Rambling Josh

This week was “Turn of the TV Week” for Sierra and Jackson’s school. No TV, no video games, and no internet. Each day the kid’s that participate bring a note from home stating that they survived another day without the mind numbing world of television, video games, and internet cluttering their tiny little heads.

They are then awarded some small reward for the accomplishment, nothing major but if there’s one thing kids hate more than anything is to see another kid get something they didn’t get. No matter how useless the item in question is if their classmate got one they want one. This phenomenon is ratcheted up another notch when it’s a sibling that is the receiver of, well anything. Anything except punishment or chores of course.

When my dad would tire of me and my brother Jarvis’s constant bickering, which was often, he would make an exaggerated claim that we would fight about who had the biggest well…restroom deposit. Dad may have thought it to be an exaggerated claim, but truth be told we argued about that too.

Nowadays I find myself uttering the same thing to my kids when they won’t stop arguing. I find myself saying a lot of the things my dad used to say to us, and it always makes me lose my train of thought. I’ll say it with the intention of continuing with my futile attempt to stop the arguing but when it comes out I stop and think to myself, “Did I just say that?”

Then the memory of Jarvis and I, runty, slack jawed, dirty, and vacantly staring at my strapping young dad saying the same exact thing comes to mind. It makes me laugh and the argument between my kids over who ate the most Cheese Nips doesn’t seem to bother me as much.

When one is bothering the other I always tell the botheree to simply ignore the botherer and they will stop. Good sound advice that is completely impractical in the sibling battlefield. Advice that even as I say it I chuckle to myself at the stupidity and impossibility of it.

It’s possible to ignore a bothersome sibling for a short period of time but eventually they’ll get to you, they know your buttons, and eventually you snap. Sometimes when you do snap it’ll startle the botherer into knocking it off. Sometimes we all need to be drug around by the throat for a little corrective “advice” to encourage us to “knock it off.”

As far as ignoring things or people that bother you, when it comes to TV, radio, and internet it’s easy, you just turn the channel or shut it off. So this week was peaceful without any multimedia telling us what to think, what to do, or who we should be. We successfully ignored them all week, and nobody got hurt.

We don’t watch much TV the way it is. We don’t have cable or internet so maybe my kids had an advantage over their classmates who had to fight off the beckoning call of 24/7 cartoons. I know my kids like to watch TV, they asked Santa for cable this past Christmas, but they always find something else to do.

Like argue.

On my travels to and from Lignite I pass by the Van Hook area and it always makes me think of my Grandpa Fritz. Grandpa has been gone now for over 20 years but it seems like it was just yesterday that I was enjoying one of my rides with him around Van Hook and New Town with him as my tour guide to the past, his past. He would point out various islands and sections of Lake Sakakawea and tell me what was there before they flooded it, and now I do the same with my children as we drive through.

My Grandpa Fritz was born into a farming family that planted, harvested, and lived on the fertile banks of the Missouri River where it meandered through northern North Dakota.

They and many like them farmed the land and raised their families along the river that had brought Lewis and Clark and many others through this country. Many more generations of Ellis’s more than likely would have been born into a life of farming enjoying the bounty of this ancient highway but in the 1950’s the Core of Engineers had a different idea. The kind of idea the Core of Engineers and many like them refer to as progress.

Progress for some always means changes for others. Progress has a way of setting people back sometimes. Not everyone, but some. You generally don’t notice or care unless those “some” are some people you know. I knew my Grandpa and I can’t help but feel that progress set him back or at least set him on a different path. It is quite possible that had they not been put on that path my mother and father never would have met, and I would be breaking stuff on a farm other than my Grandpa Ardell’s.

With the land you loved and labored over at the bottom of Lake Sakakawea you are forced to find a new way to make it in this world of progress. Progress meant trading the stability and security of a family farm with the uncertainty and constant movement of the oil field. Like the crops that grew so thick and lush on the land now at the bottom of a lake shifting in the sand, they too shifted, shifted about, working and living. I guess sometimes that’s all you can hope to do.

From what I’ve gathered much of my father’s early childhood was spent living wherever his father was working and his work was always moving. They lived in a trailer house and my Dad said that he new they weren’t going to be staying long if his Dad didn’t bother unhitching or putting blocks under the trailer.

A lot of saying goodbye to new old friends can’t be easy for a young boy. He had plenty of brothers and sisters to play with, but that’s never the same. Getting tired of them doesn’t do you much good, there not going anywhere, but you can always tell a friend to get lost until you’re ready to enjoy their company again.

They moved and moved until the town of Lignite North Dakota caused them to unhitch and block up the trailer. They may not have known it at the time but they were finally home. Lignite is where my dad met and married my mom. Lignite is where I was raised along with my sister and two brothers. Lignite is where my children love to be. Lignite is where my Grandpa Fritz lived and died.

Lignite is home, a good home.

This past week I had the pleasure of attending a band concert in which my daughter, Sierra, and her trumpet, B Sharp, took part. The concert was held in the theater of Rapid City’s civic center, where a packed house of about 2,000 friends and family listened to 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th graders honk, bang, squeak, and toot for about two hours.

Starting with the 5th graders each grade performed four songs, and then shuffled off the stage while the next grade shuffled on. The shuffling took longer than the actual concert, but was equally entertaining.

The grades that weren’t performing on stage were seated in the front few rows either awaiting their chance to shuffle and play or recovering from the effort of sitting up straight and paying attention for four songs while on stage.

It was a constant sea of movement in those first few rows. From where I was seated it looked like a bunch of bobble heads hoped up on double espressos. Heads bobbling to the music, heads bobbling to the left and right chatting with bobbling head friends. Very few heads weren’t taking part in this bobblapalooza.

Those heads not partaking were probably attached to the kids whose parents had given strict orders against bobbling of any nature. “If I see so much as one bobble out of you mister you’ll be grounded for a week.” “But mom all the other kids will be bobbling.” “Just because all the other kids get to enjoy themselves you think you have to too?”

When I wasn’t being distracted by the bobblefest I noticed how entertaining the drum section was for each grade. If you have spent any time around kids of this age group you know that the girls and boys are not on the same schedule for physical maturity. We males eventually catch up in the physical department but we are doggedly resilient in maintaining our mental immaturity.

Mental status aside, within these age groups you have quite a mix of characters and characteristics. You have a lot of girls that are physically nearing womanhood and a lot of boys that are physically runts. Clumsy runts….clumsy runts with moppy hair, big teeth, baggy pants, and the manners of a drunken sailor.

All of this physical and mental mayhem is beautifully displayed and choreographed within the drum section. The drum sections were all composed of a 5'8'' young lady making an attempt at elegance surrounded by several of the above mentioned runts. After each song the runts would bounce around like the seven stooges while the 5'8'' princess would point and bark orders.

It was a grand showing by Snow White and the seven runts. “Sneezy where’s the cymbals? Get them from Doc you need the cymbals for this song. Happy get the xylophone out of your pants Sleepy needs it. Where’s the triangle? Dopey that’s not a triangle that’s a tuba. Bashful help Dopey find the triangle. Which one of you runts took my drum stick? Grumpy I’ll break one of your arms off and use that if you don’t give it back.”

The bobble heads, stooges, runts, and princesses all put on a fine concert. The music wasn’t bad either.

My daughter is trying to kill me. Not with knives, explosives, poisoning, or a sleazy hit-man, but with a single question. Not just any question like, “Why did you have long hair and tight pants in high school?” or “Why does math make you cry?” or “Why do farts stink and why are they always funny?”

No this was a question that I had figured was a few years off yet. Something that I knew would eventually come up, but secretly hoped it wouldn’t, at least until my wife moves back home.

Sierra was sitting on the couch watching one of our favorite shows, “The Simpson’s”, and when a commercial came on she asked me a question. Most of the time “commercial time” questions are pretty basic, painless, and easy to answer. This one was different. This one made me wince inside, made my insides panic and jump around like, well like Homer. Not the philosopher, the other Homer, Homer J. Simpson.

She said, “Dad how old do I have to be before I can have a boyfriend?” As the number 35 floated though my panic stricken brain I said pleadingly, “I thought you didn’t like boys?” Oh, please say you still don’t like boys; its okay not to like boys, there really is nothing about boys to like. “Well” she says, “There is this one boy that I kind of like.”

This might be a good time to inform her that we are moving in the next hour to someplace far away from this boy that she “kind of likes” and we will be back when she’s 35 to continue this conversation. Until then we’ll find a nice “boyless” town and live in peace with no more of this nonsense about kind of liking boys.

The only answer I could come up with under these duress circumstances was, “Not for awhile.” Is that vague enough? Could be in a few minutes could be in a few decades. I just wasn’t comfortable setting a reachable number for her, a number that would give her hope that it would be okay to like boys someday soon and have, of all things, a boyfriend. If hope ever need to be dashed this was an opportune time and place.

So dash I did. I dashed to the phone to call my wife for some help, some insight, some hope for me to cling to, and above all a number. My wife thought my first impulse of 35 might be a bit excessive so I bid and bargained for a compromise of 32. My wife’s number was painfully lower, half of my second bid actually. Sixteen.

Sixteen! Good Lord that’s only about four years eight months and sixteen days away. That’s all the time I have to terrify every boy in town to the point that they tremble and wet themselves in my presents. Trembling and wetting can’t be an attractive sight for a girl. Hopefully it’s enough to keep the “kind of like’s” in the “don’t like” group for a few more years.

Let’s see what do I need to get started… a big mean dog, a beard, no more showers, a weapons permit, a knife collection, a lengthy arrest record, Chuck Norris as my faithful sidekick, and the ability to never, ever sleep.

Let the trembling and wetting begin.

A few nights ago Sierra and I were lounging around the living room reading, while Jackson, not being much of a lounger, was busy shooting hoops on his indoor basket. The rhythmic thump of his basketball came to a stop and he came over to me and said, “Dad I don’t want you to get old.”

I thought for a moment about letting him know that the alternative to me getting old was to discontinue living, but I spared him the scary sarcasm and simply asked, “Why?” He explained that if I got old I wouldn’t be able to play with him anymore.

It was comforting to know that my son has intentions of “playing” with his Dad for many years to come, because I like to play. He looked genuinely concerned about the prospect of me being “benched” with the advancement of old age. So I did my best to put him at ease.

I told him that the reason I workout all the time is to stay in shape so I will always be able to play with him. He mulled this over for a few seconds, poked at my belly to test its firmness, and said, “Well you stay in shape then.” Apparently convinced that he would have his “old man” to play with for quite some time he went back to shooting baskets.

My children are motivation for me to do a lot of things better in life. Stay in shape, eat healthy, watch my mouth, and just generally try to be a good example. I was brought up around adults that were and still are good examples of how to live and enjoy life so it is my responsibility to pass that along to my children.

I workout at the YMCA several times a week and every time I look around the locker room before or after a workout I am blinded by more motivation to stay in shape.

There is always the same group of elderly men in the locker room and I suspect that some of them don’t workout at all, I think they just come to do what their wives forbid them to do at home…be naked. Their wives have a strong argument.

They just mill around in the suit God gave them, and by the looks of it he’s not going to want it back.

There’s a little lounge area in the locker room with a big screen TV and a couple of recliners. Every morning you can find naked old men lounging in EZ chairs watching CNN and discussing politics with other naked old men. I’ve reasoned that maybe they are all former nudist that are on a rehabilitation program to slowly reintroduce them to a clothed society.

Maybe it’s just me but I find it hard to discuss current events with no pockets to leisurely put my hands in. I also like to feel that I have the freedom to randomly glance about while chatting with someone, but an inadvertent southward glance when both of you are “feeling the breeze” could be taken the wrong way.

Many things in life take discipline and focus, naked conversation is one such thing. Keeping my “play” promise to my son is another.

Gentleman it’s been a week since Valentines Day which should be plenty of time for you to be back on speaking terms with your significant other. My wife was at her apartment in Vermillion, 385 miles away, when she received my Valentines gifts in the mail. Not having to see her disappointment in person helped ease this special day by for another year.

Maybe a buffer zone of 300 miles or more should be a regulation for any gift giving or receiving. Another stipulation I would encourage would be that after the gift is opened no phone calls in regards to the gift shall take place for at least 24 hours. This would give the gift receiver time to contact other potential gift receivers and compare gift complaints, questions, or comments.

My hope is that after 24 hours worth of contrast and comparison the recipient of the gift (my wife) will have discovered that others received something much worse. This would turn her initial feelings into a milder form of disappointment. So mild in fact that the gift giver (myself) may not even pick up on it from a bad phone connection 385 miles away 24 hours later.

This new gift giving format is still in the developmental stages and awaiting approval from congress, the FDA, and the Teamsters Union. These three organizations have a large number of male members so the “Gift Giving Treaty of 2007” shouldn’t encounter much opposition.

Call your congressman, voice your support, and never again have to stare desperately into the eyes of a disappointed woman as she opens yet another failed attempt at gift giving. I’m not saying you’ll never disappoint her again in other areas of your blissful life, I mean come on, we are men, and they are women.

Our ability to disappoint them is part of our genetic code, an unbreakable code, that has been around since the first caveman drug a saber tooth tiger home for dinner and she had a craving for wooly mammoth.

As he strolls triumphantly through the door of their cave she looks up and disappointedly grunts, “Oh…saber tooth tiger.” To which he grunts, “You don’t like it do you?” She grunts, “Oh, no it’s all right…I just…I like it.” He grunts, “You don’t look like you like it.” She grunts, “Well it’s just that I was hoping for a wooly mammoth, but this is fine.” He grunts, “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted a wooly mammoth?” She grunts, “I thought you would just know.” He grunts, “I lost three fingers and my left ear trying to kill this saber tooth tiger.” She grunts, “I appreciate that I really do but Oogta two caves down got a wooly mammoth and I just thought it would be kind of nice to have one too.”

He grunts and trudges off to find a wooly mammoth. Having lost his left ear he doesn’t hear a herd of them coming and dies in a stampede. She grunts, disappointed again, and moves in with Oogta.

If you were one of the few that didn’t disappoint your lovely lady this year, well there’s always next year, or tomorrow, or today, or five minutes from now, or …..

The typing is a little labored and painful today. It’s not writers block, I have too many voices in my head wanting to be heard for that to be an issue. No my fingers are a little raw from the pre-wife-coming-home cleaning extravaganza I’ve perfected over the past year and a half. It’s been about 3 weeks since she’s been home so things slid a little further into disarray than normal.

I know I’ve whined about this before but…It started with the dishes, it’s always the dishes, plates, bowls, spoons, forks, cups, a chinchilla…I didn’t even know we had a chinchilla. The problem arose when the dishwasher filled up with dirty dishes and I discovered we were out of dishwashing detergent. It took a few days to get to the store to buy some so with a full dishwasher more dirty dishes piled up in the sink.

I know what you’re thinking. “Why didn’t you have the chinchilla do the dishes?” Well I’ll tell you why. It didn’t have the proper papers so I was unsure if it was a legal immigrant. That’s all I need is immigration busting down my door and throwing me in the hoosegow for providing gainful employment to an illegal alien.

Why didn’t I wash them the old fashioned way? Well I’ll tell you why. I didn’t feel like it all right, besides that chinchilla looked like he new how to use that dirty steak knife he was wielding.

I reluctantly changed my mind a little later when I walked into the kitchen and discovered Jackson drinking milk out of souvenir shot glass. He threw back a shot, slammed the glass on the counter, looked up with a small shot glass sized milk mustache and pointed out that all the cups were dirty.

He set me and the chinchilla up with a round of 2%, we threw it back, Jackson and the chinchilla retired to the den for “Wheel of Fortune” and I got to work. Dishes are done, laundry is laundered, and the ring in the toilet bowl is a shadow of its former self. So for the next three days nobody is allowed to use any dishes, change clothes or do whatever it is that causes that nasty ring.

When Dawn gets home there will still be a hint of sparkling citrus in the air from the cleaning solution that removed the skin from my finger tips. The sink will be empty and the kitchen cleaned in preparation for her to make a shambles of it with the cooking and baking she enjoys so much.

As long as she leaves some chocolate chip cookie dough in the freezer and leftovers in the fridge she can make as big a mess as she wants. It’s always sort of sad when we eat the last of the leftovers after she returns to college. Going back to my predictable cuisine can be tough after dining on Dawn’s creative creations for a few days.

The kids don’t complain, they’re a polite lot, but that chinchilla sure is opinionated.

Now for a public service announcement: My sister happened upon a website that lists people that are owed money. Rebates, unclaimed money, stuff of that nature. So take a break from the Rosie O’Donnell fan site and visit: www.missingmoney.com

Maybe you’ll finally be able to get that operation you’ve been saving for.

I recently watched the movie “A Prairie Home Companion” and if you’re a fan of the radio show, as I am, you’ll enjoy the movie. I find Garrison Keillor’s dry wit and humor to be entertaining and my wife apparently finds it relaxing. So much so that she chose to critique the movie with her eye’s closed, letting out intermittent snores and snorts of approval.

I was pleasantly surprised at the beginning of the movie by the location of the opening scene, Mickey’s Diner in St. Paul Minnesota. About 13 years ago I had one of the best patty melts I’ve ever eaten in that particular restaurant. I haven’t been back there since and I think my cholesterol is still reeling from that half pound of greasy goodness.

My college roommate, Chris Shafer, and I went to Minneapolis to watch the Vikings and Cowboys play. Actually, neither of us was that interested in the game and spent most of it fighting over the binoculars to watch the cheerleaders and scan the crowd for “weirdoes.” There must have been a lot of them sitting close by us because there were a lot of binoculars and fingers pointing our way.

The game was just a good excuse to spend a weekend “taste testing” in the Twin Cities. Since I had recently had a debilitating crocheting accident I had to find a new hobby while I healed up, and taste testing was as good as any.

After a long, rigorous night of taste testing, bad dancing, and general obnoxious behavior we made the decision to exchange our liquid diet for some solids. In a city, or cities, so big you would think this would be easy, but apparently not a lot of restaurants cater to the 3 a.m. bad dancing obnoxious crowd.

The blind led the obnoxious and we drove, and drove, until our jovial taste testing mood turned hungrier and uglier with every darkened diner we past. Then it appeared, an old fashioned dining car style restaurant, all lit up and filled with weary taste testers.

It never occurred to two small town boys that the kind of people that are out and about at 3 a.m. in St. Paul would be any different than us, but when we entered the diner we found that they were all indeed different. Several were carrying on heated animated debates with themselves or someone only they could see.

There weren’t two stools next to each other open when we came in but a nice man offered to move his hefty bag so Shaf and I could cower nervously next to each other. I struck up a conversation with the hefty bag man and he proceeded to tell me his life story. A very long very sad story.

The sort of story I suppose that is best told to a stranger. The sort of story that clearly explained how one might find themselves sitting in a diner at 3 a.m. with everything they own in a hefty sack. The sort of story that made me appreciate the world I was brought up in and the path I was on.

The sort of story that makes a college kid order two patty melts. One for himself and the other for someone he hopes to never be. Of all the things I spent my student loan money on that patty melt taught me the most.

Did everyone get what they wanted for Christmas? One “Burt Bachrach & The Village People Christmas Medley” CD, two sock puppets, three toes sloth, four pounds of fruit cake…and so forth and so on.

I was fortunate enough to get exactly what I wanted. No, not a lifetime subscription to the “Flatuents Is Funny” newsletter. I guess my hints weren’t ‘strong’ enough. What I got is something that has steadily risen to the top of my want list as I’ve gotten older, stool softners and time with my family. Not necessarily in that order.

Ten days in Lignite allowed me to visit and catch up with many friends and family. That is the gift I am most thankful for. Yes I know that’s about as sappy as a fresh cut Christmas tree, but I guess I’m just a sentimental old fool. ‘Old’ in my children’s young eye’s and a ‘fool’ to all.

Speaking of “fresh cut Christmas trees,” I’m pretty sure we’re going to be faced with a glorified tumbleweed when we return to Rapid City this week. One year Mom let us burn our tree to see how fast it would go up. After we took the decorations off and moved it outside of course. When I say that she ‘let’ us I mean that she didn’t stop us. It went up in flames faster than I could snap a picture of Jarvis rolling around in the snow trying to extinguish his scarf.

One year Dad had sat an expired Christmas tree by the driveway to haul out for disposal later, but I beat him to it. I was running late for school, as usual, and only had time to scrape my windshield enough for one eye to see properly. As I drove to school with one eye on the road and the other starring at frost I noticed an annoying dragging noise. With my acute mechanical know how I swerved back and forth a few times to see if the noise would stop.

Swerving didn’t seem to have much effect, going faster made it worse, and turning the radio up didn’t help much either. I think Allen Larson was standing outside his house watching me pull over to wrestle a blue spruce out from my front wheel well and toss it along the road. There it lay next to the extension cord I had drug the day befor after forgetting to unplug my car.

“Thank You” to all of you that let me know how much you enjoy reading this column. Even if you were just being polite all of your kind words and encouragement are greatly appreciated and motivational. A word of caution: Praise and or encouragement of idiotic behavior perpetuates continued idiocy. It’s a viscous circle.

I suppose you’ve spent the past few days fine tuning your list of New Years resolutions for 2007. Or possibly quietly incinerating last years resolutions before someone else takes a gander at it and points out the fact that you never accomplished any of them. Success or failure isn’t as important as trying. Someone once said, “It is better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all.”

So make your list, give the resolutions a shot, and keep your discarded Christmas trees a safe distance from my driveway.

Happy New Year.

It’s almost Christmas and seeing how I’m the father of two elementary age children I’ve recently had the privilege of attending a Christmas concert. It was quite an event, but I must admit that I was distracted by the entertainment provided by the proud on looking parents.

During the performances it was like watching a prairie dog town of the bald, bouffant, bobbed, and braided. Every few seconds one would pop out of their folding chair, camera in hand, snap a quick shot and retreat before permanently irritating anyone behind them.

It resembled a Catholic Church service with a bunch of those “holiday Catholics” standing and sitting at the wrong time, minus the kneeling of course. Although did see a guy fall to one knee after his leg buckled from an acute case of paparazzitis, but that doesn’t count.

Some parents opted to remain seated and just hold their video camera up above the crowd, their arm wavering under the strain and the person next to them wavering from the stench of failed deodorant.

I usually stand up next to the wall so I can see better and also to allow someone who needs a chair worse than me a place to park it. Some lady had the same idea and decided to stand right in front of me. Apparently believing that me seeing my child wasn’t as important as her seeing hers. Not wanting to cause a scene I opted to quietly bludgeon her with a poinsettia. Actually I just stood reeeaaally close to her until she became uncomfortable and moved.

They always save the new editions for last. There was an instant increase in gymnasium murmuring and folding chair squeaking as parents jockeyed for position to get a glimpse of the 2006 models making their elementary school Christmas concert debut. Yes the kindergarteners.

They came through the crowd like awkward movie stars with jack-o-lantern smiles and remnants of the mornings ‘special’ hairdo in tact as they nervously searched the thrones of gawkers for a familiar face. When their smiles and eyes got instantly enlarged, and their little hand shot up in a quick wave you new they had found who they were looking for.

My children aren’t in kindergarten anymore but they still search the crowd when they settle into their place on the risers looking for familiar faces. When our eyes meet their smiles and eye’s still light up, and I still get the little wave.

As the years pass I may not be able to recall what they sang or played, but I’ll always remember the little wave and smile meant just for me.

Merry Christmas to you all. May your holiday’s and the New Year be filled with love, laughter, and little waves.