie around my neck after the athletic period, I’ll remember that I have too many clothes in my closet. I’ll remember that I have enough little Nike ankle socks to wear double pairs to practice everyday and not have to do laundry until the weekend. And most importantly, I’ll remember that I get to ride bikes to school with my son and that the only thing that separates us is a bit of pavement and a couple of hours during the school day.

Regardless of benchmarks, state-mandated tests, or after-school duty out in a parking lot in sweltering Texas heat, we are blessed. This too I will remember when the time comes to grade all those benchmark tests.

Personal Foul: Deondre's Mom

Deondre’s mom wouldn’t shut up.

Standing behind me for an entire Sunday afternoon YMCA flag football game, she bellowed an incessant stream of sideline commentary.

“Deondre, what you doing?”
“Deondre, pay attention to the game.”
“Deondre, support yo team.”
“Deondre, why you talkin’ all the time?”

At that comment, I wanted to hand Deondre’s mom a mirror, but I sat there the stoic observer trying to watch the game and ignore her at the same time.
Maybe coaching high school tennis has mellowed me. Tennis coaches don’t bark out verbiage during matches. Tennis coaches don’t, or rather can’t, offer instructions or admonitions in the middle of a point, let alone a game. Instead, we have to wait until the game ends and quietly call our player over to chat briefly before the next game begins. Deondre’s mom could not survive a tennis match. Hooping and hollering doesn’t exist in tennis. Tennis parents cheer politely for winners and occasionally, but not too loudly, call out, “Nice shot.”

But as Deondre, and everyone on the sidelines, knows, football, even football sans pads, helmets, and an entourage of coaches, and tennis look nothing alike.

Somewhere along the way of ballyhooing football as a barbaric exercise of Neanderthal proportions, our ten-year old son Zane expressed and interest in the pig-skin purveyor of contusions, concussions, and cracked ribs. So, after multiple viewings of Rudy, we opted for the everybody-plays-we’re-all-about-sportsmanship flag-football league of the YMCA.

And there I sat in my multi-purpose folding canvass chair baking and basking in the hundred-degree plus temperature of a typical October day in San Antonio listening to Deondre’s mom, dressed completely in solid black, badger him from across the field and introducing myself to the nomenclature of flag football.

Contrary to popular stereotype, growing up in Texas did not inure me to the intricacies of football, nor did I ride a horse to school. And while I faithfully watch the Irish of Notre Dame stride onto the field each week and have seen Touchdown Jesus with my own eyes, football has always been little more than an excuse for snuggling under a blanket while cradling a cup of hot chocolate.

And while I couldn’t understand the need for smearing streaks of black grease under one’s eyes, plenty of kids were steak-free and managed to survive without lasting damage to their corneas, I did understand the nuances that had nothing to do with football and everything to do with sports. Eleven kids lined up on the field for each team, but, as always seems to be the case, only about three kids on each team had any real hope of being in the game. Though the other eight ran about in a purposeful fashion, there was more chance of Deondre’s mom shutting up than them serving any real purpose in the game. And as always, there was a coach’s son on each team, and as always, when it came time to give the kids on the field a chance to rest and the kids on the bench a chance to play, the coach’s son somehow always manages to stay in the game. Score another victory for nepotism.

Next weekend, if there’s not a tennis match to coach, I’ll come back for another game. Maybe the weather will show a little mercy, and maybe Deondre’s team will play way before or after Zane’s team, but in every game, someone wins and someone loses. Today Deondre’s team won by two touchdowns, and losing, no matter the sport, feels exactly the same.

Hair Today and Tomorrow Too

Forty years ago, I came to Earth in the middle of haircut, and I haven’t stopped thinking about my own hair since.

Ages before she became the tech-savvy, big business professional she recently retired from being, my mother, in one of those get-a-skill-you-can-fall-back-on-moves that preceded the days of hanging out in graduate school as a professional student until opportunity not only knocked but kicked the door in, went to beauty school and learned to, in the words of Steel Magnolias’s Truvy, “bang some hair.”

Regularly, and usually on Saturdays, women would drop by the house to have their hair and their wigs coiffed, poofed, permed, clipped, colored, and cut into beehive masterpieces that we usually saw buzzing the halls of church on Sunday. And as I’ve been told, this is where the story of me began.

Nine months pregnant and standing on her feet in the middle of boofing up some hallelujah hairdo, my mother realized that labor waits for no job, although this time it did because she insisted on finishing the do, and that on April 29 her dream of naming a child after Little House on the Prairie star Michael Landon, although my father swears it’s strictly biblical and I’m named after the archangel who waged battle with Satan himself, would come true. Forty-five minutes after dousing a do with a parting shot of Aqua Net hairspray, my mother met the best head of hair she’d ever work on again. Yes, I have three brothers, but their hair doesn’t hold a comb to mine.

Over the years, my hair has changed and chopped with the times. It has been long, short, feathered, parted to the right, left, and up the middle. It has been permed, shaved, chili bowled, and caked with enough gel, mousse, pomade, and hair glue to form a calcified veneer around my scalp. And like no product of high school and college in the ‘80s could escape, I too, even up until 1990, sported the mullet. Of course on me, with my hair, it looked good.

But with the passing of time and the expanding of waists, mine still the smallest of all my brothers, my hair has undergone yet another transformation—it’s turning gray. Slowly over the last two years tiny, errant colorless invaders have crept in and planted roots in my head. Initially I could brush back the assault with a lean toward the mirror and a blunt pair of tweezers but like Baptists to a potluck, more and more kept coming. Eventually, matters called for permanent help, the kind that comes in bottle labeled cocoa bean #54.

Perhaps the shellac surrounding my scalp protected me from the Love Canal side effects of hair dye, but reason returned and vanity subsided—slightly. In the two months before my fortieth birthday, I have refused to dye my hair anymore, but I have also refused to get a hair cut because once shorn, the gray that congregates mostly in the space above my ears and hides under a blanket of still-brown hair screams for attention like a breastfed triplet. Never the less, the barber beckoned, actually it was the mid-level cosmetology school graduate at the Great Clips Salon around the corner from home, but the extra time spent jostling hair in the morning won out, and I relented to a cut.

From the moment I stepped out of the chair, nettles of white jutted off the sides of my head like spikes on a mace decrying the winnowing of my youth. Once home a few stares into the bathroom mirror almost convinced me to Easter egg my head again, but then the effulgence of twelve 60-watt vanity bulbs shining like God from a flaming shrub blinded me into epiphany: Regardless of color, my hair always looks damn good.

Renewed by the winsome senescence of my hair, I am embracing forty as my Byzantine assault on aging. I will not go gently into that old age but instead will rage against the passing of time with a treadmill, hair gel, and possibly smaller wattage bulbs in the bathroom.

Cruise Control Off

Just a few weeks before turning 40, I went into my garage and pulled from a shelf I put up years before I knew the mystical powers of a level a box of one-of-these-days-we’ll-put-these-into-an-album photos and took a schlep down memory lane. On this trip, I wound up in Room 306 of Anderson Hall at Hardin-Simmons University where I lived with Jimmy Pogue during the spring semester of my freshman year. And there in a photo of my side of the room, on a chocolate-brown colored cork board that hung on the wall adjacent to the bed, tacked up next to a Jose Cuervo Gold beach volleyball poster of Karch Kiraly and ticket stubs from the Air Supply concert at Abilene Christian University hung a glossy-coated-full-color-worth-a-thousand-words image of my late-high school, early-college obsession: Brooke Shields.

Almost 20 years have passed since I graduated from college and the temporal trivialities of baby adulthood have gone the way of magical metabolism and dogmatic decisions, but, even today, Brooke Shields remains, to me, an iconoclastic manifestation of classic beauty and a harmless reminder of the winsome ways of college when my biggest concern centered around the number of meals left on my weekly meal plan by the weekend, so when Tom Cruise came out on national television criticizing Brooke Shields for admitting to and advocating the use of medically prescribed anti-depressants for postpartum depression, I circled the mini-vans of my multi-kid reality and mounted my support for a woman courageous enough to admit that the blessed event of childbirth had left her “completely overwhelmed” and “[not] at all joyful.”

But more than defending an icon-school-boy-crush of my youth, defending Brooke Shields meant defending my own family. Tom Cruise’s bellicose tirade against psychiatry as a pseudo-science and his caterwauling that kids on attention-deficit medications are akin to junkies on heroin, made me sorry that I enjoyed Top Gun as much as I did and made me really regret the hours of my life wasted on Magnolia and Vanilla Sky.

As parents, my wife and I belittled the issue of ADD medications for children. We emphatically rested in the camp that chalked up Ritalin and its cohorts as the last vestiges of lazy parents and teachers more interested in pragmatism than peculiars. Then, our oldest son started having trouble in school. Months of debate, discussion, consultation, and hand-wringing over a diagnosis of dyslexia, dysgraphia, and attention-deficit disorder all converged with one question from our pediatrician, “Is his learning being affected?” We started medications that week. Teachers noted the change immediately, and we didn’t. All our concerns about mood shifts, and fluctuations in personality, temperament, and weight never happened, and we now had a child who could finish a school day feeling good about himself and having learned the lessons of the day. When we faced the same issues with our second child, we followed the arduous process and made a decision that might not be right for someone else’s family but fit the needs of our child.

In another of Tom Cruise’s interviews of histrionic espousals, he bellowed that it’s easier to get addicts off of heroin than it is to wean children off psychotropic drugs like Ritalin. But life in the real world isn’t Hollywood and preying on the fears of well-intentioned parents does the same disservice to them that Brooke Shields said Cruise did to mothers everywhere when he suggested she handle her depression with vitamins and exercise. Parents already have bullies, puberty, team practices, braces, and the rising cost of milk and college tuition along with heaping doses of violent video games to contend with without the ravings of omniscient celebrities.

On May 26 this year, our boys finished another year of school and took their last medically-prescribed ADD pill until August. On May 27 they spent their first day at our neighborhood pool unfazed by their cold-turkey withdrawal. Tom Cruise is not a doctor; perhaps he should stop playing one on TV.