Home-Schooled

 

Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

This past week, I was thinking about the old saying that everything you need to know, you learned in kindergarten.  And I suppose that when you really stop to think about it, that may very well be true.  I mean, in kindergarten you learned how to be nice, how to share, and how to play well with others.  Of course, you also found out that you could increase the relative trade-in value of your lunch if you could talk your mom into tossing in some Twinkies and that having the bigger box of crayons was just inherently better than having the smaller set. 

Good manners and a basic understanding of a consumer-driven free-market economy—that’s pretty much what you get out of a kindergarten education.  Whether or not that’s really all you need to know in life is a whole other question.

My younger sister, though, never bought into the whole “everything you need to know you learned in kindergarten” philosophy.  As far as I could ever tell, she thought kindergarten was for sissies. Hell, they wouldn’t even let you have real scissors in kindergarten, and I always figured that she regarded the whole thing as a complete waste of a perfectly good year of your life that you could have otherwise spent learning how to use a chain saw and boning up on your survival skills.

Anyway, for some strange reason, my sister decided one day that all I really needed to know in life was how to shoot an arrow.  I have no idea why she thought I needed this skill, and I don’t think she did either.  For my part, I suppose I thought it might come in handy at a cocktail party someday.  I didn’t know exactly what kind of a cocktail party would involve an archery demonstration, but then again, I didn’t really know what a cocktail party even was.  So it seemed like as good a rational for learning to shoot an arrow as any other reason might have been.

So, my sister set up a little archery range in our backyard one fine spring day and got down to the business of educating me.  It vaguely seemed like something we shouldn’t have been doing, and I think we both kind of knew that.  But just to be clear, my mom had never said that we couldn’t shoot arrows in the backyard.  Of course, if my mom had spent her time listing all the things she didn’t want us to do, she’d still be talking some 30 years later.  But as far as my sister  and I were concerned, since we had never specifically been told that we couldn’t play backyard archery range, that meant that it fell under the category of Things We Didn’t Think Mom Would Care If We Did. 

Now, in all honesty, Things We Didn’t Think Mom Would Care If We Did was kind of a strange category because it was flexible to the point of being completely unpredictable.  I mean, one summer, we found a pond full of tadpoles, so we brought home about 150 of them.  My mom wouldn’t let us keep them in our bedrooms and sleep with them in our beds like we wanted to, but she didn’t really have any problem with us setting up a veritable Frog Nation on the patio.  And it was great.  We watched those little tadpoles all day long.  It was fun.  It was educational.  What more could a parent want?

Strangely, though, my mom felt completely different when we brought home a snake.  But it wasn’t like she just got mad.  It was more like she totally freaked out.  She didn’t just want us to take that snake back to where we’d found it; she wanted us to hop on a bus and drop it off in another state.  And I can just imagine how that would’ve played out when my dad got home from work.  “Where are the kids?” “Somewhere in Nebraska if they know what’s good for ‘em.”

As far as our archery range went, though, we didn’t know for a fact that my mom didn’t want us shooting arrows in the backyard, and that was good enough for us.  Of course, looking back on it now, I can honestly say that the smartest thing we did that day was put the dog inside before we got started.  And I think it’s just dumb luck that neither one of us had started drinking regularly by that age.

We didn’t really have a bow so much as we had a 40 year-old carved stick with a 40 year-old piece of string attached to it that my father had made back when he was a kid and wasn’t supposed to be shooting arrows in his backyard.  But it seemed like a pretty decent bow.  I don’t know why he still had it except that to the best of my knowledge, that man had never gotten rid of anything smaller than an airplane in his whole entire life.  Something the size of a bow probably wouldn’t have even registered on his junk radar.

I’m not sure where the arrows had come from, either, but my younger sister is the kind of person who’s always “got a guy,” and doubtless that even back then, she had a guy who knew a guy who had no real reservations about supplying teenagers with a limited range of weaponry.  I’m also not sure where she had dredged up the target.  It was a regulation-sized deal stuffed with hay and everything, and I just figured that she’s scored it in some back alley transaction somewhere.  “Psst…hey, kid, wanna buy a target?”  You don’t really imagine people dealing in black-market archery equipment, I guess, but back then, that was pretty much what the seedy side of life in the Denver suburbs amounted to.

Anyway, we were all set up for my sister to show me what she’d learned in school.  Now, why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to offer high school kids a course in how to launch sharp pointed sticks into the air is sort of beyond me.  Then again, a fair amount of high school gym class involved being smacked in the back with a basketball, getting a soccer ball kicked into your face, and having a tennis ball driven into your forehead, so it wasn’t exactly a “safety first” kind of environment to begin with. 

And it wasn’t just the wimpy kids who got pummeled.  In our school, Assault with a Piece of Sports Equipment was an equal opportunity kind of activity, and that made sense.  After all, you didn’t need any great level of athletic prowess to horsewhip someone with a jump rope.  All you needed was ten seconds of inexplicable bravery and a fair amount of righteous, misdirected anger.  Needless to say, even the tough guys got their fair share of abuse at my high school. 

At any rate, I think the gym teachers finally figured that since they were basically just teaching Assault 101 anyway, they might as well take it one step further into actual weapons.  As far as I could tell, the only reason they settled on archery instead a full course in riflery was because it was more cost-effective.  I mean, bullets aren’t reusable unless you’re firing lead balls out of a musket, and trust me, no self-respecting kid in my high school was going to stand out in the middle of the football field, shoot off a musket, and then go shag the bullets so the next person could use them.  The only thing that could’ve made that idea any sillier is if they’d also required the students to wear clown suits while they were doing it.  And if there wasn’t enough money for bullets, there sure weren’t any funds for clown suits.  So, the gym teachers just stuck to archery, and that was that.

Anyway, back at our home archery range, my sister stepped up for the inaugural shot.  She drew the bow back, and I have to admit, she actually did look a lot like Robin Hood.  She let the arrow fly, and right at the moment, we discovered something:  that bow was more than just decent.  It was freaking rocket launcher.  We just stood there and watched in amazement as the arrow sailed over the target, over the fence, and off into the wild blue yonder. 

To this day, I honestly have no idea where it landed, but I’ve always imagined the neighbors in the next three yards down sitting out on their patios having a nice glass of ice tea as this arrow goes whizzing past overhead.  “What the hell was that?”  “Oh my God, we’re under attack!”  And the next thing you know, everyone is grabbing up their canned goods and bottled water and herding their children into the basement. 

At any rate, I was always pretty sure that even if we had fired an arrow into our neighbor’s yard three houses down, we hadn’t actually fired it into the neighbor himself.  I think there would’ve been some neighborhood gossip about something like that.  It probably just landed in his yard, where he later accidentally ran it over with the lawn mower and spent the next hour or two tweezing splinters out of his shins and kneecaps.  Of course, I don’t really know that that’s true, but I tend to be optimistic like that.

Back at the shooting gallery, though, we only had one arrow left, and I wanted to take a turn.  But my sister insisted that a proper demonstration was necessary for my educational benefit.  She was nothing if not a dedicated teacher.  So, she lined everything up again and vaguely mumbled something about needing to aim low when you’re shooting an arrow (especially if you’re firing it out of a cannon). 

I’m not entirely sure what happened next, but I’ve long suspected that right at the moment she let fly, we both closed our eyes. I don’t really know why, but for my part, I’m pretty sure I was praying.  I didn’t think that would necessarily improve my sister’s aim, but just for the sake of the neighbors, I figured it couldn’t hurt.

When we finally both opened our eyes, that arrow was nowhere to be found.  The only sure place it wasn’t was in the target.  And that in and of itself was kind of amazing.  I mean, it was a regulation-sized target.  It was huge.  And we were only about 7 feet away from it.  It wasn’t like we were shooting at a dinner plate from three blocks away.  But still, my sister had somehow managed to completely miss the entire target, which, all things considered, was probably a greater feat of archery skill than actually hitting it would’ve been.

I think we were both silently hoping that we hadn’t just run our neighbor through for good, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the image out of my head of this nice older guy in a pair of khakis and golf shirt pinned to his fence like an insect sprawled out in a display case.  Anyway, we frantically started looking around, and then we saw it—a hole right through the front door of the garden shed.  We went in, and there was the arrow…halfway through the back wall of the shed and firmly embedded in the fence behind it.  My little sister had shot that arrow through two sheets of metal and right into a wooden fence.  She had taken down that garden shed like a rhino on the Serengeti.

And even though we both knew we were in big trouble at that point, she was really sort of proud of the accomplishment.  Then again, I suppose that not just anyone can bag a garden shed with only one shot.  To this day I believe that if she could’ve uprooted the whole thing and had it mounted above the mantelpiece, she would’ve done it.  It would’ve gone right next to the front fender of our old Volkswagen that my dad winged with a BB gun.  But this was hardly the time for pride.  I mean, we had shot up the garden shed, and there was no hiding it.  We had crossed over into the category of Things We Knew My Mom Would Care If We Did.

To make matters worse, that arrow was so firmly driven into the fence that we couldn’t pull it out.  So, my sister, always the evil genius, just started stacking stuff in front of it.   She was crafty like that.  And that was a good thing because all I wanted to do was run as fast as I could in any direction that led away from the scene of the crime.  I mean, right at that moment, I would’ve happily traded away everything I had for a clown suit and a bus ticket to Nebraska. 

Anyway, we wiped our prints off the bow and put it back in the garage where we’d found it, and we stashed the target next to the side of the garage where no one ever went. We figured that if we were lucky, someone would steal it.  It was, after all, in brand-new condition.   If nothing else, we could claim that we’d never seen it before and that we had no idea where it had come from.  We couldn’t hide the holes in the shed, but the way my sister saw it, we’d be home free if my parents couldn’t actually prove that we’d done it. 

Of course, I don’t know why we thought that if our parents actually hadn’t seen us do it, they’d be more inclined to think that some rogue band of infidels had invaded our backyard and shot up the garden shed.  I can just see my parents discussing it.  “So, what do you think—the rogue band of infidels theory…or our own children?”  My parents just aren’t that dumb.  Hell, nobody’s parents are that dumb. 

And I suppose that we could’ve always just lied about it, too, but my sister knew that I’d never make through a parental interrogation.  I could barely make it through a math test without a sedative. My sister knew that I couldn’t take my parents’ beady little eyes boring a hole into my guilty little brain.  I’d crack like an egg under the slightest pressure.  I’d sing like a diva at the Met.  So, she just hid the evidence to the best of her ability.  I mean, that girl was born thinking like a defense attorney. 

And if that plan had failed, I’m sure she had a backup strategy that involved burying my parents in evidentiary suppression hearings and specious legal motions guaranteed to stretch on until long after both of us had moved away.  And all that planning worked, too.  After a week went by with no mention of the shed from either of our parents, I decided that if I ever actually got arrested, I wasn’t going to waste my time calling a lawyer.  I was just going to call my sister.  As far as I was concerned, she could make anything disappear.

Years later, during some random attack of conscience, I told my mom the story of my day of home schooling, emphasizing, of course, that the whole thing had been my little sister’s idea.  But I figured that by then, the statute of limitations had run out on that particular crime and that my sister and I really had gotten away with something.  Even now, though, I’m not completely sure if I told my mom about it because I thought I needed absolution or because I just wanted bragging rights, but the truth is that I didn’t get either. 

As it turns out, my parents had known about it for years.  After all, you couldn’t really miss the hole in the front door, and even if you did, the half of the arrow you can still see going through the back wall and into the fence is harder to miss than that target should have been.  But then again, I always figured that my parents weren’t that dumb, and apparently I was right.  I just hadn’t ever counted on them being quite that forgiving.

The funny thing is that in the end, I never did get to shoot an arrow.  To this day, I’ve never shot an arrow.  I’ve never even held a bow in my hands. But I wound up learning a few things from that whole experience.  Mostly I learned that a little home schooling is a dangerous thing, especially when your little sister is running the school.  And I learned that despite your best efforts, your parents usually know what you’re up to.  And if they don’t know, they’ll find out.  Parents are smart like that.  But beyond that, I gained what is perhaps the one piece of knowledge that they actually don’t teach you in kindergarten:  the world is a wondrous place full of all sorts of remarkable things that you can know, and the invitation to learn is always there.  But from time to time, you’re better off turning down that offer.  I mean, if my day of home schooling taught me anything, it’s that sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

© R. Rissler, 2012.  All rights reserved.

Sweets for the Sweet

 

Hello, Dear Readers.  It’s good to see you.

Just the other day, I was listening to the old Van Halen song “Why Can’t This Be Love,” and I realized that Valentine’s Day is once again upon us.  Now, I have to admit that Valentine’s Day isn’t one of my favorite holidays, but then again, that’s probably why it’s such an endless source of fascination for me.  I tend to be much more interested in the things I don’t like than in the things that I do, and I think most people are like that.  I mean, I’ve heard people prattle on and on about how the last order of spicy chicken wings they ate tasted like they’d been marinated in stomach acid, and I’ve seen people derail entire dinner parties with minute descriptions of how reading about Lindsay Lohan’s latest escapades left them with little more than a raging headache and a markedly uncomfortable bloated feeling.  But when it comes to things people like, they usually just go, “Yeah, I thought that was good,” and that’s pretty much the end of the story.

I don’t know, though, that I’d say I actually dislike Valentine’s Day.  I’m just not that into it.  That might be because I’m single, but really, I think it’s more because I just find the whole thing kind of confusing.  And personally, any kind of unnecessary confusion just annoys me.  I mean, Valentine’s Day just brings up a bunch of questions that, frankly, I’d rather not have to waste my time thinking about.  And yet, from at least the beginning of February to the actual day itself, they’re almost impossible to get away from.  So this year, I decided to just tackle them head on in the hopes that some little bit of clarity might emerge.

Now, probably the biggest question that this wonderful day of love generates is a fairly simple one:  why do men seem to need to be reminded at least three times a day that Valentine’s Day is coming up?  Are they really that forgetful?  I mean, if they are, why does anyone give them important things like mortgages and jobs and children?  After all, these are things whose successful maintenance usually requires some degree of memory. 

But if you judged the ability of men to remember anything based on the sheer number of ads reminding them that Valentine’s Day is coming up, you’d expect them to walk into their houses, have their wives ask, “Did you pick up the kids from swimming lessons?” and reply, “What kids?”  “You were supposed to pick them up after you got off work.”  “I have a job?”  “Well, how do you think we’re paying for this house?”  “We have to pay to live here?”  If guys were even half as forgetful as TV leads you to believe they are, it would be amazing if they could find their way home at night.  Hell, it would be amazing if they could even remember that they had homes.

But beyond just forgetting about the holiday, if you just go by what you see in the media, selecting the Valentine’s gift itself is some sort of mysterious experience that men have to be guided carefully through, and that brings up my second question:  are guys really that inept when it comes to buying presents?  It’s like the media is saying that if TV didn’t tell guys what to get their loved ones, there’s just no telling what they might show up with.  “Here, my dearest Valentine, I brought you this candy and these gifts.”  “Oh, chocolate-covered cherries!  How delicious!  And what’s this?  A case of beer and a shotgun?  What the hell is this about?”  And from there, things just turn ugly.  Really, really ugly.  I mean, as far as the media is concerned, guys aren’t just forgetful; apparently they’re stupid, too. 

The funny thing is that at least according to TV, there are really only two levels of Valentine’s Day gifts to choose from:  expensive jewelry and stuff you can buy at the drug store.  So, it’s not like getting a present is exactly rocket science.  If you go the expensive jewelry route, you just walk into a jewelry store, plunk down all your cash on the counter, and say, “I want to biggest, sparkliest thing this money will buy.  And could you gift wrap it for me?”  It’s so easy that it hardly even requires a brain.  And apparently, that’s the angle the jewelry stores are playing—it’s so easy even a man can do it.

Of course, going the “stuff you can buy at the drug store” route is a little harder.  After all, if you just walk into a drug store and plunk your money down on the counter, one of the employees will probably grab it and run away. So, you really do have to do a tiny bit of shopping first, and that can be a bit of a challenge.  I mean, you’re buying a Valentine’s Day gift that expresses your deep love and true devotion at a place that sells cough syrup and tampons.  So, you know, it’s a tricky situation, and your relative level of sincerity is always a bit questionable.  But then again, all the Valentine’s Day stuff is usually in one aisle, so at least you get a little guidance. And what you can’t fake in sincerity you can often make up for with sheer bulk.

One thing you rarely see Valentine’s TV ads for, though, is candy.  But that’s likely because as children, we're sort of pre-programmed to associate candy with Valentine’s Day.  That is, for most kids, the holidays break down into two categories:  present holidays and candy holidays.  Any holiday that doesn’t involve one of those two things isn’t a holiday to a kid.  It’s just a day when you have to dress up and maybe go to church, and then you have to hang out with a bunch of your cousins from Iowa who you don’t even really know very well and wouldn’t be likely to befriend on any other occasion. 

As far as the kid-recognized holidays go, though, Christmas and your birthday are present holidays.  Halloween, the Fourth of July, Easter, and Valentine’s Day are candy holidays.  Of course, if you’re Jewish, Hanukkah is your big present holiday, and Passover has to be a candy holiday, although, frankly, except for the occasional macaroon, it’s not that great of a deal as far as the treats go.  But no matter what faith you’re raised in, Valentine’s Day is a candy holiday.  Kids might give out Valentines at school, but trust me, it’s got nothing to do liking someone.  It’s all about the candy.  I mean, if some kid gives you a Valentine that doesn’t have a little candy heart in it, then it’s just a big gyp.  

So, it’s not a huge surprise that even men, as feckless and confused as they may be, don’t need big signs telling them to get some candy.  Apparently, once they’ve been nagged and hounded and led by the nose to the store, their pre-programming kicks in, and in a way, it’s probably not all that surprising that a large percentage of Valentine’s Day gifts come from drug stores.  I mean, around Valentine’s Day, drug stores usually have big signs outside that just say, “We have candy!”  So the guys go in, grab the treats, and then proceed to lurch through the aisles in their complete ineptitude as gift-buyers snatching up anything wrapped in red foil that isn’t edible or in a liquid form. 

Of course, one thing that you almost never see in the media are ads for what women should give men for Valentine’s Day, and that’s probably because the basic expectation is that women are going to give the…”gift of themselves” shall we say.  But that brings up my third question:  on any other given night of the year, are women really that unwilling to have sex with their partners?  I mean, as a general rule, do they really need to be bribed into it like that?  Is that what Valentine’s Day is actually all about—forgetful, stupid men bribing otherwise unwilling women into having sex with them?  Well, yes, if you watch television, that’s exactly what Valentine’s Day is about.  Personally, I don’t know why anyone would want to participate in it.

And certainly, a fair number of people don’t participate in the Valentine’s Day festivities, not because they’ve taken the inordinate amount of time to think about it like I have but just because they’re single. Valentine’s Day is one of those holidays that seems to say, “this is not for you” if you aren’t in a relationship.  But even that doesn’t seem to be entirely true anymore, and that leads me to my fourth and perhaps most perplexing question:  why does every cable station seem to think that Valentine’s Day is a great occasion for a re-run marathon?  I mean, are single people really that lonely?

Of course, it’s always possible that the marathons are geared toward couples, but if everything goes the way it should on Valentine’s Day, I’m not sure when these people would have time to work in three or four hours of TV viewing.  I thought the whole point of bribing someone into having sex with you was supposed to be so you would have something to do that night.  And besides, some of the marathons are a little off-color for a romantic evening.  I mean, if you’re out on a date and your partner says, “Let’s hurry up and eat so that we can go back to my house and watch eight straight hours of Criminal Minds,” you’re probably going to want to politely excuse yourself and then run to the nearest police station.

So, I think it’s safe to say that most of the Valentine’s Day TV marathons are meant for single people.  But are they really the people TV programmers seem to think they are? Are they really such desperate, lonely souls that they have nothing better to do on Valentine’s Day than sit around on the couch watching hour after hour of re-runs, swilling cheap scotch, and crying?  Are they people who really need a sitcom marathon to remind them that a boring nebbish like Bob Newhart could get a babe like Suzanne Pleshette and that even Estelle Getty wasn’t sitting home alone on Valentine’s Day? Well, yes, if TV programming is any indication, that’s exactly who these people are.

The funny thing is that most of the people I know in real life are absolutely nothing like their TV advertising counterparts.  I mean, most of the men I know aren’t particularly forgetful or noticeably stupid.  Most of the women I know think sex is a fine thing and good exercise to boot.  And most of the single people I know don’t sit around on the couch drinking cheap scotch.  They go to bars and drink cheap scotch. 

But then again, advertisers pay millions of dollars to put all that marketing out there.  Jewelers make up special pieces just for Valentine’s Day.  And someone actually gets paid to program all those re-run marathons.  So, it sort of stands to reason that there must be at least some men who really are that forgetful and stupid, some women who really do need to bribed into giving it up, and some single people who are single-handedly keeping the distilleries in business.  I don’t happen to know any of these people, but they must be out there.  And maybe that’s the real source of my confusion.  It’s just that age-old question:  who the hell are these people?

I suppose that in end, what irks me most about Valentine’s Day is just that I seem to wind up asking these same four questions every year, and it kind of reminds me of the four questions that are asked at Passover, in which case I should probably just invite all my friends over on Valentine’s Day and hold a seder.  I mean, when you come right down to it, Valentine’s Day is a very confusing holiday, and the only thing that keeps me from throwing up my hands and just giving up on it all together is that this year, buried in all the murky confusion and conflicting imagery, I’ve discovered one nugget of universal truth and the one thing about Valentine’s Day that we all understand from the time we’re children to the time we’re old and gray:  there’s candy.  Forgetful, thoughtful, stupid, smart, hesitant, horny, taken, single, drunk, sober—it doesn’t make any difference at all.  Amid the train wreck of confusion that truly is Valentine’s Day, there’s always going to be candy.  And that may well be as much clarity as I’m ever going to get on the subject.

Ultimately, I don’t think anybody really understands what they’re supposed to do on Valentine’s Day, and I have to admit that I find something sort of comforting about knowing that at some level, we’re all just winging it.  So, on this Valentine’s Day, do whatever you feel you must.  Fall in love, give gifts, make love, get drunk, watch sitcoms, whatever.  But don’t forget to take some time to pay homage to what is the true essence and absolute core of this holiday’s meaning.  In other words, don’t forget to have some sweets.  After all, when it comes to Valentine’s Day, love is fleeting as far as I can tell, but candy is forever.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

© R. Rissler, 2012.  All rights reserved.