THE DODGEBALL TEST

It all started with my nephew at a family dinner.  We were grilling him about a kid his age, someone we vaguely knew.  “He’s an OK guy,” offered Collin, chewing his burger.  “But he cheats at dodgeball.”

 

Instantly, we all got it.  From that moment on, how you played dodgeball became our family’s insider character test.

 

Since my Ked-clad camp days, dodgeball has enjoyed a resurgence in cool.  It’s not quite the same bully’s nirvana it was in my gym class. You don’t try to nail the chubby girl in the back row who eats paste or the nosepicker with knocked knees.  Dodgeball is a process of elimination; a survival of the fittest.  Initially it’s organized chaos, with dozens of balls flying around simultaneously.  Get hit anywhere below the neck and you’re out.  It’s pretty black and white.  And in the craziness of the game’s first few minutes, it can come down to one person’s word against another’s. 

 

There are the people who get hit and deny it.  There are some who challenge the call, and still others who give in and slink off when questioned.  And then there are those who do the right thing.  Even when no one is watching, they pull themselves out of the game and onto the sidelines.

 

I aspire to raise one of those kids, the ones who self-police, no matter who is looking.  It’s hard work to install a moral compass that stays relatively true.  You have to be willing to nag and stay the course and remind and nag again.  But the payoff is huge.

 

A few years ago I rented an R-rated movie with my daughter and two of her friends.  It was mostly inappropriate humor, bad language and some cheesy violence, but when I saw the rating I made sure to ask both kids if this was OK with their parents.  I was impressed when both girls called their mothers to double check.  They could have easily lied.

 

When I complimented my daughter on her friends’ stand up nature, she immediately jumped on me.  “Mom, I’ve never seen an R-rated movie ever.  And I’d check with you first,” she huffed defensively.  She’d passed the dodgeball test on that one.

  

I’m well aware that sneaking R rated movies or cheating at games aren’t gateway activities to cooking meth or serial killing.  But doing the right thing starts with emphasizing the minor stuff.  It’s about being vigilant.

 

By trying to be our kids “buddies” and shying away from boundaries, too often we let the little things slide. And that means we pass up lots of small but precious opportunities to teach good old-fashioned citizenship and manners.  Respect for the elderly, giving up your seat on the train, looking people in the eye, delivering a firm handshake, where else will our children pick these things up? I have a warm spot in my heart for a young man who calls me Ma’am, even though I wasn’t raised anywhere near the south.

 

I want my children to understand that there are consequences for actions. That means we need to follow through with our threats. There is a famous parenting story about a family traveling to Disney World. Exasperated by the dreaded “when will we get there?” question, the parents told the kids if they asked one more time, they wouldn’t be able to go to Disney World.  When little Johnny broke the rule, they stuck to their guns. The miserable parents went to the park sans kids, hiring a sitter for the hotel room. 

 

 

Yes, I sound like the grannies of a previous generation, cluck-clucking at that hip-swivelin’ rock’ n’ roll music. Or, heaven forbid, I recall how ridiculous Tipper Gore sounded to me in the 80’s calling for music labeling on records, until I had my own kids and really listened to some of the misogynist bondage rap stuff on the radio. I took back everything I’d muttered under my breath about Tipper and freedom of speech that day.

 

When my children were very little, in the span of three weeks I left my wallet on top of our station wagon twice and drove away.  Those were exhausting days with two kids under age four and a home business.  The second time it happened, after I’d just replaced all my credit cards and license, I burst into tears at the realization. I’d just been to the cash machine and withdrawn my weekly budget.

 

The phone rang a few hours later.  A man had found the wallet.  He lived 20 minutes away in what I knew to be a somewhat sketchy neighborhood.  I was making bets that the money was gone. Planning on giving him a reward, I also bought a 12-pack of beer, figuring he could turn the night into a party in his ‘hood. 

 

When I rang the bell, the man who answered the door was in flowing robes, with a top knot of hair.  I quickly reached into my limited knowledge of Eastern beliefs and dimly recognized that he was a Sikh.  As I thrust the beer at him in gratitude, he practically recoiled.  “We don’t drink in our religion,” he said.  And he proceeded to invite me inside for a cup of tea.  My humiliation at my sanctimonious neighborhood profiling was complete.  The wallet was intact, with every dollar untouched.

 

There are basic things we all wish for our kids that include good health, the capacity to love, intelligence and common sense.  But I think about some of the other characteristics I hope we’ve instilled, as they sit on the lip of our nest, poised to fly. My hope is that I’ve raised kids to be considerate and upstanding, to do the right thing on the sidelines, not just on the 50 yard line in the floodlight’s glare. I want them to be the kind of people who would return the wallet with every cent intact.  I want them to defend the underdog and play fair, to be the person who takes himself out when he gets hit in dodgeball because the rules apply to all of us, whether or not anyone else is watching.

The Berry Patch

The local berry farm closed a few years ago.  That was a sad day for me.  The farmer’s kids didn’t have the desire to keep up the family land that had for so long produced juicy strawberries in late June and then perfectly honeycombed raspberries (purple and red) right on their tail.  In late July, there’d be blueberries so fat and sweet you could pop them right in you mouth. Sugar would have been redundant.

The closing of the patch was a loss to many of us locals and summer people and anyone who enjoys the ritual of growing or gathering their food understands why. Not only was there something satisfying about serving my family fresh, local grown berries, but there was a sense of accomplishment in picking them myself.

Heading to the berry patch was really more about communing and about companionship.  Bent over or on my knees between the rows of green bushes, dragon flies humming, and crickets chirping, the field was my church at times, the ritual a kind of morning vespers. Berry picking was something I did with my friend Liza (aka “Groove” a nickname from the 70’s, the exact origin of which has been lost).  Liza and I grew up on our little lake bay in the summers. She is the oldest continual friend I have and two of our children were born in the same years.  They have inherited their friendships by birth, an unspoken powerful connection.  Those ties go deep.

In the many years that Liza and I berry-picked, we survived the eye-rolling and the ridicule over our dogged devotion while the short season lasted.  Together and alone we braved hot temperatures, rain and mist, bugs and flies all to find our peace, chatting and picking, talking and advising, finding the rhythm of the row as we filled the little green cardboard boxes and loaded them onto the farm’s hand nailed wooden trays.

It was the conversation that counted, more than anything.  As our hands felt down the stalk, determining the firmness of a berry, our eyes focused on the color and our minds were free to talk.  Picking was also about tending a friendship, sustaining the strong parts and feeling tenderly for the weaker places.  Nothing was off-limits, in that easy way that lifelong friends have with one another.  We covered kids and parenting, picked over our marriages and memories and reinforced summer rituals we’d now instilled in our own children; Monday night square dancing, Friday night s’mores at the campfire. We gossiped and swapped stories.  We ate handfuls of berries straight from the vine.  Being in the patch accomplished many things.

When they were younger, Liza and I would drop our kids at the morning camp and race to the patch to pick and talk.  As they got older and able to join in, we’d occasionally bring them in the afternoons.  Even the most zealous berry picker soon became bored by our itinerant worker staying power.   They soon lost interest.

At home, berries were eaten plain or became ingredients for my annual ritual of jam-making.  I loved jam days; the washing, boiling and canning, ladling the sluggish ruby mixture into the cut glass Ball jars and later affixing the personal labels my artist friend Laura made for me.  The jams were my gift to dear friends at the holiday, a little bit of summer vacuum sealed in a jar.

It hasn’t quite been the same without the patch.  Yes, there are berries aplenty in the farmers markets around.  But it’s not the same.  It’s not like passing the field weekly and noting the height of the bushes, watching the farmer on his tractor and feeling the anticipation of opening day with the fervor of a baseball fan.  I miss the satisfying heft of lifting my pallet on the scale to be weighed, of stashing the boxes of fruit in the back of my car and closing the tailgate.

There’s talk of a new patch opening next year.  The plants are supposedly in the ground now, although I can't see them from the road.  Liza and I have more luxury of time as our children have aged.  In the absence of berry picking, we’ve found other places and ways to commune, on hikes with the dogs, in chairs at the beach with sunhats covering our heads.  Will we still find the same magic in the patch, that moment of release from our homebound selves?  Will our pattern be broken, our devotion lessened by the long break in our ritual?  I’ll let you know next summer.  

Hand Over Heart

Several thousand of us thundered to our feet for the national anthem at a recent college graduation. Predictably, these types of events are choked with the emotion of life’s passages.  I had been observing parents on the bleachers hugging family members and wincing back tears.  The graduates on the field, roasting in dark caps and gowns, excitedly waved cell phones as they located their families, while others fought sleep and hangovers.

 

Yet the instant the band struck up the anthem, the entire crowd stood and morphed into a stadium of reluctant zombies.  Operating on autopilot I began to sing.  Keep in mind that me – singing -  is not a pretty sound.  God didn’t grant me a set of pipes.  This was made more obvious by the fact that I was seated in a box with strangers, none of whom knew one another well, so it was … um…. really quiet except for me.  My voice tapered off as I panned around the room observing the group.  We looked sheepish, uncomfortable, as if it were uncool to be enthusiastic or patriotic at this moment.  In short order I ended up mouthing the words like everyone else.  I had succumbed to peer pressure.  Why had I suddenly felt foolish? 

 

What happened to the swollen sense of national pride that burst forth like a seed pod after that first Sept 11th?  Flags decorated lawns and overpasses, car bumpers and hats.  Hands were placed firmly over hearts, red white and blue everything sprouted like hives.  More than ten years later, we are tentative patriots.  We gauge our neighbors’ politics, we stick a finger in the air to test the atmosphere before we consider declaring that we love our country, despite its warts and fault lines.

 

Who remembers the needle hitting the record over the classroom loudspeaker in elementary school?  “Oh say can you see…” standing straight, one sock up and one down, chest out, facing the flag hanging from a pine pole in the corner.  It was an accomplishment to have memorized the national anthem and the pledge of allegiance.  Saying the rote words gave me a sense of belonging to a greater whole, a pride in our country and all that it stood for.

 

 

In the 1960s of my single digit years there was much to take pride in.  We had put men on the moon and discovered cures for diseases.  America was a land of  bountiful agriculture and continuous invention.  We produced “things” you could touch and products that took up space and streamlined living.  Detroit churned out shiny cars and bustling cities defined themselves as towns of steel and textiles, paper and shoes, television sets and refrigerators.  We dominated whole business sectors, conjured up Hollywood and all of this while welcoming a labor force to our shores that comprised the muscle and backbone of our manufacturing might.  We were a stew pot of ingenuity and moxie with a meteoric trajectory.  Our forefathers had shed blood in a revolution to gain independence.  That pledge of allegiance and national anthem were sacred stuff back then, they represented hard won freedom.

 

Things got upended in the 70’s.  It was a decade of turmoil, intent on throwing off the shackles of convention and complacency.  Authority figures became “the man,” cops become “pigs” and when the boy next door’s draft number was up, brothers and sons and boyfriends marched off to Vietnam and some of them didn’t come back.  And those that did, forever altered by the act of war, were shown our country’s collective back.  They were challenged, spit on, their sacrifice questioned.  They learned to hide their service like a jagged scar.

 

And as the decades ticked on, wars and conflicts came and went, and civilization progressed in some ways and devolved in others.  We lost a healthy respect for many things: our elders, appropriate discipline, boundaries and manners, sharing, saving, re-using, home-made, hand-me-downs and parenting with consequences, not just blind indulgence.  We downgraded the value of military service, the contribution of teachers and the virtue of stay at home mothers.  Celebrities with sex tapes became our aspirational heroes and we coveted anything bigger and newer: houses, cars, wardrobes and helpings.  Economize became supersize.  Our country settled into a disjointed, somewhat cagey relationship with national pride.   Today, we pull it out when it suits, as convenient as the windshield Police Benefit Association sticker that can help wriggle out of a speeding ticket.  

 

It’s not that we aren’t grateful for living here.  It’s more that we tend to forget just what we have to be thankful for.   Political schisms and the inability to compromise in Washington, the economic flat line, the drain of the wars, we have reasons to feel lackluster about the United States.  There are always things to criticize, that’s the cheap shot.  Thank God we live in a society where we can.  But somehow we’ve arrived at a place where national pride feels shameful, like joining a cult or participating in a skinhead rally.

 

 

Citizens today will tell you they are appreciative of our all-volunteer military.  Most of us will answer that we know war is hell and we understand there is a brutal cost for being free in the land of the brave. We welcome troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan at airports, stuff backpacks and donate dollars and then we head to the mall to pick up the summer swimsuit or buy the hot dogs for the July 4th BBQ. Because that’s simply the business of living.   

 

I know that patriotism isn’t just about standing at attention in front of a flag.  Real national pride is about standing up and acting.  What differentiates a good country from a GREAT country is its ability and desire to take care of its own.  This means not just the less than 1% of our population who volunteered to walk into the crucible in Iraq and Afghanistan multiple times, but the millions who fought in Vietnam, Korea and WW11.  When America needed them they answered the call.

 

While we are busy as a country, a community or as families honoring our veterans this July 4th, there is one thing we can all do.   When you hear the national anthem, or the flag marches past you, take a moment to reflect on all of the things that are right and good about America.  

 

Because I think we’ve lost something by not raising our collective voices at a ball park, a public dinner, a ceremony, wherever we are asked to sing the anthem.  I think that’s precisely the kind of thing that connects us, Black, White, Hispanic, Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic, Jewish, Atheist, whatever -- when we gather together with one unified voice.  Focusing for a moment on national pride allows our crazy quilt of a country to lay down our arms, set aside our anger and reflect how the whole is so much greater and more powerful than the sum of its parts.

 

 

This fourth of July, when I spot Old Glory in our loveable rag tag mountain town parade, I’m going to stand up straight, hand over my heart, no matter how silly that might look to my kids, or how much I may embarrass them.  I’m proud of our country.  And the only way we will go from good to great again is if we all begin to try to feel it too.