So I wrote this silly little column in today’s paper about summertime and what a great time it is to let kids be kids. Down here in the South kids have already begun their summer vacations, and I admit, I get wistful when I drive by children playing on Slip-n-Slides on their front lawns on my way to work.
So I wrote about it. Not my best work by far, but whatever.
And in response, this morning I got this lovely e-mail from a reader concerned that my prose is somehow contributing to the delinquency of American youth. (I’m leaving it in all caps because that’s the way it came to me and, well, the shouting just adds to the delight):
“YOUR PERSPECTIVES COLUMN OF TODAY, ‘BEST PART OF SUMMER IS FINDING SOMETHING TO DO,’ MISSED THE POINT OF WHAT CHILDREN SHOULD BE LEARNING AS THEY GROW UP TO ADULTHOOD. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE GOOD OLD DAYS WHEN CHILDREN WORKED DURING THE SUMMER AND LEARNED MANY OF THE VALUES NEEDED IN THE ‘REAL WORLD’. GET REAL, LIFE IS NOT ALL PLAY!”
I’m sure glad he’s not my dad.
Can you keep a secret?
I’m guessing that everybody deals with the demons inside their heads -- the guilt, insecurities, shame, sadness and regret that keep us from truly moving forward in our lives. I like to check out this Web site once a week and see what other people’s demons are.
There are a lot of sad, lonely, disgusting folks out there. They make me feel normal. Whatever that is.
Public Service Announcement
According to Consumer Reports magazine’s June issue, if you’re going to eat Oreo cookies, you might as well eat the full-fat, full-sugar version and enjoy yourself.
Regular Oreos have 160 calories per serving compared with 150 calories per serving for reduced-fat and sugar-free cookies. To add further injury, the sugar-free cookies cost about twice as much.
Nabisco, which makes Oreos, lists a serving as 34 grams. Who weighs their cookies? Couldn’t they just say a serving is about three cookies?
Then again, if you're eating Oreos, you’re probably not concerned about calories anyway.
Fashion Foe Pause
So I’ve been shopping for summer clothes and can sum up the experience this way...
There are two kinds of girls in this world: floppy hat girls, and baseball cap girls. I am a baseball cap girl. And all of this summer’s fashions are for floppy hat girls.
I have nothing against floppy, wide-brimmed, romantic hats, or the people who wear them. In fact, I have several floppy hat friends. It’s just that floppy hats look ridiculous on me. They feel ridiculous on me. I might as well be wearing a strapless, billowy ruffled shirt — which, it turns out, is what all the clothing stores are carrying these days.
I can’t wear these clothes! I can’t pull off the sexy-camisole-as-office-attire look. I’m no good at the baby-doll, No-Really-I’m-Not-Pregnant top. The styles I hate seem to be everywhere. Three-quarter-length sleeves? Oh yeah. Bermuda shorts? You betcha. The tragic wife beater tank tops with glued-on lace and sequins? RACKS of ‘em EVERYWHERE.
Sigh.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be home on my couch in my sweatpants. And a baseball cap. Hrmph.
A walk in the park
I spent all day Saturday recuperating from Friday night’s Relay for Life, which was, as usual, an emotionally and physically draining event.
The 12-hour, overnight fundraiser for the American Cancer Society draws more than 1,000 people. There are live bands, lots of food, tents, signs, banners, and more than 5,000 luminaria bags filled with sand and candles lining the track. All of this needs to get cleaned up at the end of the night. Coincidentally, roughly 97 percent of the event’s volunteers — which aren’t too numerous to begin with — vanish into thin air when the aforementioned cleaning up commences. It’s a friggin’ phenomenon, I tell ya.
I’m not complaining (too much) about the hard physical labor, because I know that the cause is definitely worthy of a lost night’s sleep, sore feet, lower back pain and a bruised wrist. Also, this year in particular I knew I’d slacked off a bit on the front-end planning side of the event. So I offered my energy and brute strength (ha ha) as sacrifice to appease the Relay gods (otherwise known as my own conscience).
Despite the physical labor, the Relay always gives me time to reflect, and to observe life at its most fragile, and most poignant. I lit the first candle of the night — the one with my mother-in-law’s name on the bag, as she was diagnosed with breast cancer just last week. It crushed me to have to write her name on that white paper bag, but it somehow warmed my heart to see that name illuminated in candlelight.
Every year there are more names to write on bags, more friends whose loved ones are suffering, more hospice patients I’ve lost to the disease. It’s an odd thing to read names of those who’ve triumphantly beaten cancer, often more than once, alongside names of those who lost their lives to it. I watched a pair of cancer survivors in jovial conversation walk right by a teenage boy who was sitting on the track, tears streaming down his face, staring at a luminaria bag with the name of someone he missed dearly.
Late in the evening, I trailed two chemo nurses as they did a lap, pausing to read countless names of people they knew and had treated. If you closed your eyes and just listened to them, you might have thought they were thumbing through an old yearbook. But then they came across the name of a 28-year-old cancer patient they’d treated just last year. Above his name were the words “In Memory Of,” and they were stunned by that news.
I knew who he was, I’d actually just spoken to his mother that afternoon, so I stopped and told them what I knew — that he’d died about a month ago in South Africa where his mother lives. For two women who deal with suffering and death far more than the rest of us, this news was a blow that put a serious damper on their night. They were teary-eyed and sullen as they walked away.
Later, I was thinking how that’s exactly the kind of nurse I’d want — someone who never expects anything but recovery, and who takes the loss of every patient as if it was a death in the family.
Cancer is one stubborn son of a bitch. If we are to beat it for good, our tenacity has to be so strong that one single “In Memory Of” luminaria stops us in our tracks as unacceptable.
I was reading an article about Lance Armstrong last week and he was saying something similar. The problem, he said, is that cancer “has been around so long, people have grown accustomed to it. They say, ‘It’s a shame. He was 75, he had prostate cancer, he didn’t make it, but he had a good life.’ Well, bullshit! He could’ve been 90 and been to another graduation, met his great-grandchildren.”
I’m with you, Lance.
(Thanks to all friends and family who sent donations to help with my Relay effort. Your generosity always inspires me!)
Livin' Large
My new reporter is spending Sunday afternoon on a Harley with about 300 other bikers, all in the name of getting a story. Her wide-eyed excitement at this prospect brought to mind last week’s Steve Rushin column in Sports Illustrated. (I’m not sure if this link will work for everyone, since I was only able to get to the Web page because I’m an SI subscriber.) Ben Malcolmson, a senior at the University of Southern California, is a sportswriter for the Daily Trojan. In a bold move laced with self-deprecation, he recently participated in walk-on tryouts for the football team because he thought the humiliating experience would make for good story fodder. Forced to list a position on his application, Malcolmson wrote, “Wide receiver?”
But in a bizarre twist of fate, he actually made the team. (And this, as you know, is no slouch football squad!)
After checking with coach Pete Carroll’s office to make sure it wasn’t a joke, he changed his story-in-progress from the “I suck” angle he’d started with to one called “Hauling in a Hail Mary.”
Then he quit his job at the newspaper, and headed straight for the gym.
How flippin’ cool is the job of a journalist? We get to step into a different person’s shoes for a day ... every single day! (That is, when we’re not arguing with public relations hacks who are trying to convince us that their client adding a new “cottage” to his law office compound is worthy of a news story or, at the very least, a picture in the paper. Grrr.)
Anyway, I’m just sayin’..... I kinda wish I was on a Harley right now. And if I really wanted to....I probably could be.
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