Two Minutes For Holding
Things had just quieted down in the east wing when the welcome silence was pierced by another bellowing shout from Room 11. “Loo-eeeeze!!”
“Good heavens,” sighed Kaylee from behind the nursing station. She brushed a lock of hair from her eyes and replaced the phone in its cradle. “Doesn’t that man ever stop?”
“I can tell you’re new here,” drawled Janice as she checked items off of her clipboard. “I don’t even notice it anymore. It’s like the racket them geese make out on the patio. Drives you crazy at first, but then you get used to it.”
“I don’t know if I can ever get used to that. It makes me want to jump out of my skin every time he does it. Imagine having a man shout at you like that! Then again, I suppose poor Louise probably got so used to hearing it that she just tuned him out like you do.”
“Poor Louise?”
“Well, I’d say she was poor, having to put up with Mr. Francis until the day she died.”
Janice gave a hoarse laugh that died out in a series of coughs. “Ah, honey, you know what they say when you assume! Far as we know, nobody was putting up with Mr. Francis but himself.”
“What about Louise?”
“There’s never been any Louise that we know of. Old Mr. Francis was a bachelor, didn’t have no kids, lived alone and never said boo to the neighbors about any Louise until they started hearing him shouting the name over and over like he does here now.”
Kaylee furrowed her brow. “Well, that’s…odd.”
“And that ain’t the half of it! Wait ‘til you see him with his hockey players.”
No Gutzon, No Glory
It can be hard to change your mind about things set in stone. Especially icons.
My father worked second shift when I was very young, and it was not unusual for me to be awake to greet him when he returned home. It might explain why my earliest memories include the experience of watching our local television station sign off for the night with a patriotic montage set to The Star Spangled Banner. Somewhere among the rippling flags and sweeping aerial vistas was a glimpse of Mount Rushmore, and the sight of it stirred within me a deep and primal fascination. The visceral impact of this enormous sculpture in the context of our national anthem and other famous monuments never left me. I began a precocious campaign for my parents to take me to see "Mountain Rushmore."
Within ten years we were there, standing on the observation platform and gawking up at Gutzon Borglum's colossal sculpture. It was enthralling to be in the presence of such an iconic monument. Prior to actually being there, Mount Rushmore existed only in pictures and films, and though my mind knew that there really is such a place, as far as my own experience was concerned, the actual physical entity might have been as mythical as Atlantis. But there it truly was, a granite reality that could not be denied.
The Reluctant Athlete
If gloves could talk...this one wouldn't have much to say.
"You want me to play softball in a prison?" I asked incredulously.
"I know," said Brian in a calm tone that resonated with sympathy and reassurance. We both knew that my objection had little to do with the unusual venue, and it was painfully obvious that he was desperate for players. So desperate, in fact, that he was approaching one of the last people you would want to ask if you wanted to forge a decent softball team. My brother tried to bolster his sincerity with a smile, but he could barely suppress a laugh as he tried to entice me by adding, "It'll be fun!"
"Yeah, fun," I grumbled. Brian belonged to a service organization that not only did the occasional good thing for the community but also participated in a recreational softball league. Scheduling a game against the inmates of our local minimum-security prison was a way to join the two vocations. Unfortunately, only a handful of members had signed up for the opportunity. Joining Brian in this endeavor would be the noble thing to do, but it would require a complete consumption of my pride. It was akin to taking a willing dive into a pool of embarrassment. "Let me think about it."
Take Me To Your Liter
Let's see: 1 inch equals 2.54 centimeters, so 1 centimeter equals...hmm...
Whatever happened to that great push to fully implement the metric system of measurement in the United States? I was only an elementary school student in the Seventies, yet I was not immune to the controversy surrounding some contemporary educational issues. There was the backlash against New Math, for example, as parents questioned the relevance of learning abstract mathematical concepts to the computational competency of their children. The use of phonics instruction still annoyed those who remembered becoming perfectly good readers without repeatedly breaking down words into their phonetic components. I was dimly aware of these debates, but the hot issue that really got my attention was the impending rise and dominance of the metric system.
As a child, this major societal shift was presented to me as an inevitability, and I perceived a menacing future. There would be no use resisting, it was implied. It wouldn't matter if you expressed a preference for the customary system or voiced an objection. Well, you better learn to like it, because it's coming! By the time we were adults, we could expect grocery store shelves filled with canned goods packaged by the gram, gas stations selling liters of gas, and car speedometers indicating kilometers per hour. I was apprehensive. Just the sight of the fraction 5/9 in the Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion formula made me uneasy.
Unfortunately, performing cumbersome system conversions seemed to be the extent of the educational effort to make the metric system relevant to our everyday lives. No wonder so many of us developed a prejudice against a measurement method that is preferred by nearly everyone else in the world.