Pole Position

That old “touch your toes” thing isn’t working for me anymore, so I thought I’d find a new exercise program.

It isn’t that I’m rejecting my toes; it’s just that I rarely see them. We don’t hang out in the same neighborhood any more and we don't have many visible body parts in common. So in the interest of personal conditioning and self improvement, I decided to swing with the new fitness craze: Pole Dancing. My family was excited for me.

“Absolutely not.” Sons One and Two answered in harmony. They haven’t agreed on anything since the great “Whose hiney put the hole in the living room wall?” debate of ’05 and they pick now to show solidarity.

“But everybody’s doing it.”

“Everybody’s having hip replacements, too. Tell that to your insurance company. Can you say deductible?”

That settled the matter for me. If the boys didn’t approve, it was just what I needed. I searched the Internet to find some local lessons.

However, I didn’t want to take a class without trying it out privately first. I’m not exactly Dasher or Dancer when it comes to the ladies aerobics class at the local YMCA; I figured I’d better work on some moves before I shinnied up a metal pole in a room full of Vixens. I slipped on my laundry day gym shorts, a clear violation of the rules of fashion etiquette for public exposure, and sauntered down to the elementary school playground where an old volleyball pole cemented into a tire stood guard over some dandelions in a sunny corner.

The videos I saw on You Tube showed sleek, gazelle-like women, frolicking delicately around a shining pole like a lady’s dress of filmy chiffon blowing around her legs in a gentle breeze.

Thinking chiffon, I circled the pole feeling a zephyr waving wisps of hair across my upturned face, and grasped the circumference of the pole in one hand as I swung my legs up into the Fireman’s Position.

It was then I realized that the pole had been baking in the Southern summer sun long enough to cook a turkey, two dozen yeast rolls, and a sweet potato casserole. It toasted my marshmallows in seconds.

My thighs stuttered across the pole, popping like an old clutch under the foot of a novice driving student. A line of blisters the size and shape of a Tibetan mountain range sprung to life on my twirling hand and my behind bore the grill marks of a well-turned sirloin. Now I know why firemen wear pants that Smokey the Bear couldn't claw his way through.

Releasing the pole is called the dismount, even if it’s accidental. On the whole, it’s not
a good idea to let go suddenly, even in case of trauma, particularly when wearing the type of shorts that maintain their position on the body with a drawstring. If you have elected to practice on an old volleyball pole that sports a hook whose purpose it is to hold up volleyball net, the idea is especially unfortunate.

Now I know what gymnasts feel like in the middle of the summersault-handspring section of their floor routine. If the Olympic committee had been on hand at that moment, I would have secured a spot as a favorite on the team. When I landed, I looked through my knees at the pole, spinning in that old tire in circles, and grinned.

At least if I got a workout, I gave that wretched thing one, too. It wouldn’t be so bad, though, if the blasted thing didn’t look better in those old gym shorts than I did.

Headliner

Just now I’m cruising toward the intersection of Heavy Sigh and Bless His Heart.

The daily newspaper for the metropolitan area where I live with hundred of other people ran a headline recently that shouted, “Shotgun Blast Kills Woman.”

While I shook my head at the level of violent crime in our world today, my teenaged son peered over my shoulder.

“Why did that make the news?”

What did I raise? A wild animal in the Jungle of Man? A zombie with no heart, not even somebody else’s?

I never miss the opportunity to dish up a life lesson like it was biscuit gravy. “A woman was killed. Thankfully that doesn’t happen much around here, so it made the front page.

“That’s not what is says. They’re all worked up over the blast. Are they surprised that a shotgun actually shot somebody?”

“That’s just the way they wrote the headline.”

“They should be careful what they say. It would be news if the shotgun pulled a knife, or if it popped somebody over the head for a bad joke. But a shotgun blasting somebody is like saying a woman went shopping at the mall.”

“It’s not exactly the same thing.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen you cause more damage at the mall.”

I needed to continue this discussion, but just then I spotted a coupon for a favorite department store.

“Well you should feel sorry for her family.” I reached for my scissors.

“I feel sorry for the writer who doesn’t know about the shotgun thing. He’s gonna feel mighty stupid when he finds out we knew about that cause and effect theory all along.”

I begin to clip. Twenty per cent off, even for sale items.

“Well what sort of headline would you come up with?”

“Well I would sure point out that there was somebody who pulled the trigger.” He watched me as I started to tuck the coupon into my wallet.

“See, Mom, it’s just like you and the mall. Coupons don’t save money.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“People do.”

I checked the fine print on the small slip of paper. Not good on clothing, glassware, food items, or school supplies. The thing was no more effective than an empty gun.

Somewhere the head of the NRA is weeping over the spokesman they’ll never have.

Duck and Wiicover

When it comes to home entertainment systems, the Nintendo Wii is the best bet for indiscriminate head injuries I’ve ever encountered.

Now that there’s a video game that doesn’t require knowledge of the access code for disarming thermonuclear missiles in order to work the controller, millions of people around the globe are dropping their weapons of mass entertainment and turning to the Wii.

Personally, I appreciate the fact that any six year old can map out new nations using the XBox 360 or any of the PlayStation stable, but I’m past the age where bending over to tie my shoes can be accomplished without the aid of a small child and a first responder in an emergency vehicle . Dadgummit, I need help. So under the guise of rewarding good grades and the relief of high school graduation, we bought a Wii.

No longer forced to live life as a virtual spectator, I picked up my plastic controller and dove right into Wii Sports. The first day I came down with tennis elbow, pulled a hamstring, and bruised a bowl of Golden Delicious Apples that were loitering menacingly on the coffee table.

Sure there are some problem areas. I have trouble remembering to push the A button to start ("The big, round button under your thumb, Mom."), and I have trouble focusing on the play instead of watching the cute character on screen cavort around the court in her spiffy duds, but after that I’m home free.

Eventually through trial and broken glass, I discovered that it’s best to use the wrist strap to prevent unwanted projectile activity. It’s altogether unsettling to clock the dog in the head yet again with an errant game controller that flies across the living room as if it were on a nonstop flight to Paris. Then you have to stop the game in the middle of a set to transport the Labrador, who is holding a damp cloth to his forehead with one paw and muttering unkind words about your aim, to the vet. I have to admit to some feelings of guilt that he's given up retrieving because of a bit of bad aim on my part.

I don’t know about you, but there’s nobody like family to spout sarcastic comments and unkind advice when you’re trying your hand at a new activity, although I think the dog is very fetching in the new pith helmet, in spite of the obvious sarcastic implications. It fits a little tight around the ears and he’s somewhat wary of the chin strap, but it fits in just fine when he hides under the coffee table to phone his therapist.

The latest casualty was Bill Dear, but it seems like a grown man with dozens of years experience working with high voltage machinery would be aware of the dangers of an unsecured battery compartment door. Upon unpacking the system, the children had, as required by law, lost the little piece of plastic that keeps batteries neatly in place and, strictly against OSHA standards, secured the batteries in place with an unregulated rubber band.

My enthusiastic backswing launched a volley of battery bullets that took out the ugly lamp from his bachelor days, six wide-eyed Precious Moments figurines, and a Girl Scout delivering cookies at the side door. Bill just managed to avoid the rocket by executing a double somersault with a half twist over the back of the couch, which would have been Olympic gold material if he had left the ceiling fan in working order and managed to keep his feet together on the landing.

All in all, everything has worked out quite nicely. I got a new lamp, Bill Dear is expecting to be able to return to work next week and the dog has become quite attached to the technicians at the vet’s office.

Pick Up Line

For the better part of twenty years, I’ve chauffeured kids back and forth to school, ball practice, assorted club meetings, meet the teacher opportunities, birthday parties, sleepovers, Scout meetings, music lessons, and general unidentifiable social obligations. I might not have always had a song in my heart, but for the most part I managed not to shoot poison darts at anyone. Not with any degree of accuracy anyway.

One day this week, Son One had to pick his brother up from school. I thought the child was going to have to file for disability. He can go for six weeks on three hours sleep a night, trudge through ice in his socks to retrieve his favorite CD from my car, and hip-check a falling bookcase into submission, but he can’t do the school run without turning in a performance worthy of the Jerry Springer show.

Later, the phone rang at work. Against my better judgment, I answered.

“Mom, I’ve had to drive all day. I’m starving and my legs hurt.”

Our refrigerator holds more food than the Pittsburgh Steelers can eat on game day. And his car has an automatic transmission. His legs shouldn’t hurt unless he stuck his feet out the bottom and powered the car at a gallop like Fred Flintstone.

I thought back to a time when the kids’ schedules were carefully spaced in such a way that if I dared take the time to venture by the house to snag a sandwich during the after school rush, somebody would turn my kids in to Social Services and call me from the office to insult my parenting skills.

“I feel your pain,” I said soothingly.

“No, Mom. You feel your pain. Mine hurts worse.”

It’s a testimony to my self discipline that the receiver didn’t melt in my hand.

Luckily, Mom wisdom can be dispensed by phone. It took three peanut butter sandwiches, two layers of deep heating rub, and a Boo Boo Bunny ice pack to make him feel better.

Tomorrow I’ll have him pick up the dry cleaning.

Boo Boo Bunny can use the workout.

Out to Launch

I would rather let my teenaged sons select my spring wardrobe than go through a Halloween haunted house. I may be taking the risk of being seen next May in a stunning camo and chained wallet ensemble, but somehow I’d rather take that risk. It seems like raising two boys would have dulled my susceptibility to the undead wearing mismatched clothes and bearing chain saws long ago, but somehow a grown man chasing me like I’d recovered a fumble and making revving noises until the spit flies frightens me beyond consciousness. Perhaps it’s because I’ve lived long enough to know just what grown men are capable of.

For instance, I know of a man who, with one ill-timed twirl of his office chair, ripped the pull-out drawer of his desk (which he had unfortunately forgotten to un-pull) from its moorings sending thousands of helpless paperclips, ballpoint pens, and TicTacs skittering to their deaths across the floor of his cubicle. Because the drawer had not acted properly according to function and stubbornly refused to recede into the desk upon contact with the chair, he was able to claim that the accident was not his own fault but was, in fact, a hardware problem. The scary part of the story? This man is an employee of the world’s largest defense contractor.

Another example, eerily personal in nature, is this. I have daily contact with, and often wash the underwear of, a man who once worked diligently to create a working tabletop model of a medieval-style trebuchet, for the sole purpose of launching toy farm animals across the kitchen at the dog. Sure, he said he was helping the kids with a school project, but to this day the Labrador looks for flying cows before he’ll set one paw on the linoleum. I couldn’t housebreak the poor animal without setting up training runs through plastic livestock, and he can’t see the movie Twister without going all white around the whiskers.

It is not news that there are men who favor bungee jumping as a form of self expression. Recently, I received a video by e-mail, a form of information transference which upholds the laws of truth, that revealed a victim, er volunteer, dangling by harness from a high horizontal wire. The fact that the scene took place in a large cow pasture and the, um, volunteer was also attached to a team of flannel-shirted engineers atop a John Deere lawn tractor by a long bungee cord gave me pause, especially when the tractor headed downfield at speeds normally associated with phrases such as “Mach 1” and “boom.” The fellow in the harness didn’t pause though, because when the ground crew let go of the tether, he hurtled through space like a cow pie meteor, completed a full somersault with a half twist and landed with gusto in a flourishing maple tree. After that, of course, everybody wanted a turn.

Any one of these guys might be the maniac in the Halloween haunted house you visit. If he’s wielding a chain saw, you can probably make it out alive. But if he’s after you with a bungee cord, you won’t see your family again until you’re starring in a You Tube video with “Fly Like an Eagle” playing in the background.

Big Business--A Retrospective

My son, Donald Trump, is to big business what Bill Gates is to electronic solitaire. He exploits the common good to create a formerly free product that people stand in line to pay money for. If Omarosa had taken lessons from this kid, she would have a corner office at Trump Tower and the Main with the Ugly Hair would be matching up accessories for her.

My son “The Don” maintains a network of dedicated employees that work hard to support his extravagant lifestyle. The fact that he’s in the seventh grade is a bonus. Money made under the school desk is not easily tracked by results-oriented Internal Revenue officers. I’m nourishing hopes that he’ll support me during retirement in case of undesirable Social Security trends.

One morning as The Don was leaving the car for Algebra class, enough change fell out of his pockets to finance gumballs for a middle school chewathon.

“It’s okay,” he shrugged, nonchalantly sweeping the pile into a mini dustpan and dumping the lot into his jacket pocket where it ripped through the lining and crashed to the sidewalk, chipping out a divot in the concrete the size of a gold bar. “I’m rolling in it.”

“That’s preferable to stepping in it,” as my Old Man, an old hand at Black Jack used to say.

Normally this sort of statement from a twelve-year-old is alarming to a parent. But, having lived with this particular twelve-year-old for about forty years, I was as cool as Frosty’s button nose—on the outside. The turmoil inside could have caused his corncob pipe to spontaneously combust. I couldn’t help but remember The Kid’s past forays into Big Business.

Taking a lesson from his older brother, who cleaned out the pockets and lunchboxes of all the kids at Daycare playing draw poker until I discovered the trend and made him repay the winnings—nickels, drink boxes, and all, he stuck to value-added enterprises that ensured customer satisfaction. During the last fad faze, The Kid bartered his lunch for highly collectable trading cards and took advantage of an established market of eager ten year olds who readily traded their allowance—and their lunch—for hard-to-come-by cards. He scored his first card for a Twinkie, invested in a carton of Ho-Ho’s, and by the time The Kid graduates from high school, he will either be a multi-millionaire or a convicted felon. Either way, I’m not liable for college tuition.

I’m not saying this kid is different, but last year he listed an underground laboratory, strength of a gorilla, and stock options as the main items on his Christmas wish list. In a fit of sudden inspiration, he invested his birthday money in a metal detector and now he collects treasures on the playground the way other kids collect bubble gum wrappers in their jacket pockets. He’s gathered enough jewelry at recess to open his own pawn shop.

Other kids have dressers to hold their clothes. This one uses his bureau like a cash register: tens and twenties in one side; fives, ones, and loose change in the other. I borrowed spare change for coffee from him until I realized he was charging ten and a half percent interest. I stopped giving him ice cream money when he offered to change a fifty.

His latest venture is pure genius. In an age where instant gratification is as close as your Blackberry, today’s tykes spend their pocket money on cheat guides for video games that are obsolete before the clerk hands them their receipt. My young entrepreneur launched a line of energetic young players with well-conditioned thumbs, who beat the games for their less talented or motivationally challenged friends. For a price, of course.

When I discovered this enterprise, I didn’t know whether to pat him on the back, send him to his room, or sign him up for political office. “Kids PAY you to play their video games?” My mind couldn’t grasp the concept.

“Technically, that’s not the exact truth,” he explained, as serious as Dan Rather under intense questioning. This kid knows more about technicalities that Johnnie Cochran knows about loopholes. “I created the concept, so I don’t actually do the physical labor. I assign a customer service representative to handle the problem, and he pays me out of the money he earns.”

“You’re getting paid for playing games you’re not even playing?”

“Ummmm. Yes.”

“Any chance I could get in on the action?”

“Mom, this may be a family business, but I’ve got to be realistic. You’re lousy at video games. You always die. But you can give me a ride to Jake’s house. I have to make a pick-up.”

“Okay,” I said, grabbing my keys. “But it’ll cost you.”

What can I say? A girl’s got to get ahead the best way she can. And unless The Don cleans his room pretty soon, he’s looking at a hostile takeover.

Paper & Scissors Rock!

On the whole, I’d rather give my teenage son a Platinum MasterCard and send him to Wal-Mart on Saturday night than do the Back-to-School shopping myself. His gym locker is in better shape than the Three-Ring Binder section of Wal-Mart after the list-bearing hordes have swept through. Back-to-school shoppers invade discount stores in August like a swarm of fire ants in a field of sweetgrass, and they’re not leaving until they’ve crossed the last bottle of hand soap off their list and called in their relatives to find the pink lunchbox they hid behind the Pepto Bismol display back in June.

Anyone who thinks a mother in search of a pack of Crayolas and a bottle of Elmer’s isn’t dangerous has never had a kid in 4K. Here’s a woman who has visions of getting a toddler-sized tornado out of her kitchen and Dora the Explorer off of her television and there’s not a force of nature that can stop her from climbing over two Kleenex displays and a store manager to get that last glue stick. And as sure as a drink box shoots a stream of blue goo in your eye when you punch in the straw, she’s gonna have a kid that wants a Batman backpack after she bought Iron Man on clearance during the summer. Put 500 copies of this woman in the safety scissors section of a discount store and in less time than it takes for Junior to lose his lunchbox, they’re fighting over the last pack of construction paper like so many Edna Scissorhands. Desperate Housewives are Stepford Wives by comparison.

Don’t even get me started about book bags and blue jeans. You’d think that one pair of pants made out of faded blue denim would be pretty much be like the ones you found for ten bucks on the clearance rack at Target. Just because the hem hit mid-ankle and the waistband tucked neatly under his armpits, Teen Boy at my house went all white around the shoetops and refused to have his yearbook picture made.

Kids today need to understand that yesterday’s highwaters are today’s Capri pants. But that argument doesn’t even work with girls. It certainly didn’t mean much to a seventeen year old boy whose regular uniform consists of 50 pockets spread across a bolt of camouflage material and a faded T-Shirt that reads, “I’m Up and Dressed. What More Do You Want?” So why do those clothes cost more than it takes to gas up a Suburban? Abercrombie & Fitch must charge by the letter.

And when did a backpack become a designer accessory? Today’s bags have room for everything except books, which—according to my son who is a High School graduate, and therefore an expert in these, and all other, matters--are optional in the classroom these days. I can understand filmstrips going the way of ancient technology, but books? They take up valuable space needed for everything from MP3 players (I don’t even have MP 1 & 2) to cell phones, which are very important so you can call your friends between classes to see who did the science homework.

Which brings us to the main source of our school woes. Friends. It is a principle of life that a true friend will not buy the very last pair of torn blue jeans at the mall. Nor will a friend refuse to eat school lunch and choose to hang out at the drink machine after I’ve shelled out $300 in advance for the pizza line in the cafeteria. Last year I discovered that I was feeding three random boys and the school rabbit, while the only things my child ate off his plate was apple peel and barbecue chips.

This year I have resolve. I will not buy clothes just because people my child doesn’t even like wear them. I will not buy trading cards just because the people my child does like would rather duel than eat lunch. I will not volunteer to chaperone the school dance just so my child can go and eat free pizza.

But if I get free pizza, that’s another story. I’ll have to buy something cool to wear. Maybe some designer jeans.