At least that’s what they say.  I don’t if that’s true or not, but I DO know it takes a small army to buy a kid school supplies.  Jeeeez!  How much stuff does one fourth grade boy need?

At church last Sunday they asked for people to please help with school supplies for some of the 300 kids who live in shelters in our city.  Of course we said yes.  Our church always responds well to appeals for things like this, or care packages for our troops, etc.  I volunteered us for a fourth grade boy and they gave us the appropriate list.

What an ordeal!  That was the most disorganized store arrangement I’ve ever seen.  Stuff was scattered over 6 or so aisles.  The instructions asked for 200 sheets of wide-rule notebook paper.  It comes in pkgs of 150.  They wanted 2 boxes of 250 count tissues.  They come in boxes of 216.  (What an odd number.)  Four pencils….they come in pkgs of 8.   I think they were just jerkin’ my chain.

Anyway, it’s bought and packaged and will be delivered this Sunday.  Regardless of the circumstances of their current homelessness, it isn’t the kids fault.  A little kindness can go a long way.

S

…..the news is just full of oddball happenings today.  Two Dallas police officers on patrol noticed the smell of something burning, then saw smoke, and finally stopped to find their cruiser, a 2004 Dodge Something, on fire.  Wait…it gets better.  As their trunk was loaded with ammo for their AR-15 rifles, they had to shut down the freeway while the rounds cooked off.  Of course the fire dept. couldn’t approach it either, so the car is now crispy.

In Cleburne, just southwest of Dallas, the residents are in an uproar because the owner of the local drive-thru beer barn employed bikini-clad girls to dance outside for the enjoyment of those in line, and of course to bring in new bidness.  Can you see the men getting home from work saying, “Yes dear, I was there and it was so disgusting I had to look away.  Especially that tall blond….Hawaiian Tropic tan….white string bikini….just disgusting.  Oh, and I went back through the line a couple more times and got a few extra cases while I was there.”  

S

Last night in conversation K told me I’ve lived a “charmed life”.  I tried to think of a snappy comeback, but I couldn’t.  Overall I have lived a charmed life.

I was born in San Antonio, TX where I lived (so I’m told) for one year, then on to Springfield, IL (so I’m told) for a year, and finally settled permanently in the Dallas suburbs.  My dad was in sales, and my mom was what we would today call a “stay at home mom”.  We were a middle class family:  we lived in modest brick homes with 2-car garages.  We had pretty much what we wanted, but of course we really didn’t want too much back then.  Advertising hadn’t reached the fevered pitch it has today.

Dad could sell ice cubes to Eskimos.  He was one of those guys everyone liked to see coming.  He would visit with his clients, shoot the shit, tell a few jokes, do a little back-slapping, then say, “Hey, you wanna buy some widgets?”  And they’d still be laughing from his jokes and say, “sure, send me a gross.”  Mom was the kindest, most trusting person in the world, which was an asset in those days, but would today get you ripped off before you could blink.  They were scrupulously honest.  If they said they would do something, consider it done.  More than anything else, I’m grateful to them for giving my brother and me our character.  Neither went to college, but we always had books and magazines and newspapers around the house and they valued education.

From dad I got my love of cars.  He always had a fairly new one, usually Oldsmobile’s or Buick’s, and later when he got me & ‘lil bro off his payroll, Cadillacs.  (Like a lot of WWII vets, he never owned a foreign car.)  Most kids back then didn’t have their own cars, but I had access to my parent’s whenever I wanted.  Naturally I was always trying to get dad to buy a cool 2-door fastback model.  I heard stories about WWII from him which probably led to my interest in history, too.  Football was the topic of conversation in our house, as it was just about everywhere in Texas in those days.  

I had a very stable childhood.  I went to one elementary school, one junior high school (as we called them in those days), and one high school.  I was an average student, did my homework, and never got into any real trouble.  My parents were firm, but reasonable.  They instilled in me a strong work ethic.  I was assigned the job of keeping up our yard as a 9-year-old, later mowing neighbor’s yards for some extra summer spending money.  I advanced to working in a hardware store (I was the lawnmower/bicycle guy), and later to summer jobs at Kraft Foods.  I was always the one who had to get out the Christmas lights and string them all over the property, dealing with the crimped, shorted wires and changing the burned out bulbs.  I hated those damn lights, still do.

When I was small and I acted up I got one warning, and the next time a spanking.  There was seldom a “next time”.  I was a mediocre athlete, never anything more than a bench-warmer.  I found out I had a knack for sports reporting, (sports being defined as ‘football’….just football) and was actually on the Friday night high school football scoreboard show on a local Dallas radio station.    I had my circle of friends, but we were a notch below the top-tier “in crowd”.   They had a local version of American Bandstand on WFAA TV, and I was there at every opportunity.  One girl or another was always wearing my ID bracelet (before we got our senior rings), and drive-in movies still existed.  *fade to black*  I graduated in the top 20% of my class…nothing special.  

HEY, WAKE UP!!  Next come my college years.  Repeat after me:  ”To-ga, to-ga, to-ga….”.

S