On White Privilege

If there was ever a hobby absolutely guaranteed to get you up-close-and-personal attention from police officers every so often, geocaching is it.

Cachers spend a lot of time hanging around in weird places looking for hidden containers.  You'll see us near guardrails and bridges and telephone poles and in corners of parking lots, or poking around in patches of woods or in parks.  Sometimes the police officer will spot you himself.  Other times a concerned citizen will call them because they've seen you somewhere and are wondering what you're up to.  (This is a perfectly legal activity, for the record.  The containers are all hidden on public property, or with the owner's permission on private property.)

Most officers I've run into have heard of geocaching.  The ones that haven't have generally been polite and receptive to the explanation, although they sometimes still run my plates.  A couple have even pitched in to help me find the container I was looking for.  One that I met recently was actually a geocacher himself!  I emerged from a bush near a light post to see him pull up and roll down his window.  I was expecting to have to go into my standard explanation spiel, but his first words were, "Is there is a cache in there?"  Whew.

Another recent interaction was a bit (or a lot) more Big Brotherish.  I was out with a friend.  We spotted a Tupperware container tucked in the end of a guardrail and brought it back to the car to sign the log.  (The whole point of this game is to find the hidden container, sign in and then replace the container for the next finder.)  He went back to return the container alone while I looked at the map to see where we should go next.  Apparently somebody spotted him doing that, and decided that since the guardrail in question was maybe 200 feet from a small local bridge, we were trying to blow up the bridge.  Good grief.  Anyway, maybe 15 minutes later his cell phone rings, and it's the police.  He was driving that day, and I gather they used his license plate info to track him down and get his phone number.   Long story short, we explained what we'd been doing, exactly what was in the guardrail and where, and, oh by the way, that the container had been there for TEN YEARS already without anything blowing up.  They never called him back, so I guess they checked it out and verified that we were telling the truth.

Now here's the thing.   Both of us are Caucasian and very non-threatening looking.  My friend has neatly trimmed gray hair and is nearly 60.  I look like the middle-aged soccer mom that I am.  And the car he was driving that day was a Range Rover, fer crissake.  We don't exactly look like a stereotypical pair of troublemakers.  I think it's safe to say that the color of our skin, our general appearance and the cars we drive get us the benefit of the doubt whenever police officers interact with us.  We are fortunate that way.

I have one friend who looks for all the world like a stereotypical Vietnam vet, although apparently he isn't.  Big guy in his 70s, long flowing white hair, bushy beard, bandanna.  Always looks like he just got off a Harley.  Another friend, a line cook at a diner, drives a beat-up car and is so skinny he could easily be mistaken for a drug user.  Both of them have been hassled a lot.  The first one won't go near any park that has a playground anymore.  Guess too many concerned moms have called the cops on him.  The second has actually had his car (fruitlessly, I might add) searched for drugs multiple times.  And both of them are Caucasian, too.

Where I get polite questions, and other white friends get hassled, darker-skinned people doubtless would get arrested or shot in today's America.  Can't imagine why there aren't many minority geocachers.

Preview

With the exception of Thing One, who came back last night for soccer practice, my children have been at my in-laws’ house since Friday for their annual ‘grandparent camp.’  In the entire week of their absence, I did one load of laundry, ran the dishwasher twice, and cooked one dinner.  I spent one full day out of town on vacation, went out to dinner with my husband twice, and spent minimal time keeping the house clean since it stayed clean after I went through it on Sunday.  My only real responsibility was the care and feeding of the three pets.

This is a temporary state, to be sure: Himself and I looked at the calendar for the rest of the summer last night and it is going to be totally insane with trips and soccer and tryouts and appointments.  The usual summer madness.  Still, I sometimes wonder what we are going to talk about when the kids have all grown up and moved out.

On The Family Tendency To “Neat-Freak”

My mother’s family, anyway.  The tendency to twitch until everything is put in its place and spotless seems to be genetic, and goes hand-in-hand with the face that says “Tell me your life story.”  (I’ve heard some absolutely crazy-personal stories from total strangers.)  Back in the days of shag carpets, my grandmother’s carpets were always neatly raked.  Remember carpet rakes??  There is not so much as a speck of dust in my mother’s house to this day.  They know better than to enter.  Carrying on the tradition, I’m embarrassed to admit that the first thing I did when walking back into my house after a couple of days in the hospital when I delivered either Thing Two or Petunia (don’t remember which) was to grab a broom and sweep the kitchen floor.  My MIL just shook her head!

Yes, my house usually looks decent, but I stress when things are disordered around me.  Clutter hits a certain point and then all other activities cease till there’s a cleanup.  My family has learned to ask how they can help and/or get out of the way when that happens.  It’s not something I’m proud of, it just is what it is.  It means that I feel like I have to clean whenever someone is coming over, even my best friends or my family.  My best girlfriend is also Italian, and we joke that I won’t notice messes at her house if she promises not to notice the ones at mine!  At least we can laugh about it.

This is the annual week that my beloved in-laws take all five of their grandchildren, who range in age from just nine to almost fifteen.  Given that four of the five are boys, this is an undertaking. They have movie days and beach days and museum days, and today they actually did some crazy rope course up in trees!  I got some great pics from that.  I dropped them off Friday evening and will pick them up Friday or Saturday.  Since my husband was leaving Friday morning to visit a friend in Detroit, I decided that I needed a vacation too, so I packed up the dog and took a road trip.  We saw some beautiful scenery and found a bunch of geocaches and she did really well at a hotel, despite never having stayed in one before. She’s a trouper.

I arrived home this afternoon, ran a couple of errands, and then cleaned the house so it will stay clean for a few days. No surprise there, but at least I took a vacation first.  I’m considering that a victory!!

Time In A Bottle

Okay, time can slow down now, please.

When I was a kid, I remember my mother saying that the days were long but the years were short.  I didn’t understand then, but dear god, do I understand now.

No more elementary schoolers in the house anymore.  Petunia will be in sixth grade next year, Thing Two in seventh.  And worst of all for this mama’s heart, Thing One in tenth.  Sophomore year already.  How did we get here so quickly?  Answer: one long day and short year at a time, I guess.

Thing One is going to a couple of soccer camps this summer.  They are called ID Camps...the idea is that multiple college coaches get together and offer one camp at one college so that kids who are potentially interested in attending/playing at a subset of those colleges can meet a bunch of coaches at once.  I’m struggling with this, partially because it means that in order to pick camps, he has to think about where he’d like to go to college already.  He has to make up the biography that players give to potential coaches.  And since these are sleepaway camps, one five or six hours away in another state, I am finding myself doing the same shopping that friends with college-bound recent graduates are doing right now: XL-sized twin bedding, towels, fans for unairconditioned dorm rooms, laundry bags and quarters and detergent.  I am so not ready for this.  I don’t care HOW big the kid is, he’s still my baby.  I will let him go, and I will try to smile about it, but that’s all I can promise right now.

School Logic

Yes, I’m still alive. All is pretty well, even...it’s just been crazy, and now it’s been so long since I posted that it seems like whatever goes up next should be of major significance!  This really isn’t, but no better time than the present to get back on the horse, so I’m going with it. 

Thing One is finishing up his freshman year of high school (yikes.)  With this comes finals, and with that, the final for his math class.  Mercifully, Himself has been able to keep up with the curriculum and work with him where he needed help with it at home so far.  I also got well past what he’s currently studying back in the Stone Age sometime (think the last math class I took was in 1992 or 1993) but I have no desire whatsoever to relearn it all now, and am beyond grateful that I don’t have to!  Anyway, this is review week in class, but due to unfortunate family circumstances, his math teacher is out on leave.  His class has a sub who has some basic math skills, but is essentially there just to maintain order.  The kids are supposed to be working on the review material on their own. 

I asked him what happens when somebody has a question.  I was told (which utterly floored me) that they are supposed to go out into the hall and ask the hall monitor, who is actually a math teacher.  

I didn’t even bother to ask him the obvious question: i.e., why the hell the math teacher isn’t subbing for the math class as opposed to sitting in the hall making sure nobody does drugs in the bathroom or randomly wanders the halls or whatever it is hall monitors do in large public high schools these days.  

I strongly suspect that the answer has something to do with union regulations.  I’d love to hear from anyone who has had a positive experience with any major teachers’ union, but the one here seems to have elevated the pursuit of mediocrity to an art form.  

Rough Around The Edges But A Heart Of Marshmallow

Thing One and Petunia share a soccer coach.  To say that he is blunt would be an understatement of epic proportions: he's one of those inherently loud Northeasterners (originally from the NYC area, I would guess, based on his choices in sports teams) who speaks his mind in no uncertain terms and often in profanity-laden ones, depending on his audience.  Having seen the man coach teenaged boys first, I was more than a little dubious about how that would translate to my ten year-old daughter, but fortunately he is able to filter himself around the girls.  As a coach, he is a yeller, albeit one every bit as quick to yell praise as criticism.  Petunia was terrified of him until she got used to his decibel level, but her first choice for next year is his team, if that tells you anything about the turnaround in her opinion of him.

Anyway, this evening there was a tryout for his team.  I was running back and forth between three fields between the three kids, so I didn't get to watch as much of the tryout as I would have liked, but Petunia seemed to be doing an awful lot of sitting on the sideline and was looking rather forlorn as a result.  After a while, he called her over to him and they had one of those conversations between a coach and a player that you sometimes see on the sidelines of a televised football game, where the coach is holding a clipboard in front of his face so you can't read his lips.  After a minute or two, she nodded and then he told her to grab a pinney and sent her into the game.  I asked her about that in the car on the way home.  She said that he called her over to reassure her that she wasn't playing much because they already knew that she was going to make the team and there were other players he needed to look at more.  Clearly he understands how hard she is on herself, and he both noticed her mood and took the time to make her feel better in the middle of a busy tryout.

Strangely enough, he had a very similar interaction with Thing One last weekend, adjusted for age and gender.  Thing One is one of those kids who takes his job on the field very seriously.  Whenever he's pulled out of a game, if there's any question at all about it, the first thing he does is ask the coach if he did something wrong.  It's actually become kind of a running joke with the coaches although they do legitimately appreciate that he's asking because he wants to get it right the next time.  The boys had two games last weekend, a regular league game on Saturday and a huge State Cup game on Sunday.  Before the Saturday game, the coaches told the boys that they were trying to figure out a way to win the game while resting the starters as much as possible for Sunday, so they should be expecting some odd assignments on the field.  Thing One was one of the boys told to expect to sit more than usual.  He played most of the first half and came out just before halftime.  He didn't go back in after halftime, and seemed ok until every other boy sitting out at the time was sent back in other than him, at which point he actually started pacing up and down the sideline.

As he recounted the conversation afterward, around then this coach asked what in the world he was doing, and he asked if he was going to get back into the game.  The coach looked at him and said, "I already told you that you were going to sit more than usual today.  When there's a big game, you play every damned minute of it because we need you in there, and you know it as well as I do.  Now sit your &%$&% ass down on that bench and &%#$& REST!"

Clearly, his internal marshmallow takes different forms with ten year-old girls and fourteen year-old boys, but no doubt it's there in both cases.  The man cares deeply about the kids he coaches and both of my kids are fortunate to have him training them.  My daughter is also fortunate that he has that filter!

Yeah, I Guess A Few Things Have Changed

2018: My son's high school has a strict no-tolerance, no exception drug and alcohol policy.  This includes nicotine (vaped or otherwise.)

Late 1980s: My high school had a smoking lounge, and most of the kids drank alcohol well before the legal age in the US, but then again, we were outside the US.  It wasn't something we officially talked about at school, though.

Mid 1970s: See picture below, taken today of the "Class Favorites" page of a high school yearbook.  Sorry, I know it's a bit hard to read.  Aside from the clearly dated choices in musicians and actors, holy cow: do you see that their favorite brands of cigarettes (Marlboro) and beer (Heineken) are listed?  And that their favorite mixed drink was 7&7??

It also cracks me up that their favorite athlete was OJ Simpson.  Talk about a time capsule!