This would have happened in the late 1950s, just after my fifth grade year at Andrew Carnegie Elementary School, in Tulsa, Oklahoma . I loved it there–the school, my friends, the town, the ranches surrounding our suburban subdivision–it was just the ideal place for a boy to grow up.
Carnegie was a “pilot school,” one set up to try out new educational initiatives, and most of them really worked for the students there. For example, from the second grade on, we changed classes. The classes of children stayed together throughout the day, but we moved from room to room and from teacher to teacher. The advantage to us was that when we were in, say, Science class, we had a Science teacher, not some nice lady who really wished she understood Science a little better. The Art teacher, for example, was actually able to get me to produce some attractive works–something that never happened before or since–just by providing the materials and environment that put success within the students’ grasp. It still is a great school, apparently–all these years later.
Continue reading...21 August 2009
Oklahoma has freakish weather. It is known for being in Tornado Alley, but you don’t have to live through a tornado to experience some weather-related excitement there. I have seen a hole the size of a Volkswagen blown in a roof by lightning. I have seen a summer storm fill the gutters in a minute, all the way to the top with warm, chocolatey water. I have seen the extremes of the continental climate from a first-hand vantage, so I know how extreme it can get. Weather like that adds interest to the life of a boy not yet old enough to lose his sense of wonder.
One three-day span stands out in my memory as perhaps the strangest. It was early winter, a time of great variability anyway, but this particular period impressed me. The first day brought about 6 inches of snow, falling steadily out of the steely skies all day and into the night. The next day dawned cold, but the sun came out at mid-day, and the temperature climbed into the seventies. The skies darkened in the late afternoon as huge, anvil-topped thunderheads built in the west. Instead of rain, though, we got pea-sized hail which pelted into the top layer of snow cover. Soon thereafter, as the sun descended, the clouds swept by, and the sky cleared as the temperature started to drop. It went into the teens that night, and the next day dawned bright and clear. Looking out the window, the hail embedded in the snow sparkled and glistened, fracturing the light into millions of tiny spectra, some complete, some partial. Roy G. Biv would have been proud of most of them.
Walking outside, it became clear that this crust of ice and snow was very strong. My sister and I didn’t break through it, even when we jumped up and down. I think it must have been my mother who suggested we try to ice skate on the icy crust. Whoever it was, the idea was genius. We spent most of the morning gliding back and forth on our front yard until the sun softened the snow, and the ice skating was over.
I have told this story a few times in my life, but I stopped telling it because I became aware over time that almost no one ever believed it. When my parents moved us from Oklahoma, they moved us away from the only audience that would understand and appreciate a story like that.
Continue reading...10 April 2009
Sometimes things just work out right. The other day I took my son to White Pines Nature Preserve south of Pittsboro, NC. This is one of the properties owned and preserved by the Triangle Land Conservancy, and according to their Web site, the White Pines Preserve is “located at the confluence of the Deep and Rocky rivers.” The preserve is unique in that it supports several stands of white pines and other plants that normally are found in the cooler mountain region of North Carolina. Apparently, because of the rivers and a north-facing hillside, the area supports a cool microclimate, and because it is a little out of the way, people have left the area pretty much undisturbed. The trails are well worn and easy to follow, so it seemed like a good day’s hike for the two of us.
Continue reading...28 October 2008
The recent anti-élite campaign jargon of the McCain-Palin camp has made use of a most annoying–but ubiquitous–malapropism. Palin, especially, refers rather often, and rather annoyingly, to the “good ol’ boy network.” If anything could solidify one’s status as outside of the élite, this off-target utterance would be that thing. See, there is a world, or at least a continent, of difference between a “good old boy” and an “old boy,’ and rest assured, it is the old boys who have the network to which one really wants to belong.
You’d never be able to buy your way in to either network, however. An “old boy” is a graduate of one of England’s “public” or independent schools, someplace like Eton College. While good ol’ boys have quite the little network of their own, membership will cost one very little. All one has to do is be among the fourth or fifth generation of a respectable, church-going family living in some region of the rural south, and you’re well on your way. True, this membership will only take one only just so far. Still, A “good ol’ boy” need not have graduated from anywhere, even an American public high school. One need only possesses a spectrum of traits, which make one worthy of the title, rendered somewhat lovingly in one’s absence.
The term signifies one’s apparent humility, one’s apparent basic decency, as well as one’s obvious tendency to withhold any forthright opinion on any particular topic in the presence of strangers. This is the central trait of the good ol’ boy, and one he holds in common with many of his upper-crust British cohort. He leaves people free to hold, and even to express, the most outlandish positions on matters many and various. He’ll never tell anyone they’re wrong; he’ll never tell people what he thinks about that topic, but you will never win him over to your line of thinking, no matter how solid your argument. Oh, you will think he agrees with you, but you will want to be a fly on the wall when next he gets together with others of his ilk to know the truth.
Although he is a man of no apparent opinions in the presence of people he doesn’t know that well, one finds he is also a man of rigidly held, dogmatic beliefs once one gets to know him. It is this trait, and perhaps this trait alone, which he shares in common with the old boys of Britain. It is this trait, perhaps, that serves as a marker of his common heritage with the ruling élite of the United Kingdom.
On a related note, one has noticed how natives of tiny, overpopulated island nations have a way of taking politeness to the next level. Look at Japan and England, for example. I mean, they come by this trait naturally, it seems, and it is easy to see why. How uncomfortable would it be to spend time with someone once one had established a source of disagreement with him or her? Best, then, to keep all such disagreements from ever surfacing, to keep one’s own counsel, to state forthright opinion only among those one knows already hold the same opinion. It only makes sense.
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23 August 2009
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