High Plains Panhandler

2004 Graduation

This past week gave us Megan's graduation from kindergarten and Colleen's second grade award ceremony, both on the same day, and both conveniently scheduled hours apart.

Megan's kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Cummings, holds a nice hour-long graduation ceremony for parents (we know this because she was also Colleen's teacher two years ago, and that year, like this year, I did a little video - a year in pictures really - for the ceremony). Mrs. Cummings is really great. She calls each kid up to sit with her while she tells everyone why he or she is a wonderful child. Then she gives an award to the kid, based on everything she just described. For example, one of the boys in the class struggled at the beginning of the school year but then finally got the hang of it, so he got the Hard Worker award. There were reading awards and writing awards and art awards. Everyone got an award, which they proudly delivered to their parents after Mrs. Cummings finished talking them up.

Mrs. Cummings went through the entire class, one by one, and made each kid feel special and wonderful. You could see it in their faces when she talked about them, even the punk boys who you know, deep down, are going to turn out bad. You could see that on their faces too.

Then it was Megan's turn. [Word of warning: this is a parental boasting section. Once a friend of mine asked me if I thought her son was the cutest thing in the world, and I told her no. I explained that my kids were the cutest in the world, and it was part of my job to say so. She could think that of her son, and I'd think it of mine, but please don't ask me to think if of anyone else's. If I did I'd have to give up my Daddy license. That said, skip this section if you'd rather not hear my boasting.]

A few days before kindergarten graduation, Mrs. Cummings told me that she was having a tough time thinking of what award to give Megan. She was so good in writing and reading and nature and art and everything else that giving her one of those awards seemed to diminish the other things she could do. So she had to make up a new award that wrapped up all the others.

The day of graduation, I didn't know what to expect, but when she called Megan up and talked about all the great things she did in class, I really didn't care about the award. That kind of praise from her teacher was an award enough - for me that is. Megan still need her certificate. So Mrs. Cummings gave her the best award of all: the Creativity Award.

The Creativity Award! That's the greatest! Now we just have to protect Megan from the hazards that the rest of her school career will throw in front of her that will try to crush that creative, inquisitive spirit.

Mrs. Cummings went on about how Colleen had been wonderful and now Megan was amazing. Then she told the room of parents and kids that she hoped we wouldn't stop having children so we could have more smart kids in the world. That's when I looked down and noticed Alex trying to pick up a Hot Wheels car from the floor with his mouth.

If Mrs. Cummings is still there in a few more years, she'll have Alex as a student. She'll love him too. I just know it.

A little while later, it was Colleen's turn to shine. The second graders had all gathered in the cafeteria for their awards ceremony. The first awards (and Toys R Us gift certificates) were for all the kids who hadn't missed any school that year. Oddly, this was the only award they also gave out gift certificates with. Why they reward attendance with money, something based on no merit, stumps me.

Next up were the Good Citizen awards. The kids who got these had never gotten in trouble in class or with the teacher. Colleen got one of these awards, as did most girls. In all of second grade I think there were three or four boys who were Good Citizens. Boys are rascals.

Then there was the A-B Honor Roll followed by the awards for the straight A honor roll. Colleen was on the straight A honor roll, and her smile was wide and toothy as she joined her good second grade friends at the front of the cafeteria for her award.

Finally there was another surprise award. This was for the best readers in each grade. The librarian took the mic and said that she would only give three awards per grade. Suzanne leaned over to me and said this would be a tough one. There were some pretty good readers in Colleen's class. So when the librarian announced Colleen's name as one of the top readers, we all cheered her - just not too loudly to embarrass her. Second graders, after all, are a sensitive lot.

It was a good end to a good year. Now Suzanne has to carefully schedule swimming lessons, sleep-overs, science camps, art camps, outdoors camps, violin and cello practices, and Alex's never ending "Me watch Superman now?" questions (I foolishly brought home a DVD copy of Superfriends, made in glorious post-Star Wars 1978 color where the Legion of Doom headquarters is in a Darth Vader helmet and Robin has a lightsaber. Alex is now, rightfully, obsessed).

It'll be a full, hot summer. Lazy at times, busy at times.

It'll be perfect.

Megan's Camping Trip

Megan's kindergarten pal, Vanessa, and her family invited Megan to go camping with them this weekend (it's a long weekend - today's a snow day). Megan and the group left Saturday at lunch and came back today at lunch. It's the first time Megan's been away from us that long. We started to miss her terribly yesterday. We expected (maybe hoped) that she would be sad from missing us Saturday and Sunday night, but that wasn't to be. She had a blast and being away from her family wasn't going to mess it up.

Here's her story about camping out:

"It was pretty good when I went camping out with Vanessa. We saw wild turkeys and we saw spider webs, birds, and a rattlesnake. We hiked trails and saw cactuses, birds, flowers, you know, the kind of stuff you'd see in the desert. We slept in a trailer. It had nice warm beds, and we saw lots of bugs. We had a prickly bush near our tent, but we didn't mind it. Robert, Vanessa's dad saw a stick scorpion. He really did!

"We weren't afraid because Vanessa's Mom, Liz, said scorpions only come out at night. Then on Monday we came home and here I am typing on the computer with my dad.

"We also played with Kalis, and Vanessa, my friend, said - put quotations marks Daddy - 'She saw a dog that was a big as three Kalises, and Kalis is very big. It was about 18 feet fat.'

"And that was the end of my trip. On the way back we saw these big beautiful purple flowers. I really missed my family. It was just me and Vanessa and her mommy and daddy and Riker, who was so cute."

[Alex interrupts here by saying, "You climb on the mountain!"]

"We had fun, and there was a lot of excitement. I'm glad I'm home so I can tickle Alex. The end."

Ruby Wisdom

Mark, my brother-in-law, fears Ruby Tequila, the Amarillo matriarch of Tex-Mex food. Her preternatural image haunts billboards along the interstates around here, and I think it's that ghostly image that gives Mark nightmares of being suffocated by fresh flour tortillas.

It used to be that the Ruby Tequila billboards made their pitch with clear sincerity: "Eat here. It's good. You'll like it." Now, however, some copywriter wittier than I has decided to make a mark on the town with a series of bizarre and aggravating slogans. The one Suzanne is most fond of goes like this: "Man's best friend is not a dog. It's a taco."

This raises interesting existential questions, answers to which are beyond the scope of this website. I'll just leave it at this: if your best friend is a taco, you need to get out more.

My favorite billboard is the one pictured below. I can't fathom its meaning. If winners never quit and losers miss the burrito, do winners ever get the burrito? Do losers have a sense of longing about the burrito or do they actually miss it like someone missing when they swat a fly. I'm very confused. What is The Burrito anyway? That's vaguely mysterious and frightening.

Maybe bro-in-law Mark is right after all - it's good to fear Ruby.

The Volleyball Game

I've never liked playing volleyball. When that ball comes at you traveling roughly at the speed of sound and slaps you right on the wrists, it stings. I mean, it really stings. So when that ball would come at me, I wouldn't do what I was supposed to do and bounce it off my forearms. I whack it hard with my fist and watch that ball fly to the back of the gym, collide with the back wall, and promptly be declared out of bounds. I've got the same problem with tennis. In racquetball, I get to whack the ball hard, but it always seems to whiz back at me, usually ricocheting off my face.

But my flailing about shouldn't dissuade any of our kids from trying things out for themselves. So Colleen decided to give her second-grade volleyball team a try, and she's having a blast. The neat thing about Colleen's team is that they constantly cheer each other on, even when someone serves the ball a good two or three feet, or when someone misses the ball and watches it roll sadly under the net to the other side.

It's great to see that kind of camaraderie. It's a lot different than the miserable schadenfreude-type cheering that goes on at work. The other day in a work meeting, after someone obnoxiously made fun of someone else missing from the meeting, a serious cliché-user decided to put this boor in his place by going with the old standby: "Well, we all know there is no 'I' in team." So I piped up and said, "But there is a "me."

"What?" said the serious work person.

"What?" I said.

"What do you mean there a 'me' in team?"

"Well there is. There's also tea and meat. There's meat tea on our team!"

That meeting is a weekly event. I haven't been invited back.

Back to the topic at hand, here's Colleen at her volleyball game:

Anniversary #11

Today was our 11th wedding anniversary. Last year, we spent our 10th anniversary in London and Paris, so it was pretty tough to come up with something comparable this year. We thought and thought about it and finally come up with dinner and a movie. True, it wasn't that exciting of a plan, but at least . . . at least . . . wait for it . . . we'll always have Paris.

Well, our babysitter of choice was running late, so we couldn't make it to Kill Bill Vol. 2, which was just as well, since upon reflection it sounds as if it isn't really anniversary movie material. Instead, we headed back to Wildorado, home of massive cow smell, and had a first rate dinner at Randy's.

Before dinner we swung by the best wine cellar in town at this liquor store called The Party Stop. The wine is hidden in a small sunken area in the rear-center of the store. The rest of the store is dedicated the finer strains of moonshine, tequila, and dark liquors in thick skinned bottles. For a Friday night, it sure was the party stop. Cars kept pulling up, clown-crammed full of 21 year olds, IDs at the ready.

We like The Party Stop because we like Andy. Andy is a wine expert. You could, if you really wanted, call him a connoisseur, but I don't think Andy would really care for that description. On first impression, he might strike someone as knowing more about MD 20/20 than Merlot, but holy plastic wine cork, he knows his stuff. Suzanne asked him for a light red that will go well with bass, and he simply nodded, walked to the wine half-cellar and made his way straight to the perfect bottle of wine. I say it was perfect because it was - not heavy, not too dry, not too complex (to use a connoisseur's word). Then he began his story about why this was the perfect wine for us, and all the time he was talking I kept thinking that he was about to pull out a pack of smokes from his ripped back pocket and tell me about all the Viet Cong he killed back in the day.

But he never did that. Instead he pointed us to another bottle of very fine (and this time expensive) wine that was made from an untarnished Chianti grape. Something like that, anyway.

Dinner was grand, the wine fantastic (we had to bring in our own wine because Randy's is in a weird dry zone and can't serve alcohol) and when we got home the babysitter had nothing bad to report, so the evening turned out to be quite spectacular. Maybe next year, for our 12th, we'll do something really crazy. Maybe ice cream. You never know.

Mr. Ambassador

Even though Amarillo seems to be a small town most of the time, it really isn't. We have most of what the big cities have, although smaller in scale. There's an opera, but most of the time they sing in English. There's a symphony, but all the musicians have other full-time jobs. There's a baseball team whose announcer, until they got a big stereo system, used to bang out that We Will Rock you song on the roof of his booth with a tire iron. There's a mayor, but he also runs the RV motorhome lot off the freeway. We see him on commercials all the time. It's embarrassing to see our duly elected city leader do the shuck and jive to sell an RV that might, if you're lucky, get a few gallons to the mile.

But that's what Amarillo is: cosmopolitan smallness. The old timers who chew on sunflower seeds while they play checkers on a pickle barrel don't talk about the corn crops anymore. They talk about their DSL lines and internet worms.

Sometimes, though, when you're lucky, Amarillo's heartbeat shrinks to that of Mayberry. That's what happened to Suzanne yesterday. She was on her way into the post office, and who should hold the door open for her? None other than Teel Bivins, former Texas state senator and current U.S. ambassador to Sweden. Really, I shouldn't say current since his nomination is still pending, but he's given the president an awful lot of money, he'll be saying "God dag, mitt namn är Ambassador" in no time.

If I had a lot of money and the inclination to buy a federal appointment, I'd want to be the Ambassador to Space. I hear you get a lightsaber with that job.

The strange thing about this story is that I was surprised when Suzanne told it to me. Wow, I thought, she ran into the almost-new ambassador. Then I realized that it's a little sad that we're surprised when we run into people who are supposed to work for us, people who go to state capitals or Washington D.C. or Sweden on our dime. Maybe we should be surprised that we don't see them enough.

Maybe they should be holding more doors open for people. Maybe that's the secret.

Kindergarten Circus

Every year the kindergartens at Olsen Park Elementary put on a circus for the first and second graders (and parents too). This year was Megan's turn, and she had been looking forward to it for two weeks. I know she had been looking forward to it because she would steer every conversation we had to her tightrope walking performance at the circus.

"Megan, can you get Alex's milk?"
"Sure. Let me walk to it like a tightrope walker."

"Megan, let's brush your teeth and get ready for bed."
"Look! I can balance my toothpaste on my toothbrush, just like a tightrope walker."

You know, that kind of thing.

Here she is, in all her tightrope walking glory: