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.

Fifteen

Thing One always loved school starting from his first days in nursery school, so when he came home one day around Christmas of his kindergarten year telling me that he hated school and didn’t want to go anymore, I knew something was up.  It turned out that there was a kid in his class who was picking on him and generally making his life miserable.  I talked to the teacher about it, she had a chat with him and switched some seats around in the classroom, and things got back to normal. A week or two after this I was in the classroom volunteering and met this kid for the first time. Watching his behavior, I understood why he’d upset a lot of the other kids, but as an adult all I wanted to do was give this boy a hug. From my perspective, it was easy to tell that he was screaming out for love and attention.

I met his mother once in the school pickup line. She looked more like his older sister than his mother, and she had a couple of very young children with her as well. I wanted to give her a hug too.

This kid was only at our school for a couple of years, and then he moved and we didn’t hear anything else about him.

This morning, I opened my Facebook page and there he was.  I wouldn’t have recognized his picture because it’s been so many years, but I remembered his name as soon as I saw it. He’s listed as missing from a nearby city and people are desperately trying to find him. He’s 15 years old, just like my Thing One. There but for the grace of God.  If you are a praying sort of person, please say a prayer for his safety and well-being.

Cross-Cultural Moment

I got an email yesterday from a guy in Germany who is coming to the US next month for business and wants to find a series of my geocaches while he’s here.  These particular caches all require solving some sort of puzzle to get the final coordinates.  He’d gotten all but three of the puzzles in the series and was very politely requesting help with the remaining few, which is a totally ok thing to do.

One of the three is a complicated cipher but one that would theoretically work equally well in English or German, so it was just a matter of telling him what sort of cipher it is.  The other two made me laugh, though.  The solving of one requires both a knowledge of how to keep a box score in baseball and an understanding of the Abbott and Costello “Who’s On First” skit.  The other requires familiarity with certain episodes of the old “I Love Lucy” show.  It doesn’t surprise me at all that a native German would have trouble with those!  I can’t even imagine trying to solve puzzles that rely on a knowledge of German pop culture.  Talk about frustrating.  If the situation were reversed I would certainly appreciate kindness, so I sent him a bunch of links to helpful Wikipedia pages and told him to please get back to me if he still had any trouble.  My family is actually going to Germany next summer (Himself grew up there as an Army brat and wants the kids to see it) so maybe I will find myself in the position that he is in now while trying to find geocaches on that trip!  Who knows.

As a side note, I’ve been very surprised at how many stereotypical red-blooded American guys of my acquaintance don’t know how to keep a box score.  The critical piece of information as far as puzzle-solving is concerned is that each position on the baseball field has its own designated number between one and nine, but a significant number of people seem not to know that, judging by the number of questions I’ve gotten on this particular puzzle.   I didn’t even grow up in the US for the most part, but every summer we would go to one major league baseball game, and my father and my uncle taught me how to keep a box score. I still remember how. Makes me think of them every time I do it.  This puzzle was in their honor.

Courage

Had one of those fascinating “people talk to me” moments the other day.  I was chatting with the parents of a boy on Thing Two’s soccer team before pickup from practice, and the woman mentioned that she came to the US from Hungary at 22.  The husband added that he’d arrived at 17, joining his stepfather who had mysteriously disappeared from the family home in Hungary years before and then contacted him out of the blue from what might as well have been Mars.  The two had been high school sweethearts but then he emigrated and they broke it off.  Five years later, he called her and asked if she was married yet.  Since she wasn’t, he told her that she should come and join him!  She arrived alone, speaking no English whatsoever, and because of traffic he was three hours late to pick her up at the airport.  She said she spent those three hours sobbing and confused and frightened. I can only imagine. There was no going back, and she had no idea what she was going toward.

They’ve been married for almost 25 years now and have two beautiful children. It sounds like they’ve made a good life for themselves here.  And both of them have serious guts!  I’m in awe.