High Plains Panhandler

La Chateau des Pyrenees

We have a small print of La Chateua des Pyrenees by Rene Magritte hanging in our living room. It's a picture of a gigantic boulder floating over some breaking waves. At the very top of the boulder is a castle, which is apparently carved out of the rock.

Alex, Suzanne, and I were sitting under the picture. Alex pointed at it and said, in his most official three-year old voice, "That's a rock."

I asked him what was on top of the rock, and he looked at the picture for a long time and then shrugged. Suzanne whispered to him that a castle was up there. Then he announced that, yes, a castle was on top of the boulder. When I asked him how he knew that (pretending that I hadn't heard Suzanne), he gave me a long look, as if sizing me up. Then he shrugged again and said simply, "I know rocks."

Far be it for me to question his expertise ever again.

Doctor, Doctor

We've suffered through plenty of ear infections during the past few years, so much so that we've become quite adept at recognizing the early signs of infections (one of the most subtle being: "Daddy, ma ear hurts!"). This time, however, Alex went far beyond a simple ear infection. The doctor told us he had a ruptured ear drum, which, based on my extensive scientific background (watching the movie Outland in high school), I immediately understood that without the proper space helmet to contain his ruptured ear drum, Alex's head would explode.

So Suzanne gave me a few clear instructions: at lunch go by the drug store and pick up Alex's prescription of ear medicine. Bring it home. Repeat if necessary.

I went by Walgreens pharmacy, waited in line, and then, helped by the nice assistant pharmacy guy, I grabbed the medicine and was ready to go. Then nice assistant asked me if I needed any help or instructions.

That's when I messed up.

I simply said, "No, that's okay. It's for my little boy. I'll just put some of this in his ear and he'll be fine."

Whoops. The problem was that the medicine was for drinking, not for squirting in the ear. As soon as I exposed my medication plan, the assistant's eyes got wide, his face white, and he pinned me down by the wrist.

"Wait, sir, you need to talk to the pharmacist. This is oral medication. You really need to talk to the pharmacist. Don't move. Wait here. Don't go anywhere."

Then he sprinted past the counters of vials, containers, and packages and grabbed the head pharmacist by the shoulders. I could tell he was the head guy because he wore a Dr. Frankenstein-style lab coat. He whispered into the head pharmacist's ear, and then they both rushed over to me.

"Sir," said the pharmacist, leaning over the counter and getting a few inches from my face, "you must administer this medicine orally. Please do not put in in your ear."

"It's for my little boy," I said.

"Then don't put it in his ear!"

"Okay. It goes in his mouth."

"That's right. And keep it refrigerated."

"What? His mouth?"

"No!" There was honest anguish on his face, the anguish brought on by sleepless nights fearing lawsuits. "No, the medicine."

"Ok, look, I'm just the delivery boy. My wife is much smarter than I am. Plus, she reads instructions. I think we'll be fine."

Then I left, but when I looked back, I saw the pharmacist and his assistant clutching their hands nervously, watching me as if I were a doughboy wading off to fight the Germans, knowing that I'd never come back alive.

The Speech Tourney II

(This is the second part of my speech tournament judging adventure.)

Our first contestant walked briskly into the room. She glanced at the sheet of quotes and then asked for two minutes of preparation time, during which she turned away from our judge's table and held her finger to her head, concentrating, as if she were sending out potent waves of ESP.

When she began speaking, she morphed into Public Speaking Person with a deep radio voice and frightening hand gestures. The quote she picked for her presentation was this: "Sometimes it takes a little war to make you feel important."

That quote is absolutely dripping with sarcasm, and she didn't get it at all. Instead, she became Hawk Girl and brandished her mace in the air while saying things such as: "War is good for both sides. It makes both sides feel important. When Iraq attacked us, we attacked them back and felt important about it."

Hold the tomatoes! Was she serious? Yet, as a judge, I couldn't betray any look of amazement , so I simply scribbled quick and furious notes on her evaluation sheet: "Make sure you detail your evidence." Really what I wanted to write was, "AIIIEEE! Shoot me now!" and "This is why you can't vote until you're 18."

Six students out of the seven who presented all picked this quote, and the sad part of this wretched story is that they all missed the point. Every one of them thought it really meant that we don't fight wars for freedom or liberation or defense, but we do it to feel important. That argument would be fine if they were using a little bit of irony, but that room was irony-free. The students were deadly earnest: fighting a war is good for everyone because everyone feels important about it. Wowza!

The presenter I gave my highest marks to spoke on a different topic: "We live in a time of violent peace." Her speech was quite good, much better than anyone else in the room. When the last presenter had finished and we, the three mighty judges, had completed our assessments, the head missionary asked if we could compare notes. I was okay with that, as long as we didn't change any of our votes. So he looked at my number one choice and smacked his head. "Oh, I wanted to make her number one, too!"

But he didn't, because he was a silly person.

He asked me if he was supposed to write anything down on his list. I told him that was the whole point of judging. Giving feedback would be a nice thing to do. He scratched his head and looked at his watch. I don't think he understood.

Afterward I met up with my two fellow judges in the special judges' lounge. Inside the tournament people had set up tables with sandwiches, chips, cookies, and fruit. I grabbed a coke and tried to talk to the two missionaries, but they were gorging themselves on food. There's a scene in A Christmas Story where Ralphie's brother, Randy, makes his mother laugh by smushing his face into him mashed potatoes and oinking like a pig. This is how the two Mormon missionaries devoured their food. They didn't pause, the didn't stop. They inhaled it all in seconds. Then they went back for more. The only other time I saw arms move that fast was on a 80 year old woman in front of a slot machine in Las Vegas.

"They don't feed you much, do they?" I asked.

"I know English!" said the second missionary, pasta salad falling from his mouth.

I don't know how the impromptu speakers faired after that. I suppose they went on to the finals. What I do know is that I had fun judging, and I'll do it again next year. I'll just make sure to bring a translator, just in case.

The Speech Tourney

This weekend I was invited to be a judge at a speech tournament at Tascosa High School. Here are my qualifications to judge a high school speech tournament: I answered the phone.

Actually, when I got the phone call, the student on the other end said they got my name somehow (probably from Homeland Security) and wondered if I would like to judge the semi-finals or finals. I told him I'd do the finals, since that sounded like the best time to crush and destroy young hopes and dreams. He said, "Yes, the finals would be good for that."

So I showed up for the my first round at 1:30. This was the impromptu presentation. In it, we (there were three of us judges in the room - more on that later) would give each student a list of quotations. From there, they'd take a couple of minutes to prepare their thoughts and then launch into their presentation, somehow tying the quote in to whatever profundity they would like to express.

Before the first student walked in, I checked with the other two judges about what exactly we were supposed to do (my instructions at the check-in desk were surprisingly non-existent), but they had no idea. My two judging comrades, who were awfully young, must have just graduated high school themselves. That's when I noticed their name badges, which pronounced loudly "Church of Latter Day Saints Missionary."

"So you're missionaries?" I said.

"That's right," said the leader of the two. "We're the one who ride bikes around town."

"I bet that's a chilly job!" Haha, a little ice breaker there. The high that day was in the low 40s.

"I'm from Utah," said the leader.

"I wouldn't have guessed," I said.

The leader missionary pointed at his missionary friend. "Can you believe that he just learned English four months ago?"

Boy, that one took me by surprise. "Come again?" I said.

"He just learned English four months ago."

"In Utah!" said the other missionary, a big Osmand-style smile on his face.

"So . . . um," I didn't know how to say this gently. "So you just learned English and you're judging a speech tournament?"

Missionary number two jerked his thumb toward himself and said proudly, "I know English!"

"All righty," I said.

"Our bishop told us they needed volunteer judges," said the first missionary, "so here we are!"

"We sleep on the floor!" exclaimed the second missionary.

"Not any more," said the first one. "We stay at the bishop's house."

"All righty," I said.

And then that awkward let-me-ask-you-about-church silence filled the room. I knew, I just knew, that they were going to hit me up and save me from my devilish ways. I waited for it, but they didn't say a word, which then made me feel insulted, as if I wasn't good enough to get some good, old-fashioned missionary help. So I tapped my pencil against the table while the three of us stewed uncomfortably for a few more seconds until our first contestant came in.

That's when the fun began.

(Part II of this arduous story comes tomorrow.)

Kiki's Birthday Party

This weekend was Kiki's 70th birthday party in Houston (she's Suzanne's mom, known to all 843 grandchildren as Kiki -- someone once told us that they had seen a billboard in Hawaii that said "Don't Shake the Kiki!" which was supposed to teach people not to shake their small children. So if you meet my mother-in-law, don't shake her).

Through a series of coincidences, serendipity raised its sparkly head, and we were able to commandeer the company plane for the trip from here to there. When all five of us showed up in Houston, Kiki looked as though she had been hit in the head with a brick, which meant that she was either happy to see us or she was wondering why I was ignoring the restraining order.

We had a great time: pizza and birthday cake Saturday night and a swanky brunch Sunday morning. As we were leaving the restaurant after brunch, the pianist began playing music from The Godfather, which got me thinking that we have plenty of people on Suzanne's side of the family. Maybe we should start our own crime syndicate. My brother-in-law Dan might just be the right guy to run the underworld part of the operation, but he might end up doing a dime in the pen (vocabulary courtesy of The Sopranos). That wouldn't be too good, but if they have high speed internet access, I'm sure he wouldn't mind being in lock-down for a few years.