Don't Forget To Stop And Eat The Roses

Gary Larson's Far Side comic has always been one of my favorites, right up there with Dilbert.  This may be one of my favorite Far Side strips of all time.

My brother has been on a tough road lately.  About a year ago, a dear friend of his from college committed suicide.  Then, a few weeks ago, another dear friend died of cancer only a few months after being diagnosed.  Bearing in mind that my brother is only 41, he's having a hard time coming to grips with, as he put it, being old enough that these kinds of things happen to your friends.

He has always been a seize-the-moment kind of guy, and I know that these recent events are likely to push him even further in that direction.  You just never know what's going to happen tomorrow, after all.  I've always been more of a planner and a delayed-gratification kinda gal myself, but what's hitting me these days is how little time (relatively speaking) I have left with my kids at home.  Thing One in particular, who is already halfway through his sophomore year, taking the PSAT and thinking about colleges.  That whole days are long, years are short thing again.  We need to work on making more memories with them while they are home: life can't always be about soccer practice.  Time to eat some roses.

Another Cross-Cultural Moment

Thing One's high school soccer team this year included (very unusually) not one, but TWO German exchange students.  One sophomore from Hamburg, one junior from Hannover.  Given how much I have said over the years about the rural nature of this area, you can likely imagine the culture shock that two boys from city-center Germany are having here.  The one, who happens to be living with the family of a friend of mine, at least has three host siblings, and their house is in a neighborhood.  The other is living on a sheep farm with no other kids!  Apparently these kids were assigned to families all over the country by their exchange program and where they ended up was to some extent a matter of luck.

Karl, the kid from Hannover, ended up in carpools with me frequently because his host mother, the mother of another player from the team and I are all friends and live in the same area.  We joke that we carpool in self-defense, since between us we have nine very active children between the ages of 11 and 17!  Karl is a really nice kid, and although his English is heavily accented, it 's excellent.  In all the hours he's spent in my car overall, we've only run into one standard English word he couldn't remember, and as a consequence Thing One and I now know that the German word for "kite" literally translates as "air dragon."  

Not surprisingly, though, we do have the odd communication breakdown when figurative speech and slang get involved.  Having studied two foreign languages in school myself, both Chinese and German, I have been on the other end of that many times.  Sometimes you just have to know what something means, because it doesn't translate literally.  My high school Mandarin teacher explained to us once that if someone calls you a rotten turtle egg, it is the rough equivalent of being called an SOB in English.  Who knew?  I remember at one point having to explain the meaning of the word "hick" to Karl, and when somebody told him to put the biscuit in the basket (meaning to shoot the soccer ball into the goal) he was totally befuddled.  Unsurprisingly.  

So, with this as background, you can understand why I was a bit taken aback at the grocery store yesterday.  All I wanted to do was buy the kid a 17th birthday card, but I hadn't realized until then just how many teen-appropriate birthday cards rely on either figures of speech or language-based puns for their humor!   I took pictures of a few examples.  Pictures 1-2 and 4-5 are the front and inside views of the same cards, FYI.  

 

You couldn't blame the kid for looking at any one of these and going, "Huh??"  I finally found another one with humor that would translate across the language divide and bought that instead.

I'm glad he's here.  I'm deeply impressed that he had the nerve to leave everything familiar to him and expand his horizons, and I'm grateful that my son has learned something about Germany from him and also made a good friend in the process.  It's a step toward making the big world a tiny bit smaller, for both of them.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  Wishing you a happy day with your friends and loved ones.  

 

Not A Good Run

I told you about the former classmate of Thing One's who went missing recently but was found.  Another kid of roughly the same age from around here has been AWOL for a week or so now, apparently because he had a fight with his parents about his grades and took off.  Then, just yesterday, Thing One might have saved a third kid's life.

I was in the kitchen baking with Petunia when he yelled down from his room, "Mom, I need you to come look at this right now."  Something in his tone had me running up the stairs almost before he finished the sentence.  He told me to sit down and handed me his phone, which was displaying an Instagram post.  As soon as I read it I understood why he was concerned: the kid in question had written something that legitimately sounded suicidal.  Among other things, he wrote, "See you all on the other side when you get there."  We immediately reached out to the high school (for help identifying the kid since it was an IG account under an alias), and the vice principal called the police.  They actually came to the house to talk to us, although all we could do was show them the account and the post.  Thing One sent the kid a direct (private) message too, asking him to please talk to someone trustworthy before he did anything he couldn't walk back.

I'm really proud of Thing One.  Apparently, of all the followers this kid has on Instagram, he was the only one worried enough to talk to an adult after seeing the post.  I'm incredibly happy that the high school and police department acted so quickly.  I hope the kid is okay.  And I can't even fathom what would make a high school sophomore decide that life isn't worth living.  Reading back through his post history on my son's account, I can only guess that depression is involved, but what the hell do I know.  Hug your teenagers, folks.

The Spirit of Halloween

They found that boy, by the way.  Thank goodness.

Thing Two has soccer practice on Thursday nights.  Last night, his coach sent him over to goalie training, which is at the back of the large field complex.  There was another team practicing between where I was standing and the field where the goalies were working out, but I wasn't paying a lot of attention to them until the coach of that team started dropping pinnies on the ground in front of me.

Thing Two is one of those specks in the background.

Pinnies are the mesh 'vests' that coaches have players put on over their regular shirts when they are separating a team into smaller groups by color, by the way.

The coach arranged the pinnies as you see in the picture.  Then he handed a couple of bags of Halloween candy to his assistant and told him to place the candy under the pinnies, Easter-egg-hunt style.  Except, and this is the part that threw me, he told the guy to put a lot of candy under some pinnies, one piece under others and none at all under the rest.  I had to ask why, since it seemed like that would be a recipe for disaster.

The coach told me that he wanted to see how well his boys would share with each other, as a measure of character and team spirit.  We left before their practice was over, but I hope they made their coach proud.