The Good Old Days

Are you raising an unbearable child? Probably.

When I was a kid I split time between my Mom's house in the woods and my Dad's farm just down the road. From relatively early on we had pretty much full independence. On a nice day we'd be sent out in the morning to find our own fun. I cannot tell you the number of hours I spent up in the hayloft (which was literally suspended from the second-floor barn ceiling some 20 feet above the floor) or amidst the shards of metal and glass all over the place. Barbed wire was just another impediment -- or better yet an addition -- to the forts and tunnels we created. We'd climb the machinery and dangle from beams. We'd run around like we owned the place and I don't remember my grandmother helicoptering even though she was always in the house and occasionally would pop out and give us a shout offering a popsicle. We'd run down the hill behind the barn (the one that was perfect for sledding in the winter) at full speed to see who could get the furthest before wiping out.

In the woods we'd climb trees and jump from the branches. Or in the nearby fields we'd play tackle football, or baseball complete with hit pitches and in one-on-one or two-on-two games it counted as an out if you threw the ball and nailed a runner between bases. We had boxing matches with winter mittens as gloves. No one chased us around to make sure we drank enough water (we ran into the house when we were thirsty) or had enough to eat ("your arms ain't broke" is something I heard on more than one occasion when I whined about wanting a snack.) We'd chuck iceballs at one another in the winter and attach little sour apples to sticks and whip them at one another in the fall. We'd fight when angry.

And mine wasn't some sort of antiquated, mythological childhood. Everybody I knew did this stuff. And I'd bet anyone in my age range has similar stories, catered to the suburbs or the city or what have you. I probably sound like an old man romanticizing the good old days, and I never want to be that guy, so I suppose that there are things I missed that I didn't even realize. When you grow up poor or working class there are all sorts of disadvantages that you internalize, and my kids (touch wood) will have all sorts of advantages including me probably helping them to schedule them beyond free time while I hover and coach and beam. It's a different world now just as it was a different world then from what my parents knew, a world they always put up as being somehow tougher and more authentic just as their parents surely did for them.

Nonetheless, I know that my kids (again, assuming it happens) will never run on the farm or get to enjoy seemingly endless expanses of woods to explore. And so I'll tell them stories, about the time I tried to jump from a tree onto the back of a friend's speeding minibike, or about taking an iceball square in the nose (my first broken bone!), or about jumping from the neighbor's roof into a pile of leaves that proved insufficient to cushion the fall, or about that time we . . .

Aerosmith, RIP?

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Aerosmith. Although traditionally labeled a Boston band, they actually got their start in the Lake Sunapee region of New Hampshire, where I grew up. It's tough to be a kid growing up in the area without absorbing the bands full corpus. Furthermore, when Aerosmith was starting out, they were regulars in the local party scene so that the first time I planned to go to an Aerosmith concert my Mom was stunned that I'd pay $20 to see them when she saw them for free every weekend.

One great story (that I've heard from multiple sources) among myriads that people roughly my parents' age tell that created the band's local legend involves Steve Tyler hitting on my Mom. It's an anecdote that embodies both figures quite well. At a party one night Tyler was wearing nothing but a fur coat. He went up to my Mom and sort of embraced her, opened up his coat, and put himself on offer. My Mom's response? "Put it away, Steve."

So despite the fact that it has been a long, long time since Aerosmith put out anything even vaguely relevant, it was still something of a shock to know that the band may be no more. Always racked by fraught internal dynamics (they broke up once before in the early 1980s) it seems that Tyler has decided to walk that way.

FJM Spins the Dead

OMG Guys! OMG! OMG! OMG! The gang from the gone but never forgotten blog Fire Joe Morgan are guest blogging at Deadspin. No productivity for me today!

Forever Young

If you are of a certain age John Hughes' death probably meant more to you than it did to most. For those of us in Generation X Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and especially The Breakfast Club spoke to your angst-ridden teen-aged soul. Molly Ringwald was probably the grande damme of the Brat Pack. Her New York Times op-ed on Hughes' death is powerful and wonderful and if your current age hovers somewhere near 40 it will probably speak to you in a way that you never expected Molly Ringwald to speak to you again.

(Basically, if you're fighting off admitting you're middle aged, this piece is a must read.)

Scool House Rock

If you are a late-era Baby Boomer or fall in Generation X, School House Rock holds a sacred place in your heart. Saturday mornings, embodied by the Smurfs and especially Bugs Bunney-Road Runner were framed by these animated music videos that, well, made learning fun! Recently I was in Target and saw a new Election Edition of School House Rock and thought it would be fun to show some of the clips in my class on the Modern Presidency and Presidential Elections. But then I rounded a corner and my wife noticed that for $2 less I could actually get the entire School House Rock collection. Giddyup!

Talk about a trip down memory lane. "Conjunction Junction," "Noun is a Person, Place or Thing," "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here," The Adjective Song (probably my favorite -- what a melody!), and dozens of others come flooding down the memory banks. What is remarkable is how well written the songs are, how infectious the melodies, how varied the genres. We have our little godson/nephew with us for about ten days, and so this morning I got up and once the boy was up we put on the dvd to play through the whole history of School House Rock. The grammar songs are the best, the ones that really bring me back to Satruday mornings in the 1970s and early 1980s.

"Verb! That's What's Happenin'!"

John Rambo is Back

Admit it. You're considering seeing the latest installment of the Rambo movies. Oh, you might do it "ironically," or out of a sense of nostalgia. But you're actually looking forward to it, even if you use it as an excuse for going to the movies drunk. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the review in The New York Times was actually quite fair. One quotation from AO Scott's assessment probably sums it up best: "[T]he movie does have its own kind of blockheaded poetry."

Amen to that, brother.