And the award goes to....

A big part of being a parent is trudging to endless events to watch your kids play sports or lead cheers or sing songs or do other assorted cute things.

The events, I generally don’t mind. But almost every activity has an accompanying year-end awards ceremony or banquet, and those can be pure torture.

For one thing, at a ball game, I can concentrate on watching my son play, or my daughter cheer, and ignore everybody else. But at these banquets and ceremonies, I have to watch this parade of kids I don’t care about going to receive awards as I sit there and clap listlessly for three hours and hope none of the other parents make eye contact and want to talk to me.

Just last week, there was a year-end awards ceremony at my kids’ high school, and it was every bit of the thrill-fest I thought it would be. I haven’t had that much fun since my last MRI.

In the “everybody’s a winner” climate that exists today in schools, they seem to be determined to see that every student gets some sort of award. They honor the student with the highest grade-point average in every subject – and I do mean every subject. My favorite was the kid who won the weightlifting award. That’s going to look good on a college resume.

They also gave out “perfect attendance” awards. I like to point out to my kids that I had perfect attendance in school from kindergarten through the 11th grade. Not because I was some nerd who loved school, but because I knew if I had any illness this side of the Ebola virus, my mother was going to make me go to school.

It wasn’t because she was mean, but there was really nothing else she could do with me when I was sick. She couldn’t miss work, and my dad was at work, and nobody had heard of “day care” in those days. So she’d slap some Vick’s Vapor Rub on my chest, tell me to suck it up and shoo me toward the school bus. So I never considered perfect attendance an accomplishment – it was a mandate.

I am, of course, proud of my kids, and they both were honored for having an A average throughout the school year, which seems impossible since they do homework or study about as often as Haley’s Comet passes the Earth. But I may just have to find a reason to be out of town when next year’s awards banquet comes around. If that makes me a bad parent, I’ll live with the fallout.

Since my kids are also involved in athletics, there are “sports banquets” to attend. This year they combined the football and cheerleading banquets into one, which meant it lasted longer than the Yalta Conference. And just this week I attended a baseball banquet, which wasn’t that bad, except that the food would have been disallowed by the Geneva Convention, and people my age aren’t meant to sit for two hours at a school cafeteria table. Those seats were designed for smaller butts than mine.

They like to thank people a lot at sports banquets. Anybody who makes any minor contribution to the team or the program gets a plaque. This is preceded by a speech that usually goes something like, “There’s a special person here who I want to thank. She was responsible for bringing the napkins for the concession stand, and let me tell you, without her, I don’t know what we would have done. Every game I could count on her being there with the napkins, without me even having to ask her. We played a lot of games, so that’s a lot of napkins, and people don’t realize how much effort that takes.”

This goes on for about 5 more minutes, and then they bring up the person who brought the ketchup, and two hours later you begin praying for the Ebola virus to strike you, at last.

In the end, I suppose it’s worth it. My son was named his team’s Most Valuable Player and was given a large wooden plaque, which he wanted to put on the front of the refrigerator. Most valuable, but perhaps not most clear-thinking.

I reckon there’ll come a day soon when I’ll miss going to these sorts of events, but right now I can’t picture it. I’m just glad summer is here and eight weeks of blissful nothing-filled evenings await me.

Question authority

There’s nothing worse than dealing with somebody who has just a little bit of authority.

You know what I mean – parking lot attendants, store security guards, school secretaries, etc. You give these people a little bit of authority, and they go on a power trip that would make Stalin seem meek.

If you’ve ever worked in an office environment, you know what I’m talking about. These secretaries – now often known as administrative professionals – can make your life easier if they’re competent, but can make you miserable if they’re incompetent. I’m stuck with the latter.

I turned in an expense report the other day from a trip. She brings my Holiday Inn invoice over and says, “What were the restaurant charges for?”

I said, “Food.”

She said, “Well, was it breakfast, lunch, dinner?”

I said, “Yes.”

I mean, what else could you buy at a hotel restaurant? Food is the only option. Hopefully the little account-Nazi got it all figured out without any further elaboration from me.

I admit, I do sort of bristle when I’m questioned by certain people, and perhaps I don’t handle things as diplomatically as possible. I generally hold my tongue when I’m dealing with a real policeman, except for the one time I got arrested, and we don’t want to talk about that right now, do we?

I remember once, when I was a younger man, and I went out with my friend Sam and a couple of others to celebrate Sam’s upcoming nuptials. Well, it was late in the evening, and we were at a hotel, and a member of our party decided he wanted to go out and visit a house of entertainment, so he called a cab. But the poor guy was really tired from all the bobbing for apples and hide-and-seek and Bible studying we had done at the bachelor party, so he fell asleep before the cabbie got there.

The cabbie was not happy when he arrived and learned there was not to be a passenger, so he demanded we pay him for his inconvenience. We said no. So he showed up later at our door with an officer of the law, who demanded to know what was going on. This guy was in uniform, and acting really official as he tried to ascertain the facts of the matter.

Then I noticed my friend Sam staring at the officer intently, and he asked him, “Excuse me, are you a real police officer?” The guy sort of bowed up and said, “I’m a Cobb County Park Ranger. You got a problem with that?” No, we allowed, we didn’t have a problem with that, but since we weren’t illegally using a picnic table or shooting turkeys out of season, we figured we were out of his jurisdiction, and we went back inside the hotel room and shut the door and had a good laugh.

The good times ended a few minutes later when another knock came on the door. This time we were greeted by the jilted cabbie, the hotel manager, Ranger Smith and one annoyed-looking Marietta policeman, who worked out a compromise: we gave the cabbie $5, and we didn’t get arrested.

I believe the popular phrase in the ’60s was “Question Authority”, which is fine, unless that authority has the power to arrest you or kick you out of their house (in case my kids are reading this). In that case, just keep it to yourself.

See no evil, hear no evil

I went and met three of my old friends from high school the other night. We basically just sat around and talked for hours and behaved impeccably, in large part because we’re all too old now to misbehave without pulling a muscle.

The next day my wife asked me a number of questions about my friends – you know, is this one still married, is that one dating anybody, is this one going to have any more kids, where does that one work now, etc. etc.

I gave her an honest answer: “I don’t know.”

How in the world, she wanted to know, did you spend five hours with these people and not find anything out?

“Well,” I said, “It just didn’t come up.”

She wanted to know, in that case, what we did talk about. I said, you know, important things, like how the Bulldogs are going to do this year, and how goofy some of our old classmates look in their Facebook pictures, and the time somebody’s hair caught on fire when we were riding around in a Volkswagen bus, and how I work with a woman who got married and hyphenated her last name, so her name is now Jones-Jones. You know, stuff like that.

I hated to disappoint her by not knowing all of the details of their personal lives, but men aren’t like that. Unlike what you see in movies, men don’t sit around with each other and say stuff like, “You know, Carol and I are growing apart, and we’re having a lot of problems in our relationship. We just don’t communicate on the same level we used to, and I fear we may be headed for divorce.”

What’s more likely to happen is one day you run into him, and he’s not with Carol, he’s now with Brandy, and you just assume that he and Carol got divorced, or she’s dead, or she’s out of town and he’s just feeling really brave. In any case, you don’t ask, you just say hi to Brandy and move on.

My wife, on the other hand, will come home and say, “Did I tell you about Jenny? Well, she and her husband have been trying to conceive, and they’re having some trust issues because she found another woman’s underwear in his suitcase, but they got past that, but now they’re having trouble because his sperm count is low, and she’s considering in-vitro fertilization, but she’s not sure she should even get pregnant because she has a sister who is bi-polar and once attacked her mother with a pickaxe, and she’s afraid it might run in the family…”

And I’ll say, “Who is Jenny?” And she’ll say, “Oh, I just met her.”

I don’t know that it’s so much that we don’t care about our friends’ personal lives, we just don’t want to be involved, and we don’t want to have to answer questions. For example, let’s say your friend confides in you that he’s getting a divorce because he realized he made a mistake marrying his wife, and he doesn’t love her, and you relay this information to your wife. Here’s how that’s going to go:

Wife: “So, that’s it. He’s just going to dump her for some hot young thing? What a pig.”
You: “No, that’s not it. He just realized he shouldn’t have married her.”
Wife: “Oh, really? And is that what you’re going to do? Realize you made a mistake marrying me?”
You: “What? No. Of course not. But he doesn’t love her.”
Wife: “So I guess one day you’re just going to walk in and tell me you don’t love me and leave me here to raise the kids by myself while you go flitting across the country with some trashy Hooters waitress. Is that what you’re telling me?”

At this point, you spend about 12 straight hours trying to convince her that you are nothing like your friend, or you pretend you’re late for a meeting and rush out the door, or you double over in pain and fake appendicitis. Either way, it’s going to cost you some jewelry.

So I say, when it comes to the personal lives of your friends, follow the Sgt. Schultz model from Hogan’s Heroes – I see nothing. I know nothing. Trust me, it’s the best way.

Honor thy mother

When my mother was alive, she would always say that she didn’t want her kids to make a big deal out of Mother’s Day. She said it meant more to her that we were good to her the other 364 days of the year. She had seen plenty of people who didn’t treat their mother right most of the time, but made a big show of it on Mother’s Day, and that really bothered her.

It’s good that she felt that way, because I gave her some pretty bad Mother’s Day gifts. I remember one year, I made her an ashtray in school. This was a great gift, when you consider that nobody in our house smoked. But she displayed it proudly for years.

When you get married and have kids, it comes as a shock to most guys to learn they are also expected to buy their wife a Mother’s Day gift. It is never wise to say to your wife in that situation, “But you’re not my mother.” Just buy her something and be done with it.

I took my wife shopping the day before Mother’s Day this year, which is a gift in its own right. I learned early on the trick of making her so miserable when we went shopping that she would never ask me to go again. I’d rather run nekkid through a briar patch than go shopping at a crowded mall or shopping center.

A young woman at work, who is still something of a newlywed, was telling me the other day that she and her husband go shopping on the weekends, and he “loves it.” She said they had gone for about four hours the previous weekend, and he had a great time, going with her from store to store, watching her try on clothes, giving his opinion.

I didn’t want to tell her that unless they were at Frederick’s of Hollywood, he was almost certainly not having a great time watching her try on clothes. But why burst her bubble?

I figured it was wise to just let my wife pick out her own Mother’s Day gift from me, because that way she wouldn’t have to take it back to the store. Of course, one of the things she got was a rug for the bathroom, and we hadn’t been home 10 minutes when she said, “I don’t like this. I have to take it back.” At least it wasn’t my fault.

At one point in the store, she said she might want some new cookware. I pointed out that this might be the same as buying our dog a car. You know, because the dog doesn’t drive.

She didn’t think it was funny, either.

I thought that when my mother died, Mother’s Day would be really tough for me. But I guess because of her attitude towards it, it doesn’t bother me any more than any other day. It’s really just an artificial holiday. You should honor your mother and be good to her every single day of your life. If you don’t, I’m pretty sure you’re going to hell.

I tend to miss her more at other times, like when I’m sick. I don’t care how old you are, when you are sick, or something is going wrong, you want to be able to tell your mother about it. I have been going through a medical nightmare for three months, and I just know that if she was around I would feel better about it.

My mother had dreams of being a nurse, but it didn’t work out. But she had all sorts of medical books and insight and any time I had a problem, I’d call her first, and she usually had the right answer. Like most men, I can be stubborn about going to the doctor and getting things taken care of. But if my mother told me I needed to go, I went, no questions asked.

I have to do an MRI tomorrow and I’m being a wimp and am totally freaked out about it, because I have claustrophobia and just the thought of it makes my skin crawl and my pulse pound. A lot of people have tried to reassure me, but I still wish I could call her and talk to her about it. She’d probably tell me to suck it up and don’t be a baby and I need to go in there and get it over with, and as always, she’d be right.

When I was a newspaper columnist, she would clip out every column I wrote, and she kept it in a scrapbook. She’d probably do the same thing with this blog, though she’d scold me every time I wrote something that “wasn’t nice.”

I don’t get that sad anymore about her being gone. I had her for 42 years, and that’s more than some people can say. Everybody deserves a mama who keeps their columns in a scrapbook, even when they’re a grown man. So if your mother is still alive, make sure that every day is Mother’s Day. You don’t want to go to hell.