Mason Benjamin Wham, here at age 27 hours

Ladies and gentlemen, may I be permitted to introduce the first new addition to the Frank B. Wham, Sr. branch of Whams in about 22 years! Meet Mason Benjamin Wham, the absolutely beautiful fruit of my younger brother, Nick’s loins and the result of the hard work of Kerry, my sister-in-law.

He is, of course, flawless in every way and has already scored perfect marks on all his newborn tests. Depending on who one asks, he arrived a week early (by Sissy’s account) or two weeks early (by Dr. Keller’s account). It’s actually a good thing he decided to come on and make his debut because as it was, he was 8 lbs. 7 oz and 20 inches long. A week or two more of floating around and growing and he would have been a hoss sure enough. As it is, he fits perfectly into the crook of an arm and weighs about the same as a large bag of sugar and is just as sweet.

Nick and Sissy brought him home today and I’ll need to be going over there before long to help get him settled in. In all likelihood, he’ll never see the inside of a day care since Nick’s mother, Teresa, is “conveniently” unemployed due to cutbacks at her former office. Daddy is absolutely about to explode with pride over his first (and if Sissy is to be believed, his last) grandchild. I think Teresa may have to sew new buttons on all of his shirts to replace the ones he burst upon Mason’s arrival.

One funny story about his birth. No one told my brother that babies don’t automatically start breathing as soon as they clear the birth canal; so, there he was coaching and waiting like a good new father when Mason pretty much popped into the doctor’s hands. According to Nick, “He was as blue as my blue jeans and he wasn’t breathing. I sank to my knees certain that my son was still born.” Luckily for all of us, a little suction at the nose and mouth and Mason announced his arrival into the world with a set of lungs that would have made his Granny Wham very proud. He also has no problems nursing and has shown a definite appreciation for George Jones songs.

I think he’s perfect.

In Flanders Fields
By: Lt. Col. John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

From one who has never known the smell of battle and the stench of blood and fear to every veteran of every American war, popular and unpopular, won or lost, concluded or continuing, thank you so much for risking your lives and many times giving your lives in the service of your country. You did not ask if you believed in the cause for it was enough that you believed in the country that gave the call.

Bless you, each and every one of you.

I’d wash all y’all’s tired feet if I could.

Thank you again. Love y’all.

This is a VERY simple movie for me to review. If you were one of the students who adored Sartre’ and “got” Albert Camus’ book “The Stranger”, you’ll love “The Box”. If you understand “Waiting for Godot”, you’ll sop this movie up with a biscuit. It is an existential masterpiece.

I hated it.

Sure, Budge loved it. She’s even seen it twice. Of course, Budge also had a crisis of conscience when she was in AP English because she thought she was becoming an Existentialist, which, in the South, is the same as thinking you are becoming an Atheist.

Just in terms of “moviespeak” the acting was horrible. Cameron Diaz tries to affect a Southern accent and doesn’t get close, and nothing is worse to the ear of a good ol’ wild eyed Southern boy than a fake Southern accent.

The movie DOES have one redeeming quality . . . it showcases decor from the 1970s that I haven’t seen since I was a child. Remember avocado colored appliances anyone?

The Movie is VASTLY Inferior to the Book.

NOTA BENE: This post was inadvertently not published on 10-23-09 when I actually saw the movie and wrote the review, but I hate to waste writing and I really hated the movie.

Just got in from seeing the heavily hyped Where the Wild Things Are with three of my favorite ladies in the whole world: Budge, the Girl Child, and the Girly Girl. I could say a lot, but in all honesty, I’m still in a bit of a shock at how not-what-I-expected this movie turned out to be. I didn’t HATE it, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

First of all, this is NOT a children friendly movie. Any child under age ten with the least bit of an imagination will have nightmares about MULTIPLE scenes in the film. It is surrealistically frightening in several places. Second of all, the movie is DEEP on some levels. That’s not bad, but it’s nothing like I expected either. Children, unless they are supernaturally precocious won’t “get” this movie at all. Everyone who does “get” it is going to be very sad, which brings me to my final idea that the movie is a TREMENDOUS downer. Don’t go thinking you are going to see a colorful enactment of a beloved children’s book. You aren’t. You’re going to see a morality play that will leave you in a funk for hours if you are of a regular emotional constitution. If you are like me, you may unfold from the finger-sucking fetal position in two or three days.

I will say one thing about the movie and hope no one judges me harshly for the multitudinous indiscretions of my youth. If you ignore the moral and pretend you haven’t read the book, you are in for a long, strange trip. The last time I felt like I did tonight after leaving a movie, I was in college and watched a double feature of Pink Floyd’s The Wall AND The Dark Side of the Rainbow in a VERY “smoky” apartment while simultaneously “riding the Magic Bus“, if you know what I mean. Taken just as a visual, this movie is like . . . wow, man.

Otherwise, wait for the DVD so you can watch barefooted and comfortably numb.

Love y’all. Have a good weekend.

We fell back last night and took back our hour of sleep that was so rudely stolen from us back in the late spring. Now, for a large majority of the people in the places where this biannual clock changing is enforced, the event passed largely unnoticed. For a select few, however, last night was a PITAS of the highest degree. Anyone working in a manufacturing plant last night had a bad time.

See at one time, we had more textile plants (factories, if you must) here in the South than a feral dog has fleas and ticks. For over a hundred years, textiles fueled this region and new cotton mills seemed to pop up like so many toadstools after a hard rain. All that wouldn’t matter as much to me except that much of my family went through a spell at one or the other local mills. In my own time, I spent a few dreary summers in one of the many textile plants owned by the richest man in South Carolina. He has always been known as a bit of a miser, so everyone in his plants worked “swing shifts”.

To the uninitiated, most factories run on three eight hour shifts: First is 8 AM to 4 PM, Second is 4 PM to 12 Midnight, and Third (or Graveyard) lasts from 12 Midnight to 8 AM. If you worked a swing shift, you would spend a week on First, then a week on Second, then a week on Third and the next week back to First. It was brutal to say the least, but in a factory running swing shifts, the owners don’t have to pay a shift premium because everyone works all the shifts. Again, for those not accustomed to the lint-head lifestyle, a shift premium is the extra pay you draw for working an “off” shift — Second or Third. Most of the time, you’d get so much more for Second and then double that for working Third. It was a way of rewarding bleary-eyed drives home in early morning and basically shooting any of one’s body’s natural circadian rhythms in the head.

Now, I gave y’all that  quasi-history lesson to tell you this — under no circumstances did you want to be working Third when the time “fell back”. See, if you don’t know, the time actually changes at 2:00 AM. Most people just set the clocks back and go to bed. Not in a cotton mill. Oh no. The one time I was unfortunate enough to get caught on fall back night, I joined a group at the time clock and watched at 2:00 as the clock wound back to 1:00 AM. A whole miserable hour of hot, lint-filled, and sweaty work was just erased like so much chaff on the wind. It was heart breaking and the worst thing was, you didn’t get paid extra even though you worked 9 hours instead of 8 because your time card would show 8 hours and not 9. The Man got an extra pound of flesh for nothing.

It’s been many a year since I walked the machine aisles picking up lint waste, but I haven’t forgotten that cruel irony. Sadly, what few manufacturing plants that still run today around here have continued that barbaric practice. Unfortunately, most of them run 12 hour shifts so the late shift works 13 hours!

Of course, “jump forward” night in the spring was different, but who wants to talk about that !

Sleep good and enjoy waking to daylight and not dark, y’all, and as always, don’t forget to scrub your necks and wash your feet. Love y’all!

When I was growing up, we lived in the back forty acres of the boondocks. I took some friends home from college to meet my mama over the holidays once and two of them swore we lived in a different time zone, if not another space time continuum. Living that far from nowhere meant that social events were scarce, but for a kid with a sugar craving on All Saint’s Eve, it was death. I LITERALLY had no where within walking distance of my house and we lived so far out we’d have to eat all the candy we got driving around just to survive the trip. So in the era of my childhood, preceding all the newfangled “Trunk or Treats” , the highlight of Halloween for me, my brother’s generation, and my dad’s generation was the annual trip to Greenpond to visit Aunt Nell and drink her Witch’s Brew.

Twenty or so years ago in Greenpond. My baby first cousin, Blake, is the Blue Dinosaur; my brother, Nick, is the redhead behind him; Aunt Nell is in the witch's costume; my second cousin, Anna, is next to Aunt Nell and is holding a child I don't recognize; and Zach, my oldest first cousin, is standing behind Anna.

See, when Daddy and Aunt Cathy, as well as all the First Cousins, were children, they lived in the boonies as well; so they didn’t have anywhere to get candy on Halloween either. In an effort to give the children somewhere to wear their costumes and get some candy, Papa Wham’s sister, my great-Aunt Nell, started dressing up in a witch’s costume on Halloween and hosting a small gathering. She’d put a huge (well, huge for a five year old) cauldron of what she swore was witch’s brew on an open fire in front of her open and detached garage then pop up a huge amount of pop corn and lay out a great stock of candies.

Children — first my daddy’s generation, then mine — would come with their parents and eat popcorn and run around the pitch black yard in our costumes playing hide and seek until we vomited. It was our unofficial family reunion and most Halloween nights, just about every lineal descendant of Granny Mattie would make their way up Aunt Nell’s winding driveway. Rain or shine, she always turned out.

The Witch of Greenpond became pretty much a local legend. Aunt Nell made the cover of the local weekly newspapers and in all the years I can remember, she never missed a Halloween. Time comes for us all though, even good witches, and the year finally arrived when Aunt Nell simply couldn’t take on the night’s festivities. Alzheimer’s Disease had robbed her of the memory of the wonderful times she’d given all of us and the rest of the rural children of the surrounding countryside.

That year, about six or seven years ago now, I think, the pointed hat was passed. Anna, the adorable little blonde standing next to Aunt Nell in the picture, took up the mantle of the Greenpond Witch from her grandmother. Now she presides over the ceremony that has meant so much to so many people for so long. Now, rain or shine (and tonight was a frog-floater) the cauldron still gets lit and the children still come to eat popcorn, chase each other, and drink a cup of Witch’s Brew . . . which still tastes suspiciously like cherry Kool-Aid.

Happy Halloween, y’all, and don’t forget to wash your feet after you come in from trick or treating!

Behold the lowly acorn; sign of Fall, food for wildlife, and deadly missile!

I love Fall. From now until the end of November is hands down my favorite time of the year. Granny Wham always loved Fall. As soon as the weather got nippish at night, she’d tell Papa it was time to go see the leaves. That meant I’d spend the night with them on an October Friday and we’d get up at the butt-crack of dawn the next morning to head to the Blue Ridge Parkway. As long as we were on the highways, I’d read. I wish I still could read in a moving car, but for some reason, carsickness hits as soon as I look at a page . . . but I digress from my digression!

The three of us would spend all day in the mountains looking at the golds, reds, and yellows all along the mountain roads. Still, this was Granny and she is who I took the lion’s share of my worrying tendencies from, so we’d have to be headed down I-26 towards home before the first sign of dark. Granny didn’t like to travel at night.

So Fall has always held a particularly warm place in my heart from an early age. However, this beautiful season is not without its extreme hazards. In my front yard are three extremely tall and extremely productive oak trees. Overhanging my back fence are about ten or twelve more. Now, while they are a wonder to look at, it is with some trepidation that I venture forth from the safety of the front porch to journey to the mailbox.

You see, these oaks do not produce the dinky little BB sized acorns. Oh, no! These trees shed acorns that, if cast in lead, could have been fired in a .68 caliber Brown Bess musket with no trouble at all. My trees are well over fifty feet tall and when one of those green slugs lets go from a bough near the top, it stands to reach terminal velocity before it makes contact with the ground . . . or my balding pate! Getting cracked in the top of the head with one or two of those little monsters is enough to bring tears to a strong man’s eyes. What’s just as bad, the trees in the back lot overhang my tin-roofed workshop. When acorns hit that tin roof at about Mach 1, they make a crack like a 12 gauge shotgun going off.

Now, this doesn’t bother my oldest fuzzy child, Beau, in the least. He is stone deaf as befits a canine of his years and stature. His kennelmate, Jack, however, goes into paroxysms each time a shot rings out from the tin roof. I have to admit that I find them startling as well. More than once I’ve nearly put out an eye with an Xacto knife as I was cutting and concentrating when one of the green hailstones hit!

Still, the squirrels and deer the crop of mast attracts to my back yard is plenty enough reason for me to leave the trees alone and risk a knot on the noggin or four!

Happy Autumn everyone! Don’t forget to wash your feet!

Hello to my three loyal readers!

As most of you know, I’ve been out of work since June. I won’t go in to details, other than to say my former district shut down a school and so I became the sixth librarian in a five school district. So, I was bumped from my job in favor of a person with less than a quarter of my ability but three times my seniority. Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Anyway, I’ve been casting about for ways to keep my questionable sanity intact. To that end, I’ve launched some more blogs. Each blog will now have a focus instead of being a catch-all for whatever jumps into my head at the time. The new lineup will go something like this:

“Granny Beads & Grocery Store Feet” will remain my flagship blog. It will actually improve now because it will now take over as the repository of my memoir, story, and anecdote collection about my life growing up and living in the small-town South. This will now be a “politic, employment, and hopefully angst free zone.”  I’ve been asked to write a book. Well, this is where it’ll get written.

“Insomnia Inducers” is a niche blog that appeals to the neurotic, OCD, paranoid side of me. To call me a pessimist would be to defame good pessimists throughout the world. “II” will be slavishly devoted to publishing the growing list of horrible things that keep me awake at night. Truthfully, if it’s on “II”, then I’ve literally lost sleep over it.

“The Idiot Patrol” is my attempt to point out the overwhelming plethora of people in this world who should have the common decency to do us all a favor and stop breathing the air that other people so desperately need. Each update will point out a person who fits my very liberal definition of an idiot for some reason. They could be mean or a boor or a leader who is incompetent to the point of criminality. Each and every one will get my undivided attention for around 500 words. This blog will be political, employment related, and probably riddled with middle aged W.A.S.P.  angst masquerading as righteous indignation.

Finally, I’m launching “The American Reality”. This blog, located at nomoredream.wordpress.com since I couldn’t get the address I wanted, will be where I play pundit and solve every problem the world has to offer with wit and the wisdom passed down to me by my ancestors. Here, I will hold forth on education, politics, movements (bowel and otherwise), and pretty much all the rest of the hot-button issues of the day. If you want my opinion on all things public, this will be where to turn and I’ll go ahead and guess that y’all probably won’t like it.

In time, I hope to launch a one-page web site that gives a jumping off point to each of these endeavors as well as including other items of interest to me. I hope you all like the line up. It’s what I’m praying will keep me from going off the deep end of the shallow pier.

Check them out and keep your feet clean, y’all!

I had a Facebook conversation last week with my favorite Georgia Peach, Buffy “the Unquiet Librarian” Hamilton about an article she’d posted on Facebook. In a nutshell, the Sports Illustrated article dealt with the fallout around an Ohio public school district’s decision to cut ALL extracurricular activities. No band, no afterschool clubs, and, most shockingly, NO SPORTS. Ms. Hamilton point out how she wished communities would get in a comparable uproar over shutting down library programs. I had a response for her that we discussed via chat.

Peaches understood my response, but I’m pretty sure it’s not going to make me any friends here. Of course, y’all know I shoot straight and call them like I seem them. This is no place for the squeamish or hopelessly idealistic. I told her that outcry over libraries would never reach the levels of outrage over canceling sports simply because sports are more important to schools and communities than school libraries.

Libraries can’t begin to compete with the importance of sports to a school, especially in impoverished urban or rural areas. How many high school students do you know who wake up chomping at the bit to get to the library? Sure, some are out there, but compare that to the number of students in your school who willingly shell out money to sit in the stands on Friday night. Sports are the ONLY reason many, many students attend school at all. Take away sports and attendance at high risk schools will decline because the former athletes — often among the lowest socio-economic class — will have no reason to get up and come to school. They will have no reason to get up and come to school because . . . well, hold that thought because that’ll be tomorrow’s post.

To keep in this vein, however, football is big business. Nothing galvanizes a school like a winning team. When’s the last time your school held a pep rally and devoted “prime instructional time” to a new shipment of books or new computers for the media center? When’s the last time your library produced revenue for the school? Instead, our institutions are a drain on revenue. When’s the last time, other than a faculty meeting, that the entire district population was “encouraged” to attend a library event like a bookfair? Never? But I have known superintendents and principals who “strongly encouraged” everyone in the district to attend a crucial Friday night fight. Oh yeah, and don’t tell me they can’t do it because I and a lot of my three regular readers live in the South where football is king and we don’t have unions to hide behind so if an administrator tells you to do something or be somewhere, you’d best do it or be prepared for consequences and repercussions.

Now I figure those educators who are still reading are pretty bent by now, so let’s just keep on bending. Football and other sports serve a legitimate purpose as an outlet for energy and competition. They get kids moving and involved and moved and involved kids want to come to school and want to learn. What does a library have to compete with that? Very little.

Now I know someone out there is going to comment on a Keith Curry Lance study or some such nonsense about “libraries raise test scores through the roof.” Before you get on that soapbox, let me go ahead and say, nope — I don’t believe it and I’ve read the same reports you have. The typical high stakes standardized tests that are used to evaluate students’ AND TEACHERS’ performance have no component that would be increased by time in a library. We have all proctored enough of those tests to know they are not overflowing with HOTS, no matter what the DO and the curriculum experts try to sell us. They are read and regurgitate and if you want students to blow those tests away, you skill and drill them until they want to cry and you want to join them in the sob-fest.

Sports and other ECAs give kids a reason to live after surviving a week or two of those tests AND the mind-numbing weeks of preparation that goes into them. Sports reach the whole school while libraries only reach a small portion since most teachers can’t afford time away from test prep to actually engage in a worthwhile lesson and can’t afford to “waste” precious planning period rest time to engage in meaningful collaboration.

Call me a fool, call me a traitor to my profession, or call me a dirty footed scoundrel, but prove me wrong first. Until education is revolutionized rather than reformed in this country, football and sports in general will be more important to schools and communities that school libraries.

Sorry to upset y’all. It’s just the way it is.

One of my all time favorite kids is turning sixteen tomorrow. She was one of my best customers back when I had a job as a middle school librarian and I wanted to do something for her special day, but as you can imagine, being out of work has seriously cut into the gift giving budget, so I sent her a card and enclosed a two page note that I wish someone had given me when I was turning sixteen. Maybe things would have turned out differently. Do you think I gave her good advice?

Dear _____,

You are turning sweet 16! Though you may not believe it, what comes next is probably the most important five year period of your life. From 16 to 21, you will make a ton of decisions that will affect the rest of your life. The problem is, you sometimes won’t know that you are about to make such a life changing decision until you look back on that moment from ten or twenty years down the road. For that reason, you must be careful and thoughtful about everything you do. I’ve got a few things to tell you about what’s coming that I really wish someone had told me when I was 16, but no one was around to tell me. Trust me when I say everything I’m going to tell you are lessons I learned the hard way by making mistakes, some of which I am still paying for to this day.

First, sex. Just say no. I realize that is sometimes easier said than done, especially when “everyone is doing it” and every TV show, movie, and song seems to be screaming that it’s okay and you are weird if you don’t sleep with everyone who comes along. Well, take it from me, they are wrong. Having sex too soon is a really good way to train-wreck your life in a hurry. Aside from the obvious fact that you can contract dieseases and get pregnant, you can also be devastated emotionally. I promise you, as someone who knows too well, a lifetime of regret and second guessing is not worth a few minutes of what seems like the ultimate pleasure. Also, your generation seems to have trouble sometimes figuring out “what is sex.” This is a simple question. If you have to wonder if what you are thinking of doing is sexual, then it’s sex and don’t do it. It’s just not worth it.

Second, relationships. In the next five years, you’ll cement some relationships that will last for the rest of your life. Oddly enough, some of the people you think you’ll be friends with forever will drift away while some people you never dreamed of speaking to will turn out to be your dearest friends. You won’t make all the friends you’ll ever have by 21, but you’ll get a good start. You’ll also come across a boy or two that you thought at first would make a good boyfriend but after awhile you’ll see that he’s really a great boy who’s a friend. Hold on to those because friends of the opposite sex can give you insight into some decisions that your very best girlfriends can’t.

While I’m talking about relationships, don’t forget the most important relationships of all and that’s family. You will be sorely tempted many times in the next five years to think that your parents are idiots who know nothing and are completely out of touch with reality. However, if you will watch your tongue and try, just try, to listen to them, you will be shocked when you are 30 at how incredibly intelligent they have become. No relationships are more important than family. They are the ones who have been with you the longest and you didn’t get to pick each other – you just got stuck together by Someone who is a lot smarter than all of us. If you break ties with your family, you will live to regret it. Again, I know from experience what I’m talking about. When those family members are gone, you’ll be shocked at how lonely life can be.

College and jobs. Go to college or don’t go to college. You can make it in life either way. Just don’t go to college or pick what college you go to just because “everyone else is going there”. Following what everyone else does is another really good way to train-wreck your life because you aren’t everyone else. When you decide on a career, remember this – you will spend more waking hours at your job than you will anything else in your life. If you think being in school and hating it sucks, you’ve never laid in bed listening to the clock go off and nearly bursting into tears because you hate the thought of going to a job you despise. Find something you love to do then find a way to make a living out of it. That’s what I did and it’s one of the few things in my life that is still regret free.

Jobs lead to money and if you don’t listen to anything else, PLEASE listen to this. Be careful, careful, careful about money. No, money is not the most important thing in the world – far from it – but good money management can make your life go a lot easier. The worst thing you can do is come out of college thousands of dollars in debt with student loans AND credit cards! Avoid credit cards like the plague. Debt is like crack cocaine, it feels so good to buy what you want, but sooner or later, you have to pay. Now, having said all that, don’t hoard money either. Once you have a good roof over your head and the light bill and such are paid, don’t be afraid to live a little. People who hoard up money are just keeping score and money is a very empty way to keep score. Remember this – use things and love people; don’t use people and love things.

Finally, keep one thing in the back of your mind as you go “This too will pass away.” It’s true of everything. If you are insanely happy at the moment, don’t get too caught up in it because it WILL pass away. No one can stay on the mountain top forever. At the same time, though, if you are in a dark period of life and it seems like the sun will never shine again, this too will pass away. No one stays in the valley forever, it just seems like a long time sometimes.

So, Sweetie, I hope you can find a nugget or two in the ramblings of an old man who’s seen a bit too much and avoid some pitfalls along the way. Life is a wonderful thing, enjoy it as much as you can, but always remember – this is the journey, not the destination. Enjoy your Sweet 16, _____, and may you have many, many more!

With fond affection,

Mr. S. Wham

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