Technology Great for Today’s High School Kids
Recently, I was in a high school during class change and there are two defining differences between my time in purgatory and now. For one thing, we were a whole lot older looking when we were 15 to 18 years old and, for another, electronic gadgets are de rigueur.
Not to dwell on the difference in appearance between the kids I saw shuffling passed and my memory of the mature and sophisticated young adults of my time, but the perception does have some truth to it.
Maybe it’s the style of dress. I’m still pretty sure the class of 1973 looked more world-weary and grown-up behind our over-sized granny glasses and beneath our flowing locks. (Yes, I had flowing locks down to my shoulders and a thick wave of brown hair that swept across my forehead and rested gently on my brow. No, really.)
We also had bell-bottom jeans, wide belts, psychedelic patterns, crushed velvet vests, see-through blouses, hot pants, and headbands. These definitely craft a more adult look. The style also makes every television series from that period look like a bad acid trip.
The second distinction, the fascination with gadgets, is made all the more evident by the many high school clichés that remain. The halls are still too small to hold all the students scurrying to their next class and smell of overactive glands, perfume, and magic markers.
The “office” continues to be intimidating with the secretaries who have heard it all, and the principal’s door remains the gate to the certain doom awaiting all students sent there “to see” the executioner.
The gyms still reek of sweat, damp towels, and humiliation. In a perfect universe the sadist that came up with climbing a rope, blood ball, and communal showers for adolescents of varying degrees of maturity is receiving wet towel snaps on his bare backside in Hades.
Arguably, photo-taking, Internet browsing, text-messaging cell phones are the most common devices many kids have now, but hardly the only privilege experienced by today’s teen. In the dark ages, we weren’t even allowed to use calculators during tests. We had to do everything long hand or figure out how to work a slide rule. This is probably the reason Americans used to do so poorly in math. The sheer terror of doing pages of problems on reams of scratch paper would make any normal person change their major to English.
Another impediment we 70s kids had to contend with was the mimeographed copy. Laser, ink-jet, and dot matrix printers, not to mention high-resolution copiers just make it too easy on youngsters. The mimeograph was the brainchild of ophthalmologists attempting to gain market share in the youth market. Usually, half the page was completely indecipherable so the teacher would have to read those portions to the class. The student had to trace in the missing letters and words.
The incomplete handout made for a great excuse for doing only part of an assignment. You could plead that your copy wasn’t legible and it worked sometimes. Kids now are stuck. A perfect reproduction cuts down on the wriggle room.
The one item I wished we’d had in prehistoric times is the I-pod and its ilk. How cool is it to listen to your favorite tunes without 400 feet of extension cord and a 40-pound boom box. The closest we came to portable were transistor radios from Japan. We referred to them as “transistor” because the technology was still new having been invented in 1947, only eight years before most of us were born.
Modern high schools now have computers, digital video and audio equipment, and the Internet. In the early 1970s we had reel-to-reel tape recorders, Dewey Decimal file cards, and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Copy and paste from the encyclopedia required scissors and severely limited the number of times it could be used. Scrolling was done on real scrolls and we had digital calculators until we ran out of fingers.
Teenagers in high school have some obvious advantages over the stone tablets and sharp sticks we had way back when. I don’t envy everything they have to contend with, but they do have some nice toys.

Grandfather Is Bad Influence
I told everyone right up front, don’t leave the kid around me or I’ll ruin him. Well, they didn’t listen and now he’s been “Grandfathered.”
What this means is I’ve taught Logan a lot of things, most of which, he would have been better off not knowing. However, the horse is long gone, the barn burned, and the bank’s called the mortgage.
The first thing I scrambled was his vocabulary. It has turned into a cross between the dialogue from a “Cheech and Chong” movie and Tourette’s Syndrome. He knows and uses “cool” appropriately along with “let’s rock and roll,” “idiot,” and “yahoo.” I thought I was doing a good thing by not cursing around him, but my substitute words don’t seem much better coming from the mouth of an almost three-year-old.
Logan has also picked up the driving lingo I got from my father. His favorites are, “Whoa, Betsy,” “Hang on Sally,” and “Look out, I’m coming through.” These are warnings I give when braking, taking a sharp curve, and passing through a mostly yellow light.
Logan has also picked up my pet names for our pets. (Sounds redundant, doesn’t it?) He calls Dottie, Sweetie and Girlfriend. Toto is Buddy, and Sadie is Sadie Sue.
My worst contribution to his eventual life of tattoos and piercings is an appreciation of my kind of music. Other than “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” I’ve always played what I like to listen to and sing along with when he’s in the car with me. He is officially a fan of Bret Michaels and Poison can sing most of the chorus for “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.”
The only good I’ve done to him is he doesn’t like Barry Manilow or Manheim Steamroller
His grandmother is a music fan too and she likes to blast her tunes when I’m gone. This is necessary because we generally don’t have the same taste in music, or movies for that matter. My wife won’t watch anything but romantic comedies. I’ll watch them with her if there’s a good car chase or at least one exploding head.
Thanks to grandma, Logan really digs Cheap Trick and can sing along with a number of their songs. I even burned a CD for our car trips with his choices on it.
I’ve started passing on my compulsion for cleaning to the poor kid. He thinks it’s fun to spray Windex and wipe things off with paper towels. I’ve had to hide the bottle to keep him from cleaning objects that don’t do well with ammonia, like the carpets and the dogs.
Logan insists on helping me gather the trash, too. When I pull the bag from the 90-bag roll, I always put the twist tie in my mouth just so I know where it is. He thinks it’s an integral part of the procedure, so he has to have a garbage bag tie between his teeth.
I’m intentionally teaching the grandkid to wash cars, now. He loves the sponge part, a possible benefit of watching “SpongeBob Square Pants.” He needs a little work with the hose since he hoses all three cars simultaneously even though two are in the garage already clean.
I’m trying to not cause any more harm, but the forces of nature conspire against me. Before Logan was born I teased my wife that the first rotten thing I wanted to teach him was to pee in the snow. I have no idea why I chose that as my legacy to him, but then I try not to make sense unless it is absolutely unavoidable.
I reneged on that threat thinking I might at least spare him a public indecency charge. I was undone by a wriggling little boy with a bursting bladder in a wooded area with no available restroom. Now, he knows how to pee on a tree and he is quite proud.
He was a perfectly good boy until he met me and I’m trying very hard not to introduce any more of my bad notions into his psyche. After all, I don’t want to be sitting next to him, waiting to see the principal when he’s in kindergarten.
I did enough of that when I was in school and I’m a bit old to get any more swats.

Pondering the Really Big Questions
There are things in the universe that have baffled personkind through the ages. I’ve lived half a century and these mysteries will surely remain long after I’m gone.
Let’s start with why don’t dogs have bellybuttons? They had umbilical cords, so where did the innies, or would they have been outies, go? If this condition occurred in people, women would have one less place to pierce and men would not have to harvest lint from it.
Why is it that the one tool you need for any job, is either lost or you haven’t bought it yet? Of course, you don’t discover this until you have parts lying everywhere, portions of your home or driveway blocked, and it’s Sunday evening and the hardware stores are all closed.
Why is spaghetti sauce irresistibly drawn to white shirts or blouses? You can wear a bib, or even cover your body in Saran wrap, and there will still be one small permanent dot of red right in the place most noticeable by everyone, including the blind.
I tested this annoying dictum at my sister’s wedding last weekend. I tucked a large napkin into the collar of my white dress shirt, put my face into the spaghetti, (Yes, I got the spaghetti instead of the chicken.) and ate very, very slowly. I had two specks of sauce on my sleeve. The magnetic properties of clothing confirmed.
This odd attraction also happens with pizza cheese, mustard, grape jam, and soy sauce.
Where does Kevin Costner find those movie scripts that only make sense to the inebriated? “Field of Dreams” was so good I watched it alone so I could choke back tears. It was a sappy movie, but every guy that ever had a father liked it. Now, Kevin seems to have developed an aversion to anything written by people. He’s obviously hired those 1,000 monkeys pounding on typewriters and none of them have heard of Shakespeare.
Why do automobile manufacturers still put turn signals on cars? My obsessive-compulsive stepson and I seem to be the last two drivers on the planet who know what that little stick on the steering column does. Most people don’t use it at all, making the rest of us guess what they are about to do. As a consolation, we have a 50-50 chance of being correct.
There is one thing worse than no turn signal and that’s the ever popular “fooled you.” Twice in the last week I’ve seen motorists turn on their left signal and then turn abruptly to the right.
Who does know that their body is not symmetrical? My barber asked me if I knew that my ears were uneven. I replied that the fact that my glasses only touch one ear and that I have to leave my collar unbuttoned so I can hear with the other, was a dead giveaway.
I’ve also discovered a birth mark on the back of my neck that is shaped like Indo-China, my chin has completely disappeared, and my wallet no longer leaves a wear mark on my jeans because I have no butt.
Did you know that the amount of traffic on the road is directly proportionate to how big of a rush you are in? If you’ve got nowhere to be or you’re driving to see a family member you’ve spent months avoiding, the highway clears out and everyone goes the over the speed limit. Pedestrians wave you by and you hit every light so perfectly you don’t need your brake pedal.
If you’re about to be late for an appointment or work, a secret signal goes out and everyone within 90 miles gets in front of you, the police set up radar traps, and traffic lights get stuck on red for hours. I observe this occurrence every day on my way to and from work, and defy anyone to offer a single instance when this infallible law was broken.
The list goes on, but that’s another column, which brings up another big question. Have you noticed how columns always fit perfectly onto the page in the newspaper? How do the writers know when to end a column? Hmm.

Senior Moments
Granted, I expected my memory to slowly worsen as I age. It is a natural part of the disintegration process that starts the moment we pop into the world and draw our first lead and mercury laced breath.
This is the one area of life I’ve reached the 99th percentile. I can’t even climb the stairs and recall why I took the trip. A few days ago, I had to brush my teeth and went upstairs to our master bedroom’s bathroom. Before I made it I checked to see if the towels in the linen closet were neat, put the telephone on the receiver, and grabbed a pair of dirty socks I’d forgotten to take downstairs to the laundry room. Back downstairs, as I was tossing the socks I remembered I hadn’t brushed my teeth. Well, I needed the exercise, anyway.
I have a pair of huge flowerpots I borrowed from my sister-in-law to raise tomatoes in. The plant died in a week and I’ve been trying to return those pots for two months. I go into Elyria nearly every day where my sister-in-law lives. I’ve moved those grass killers all over the backyard hoping I’d remember to toss them into the car, but there they sit, in my polka dot yard, mocking me.
Recently, I ran into one of the two sisters who have given me haircuts for 4 or 5 years. (I can’t remember how long?) I could not recall her name. I stared, I apologized, and I went through the alphabet trying to remember. No luck. Paula had to tell me her name. You’d think the fact that she wields a straight razor near my carotid artery would etch her name into my cerebral cortex.
In July, Toto spent the night in the garage because I forgot I’d let him into it for his late night pee. My computer is next to the garage door and I kept hearing this scratching noise the next morning. I was relieved it wasn’t my hard drive, but Toto has as yet to forgive me. His memory is longer than mine and he won’t go into the garage unless I go with him.
On Saturday I took a trip to Norwalk to pick up a cargo van for Enterprise. The keys were in Norwalk but the van was in another town. I drove to this town passed signs with the name clearly written, spent some time there talking to people, and even had a map with the city’s name on it. You’d have thought I could remember the name of the town when I got home and told my wife about my exciting day. Nope.
I remembered it was Willard just this morning as I was writing this column.
I’m beginning to affect my wife who has the most remarkable memory of any one I’ve ever met. She worked in med-surg for a couple of decades, but can recall the name, room number, and bed of every patient she ever had. It’s down right freaky.
Twenty years with me has begun to take its toll.
This last week, my wife and I ran some errands and stopped for sandwiches. We used her placard to park in the handicapped space. We are the only two people to have read the warning on the card about driving with it hanging from the rearview mirror and the increased possibility of running over nuns and school children.
We always, and I do mean always, take the placard down before moving the truck. My wife has the elbow bruises from me whacking her with the center console armrest, where the card normally resides, to prove it.
After we’d returned home and pulled into the garage, we noticed it still hanging from the mirror. Had we forgotten to remove it? Did I have an episode and put it back up to remove the contents of the center console? Was this the work of poltergeist? Our mutual senior moment makes this a mystery with no solution.
I wish I could give you hope that this is my malady, but now that I clean rental cars for fun and fortune, I can say that the human mind is one faulty blob. In addition to the usual coins and paper napkins, I’ve pulled a baseball glove with a softball inside, a half empty baby bottle, and several pair of sunglasses, CDs, and someone else’s handicap placard from various vehicles we rent. There’s also a baby carriage sitting on a shelf that arrived before I did.
Senior moments, had one lately?

While The Wife is Away
My wife went to New Hampshire, state motto, “We have ticks the size of Buicks,” to visit our best friends. I’ve been alone with three dogs for 4 days and completely unsupervised, neither of which is ever a good thing.
The first thing I did was something I’d been fantasizing about for years. I cleaned off the kitchen table. I hadn’t seen the top of it since we’d bought it a couple of years ago, so this was my big chance. It still looked like a table. My wife will not be happy.
Things spiraled out of control from there.
I satisfied another deep longing and emptied out the condiment drawer in the refrigerator. This was supposed to be a “Fresh Sealed” drawer. The condiments were fresh and sealed when we got them in the previous century.
We used to have a condiment cupboard drawer until the infamous “Gray Horseysauce Incident.”
My first full day as a wild and crazy single guy I did what most men do when left to their own devices. I started working on the leftovers in the ‘frig. I threw out the spotted green beans and the brown sour cream. I devoured the half pack of hot dogs and made peanut butter and grape jam sandwiches out of the remaining hotdog buns.
To continue my avoidance of cooking for one I went on the pizza-my-wife-hates diet. It’s a brand name thin crust frozen pizza that tastes better if you leave the cardboard on the bottom. However, it only takes 12 minutes to cook, so a little sacrifice is allowable.
By the third day my jaw was too sore to chew another human “Bonz” so I went into the bowels of the freezer and found frozen sirloin patties. Now, I know that the chance of cow being in the patty is even less likely that it will be a choice cut of any kind. But again, a few minutes on the grill and your eating something that tastes like cow.
To round out this sumptuous meal I dug all the way into the back of the freezer and found frozen corn. They weren’t from Mr. Birdseye though they were quick frozen, in the last ice age. I guessing there was a lot of wild flavorless corn 10,000 years ago so they saved a package for me.
This next part is not for the squeamish or faint of heart.
I had three wheat buns that needed to be eaten so I made an equal number of “sirloin” burgers. The first bun was on top of the two attached buns and was fine. One of the second buns had a questionable spot. It may have been mold. It might have been a burned dough bubble. It could have fallen from someone’s nose.
Feeling lucky, I removed the bad spot and devoured the bun. After all, what are you going to do with an extra burger?
Not to be ignored, my three mutts have been something less than inconspicuous. They whined and scratched to be fed, watered, taken for walks, and to visit the facilities in the backyard. Naturally, one of them had to get sick. Satan Sue gets the trots about once a month for no apparent reason other than to give me something to curse about. I know it doesn’t help, but I feel better and the other two fur beasts hide so I’ll know it wasn’t their present to me. Satan spent the better part of a day decorating the livingroom carpet without warning or the slightest sound.
My wife will be home in two more days and I’d like to accomplish one more feat before I pick her up at Cleveland Hopkins, motto “You can’t park here.”
Anyone have a recipe that takes taco sauce, cocktail sauce, and caramel syrup?