Age and experience force me to admit I’m smarter than I live. Like a lot of late middle aged people who fight weight problems, I have at least two dozen diet books on the shelves and probably know as much about nutrition as professional dieticians. Seriously. Heck, I think I could write a diet book…a good one. (Tomorrow. I’ll get back on my diet tomorrow.)

I know for a fact a lot of us intend to exercise more…just as soon as the weather improves, the rain stops, or we find a gym we like. In the meantime, our unused treadmill sits lonely in the garage, companion to our weight bench and unused weights.  (If you want exercise equipment at bargain prices, try your local thrift store. The last time I tried to donate to Saint Vincent’s, they wouldn’t take mine. Overstocked. There has to be a moral there.)

At a younger age I smoked more than was good for me. I really liked my tobacco, but with each puff, I worried about lung cancer, heart trouble and emphysema. (I could name a half dozen people who died from lung cancer. But I was quick to point out one of them never smoked, as if that proved something. As I write, I’m not sure it proved anything at all.) Over the years, I quit a dozen times, once for four years, but it took a serious bout of bronchitis and a midnight trip to the local ER to finish my smoking days.

I was never drawn to drugs, but I learned to like my beer. During my  early career with the US Forest Service, we took pride in being hard drinkers and hard workers. I gave beer up too, but America drinks. Boy, how we drink. And it’s no wonder. You can’t watch a TV program without seeing the lead characters drinking…programs like Blue Bloods, NCIS (the famous basement scene where Gibbs dumps the nails out of a pint fruit jar and pours whiskey for an uninvited guest), NCIS New Orleans…the party town.

I think we ignore what we really know in favor of the pleasure of our habits. I know I did. Maybe it’s a left over from our youthful sense of invincibility. Bad habits may kill, but it’s gonna get the other guy, not me.

Rod

My first disclaimer: I can’t say much about chuffy men. Not really. I’m still working on my winter fat from 2015.

My second disclaimer: This is not about the women of the world. Nope. This is about the men.  (Frankly, I’m afraid to be critical of women. That’s gotten a tad risky, at home as well as in the world at large. Testy, they are.)

That said, it seems we men are bent on letting our grooming standards slip to the point of just getting plain ugly. Take the big chuffy guy going into our local Bi-Mart store. If he ever shaved, it had to have been last year, and I’m sure his hair hadn’t been insulted by a comb or brush longer than that. (I mean, I’m mostly bald, and I still brush what little is left.) But it wasn’t beard and hair that stopped me in my tracks. It was the flannel pajama bottoms he had cut off at the knees…to wear to town…and, I guess, to show off his leg tats and fat knees.

(I mentioned the pajamas bottoms to my good wife who said they might just be a wild pair of shorts, but I didn’t buy in. Nope. He was wearing pajama bottoms.)

And I see some of us old guys wearing shorts to town that look like they saw the laundry last month and have been slept in every day since. I guess I’ve turned into an old fuss budget, but I can’t help think, “Where’s the pride?”

The grooming standards I grew up with came straight out of the Great Depression. As one old timer who survived that rough period put it, “Shave, keep your shoes shined, your hair cut and your pocketknife sharp.”

On TV I see celebrities who show up for gala events sans tie, sans shave, sans haircut, studs in their ears, and nose candy hanging like metal snot from their noses. (I have no idea what to say about some of the sleeve tats.) It’s like we men are in some kind of pushing match to see who can move the grooming standards to the next level…and it ain’t one level up.

Nope, I have to believe the new standard for male grooming is, “Let’s get ugly and go to town.”

Rod

Back in the dim and distant past, during my years as an English teacher, I loved my students…mostly…and my classroom. (Except when I needed to run an errand and found I was as confined to school as were my students.) What I didn’t like was the constant record keeping: grades; test scores; tardies; absences…and I forget the rest. It sometimes felt like it was more important to keep records than it was to educate.

One student in particular was frequently late getting to class before the bell rang. (It wasn’t really a bell, just an annoying buzzer, but we called it a bell anyway.) I never knew why he was late, and it wasn’t more than a sixty second lapse, so I really didn’t care much.

But one day just as I flipped the grade book open to mark another “T” for tardy on his line in the grade book, I’d had an idea.

I said, “George, I want you to tell us a good story about why you are always late getting to this class.” (I think it was George, but it might have been Everett. After forty-seven years, the past can indeed become “dim and distant.”)

Then I added, “It doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be a good story. If the class likes it, they’ll give you a thumbs up. If they don’t like it, then it’s a thumbs down and I have to mark another tardy in the book.”

Darned if George wasn’t up to the challenge. I’ve forgotten the story he told, but the class laughed and voted thumbs up.

The fun began the next day when I saw two of my seniors leaning against the wall in the hallway outside my door. When the “bell” buzzed, they stepped into the classroom and said, “Mister Collins, we’re late.”

“Okay,” I said. “What’s your story?” (I think, I said that. Maybe…probably.) The class was entertained by two fine tales. And, yes, they voted thumbs up.

Thus ended my career as a keeper of the “T” for tardy records. Thereafter, we started a lot classes with good stories about “Why I was late for class.” No one was ever really late for any of my English classes again…unless, of course, they had a good story to tell. (And I never entered a “T” in the grade book again.)

Rod

For nearly five years, the public school system endured my attempts to teach high school English. My last assignment was a peach…four classes of senior elective English…filled with bright volunteers who knew they were bound for academia. Great kids and good students, all of them. Lucky me. (I also taught one period of history, but that’s for another blog.)

My teacher buddies were the two librarians, a math teacher, a music teacher, and the Agriculture teacher. My break/prep period and the Ag teacher’s break coincided, which may explain why we got acquainted. Over numerous cups of coffee, I discovered he taught mechanics, welding, machine operation, public speaking, accounting, judging, planning and planting…and I’m sure that’s not the whole list.

When I compared my efforts to prepare students to lead a life (Shakespeare anyone?) to his much broader, more practical training program, I decided he was doing a much, much better than I was.

I thought back to my school years and tried to find one thing I had learned in high school or college I could use to earn a living. Except for some basic science and math knowledge and for some honing of my slumbering writing and speaking skills, I couldn’t think of a darned thing…other than teaching.

As I cataloged my vocational skills, I realized my survival skills were those I learned from my father and my uncles…skills I used to earn the money to put myself through college: basic mechanics; how to change a tire; building a car from the ground up; basic carpentry; tool use; power saw operation (which came in handy when I worked summers as a firefighter for the US Forest Service); truck driving; auto wrecker driving; and just plain old “how to work.”

I thought about what we were collectively doing in our public schools…or not doing…for students through our insistence on a standard, nationwide college preparatory program. At that time, about thirty percent of our students were going on to college. (Hmm…an immediate seventy percent MIA count. Wow.) Of those who attended college, about ten percent actually matriculated. (Ten percent of thirty percent leaves us ninety-seven percent MIA of those who actually graduated from high school.)

I think this realization triggered my decision to leave teaching, but I sometimes think if our schools offered good, solid vocational programs for those who wanted and perhaps needed that type of training, I might have stayed with it. Vocational Ag, anyone?

Rod

p.s. I love my Shakespeare. Used to teach his plays.

I honor honest historians and the work they do to bring me stories about the lives and times of monarchs and kings and conquests. What impresses me more than kings and conquests, however gloriously portrayed in the pages of books or on theater screens, are stories of the lives of common people.

History books make it clear the bulk of the people in earlier times were serfs or peasants. And it looks to me like being a serf or a peasant guaranteed a rough life, one without much hope for a better one.

Despair is the word which comes to mind. Basically, if the harvest failed, or the brigands raided, you starved, and there wasn’t a heck of a lot you could do about it. Enslaved by birth and circumstance, you were.

Stories of lives without hope gives me a tug of sympathy for the brigands and outlaws. At least they were in charge of something. The persistence and the continued popularity of the tale of Robin Hood and his Merry Band of Outlaws is, I think, a case in point: a free roaming band living in defiance of the High Sheriff, the king and the circumstances of life. There must be an echo of “me too” in many hearts. (Early records may also explain the lure the Church held for the devout. At least there was hope for a better life in the next one.)

Putting the romance of Robin Hood aside, the victims were often just as helpless as the brigands. No matter what poet lived in a peasant heart, a life of drudgery was guaranteed to kill the soul. (I think that might explain the pull Druidism and witchcraft held for my ancestors in Jolly Old England. It must have given them a sense of power over their circumstances.)

In America, we don’t share the same problems. We are protected by a constitution and a bill of rights which guarantee freedom of speech, the right to assembly, the right of citizenship, the right to vote, and so on. And no matter how I bristle over each incursion into my personal freedom by the governing bodies of county, city, state and federal bureaucracies, I still possess the last great freedom: freedom of occupation.

I’ll try to not sound schmaltzy, but I was born a common man, so I can relate to my “common” ancestors. I believe as long we common people can choose the way we earn a living, can choose where we want to work and live, and can choose who we live with, we are free. Freedom equals choice, opportunity, life, liberty and the pursuit happiness. (I think I read that someplace.)

Rod

I suppose it is a way to acknowledge we live in very busy times in a very busy world, but electronic nagging is starting to weigh on me.

If I fail to take my TV dinner out of the microwave (which thankfully only beeps four times instead of five like the old one), the machine beeps every sixty seconds until I obey. Our new super keen dryer plays an insistent four note musical when it finishes drying whatever the load was, and will do so every few seconds until someone pops the lid. (And the other day, it told me it was time to clean the lint trap.)

My new smart phone gurgles and sends me a “vroom” sound…and vibrates as well…when some unknown telemarketer sends a text message. Pop-ups plague my computer screen, and my car has all kinds of warnings…like “passenger door open” or “low tire” or “passenger seat belt.” Heck, it won’t even let me run out of gas. (Where is the fun in  that?)

I sometimes trigger the Wally World alarm, even if I’m not carrying a bag. (I suppose that’s one of those “just-in-case” warnings.) And my check for groceries sometimes won’t scan on the first try.

But the final straw is my kitchen smoke alarm, the one hanging high on the wall. I boil spuds, steam veggies, and poach eggs with never a quiver from the alarm, but the instant I fry bacon or beefsteak, it makes a shriek fit to ruin a good pair of hearing aids. The darned thing has got to be vegetarian.

I’m promising myself a week in a cabin with a fireplace on a nice lake to get away from all of this electronic nagging. (Now, if I can just find one where my smart phone has service…)

Rod