Core

Baby birds love Effingham.  This is a given, of course, but I was reminded a few weeks ago while driving my family back from yet another successful jumping session at Monkey Joe’s.

Monkey Joe’s, as you might assume, is an indoor inflatable amusement park.  This might sound ridiculous, but keep in mind that much has improved in the inflatable recreation business in the last few decades.  In other words, these are not your father’s bounce houses.

 When I was growing up, we had one inflatable jump house at the county fair.  These looked really cool from a distance, but they also got super crowded.  Children bonked heads; toddlers got stuck in the creases. They were a mess.

Fortunately, those days are gone.  Modern American children, thanks to businesses such as Monkey Joe’s, can enjoy all the fun of inflatables without the sweat and tears.  Multiple inflatables, from giant slides to lengthy obstacle courses, minimize crowding.  These parks even provide snacks and arcades.

I’m no businessman, but I sincerely believe that if a person opened such a park in Effingham they would do quite well for themselves.  In fact, I will make this promise right now.  If you build it, my kids will absolutely go there, and they will bring their friends, and we will all buy pizza.  In fact, considering the area’s panache for socializing, I predict that if you built the place with refreshments on tap, you would die quite rich.

But I digress.  Back to baby birds.

On the way home from our fun, we made a pit stop at the Centralia McDonalds.  We used the drive up window and somehow managed to purchase a cheeseless cheeseburger.  Weird.  Fortunately we caught the error and quickly turned around.

While crawling through the drive through the second time, a baby bird, perhaps three weeks old, literally dropped into our car.  This startled me a bit, but I was on a cheeseburger mission, and so I kept my composure.  After parking the car, I knelt down to rescue the bird but instead the silly thing jumped up into the inner workings of the vehicle above the foot pedals.

However, no one even believed we had a baby bird in the car in the first place, and we were in a hurry, so I started driving home, curious as to how this adventure would end.  Considering the fledgling had made the decision to hitchhike mere inches from the engine, I was not optimistic.

Anyway, it was a relatively peaceful trip home until about half way between the Keller Drive and Sigel exits.  That was the moment the baby bird made its second appearance.  On my daughter’s startled lap.

 “A bird!  A bird is on me!  A BIRD!  Ahhhh!”

Shrill.  Intense.  Insane.

“I told you guys there was a baby bird in the car.” I helpfully explained, curious as to how the creature had somehow managed to sneak past my feet, beneath the seats, and onto my daughter’s lap.  As the screaming continued, my wife turned around to rescue her firstborn from the vicious predator.

Over the course of the next few moments, while my six-year-old daughter continued to scream like a maniac and my four-year-old son calmly watched the whole thing like it was a nature program, the poor creature was finally snatched up. After giving the newbie sparrow some directions and a few bucks, we dropped it off in a safe neighborhood and wished it good luck.  I’ve thought about the young bird’s destiny more than once these last few weeks.  Considering recent weather patterns, it is most likely wet.

Regardless, I will probably never forget this episode.  For my daughter though, this frightening moment may become a core memory.

A core memory is one that you keep with you your whole life.  I know this because I have watched Pixar’s most recent cinematic triumph, “Inside Out.”  According to the movie, a core memory is so intense, so closely forged with your personality, that it influences your life well after the event has passed.

We all have core memories.  Some of them are positive and some of them are not.  One commonality about most core memories, though, despite their importance, is that they are rarely made on purpose. 

For example, a former student contacted me recently to thank me for some kindness I had offered him over fifteen years ago.  I had basically told him, after reading some of his poetry, that he would be a writer someday.  Apparently that token of sincere affirmation has stuck with him the last decade and a half, because his first novel will be published at the end of this month.

Now, I didn’t share this story for kudos.  I shared the story to emphasize that although we rarely design our own core memories, we can absolutely influence those of others, particularly for our young people. 

This is something to think about the next time a baby bird falls into your car or jumps onto your lap.  For my daughter, part of her core memory will be that weird-looking little bird, yes.  But a larger part, most likely, will be that of her mother risking life and limb to crawl into the backseat to rescue her.

Questions

How many Cheerios have we drowned down the sink?

This is a question I ask myself more than I care to admit, and it’s not just Cheerios, either. An uninspiring amount of food gets thrown away at our house. It annoys me, and so I often ask the question, “Why are we wasting food?”

But who’s really to blame? The 4-year-old who didn’t finish his cereal — again — or the almost 40-year-old who poured too much in the bowl for the seventh time in eight days?

Food has been on my mind lately, which is typical for humans in general, I suppose, and perhaps for Americans in particular. We are surrounded by food. Biologically speaking, securing food is the most important thing we do each day. In fact, National Geographic spent a sizable portion of last year trying to answer the very crucial question, “With the world’s population still skyrocketing, how will we feed everyone, in a sustainable way, by 2050?”

The magazine devoted multiple articles over the course of 12 months toward analyzing the issue of food. I didn’t take notes, or anything, but some of the more interesting takeaways were rather surprising.

For one thing, Earth, as a whole, does not have a food shortage. The planet actually provides more calories per person than what is either consumed or even needed. Hunger, thus, is not currently a problem of production but one of movement. What happens, then, to all those uneaten calories? Unfortunately, much of it just rots. More depressing, particularly in developed countries like the United States, much of it is simply thrown away. (See opening paragraph for more details.)

Another point that I found interesting, coming from a publication that prides itself on its scientific clarity, is that there is not a great deal of evidence to prove that genetically modified food is inherently bad for you. In fact, the magazine suggests that GM crops, such as corn and rice hybrids, will play a crucial role in feeding all those additional mouths by mid-century.

Granted, natural eating certainly tastes better and does makes a person feel more human. However, enjoying that debate is a luxury that many people on the planet don’t have, mostly because they’re too busy trying to find enough food — modified or not — to feed their families.

As an American, though, I think the most interesting article tried to tackle perhaps two of the weirdest questions of them all: “How is it that United States, with its abundant resources, even has a hunger problem, and weirder still, why are so many Americans simultaneously undernourished and overweight?”

Unfortunately, space does not allow an in-depth analysis of these questions, which is good, because I wanted to devote the last few paragraphs to discussing something else, anyway.

As many of you know, Blessings in a Backpack feeds hungry students in our community. The organization puts food into backpacks that many students take home on Friday nights to help nourish them until Monday morning. For many of our local youth, the school cafeteria is one of the few places where they can find a consistent meal. Is it saving lives? Probably not, but the program is certainly making lives better.

Now, like perhaps some of you, when I first heard about this program, my initial response was “Seriously? These kids have ‘no’ food between Friday and Monday? You’re telling me that in a community surrounded by cornfields, in a state saturated by social programs, in a nation battling an obesity epidemic, we’re stuffing backpacks with food? Seriously? How in the world is that going to solve the problem?”

And about that time, a little voice inside my head simply said,

“It’s not. Putting food into backpacks will not solve the problem. There will always be hunger. But it’s not your job to solve all the world’s problems. It’s your job to help people. You have not been asked to stop hunger. You have been asked to feed hungry people.”

After that little divine epiphany, I shut up for a while. I shut up and stopped asking so many damned questions, because that is exactly what such questions are. They are damned, they are distractions keeping us from doing what we know is good.

Sometimes we waste so much time asking stupid questions we don’t get around to actually answering anything. People don’t need more questions. They need blessed. We don’t need to have it all figured out before we act. Sometimes we just need to act.

This is what I find so inspiring about the people involved with Blessings in a Backpack. This is what is inspiring about all the local, community-driven organizations making the world a little better, piece by piece, person by person.

They don’t waste time asking silly questions. They are too busy pouring cereal. 

Travel

Although this may sound unpatriotic, part of me hopes my kids are not great athletes.

I know, many of you are smirking right now, snickering to yourself, “Don’t think you have much to worry about,” but here’s the deal.  In 1996, my wife was chosen as the athlete of the year for her high school.  In 1995, her cousin won the same honor.  In 1994, her youngest brother earned the award, and her older brother would have won had he not been beaten out.  By another cousin.

The point is, my children may have inherited some troublesome genetics.  Troublesome, because, if they show even the remotest athletic promise, I am basically required to schedule away my weekends for at least a decade, traveling to various locales throughout the state, or, if they are really good, throughout the country.

As many of you already know, the face of youth sports has changed dramatically in recent years.  Although the park district, community leagues, and school-sponsored contests we remember still exist, these options have been supplemented and increasingly eclipsed by a much more lucrative model:  travel ball.

Now, for the sake of brevity, the term “travel ball,” in this context, encompasses many variations, from seasonal leagues that offer pre-collegiate athletes the chance to hone their skills close to home, to year-round teams that venture out of state to compete in large-scale tournaments.  One thing all these options have in common, though, besides the moving ball part, is commitment.  Travel ball generally requires plenty of time and money.

This is why part of me secretly hopes my kids aren’t super interested in sports.  It’s not that I’m lazy or don’t like to travel.  It’s just that—and don’t take this personally if you’re a parent—I don’t really want to travel great distances to watch children play softball, or basketball, or whatever, at least not multiple weekends out of the year.  And it’s not that I don’t care about my kids’ happiness or future.    It’s just that—and don’t take this personally if you’re a traveling team coach—I don’t really believe that, if my kid was put on this earth to play sports, your travel team is going to make that difference.

This is a dangerous column to write, of course, because it’s entirely plausible I may someday eat these words.  Five years from now, you may very well see me sitting on some bleacher in Ohio, for example, shivering, sipping on coffee, watching my daughter play softball against a bunch of girls she has never met.  If that happens, you have my permission to take out your smartphone, bring up this column, and laugh in my face.  That will be your right.  Please do me a favor, though.  If that scene does takes place, and I say something stupid, like, “Well, Coach Smarty Bottom really thinks if she can get her timing down, she could play division one in a few years,” please punch me in the mouth.  Hard.

In all seriousness, though, what you and your family do on the weekend is totally your business.  As previously mentioned, I am not an athlete; I am not a coach.  I am not an expert on sports in general or youth sports in particular.   However, Tim Keown, who is kind of an expert on the subject, being as he’s a senior writer for ESPN, had this to say on the topic:

“This is the age of the special child. This is the age of the parent who believes his or her kid playing Little League for the neighborhood team is beneath them both…This is the age of the youth-sports industrial complex, where men make a living putting on tournaments for 7-year-olds, and parents subject their children to tryouts and pay good money for the right to enter into it.”

The article, entitled, Where the Elite Kids Shouldn't Meet  went on to discuss the potential health risks involved in playing year round sports at such a young age, as well as the inherit absurdity behind some of its practices, such as having tryouts for nine-year-olds. The article, which is, admittedly, one-sided but certainly worth a read, basically lampooned a micro-culture that Keown suggests has lost its mind.

But what do I know?  I’m not a sports writer.  I’m just a guy who recently watched his little girl play softball for the first time, who watched her walk off the diamond with a huge smile on her face.

“That was fun.”  She declared, her eyes shining and sincere.  “I really like softball.”

As her dad, of course I want to keep it that way. My gut instinct, though, tells me that having her play one organized sport most of the year might not be the best strategy.