Mama Says

The teachers are dropping like Parma bowling pins at our children’s elementary school. Many of the students — displaying a remarkable lack of empathy — love this, since when the teacher’s home sick the class is split up and distributed among the other classrooms. It’s similar to the fun they get from a tornado drill. There’s nothing nicer than a tiny, easy to manage crisis.

But having just spent a couple of weeks with our own round of colds, I expect the sick teachers aren’t having quite as much fun. So I thought I’d offer this recipe for a comfort-food recipe from my childhood. My mother always made this for us when we were ill, and it is so easy that the sick person can even make it to pamper herself without fainting over the stove.

SHANTY POTATOES

• Peel and thinly slice into a small sauce pan as many white potatoes as you think you’ll eat in one sitting. This dish isn’t so great left over.

• Barely cover with water and bring to a boil.

• Add salt, pepper, and a big old blob of margarine (or, as my mother would say, “oleo.”)

• Turn the heat down to medium-low and cover.

• Check the water level every couple of minutes to be sure that the potatoes aren’t getting dry.

• When the potatoes fall apart when poked with a fork and the broth has slightly thickened, they’re done (about 15 minutes).

Serve with toasted white bread and hot tea with lemon. You’ll be back on your feet in no time.

This past weekend, my family “got away.” We took a little trip to Michigan to teach our children to cross-country ski.

Now, usually we follow a regular routine whenever we go on a trip of any length. First, we get an idea about where we would like to go. Then, we discuss — often for weeks or months. Discussion is supplemented by intense and exhaustive research, to ensure that no fun element that could possibly enhance the trip is overlooked. Finally — and most importantly — I spend at least twelve hours cleaning the house and neatly packing so that in case, God forbid, we all perish in a 20-car pileup, the executors of our estate will be able to say, “It’s a shame she died; she kept her dresser drawers so neat and never left milk to spoil in the fridge.”

Recently, however, I’ve been distracted by this and that. As a result, I found myself on Friday with two kids home from school for the long holiday weekend, a Plain Press column due, and my father-in-law’s birthday to celebrate in the evening. Come Saturday morning, not a thing was packed, and the house was a complete mess. But we had to leave anyway; we had hotel reservations.

Well, John forgave me for forgetting to pack his socks and underwear (he’s keenly aware that, technically, I don’t have to pack for him at all), but I still feel that my having left two dirty skillets in the sink and a cup of cold tea on the kitchen counter led somehow to our having to leave a broken minivan in Ypsilanti. The trip that begins with confusion cannot but end the same way.

Having left home in chaos, we also returned that way. There have been the van repairs to manage, a second round-trip to make to Michigan, the credit card bill to consider, and of course the dishes, laundry, and general clutter that we left behind that still need seeing to.

Fortunately, I also came back with this: the mind’s photograph of my little daughter, pink-cheeked and smiling, stopping to listen to the sound made by snowflakes falling in a pine woods. An element of perfect order.

For at least the past year, and possibly longer, my two children have been constructing what I can only describe as a comic soap opera of literally epic proportions.

It began with what was to most casual observers a sort of annoying pretend game of which the most obvious feature was a slightly cloying use of baby voices. As a matter of fact, I used to need to call frequent intermissions on rainy days when there were no friends over to serve as a distraction, since they could go on in character for hours at a time.

But gradually, the plot has evolved and become more complex, the cast of characters has expanded, and now I find myself eagerly awaiting the next episode.

My son, Ned, gives credit to his sister, Audrey, for the story’s concept, which began with a character named Baby Bon who, wandering alone in a forest, encounters a friendly wombat named Mr. Wombie. Taking pity on the poor, lost babe, Mr. Wombie helps Bon find shelter at the Wombat Hotel, a vast 4,000-room complex inhabited entirely by eccentric male wombats and clever female babies — except for one “crotchety old babysitter” named Strict.

Strict, however, is not the hotel’s authority figure. Apparently, she exists in the story mainly to provide the plot with a villain, and perhaps also to satisfy any concerns that either the storytellers or the eavesdropping audience might have about innocent human children being left unsupervised with wild animals. The real authority comes in the form of a Parliament of Wombats, which tends to act with remarkable unanimity, down to wearing identical silk sashes and baseball hats embroidered with silly slogans, such as “I Am Fun!” The Parliament is headed by Prince Wombat, who I believe serves for life, as well as a queen of the babies, who is periodically replaced as the reigning queen becomes too old (age 5) to serve. Currently occupying this revered office is Queen Pudgie IX.

The idea of somehow recording this developing story has, of course, occurred to their pop and me, but it’s difficult to know how to do this without interfering with their play. Even the occasional questions we interject or the gut-busting laughter the story sometimes provokes threatens the project’s spontaneity. A video camera or even surreptitious note-taking would put them too much on the spot, and, unfortunately, I lack the tape-recorder-like memory to take in and spew out, intact, the dialogue and stage directions I am privileged to overhear.

But even more than the loss of this body of work - which would be a great shame - I am coming to dread the end of the story. Although I accept that such a game can’t go on forever any more than childhood can, I am already feeling sad about the eventual ending because of the likelihood that one of the children will abandon the partnership before the other is ready.

Borrowing trouble, as I listen to each episode unfold over after-school snacks or in the back seat of the van, I am increasingly haunted by the ghosts of my older-children-yet-to-come. I picture one child eagerly leaning toward the other, tossing out a line to cue the scene. I imagine the eagerness and joy of that child, anticipating for the umpty-umpth time the challenge of this improvisation, wondering what twists the sibling/co-creator will throw, and being answered instead with a weary eye-rolling and an, “Oh, I’m too old for baby games.”

This imaginary scene makes me mourn not just for the child who is temporarily left behind, but also for the child who, moving on to the next stage, abandons childish pursuits, and maybe even forgets the happiness they once brought.

In my own childhood, I shared with some of my siblings an on-going game called “Summer Camp,” which, if not quite as complex and enduring as Wombat Hotel, was similar in nature. I can’t remember exactly how the game finally ended; what I do remember is a conversation I had not long ago with my brother, Chris, in which he admitted to having no recollection whatsoever of the hours and days we must have spent playing Camp. He doesn’t doubt that we did play such a game, but the demanding details of adult life have pushed this part of our childhood beyond the reach of his recall.

Upon hearing this, I’m sorry for him for being deprived of the memory, and I’m sorry for myself for being denied the pleasure of sharing it with him. And even more, I find myself wondering whether if we could all reach back to this time in our childhood when we collaborated so successfully and so creatively on a project, whether we’d feel better prepared to confront together the shared challenges of life as adult siblings.

Yesterday, I had a series of experiences that, upon reflection, seemed connected like beads on a thread:

• My niece related to me a story about an incident that had just occurred at a gas station, during which a man she described as “looking clean cut,” asked her to let him pay for her gas on his credit card in exchange for cash, because he needed a few dollars to tide him over and didn’t have anything left in his bank account. He even offered to charge her only half the cost of the gas. Thinking she was helping someone in a bind, she paid him $20 for $23 worth of gas. Immediately after leaving, she realized that the credit card was probably stolen.

• Along with my niece, I attended a two-hour training session for the upcoming Homeless Stand-Down, the theme of which was the essential humanity of both guests and volunteers at the stand-down, and our need to recognize this in extending the hand of charity.

• I took my young daughter and her friend to a movie. When we took our seats, we were alone in the theater. Immediately after we sat down, a somewhat unkempt older man entered, crossed in front of us, and sat next to me. I stayed put, but was very uncomfortable. A few moments later, he got up, crossed in front of us again, and left the theater for a few moments before returning and choosing a seat next to my daughter. I then immediately got up and moved the girls to a spot on the aisle in another part of the theater, and watched the entrance until two other families arrived, before settling in to watch the movie.

It was clear to me that these experiences were all related, but I’m still trying to work out the message.

For one thing, there’s the theme of outward appearances, and how our pre-conceived ideas about people affect our choices. The man at the gas station “looked” honest to my niece, and so she did as she was asked. She chose to do that in spite of the fact that her education in accounting has been preparing her to detect and investigate fraud. I suspect that the fact that she was on her way to the training session helped to put her in the frame of mind to give him the money. Also, she is young, and was raised in a rural area, and has seldom been approached by anyone directly appealing to her for money. Lacking a history of negative experiences, she simply responded to the first prompting of her conscience. Immediately after she did, her conscience pricked her for whatever harm might be caused if the card was used illegally.

In contrast, the man in the movie theater “looked” creepy to me. However, the training session had just sensitized me to try to see the man’s soul, whatever my aversion to his outward appearance, and not to hurt his feelings by moving away. On the other hand, I’d had a similar incident fifteen years ago in which I found myself alone on a subway car with a man. In that incident, I had also wanted to move away or leave the car, but had convinced myself that this was merely an uncharitable impulse based on the man’s appearance. The subway man subsequently exposed himself and began masturbating, and I fled. When the man in the theater returned and chose a seat near my daughter, any confusion I had about how to respond to the situation was cleared right up. Suddenly, I didn’t care at all about hurting his feelings.

My niece and I both initially wanted to do the generous (or, in my case, at least the tolerant) thing. But neither of us came away from our experiences satisfied that we really would have done good by trying to be nice.

As I think this over and consider what I might have done differently, I have also thought about the scriptural passages that were read at yesterday’s Mass, and about the content of the stand-down training. To me, the passages from Isaiah (58:7-10) and Matthew (5:13-16), and even the more specific message of the stand-down training directed both of us toward following our more generous impulses, without accounting for how the “good” that we do toward one person could result in bad being done toward someone else.

In both situations, there was a possible third party — the person from whom the credit card may have been stolen, and my little daughter and her friend. I think neither my niece nor I considered these third parties as we made our initial estimation of the possible good-to-possible harm ratio. It was only when we accounted for them that we thought we saw more clearly what action we should have taken.

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking also leads to no good. I suspect that fear of unintended negative consequences is the main reason why more people choose not to act in a radical way. We don’t give our riches to the poor because we’re afraid they’ll spend it getting high instead of buying milk for their babies. Meanwhile, the poor stay poor, and the babies have no milk anyway.

It is a very fun thing - this right to occupy a chunk of cyberspace, and to fill it up with my own opinions, ideas, rants and raves. But like all rights, it comes with its share of responsibilities. For instance, I must make a sincere effort not to publish false information, I must check and repair links regularly, and I must never, ever force my visitors to listen to a cranked-up MIDI of “You Light Up My Life” while they fumble for the mute key. It’s all part of being a good citizen of the Internet community.

It’s kind of like that with network TV.

Brief history lesson: decades ago, when government wanted to encourage companies to get into the radio and TV business, the FCC handed over the rights to broadcast over chunks of the electromagnetic spectrum to stations across the country, at a cost that closely resembled “free.” When, in the fullness of time, it became evident that broadcasting was going to catch on, the cost to occupy the airwaves moved up from “free” to “buckets of money.” Any new tenant of the spectrum — say, a cell phone company — pays a big ol’ fee. But the networks are still sailing along with something much like their original cherry deals.

Because the networks benefit from the public’s generosity, the FCC figures they owe the public something in return. Specifically, they owe us programming that does something beyond amusing, titillating and satiating our desire to watch strangers suffer humiliations for a chance to win cash prizes. They owe us information, and they owe us education. And by “us,” I mean you, me, and especially all of our kids.

For many years, this has been the cause of some struggle. On the one hand, the networks (being businesses) would like to maximize their revenue by airing wildly popular shows appealing to persons with a combination of A) lots of time on their hands, B) disposable income, and C) poor impulse control. Perfectly reasonable desire. On the other hand, the airwaves don’t belong either to the networks or to select careless consumers; they belong to the public. That is why the FCC has passed guidelines regarding program content, to try to ensure that there is some balance.

One recent set of guidelines, passed in 1996, requires that three hours of a station’s regular weekly schedule between 7AM and 10PM must be set aside for core educational children’s programming. To meet the FCC’s standards for core programming, the shows which a station identifies as its educational and informational programming for kids must meet some criteria. Specifically, such a show must:

• have education of children as a significant purpose;
• be regularly scheduled;
• be identified on air as educational programming.

To me, the most interesting of these criteria is the first; the emphasis on the word “significant” is my own.

Although I am no longer a regular television viewer, I do try to be aware of what’s on. So I went looking to find out what’s passing for “significant” education on our local Cleveland stations these days.

So far, the most recent list I’ve been able to uncover dates from about two years ago. A little yellowed and dry at the edges, but sufficient to give me an idea.

Although I did raise my eyebrows at the appearance of “Baby Looney Tunes” on the same list with Marty Stouffer’s venerable “Wild America,” the more intriguing item was not a particular program, but this line at the bottom of the list:

Note: It is the broadcast station - not the FCC - that has determined that a program is specifically designed to educate and inform children and whether it satisfies the definition of core programming.

Now, to me that sounds a little like letting my fourth grader define what I mean by “a clean room.”

If you’re skeptical about how honorably our Cleveland stations are adhering to the spirit of the FCC guidelines in providing meaningful educational programming, you aren’t alone.

This week, OC Inc, the United Church of Christ’s media justice office, is gathering together parents of young children, educators, and other stakeholders in broadcast television to challenge the licenses of stations that are not meeting their responsibility to their youngest viewers.

To find out more about how broadcast TV is supposed to be serving your child, or to share your own story about how your child’s needs aren’t being met, you’re invited to a briefing with former FCC Commissioner and current OC Inc. Managing Director Gloria Tristani at 9AM, Thursday, 10 February, 2005. The meeting will be held at Church House, 700 Prospect Ave, Cleveland OH. Call Megan Hoelle at 216-737-2179 for details and to let her know you’d like to join them.