Visit From Some Old Friends

Easter week dawns amidst schizophrenic weather, the day trying to decide if it should clear off and warm up, melting the snow off the trees or get colder and send more snow/sleet/ rain down upon us. What a hot mess. Usually, Easter week is when I clean up the golf clubs, and start thinking about maybe going to a driving range or something. I mean, it’s been 7 months since I last played; maybe it’s time, but, not today.

This week is crammed full of end of quarter business activity, a frenzied five days of review appointments, bill paying and the endless assessment of numbers. There is a light at the end of this tunnel however, since I will celebrate the end of the 1^st Quarter by taking a few days off next week and going on a trip somewhere with Pam. The to-do list this week includes an item, “PLAN TRIP”, so there’s that.

There’s also a special treat on the agenda of this Easter week. Many of you long time Grovers will remember Greg and Deena Greer, veterans of the famed McMath Sunday School Conglomerate, which dominated GABC back in the day. They moved to Knoxville, Tennessee years ago, Greg leaving a perfectly great job to pursue the ministry, and more specifically to get involved in some start up church. Of course, it was a ridiculous career move for Greg and I questioned his sanity. But, as is often the case when it comes to God’s will, I was wrong and Greg was right. The church has thrived; the Greer family did not wind up on public assistance, and God has blessed Greg and Deena with a wonderful life. Part of that life is a 6’5”, 270 pound offensive tackle named Chandler Greer, who is being heavily recruited by a long list of big time college football programs, among them, the University of Virginia. So, they will be staying at our house one night this week, having dinner and then heading up to Charlottesville for their recruitment visit the next morning. I can’t wait to see these wonderful friends again. Incidentally, what does one feed a 6’5”, 270 pound high school senior who has been riding in a car all day? We were thinking of making him an entire meat loaf for his appetizer, and taking it from there.

My NCAA brackets are still intact, although they were leaking oil at one point over the weekend. La Salle? Pacific Gulf Coast? Puh-leeze. 6 of my elite 8, and all of my final four are still alive and kicking.

My book is rocking along. Chapter 17 has hit a plot device that will require writing skills that I’m not sure I possess to pull off. So much fun though, I must admit.

Ok, you’re all caught up.

Harvard Wins. Revenge of the Nerds.

Ok, there I was feeling rather smug about my bracket. I picked 3 out of four winners in the play-in games, then proceeded to get 13 out of 15 of the first round contests. Then I wake up this morning and see that Harvard beat New Mexico late last night. Seriously?

I am here to tell you that if Harvard University has now become a basketball power, we are in serious trouble as a nation. What’s next, MIT putting a beat down on Alabama in the Sugar Bowl? Forget testing for steroids or illegal drugs, I demand to see the full academic transcripts of every man on the Harvard roster. I want SAT scores, GPA’s and I want the NCAA to demand that each of them translate two chapters of The Odyssey into English before their next game. If their starting five can’t explain the central importance of the Pythagorean theorem to Euclidian geometry in less than two minutes then I want a full investigation into their eligibility. What are we to make of this? Here we have the premier academic institution in all of America going out on a basketball court and defeating a State university who won 29 games this year and who many thought should have been seeded even higher than a 3. New Mexico’s coach, Steve Alford had been interviewed more times than Hillary Clinton in the days leading up to the tournament. Many wise prognosticators of college hoops had declared New Mexico as their pick to make it to the final four. So, I’m supposed to believe that a bunch of scrappy eggheads who lost to mighty Columbia by 15 points in February, just waltz out onto the floor and beat the Lobos? Color me skeptical.

So, now the West Regional has been transformed into Revenge of the Nerds. Wonderful.

The End Of Awards Assemblies??

There’s a story making its way around the interwebs about a principal of a middle school in Massachusetts, who allegedly cancelled an honor’s assembly because it caused too much embarrassment to underachieving students. Since the story originated with Fox News, the intelligent consumer of news must perform the necessary due diligence to make sure the facts weren’t selectively cherry-picked and only half the story told. Upon doing so I discovered that the real story isn’t quite as damning as made out to be by Fox. What actually happened was that the principal rescheduled a private “honors-only” assembly to a later assembly where the entire school would be present. Still, we do find a letter that he wrote to the parents explaining his decision that I would like to discuss. Principal David Fabrizio of Irswich Middle School opined:

“ The Honors Night, which can be a great sense of pride for the recipients’ families, can also be devastating to a child who has worked extremely hard in a difficult class but who, despite growth, has not been able to maintain a high grade point average.”

There are so many things wrong with this sort of thinking it is difficult to know where to begin, but the obvious place would be…if Principal Fabrizio believes this, then why not keep the Honors Night Assembly private? By opening up the Honors assembly to the entire school won’t he be deliberately exposing under achieving students to devastation?

When I first read his quote I thought back to my days in Middle and High School. I remembered my horrible study habits, my nonchalance, my determined refusal to bring books to class, my spotty record turning in homework. I also remember all the fun I had skipping my last class of the day to go swimming off the horseshoe bridge about a mile from school,(a record of 27 absences for the year, which I believe is still the school record). My long suffering guidance counselor, God rest her soul, would daily harangue me for my indifferent scholarship, accusing me of wasting God-given talent, with little or no regard for how these criticisms might affect my self esteem. Finally, by the middle of my junior year, I was able to right the ship, although too late to salvage a respectable GPA. I share all this to say, that I was never once “devastated” when I sat through the awards assemblies where I would see my contemporaries receiving one plaudit after another. What I was, was bored, and annoyed, but far from “devastated”.

What are middle school students made of nowadays that an awards assembly would be an occasion for such humiliation? I must say that I was very disappointed the day I realized that I didn’t have enough athletic skill to become the starting short stop for the New York Yankees, quite pissed, in fact. It was just the latest in a long line of painful; sobering bouts of self discovery that each of us must endure. No, I wasn’t the best looking guy in school. No, my 1966 VW Beetle wasn’t the hottest ride in the senior lot. No, I wouldn’t be getting that free ride to Harvard after all. But along the way I discovered skills and gifts that I possessed in abundance that many of my class mates did not. My ability, for example, to charm my way out of detention, to convince the assistant principals to look the other way when one of my practical jokes went awry, contributed mightily to my self-confidence.

We are a culture who values self esteem in our children above practically anything else. This fixation on feeling good about ourselves is what produces confused Principals like David Fabrizio. It was my Parents’ conviction that my self-esteem would grow once I learned to do something well, not before I learned to do something well. Why would my parents want me to feel good about being an under-achieving, wise-cracking  charmer? “You want to feel better about yourself? Stop acting like an idiot,” they would say. “And while you’re at it, sit still and pay attention during the awards assemblies. You might learn something!”

Once I entered the real world I learned rather quickly that my guidance counselor was right. In business, they don’t hand out participation trophies; you have to actually accomplish something. If I had actually applied myself back in school, it would have benefitted me in ways large and small. Lesson learned. If the David Fabrizios of the world have their way, we will be sending young people out into the world totally ill-equipped to deal with its inherent unfairness. Coddling kids and giving them a false sense of their own value is educational malpractice and only produces a generation of self-deluded narcissists.

A Job Opening

In my line of work, I am something of an anomaly, since I have always been able to run a successful practice without any full time help. There are many reasons for this, primary among them being the fact that I’m cheap. That salient fact aside, I have always been able to manage my business just fine with part time secretarial and administrative employees. Now, I’m aware of all the arguments about how much more productive I would be, how much more money I could make, how much faster my business would grow if only I would hire this person and that person to help my business to that ever illusive “next level”. But the fact is I have never had a burning desire to get to the next level. What’s wrong with the level I’m on? After 30 years in the business, I do quite well. With each passing year, I’m able to work a little less than the year before. My income is just fine, most of the time. Besides, with more employees come more complications, more responsibility, and more complexity. As I get older, I want less of all three.

Anyhow, I say all this because I have recently lost my assistant, so am once again in the market for a unique individual to fill the position. I’m looking for a bright, energetic woman with computer and secretarial skills, who doesn’t want to work a ton of hours, and wants those hours to be flexible. Perhaps a mom whose kids are now in school and wants to make some extra money but still be there when they get off the bus in the afternoons. I need someone who can work between 10 and 15 hours a week. Having a good telephone voice would help, experience in the investment or insurance fields would be a huge benefit, but is not a must. I am flexible as to which days of the week would be involved, they can even vary from week to week if need be. The benefits of the job would be flexibility, pretty decent pay ( between $10 and $12 an hour depending on skill level to start ), and most of all, the chance to work for an awesome boss. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that my office is sometimes a place of rampant practical joking and adolescent high jinks are quite common, so a sense of humor and a thick skin are sometimes required.

If you’re reading this and think that I am writing about you, please call me or contact me in some way. I will not give out my number or address for obvious reasons. Besides, the person I am looking for will be resourceful enough to find me.

    

Writing A Book

For the past two months I’ve been writing a book that has turned into an obsession. It’s more than just a story, but to call it a novel sounds pretentious. But at 16 chapters with no end in sight, I suppose it qualifies. Every time I try to summarize what it’s “about”, it ends up sounding ridiculous. Let me try again…

It’s about a man who has a prodigious ability for winning games of chance, a gambling savant, who meets and falls in love with a woman who is his total opposite in every way that matters and who happens to be clairvoyant. Eventually they end up hating each other and getting a divorce, about as ugly a divorce as can be imagined since it involves, infidelity, bankruptcy, and a suicide attempt. After the protagonist’s parents pass away, he moves back into their home whereupon he starts getting nightly visits from his ex-wife in his dreams. Unknown to him, his ex-wife is seeing him in her dreams every night as well. After a while it is difficult to differentiate between reality and dreams, as the two of them try to deal with issues of forgiveness, the possibility of redemption, and the spectre of loss.

See what I mean?

But here’s the cool thing, writing a story is a little like being God. You create these characters, endow them with personality, then turn them loose to interact with each other. Sometimes you are pleased with them and the decisions they make, other times you want to smack the hell out of them. I imagine that God feels the same way looking down upon us. The big difference obviously is that I can write my characters out of trouble. In the real world, what’s done is done. Still, it has been great fun creating an entire universe of people whose fate is in my hands. I spend half my time researching details. What exactly was the color of the steel in that great big arch bridge on I-95 leading into Maine? Google Earth to the rescue, green! Then I write a couple thousand words a night, and when I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing.

Two things I’ve come to understand over these past two months. First, I fully understand why so many novelists are crazy. Writing changes you, transforms you into someone else, a not entirely pleasant experience. Secondly, it is great fun. Creating something, no matter how amateurish, is an exhilarating experience. Although my story is not auto-biographical by any stretch, it does contain much of who I am. I can only write what I know, so my experiences inform my characters. I have no idea how it will all end. I feel as though I’m about half way done.

I’ll keep you posted.

Wonder What It's Like In Key West Today?

It is March the 18^th. I wake up this morning at 6:10 to the sound of ice pellets ticking against the windows. I stumble out into the hallway; walk over to the big Palladian window that overlooks my front yard. My heart sinks. My chin drops to my chest. There’s an inch and a half film of slush covering the world, and now a mixture of sleet and freezing rain is adding to the misery. There is not one single sign of life, no dogs, cats, birds or even squirrels to be seen. Where do they go at times like these? I trudge into my office and check out the weather radar map. It shows a band of green and pink running directly through Short Pump, with an ominous blue band to the north and west. It is 33 degrees. This is not the day that the Lord has made; this day comes directly from the pit of hell courtesy of Lucifer himself.

I slump back in my chair. I grab my cell phone and open the weather gadget that shows the 7 day forecast of some of my favorite places. I flip over to Key West. Just as I suspected, the forecast for the entire week shows bright sunshine and 79 degrees, all seven days, into infinity. I remember when I was younger I used to brag about being from Virginia. Specifically, I would champion the fact that in Virginia one gets to enjoy all four seasons, and about how the changing of the seasons brought with it charm and variety. Lies, all lies.

I have a birthday coming up. I will turn 55. Seasons have become overrated. The only season that appeals to me on mornings like this is the monotonous 79 and sunny of places like Key West and San Diego. I’ve been warned about global warning for over 15 years now and, well, it can’t get here soon enough for me.

What Is The "Good Life"?

Yesterday was our day to take dinner out to my Dad. It was the day before St. Patrick’s Day, so Pam decided to plan an Irish dinner. By 3 o’clock the kitchen was alive with activity. There would be her famous meat loaf, with a raw sliced sliver of carrot, coin-shaped hidden inside one serving. Whoever got the orange “coin” would be blessed with good luck throughout the year. There would be mashed potatoes, green beans, and homemade Irish Soda bread with raisins. For dessert she had made bright green Pistachio pie. In honor of the day, she renamed all of these dishes to suit the occasion. Meat loaf became “Blarney Stones,” dessert became “Shamrock Pie”. Then she went out and bought special green shamrock paper plates to serve the pie on, along with matching four leaf clover napkins. For Ezra she bought Irish themed stickers featuring Snoopy and Woodstock dressed up like Leprechauns. She even wrote his name at the top of a piece of green construction paper so he would have a place to stick them. The dinner was a rousing success. Everyone cleaned their plates. There were six “Blarney Stones” in the dish and only 5 of us, so in keeping with the famous Dunnevant luck; the lucky coin will appear in dad’s leftovers today.

As I watched Pam flitting about the kitchen preparing this meal, it occurred to me that a life well lived is not heralded by screaming headlines in the newspaper, rather it comes in the form of a thousand daily graces. It doesn’t come from wearing the right clothes, living in the right house or driving the right car, it comes from sharing your life with people who take care of the details with tenderness, people for whom the little things in life aren’t little at all. The “good life” is the sum total of these tender moments. My wife’s talent for transforming the routine into something extraordinary has made for me and our family a remarkable life. Even after nearly 30 years together, her loving kindness still astonishes me.

Want some marital advice? Marry the right woman.