Mental Notes & Random Musings

The Junior High School years were different than the elementary school years. No longer did we have recess of snack breaks. Homework became a part of my life, and yes as a parent of three children I can tell you that the amount of homework my kids started bringing home from elementary school made me more concerned than elated. Elementary school was about socialization and the ability to learn the basics. Junior High school was about correlating them all so that in High School you had the basis to start becoming an adult. I was genuinely becoming less young and less dumb by the day, in theory.  Of course, it was Middle School by the time my kids were in this state of life, and sixth grade was now part of that school and not the elementary school. The homework that was piled on them from the oldest daughter to the middle son, to the youngest daughter increased all through elementary school, and was downright insane during middle school. This is where the old and dumb like me had the ...

School was different when I was young and dumb. My mother walked me down to kindergarten down the street when I was five. My city was one of the rarities in New Hampshire that public kindergarten in 1975. That was the last time she took me to the first day of anything, and I had done two years of nursery school prior to that, which was an even bigger rarity. My mother owned an art gallery and was involved in local theater, so one of her artsy friends got me into his mother’s nursery school for free so my mother could have more time to herself. This was a trend that continued until she left my father soon after my walk to kindergarten.  At the time I was not emotionally stable enough to understand any of this, and for all I know fifty years later I am over analyzing it, but it is my existence so I will go on as I see it. The mommy issues really have nothing to do with this entry; I just threw it in there because it is what it is. I was getting on about what school was and was not in...

Ok, so I want to take a moment to bridge my young and dumb reading, to the young and dumb reading I did on behalf of my kids. My oldest daughter started it all by bringing home Harry Potter books and reading them to herself. She was twelve at the time and the other two were six and four. I was in single daddy-ville working overnights and sleeping most of the day. There was a window from when they got off the school bus, and when I left for work, where I awkwardly socialized with them all. Reading to the younger ones originally consisted of reading what books I got for my daughter. These were the important ones, before she started veering off to the Vampire stuff like Twilight, Vampire Diaries, and Sookie Stackhouse, which were all a bit too old for reading to your kids.   Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: This book and the next book I was able to read t the kids and then watch the movie with them on the massive Sony projection HDTV in the basement. The third book, Harr...

No Gen Xer’s quest into young and dumbness would be complete without an overactive imagination. Had my father wanted to find me there was a fifty percent chance I was roaming around someplace that I shouldn’t be and thanks to a lack of cellphones the possibility of finding me was slim. The other fifty percent of the time was sharing our overactive imaginations indoors at a friend’s house. This could involve Dungeon’s and Dragons (aka D&D), the newest comic book drop, where we each bought one, read it and swapped out. Either could be an all-day affair, but there was also the rare case of Creature Double Feature having a Godzilla or Gomorra day, and we would be at whatever house had a free TV. There were only twelve channels on the cable TV where I grew up and WLVI was the king.  The overactive imagination was what made me realize my bedroom floor was slanted, and I could use a golf ball I found outside the local driving range, and my sneakers to have a makeshift pinball machine ...