Friday, September 5, 2008
I must be honest at this point…because when all is revealed I might be considered a “little league parent”…you would be wrong but I will give the facts and it is what it is…
I exposed my D to every sport that there was…and also to the world of miniature war gaming and all of the above…mind you she was excellent and feared in the local group at 7 or 8…
But there was only one consuming passion in her life…and that was music…what a surprise… her mom was a piano/organist and her dad…(that’s me) was a classical choral high tenor…amateur but not bad…from 9 or 10 her only goal was to be a musician…I frankly would have preferred for her to explore her gift in military tactics or polysci…but I wasn’t a “little league parent” it was her life not mine…and I did everything I could to help her achieve her goals not mine…a couple of high profile summer camps and she got a DI academic full ride…and now teaches instrumental music …not what I wanted but what she wanted…have I made my point…With reference and apologies to the Watertown crew…and some very good and old friends from that group…they where more my brothers home boys then mine…I was 18 when my family made the move from Alden to Watertown (my brother was only 8)…I spent the next 40 out of 72 months away at 2 different colleges…but then 40 out of 510 months in Watertown…of the 729 months of my life well you do the math…
As much as I am apart of where I am now…I am still more apart of where I grew up….
When I was about 4 my family left a suburban Buffalo and moved about 15 miles to the east to the Town of Alden…a weird genetic mix of German/Polish farm kids and Eastern European Factory kids…. (Mostly but not totally Polish)…
I was watching I’m not smarter then a 5th Grader a week or so ago and one of the class was shocked because a contestant mentioned having a pocket knife in school…different era, different time…in my school…entered K in September of ’53…and left as a senior in June of ’66…if you had checked the pocket/purse/book bag (sorry backpacks were unknown)…90% probably had a pocket knife in them…and that included the girls…it was a tool…we never even imagined your Tom Mix as a weapon…
The drag races on our 100+ foot drive way…with several classes…the off-road races on course mowed thru the fields…the field car races…the building of “forts” out of spare lumber…the building of the jump for sleds et al down by the local creek…soccer, football, baseball, wiffle ball in any of a number of front, side or back yards…
To return to the above mention pocket knife theme…in the closet or some where in the room of most of the kids I knew…girls and boys was a .22 caliber rifle…not for shooting our classmates but for shooting targets…groundhogs and other vermin…a friend held the local record for shooting crows out of his dad’s corn fields…where I grew up knifes and guns were tools…not weapons…and half of the best high school rifle team in Eire county were girls…different time…different वलुएस...
I remember the Z girls of a family…a farm family 3 girls one guy…but it was the girls who accepted the farm life…all three were great kids…but the farm life was what they knew and they accepted that…
I remember one pickup tackle football game …4 on 4 where I was the captain and my 3 picks where the Z girls…the result while incomprehensible to others was a forgone conclusion to me…(the below was Email response to some old friends that I played street games with 100 years ago…well maybe it was only 40 +/- years ago but I’m old and get confused from time to time)
| Even 10 or so years ago if you drove by a vacant lot or play ground in Watertown you'd see kids playing a recognizable game or one they had invented…। like our games of rubber ball or remember wall ball…or the one time I taught you guys speedball…(if all don't remember it was a cross between rugby and ultimate Frisbee…) and none of you remember the drag races with bikes and the road course for kid powered wheeled things we had but that is part of the Alden Mythology... Don't see that now… I see two main reasons… Video games and "little league parents" Will not comment on the first only the last… The value in dollars of a DI scholarship or a pro contract and too many parents salivate… It's only "organized sport and high bucks summer camps"…playground and street sports…"Damn it why did you do that…you could have hurt yourself"…not really thinking about the kid's health or happiness but at the potential bucks… When I was a kid…sports/games…you played for the fun…for the "high" you got…some of you probably thought that the miles I ran per week was nuts…I have one word for you…endorphins…
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Tuesday, September 2, 2008
I guess it was dumb luck…or maybe fate but I turned on my TV just as CNN was covering the Lieberman speech at the Republican Convention…(my cable defaults to CNN…not my first choice)
A good speech (IMHO)…and significant from the stand point of the fact that this was the Dems 2000 VP candidate…who was endorsing the Repub’s 2008 ticket…the first comment was from a member of the 2000 election staff on the Dems side…who trashed the speech…(MT is totally shocked…(hehe))…dang…news reporting is at least in theory supposed to be independent without opinion…to report the news without bias and let the listener decide…yah right…(okay so lets face it I’m a troll trying to live in a human world, and quite frankly I’d rather live with my cat then with most of the people I know)if you ask me what is the single most pressing problem in the US of A today…I’d say that it’s news programs who have stopped reporting the facts and are more concerned with convincing us of their opinions of the facts…
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