Don’t listen to your parents

This is probably not the best advice at this time of year, but I assume most of my readers are not expecting fantabulous gifts under the tree from Santa or their parents.

I’ve had lots of fun with the mantra:

Don’t listen to your parents!
They tell you to act your age.
If you act your age, you’ll grow up.
If you grow up, you’ll get old.
If you get old, you’ll die.
So, why act your age?

I’ve done my share of listening to my parents and other parental figures, and taking their advice to heart.  I’ve also done my share of ignoring advice, either because of orneriness or because the advice was just plain wrong.

I think the best advice was just plain encouragement: get good grades.  Sometimes that encouragement also took the form of a dime or a quarter for each A on my report card.  A dime?  That’s not much!  Ah, but I grew up at a time when a movie ticket was ten cents, and candy bars and ice cream cones were a nickel.

My encouragement was also by example.  We had lots of magazines and newspapers in the house, and my brother and I were given books from time-to-time.

My parents were divorced before I started school, and my father “bribed” us with neat Christmas gifts that encouraged creative play.  Among these were train sets and Erector sets.  Our imaginations soared, even as we had difficulty getting every square nut to turn easily on the small screws.

Then there was the advice that was off-the mark or just plain wrong.

One year about St. Patrick’s day we were getting dressed to go somewhere and my brother and I wondered about wearing green.  My mother replied, “We’re Orange Irish!”  As far as we knew, Magree was an Irish name, but we had no knowledge of any ancestor coming from Ireland.  Plus, because of the divorce, my mother had very little contact with her father-in-law and knew very little of our father’s family history.  If she did, she never shared it with us.  On her side, her grandparents were born in England or Germany.

Many decades later, I pieced together that my Magree line was resident in the United States since at least 1830.  An irony was that my great-grandfather was born in England, though he sometimes claimed to be born in Brooklyn.  His father was probably born in Baltimore, and the closest record I have of him having any Irish connection is being the master of a ship in 1851 bringing mostly Irish immigrants from Liverpool to New York.

So much for being Orange-Irish.

When I proposed to my wife-to-be (Jan), my mother didn’t think she was suitable for me and that the marriage would not last.  Sorry, Mom, but it has lasted longer than your two marriages put together.

Before I met Jan, I had flunked out of Case Institute of Technology.  I considered going to Ohio Wesleyan in the middle of Ohio, but my mother didn’t like that.  I wouldn’t be in Cleveland where she could see me more often.  Well, I did go to Ohio Wesleyan and got good enough grades to get into graduate school at Case.

Because of the divorce, I didn’t see my father much and so didn’t get much advice from him.

I did ask him for a loan of $107 to pay for my meals at Ohio Wesleyan for one semester.  When I tried to pay him back, he refused to accept it.

None of his seven children followed his example on education.  He dropped out after the eleventh grade.  All finished high school, five received college degrees, and two of those did graduate work.

But the advice from my Dad that I chuckle about the most is that music must be foot-tapping.  Probably ninety percent of the time that I turn on MPR the music has a strong beat.  Today, it was L’Arlésienne by George Bizet (and I identified it within two minutes!)  If you are not familiar with it, it is the piece that “The Prisoner” times over and over again, getting a different time for each record.

My mother remarried when I was fifteen.  My stepfather insisted that we use Desenex (and only Desenex) on our feet every morning and that we polish our shoes every week.  He did have a point because he had been hospitalized with athlete’s foot some years before.  I haven’t checked with my brother, but I rarely powder my feet.  If I do, it’s with Desenex only because I happen to have it on the shelf.  Polish shoes?  One does not polish today’s athletic shoes, and I can’t even get myself to oil work boots with any regularity.

My last piece of ignored advice is not from a parent, but a teacher.  In my high school boys had to take a semester class called “Personal Regimen”.  I won’t go into the details of the class, but we could get an F for wearing Levis.  I had been wearing Levis since junior high school ($4.95 a pair) and my mother liked them because they were easier to wash than many other pants.  Sixty years plus later, I wear jeans almost all the time: to church, concerts, theater, restaurants, and more.

Oh, one last word.  The best thing I got out of Personal Regimen was learning to tie a tie.  If I really need to, I can still tie a Windsor knot without looking in the mirror.

When people ask Mel’s age, he tells them to guess.  The latest guesser took six tries to guess, all but the last under.

Too soon old, too late smart

Each season it seems I can do less than I did in the same season last year.

My skis are as fast as ever but it seems each year I make fewer runs than I did the previous year.  Flying over bumps is no longer a thrill but a chill.  Cross-country skiing on an un-groomed trail is too much of a chore.  Snowshoeing on fresh deep snow has become a very slow process.  I only do one-third of the trail before I head back to the cabin.

I can get up out of deep snow if I fall, but I might have been lucky the last time.  My foot came out of one snowshoe.  The loose snowshoe became a "crutch" to push myself up with.

Snow shoveling is no longer a one-session job.  Shovel out to the garage. Shovel half the apron between the garage and the alley, maybe both halves if the snow is light.  If the snow is deep or the city grader has been by then I might use the snow blower.

My next session (or first depending on circumstances) is to clear around the house to the front, clear across the front yard and up the porch for the mail carrier.  Next I clear a shovel width to the street and both ways on the sidewalk.

I long ago gave up running.  I wasn’t getting shin splints as I was in high school and college, but I stopped running around a track or on the street.  I do walk the “4.4” mile Brimson Sisu, but even there my times seem longer than the previous year.

I can still stand on one leg to put my pants on or as an exercise, but I often wobble.  I used to think nothing of standing on a step stool to change a light bulb or to climb a ladder on to the roof of our cabin.  I can still remember going up and down the ladder to get a bat out of our chimney.  Now it takes a long time to move one foot from the ladder to the roof, even worse to move the other foot.

We buy juice and wine by the case and store them in the basement.  A few years ago I thought nothing of going down the stairs with a case, glancing only a few times to let me know when I got to the bottom.  Now, I either take a few bottles at a time or go down backwards dragging the full case one step at a time.

For a long time I’ve spouted the mantra: We should never listen to our parents.  They tell us to act our age.  If we do that, we grow up.  If we grow up, we get old.  If we get old, we die.  So, why act our age?

I am doing my best to not act my age.  Instead of playing with all these “big kid” toys, be it skis or yard equipment, I now play with words.

I write this weekly column, which is both playing with words and ideas.

I have all but given up on writing letters to the editor of any major newspaper; too many times what is published is not what I intended.  In fact, with two different papers what was published was exactly the opposite of what I submitted.  But I find that I spend too much time leaving comments on facebook or on a New York Times article.  Leaving comments is not a bad idea, but I rarely come back to see what others submitted after me.

I do post all kinds of ideas to my blog, but I get the feeling that lots of them are read by more spammers’ bots than live people. I think I get more live readers in Duluth of this column than I get live readers in the whole world of my blog.

I do think I’m getting smart in the sense that I see through fancy, deceiving language more quickly than I used to.  Political language, no matter the source, is too often either promising more than possible or putting down opposition more than justified.  Commercial language, no matter the product or service, is filled with hype or misdirection.  This new software makes beautiful documents if you only want to do something simple.  This car gives you carefree driving if you can find the wiper switch in the dark.

Still, I have a long way to go to be smart.

A smart person would not start a snow-filled chipper on a cold day.  The flywheel is frozen in place and the belt gets hotter and hotter until it catches fire!  A smart person would remember to put the cover on before snow got in the hopper.

A smart person would always check for hat and gloves before leaving an event.  A smart person would look under a chair at home for a pen before thinking that he or she left it someplace else.

A smart person would listen intently to a speaker, remember all key points, and not fall asleep.

A smart person would keep a desk neatly ordered instead of spending lots of time looking in every stack and every file drawer.

A smart person would remember to submit an article by the publisher’s deadline.  Aha!  I am redeemed.  Now to be a really smart person and submit this article to the right email address!

Except for the last, italicized sentence, this also appears in the Reader Weekly of 2014-04-03 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/04/03/3172_too_soon_old_too_late_smart.  This particular issue is also called the Northland Enquirer.

What does a teacher make? Surprise answer!

If you're tired of the bashing of teachers, tired of the complaints of their performance, and tired of the charges of "greedy" teacher unions", you'll enjoy this bit of stand-up ire by Taylor Mali.

You can find his biography at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Mali.  His website is at http://www.taylormali.com/.

Contradictory parental advice

As I was walking gingerly on slippery, bumpy, ice-and-snow-covered sidewalks, carefully watching where I stepped, slouched over so that I saw the surface only a few feet in front of me, I thought of the parental advice, "Watch where you walk!"

But as I was slouched over, I also thought of the parental advice, "Stand up straight!"

Momma, make up your mind!

In defense of teachers

"Greedy teacher unions!" "Underperforming schools!" and many other simplistic slogans pollute the discussion about improving education. But more thoughtful people wonder how to counter all the other problems that make learning difficult: disinterested parents, bullies, too much testing, too little class time, and on it goes with things that are outside the control of teachers.

For a good summary of these problems, see "Teachers aren't the problem" by Micheal Kennedy, Star Tribune, 2007-06-17. Kennedy teaches at Southwest High School in Minneapolis.