Sheep and Goats

Screening With the Barenaked Ladies

If you don’t instill values into your kids, it’s not true that they will grow up free and beautiful and unencumbered, selecting their own values from the rich cornucopia of ideas....and thus escaping your stupid prejudices. No, all it means is that someone else will instill values into them. Moreover that someone else is not likely to have your kids interests at heart, at least, not to the extent you do. Heaven help you if that someone else is the entertainment media. That medium even pushes the percentages of Sturgeon's law, which informs that "90% of everything is crap."

You have to shield the kids somehow. You can‘t quite do what the entertainment industry tells you to do….watch this or that show with your child and then discuss its values or lack thereof. This is just their ploy to double the audience. Maybe it was true in your household that adults had equal leisure time with the kids. It sure wasn’t true in ours. And what limited parent-child time I had…..I sure wasn’t going to blow it all playing “bad cop.”

TV tickets might work. They did fairly well for us. You allot the kids so many TV tickets per week. Using them as they see fit, they would be able to watch 2 hours or so per week of commercial TV. (Public TV was unlimited. And we didn’t have cable….why torture them with unlimited channels they can’t watch?) I remember my son, at 6 or 7, telling someone how much he enjoyed TV….you learn so much. He actually thought that was its purpose. True, we found out years later that the kids had cheated around the edges a little….they’d found a way to counterfeit the tickets or whatever, but even so, it’s a policy I’d repeat in a heartbeat were I to come along with a second crop of kids, which Mrs. Sheepandgoats does not plan to give me.

Or you might just flat-out do away with the television. That sounds a little drastic, but here and there you run across families that have done just that. True, it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it’s really not that great of a baby…it poops an awful lot and you can well survive without it. As a single person, I actually went through long periods without a television and to this day there are long running popular TV series deemed indispensable of which I’ve never seen a single episode. Ironically, I found not having a TV was a good way to acquire one. People would come visit and notice the gaping hole in your living room. They’d feel uncomfortable, even a bit sorry for you, as if they’d found you naked, or with empty cupboards. The next thing you knew, they’d buy a new TV themselves and give you the old one! I can’t tell you how many TVs I got in that way. I think I only bought one. The method still works. A pal just bought one of those new half acre TVs and gave me his old 25 inch one, a decided upgrade over our storebought 19 incher.

The JW organization tries to help with tips for screening, not so much TV shows, but music. We all know that kids have unquenchable thirst for music, and the music industry fully conforms to Sturgeon’s law, and then some. So the Watchtower chimes in with tips as to how to look at a CD jacket, or what to make of a group’s name…..is it suggestive or even obscene? This way you can screen out the music that is inappropriate.

Such advise works after a fashion, but it tends to filter out almost everything. The Righteous Brothers might sneak through, but most other groups will be tossed out on their ear. The kids are not going to want to exist on just Kingdom songs. Mine sure didn’t, anyway. Even worse, the system can admit stuff that really is offensive…..some uncouth slob, for example, who goes just by his birth name and has a CD jacket featuring  trees or bunnies (rabbits)….you know, things God made. Nothing obvious to tip you off! Still, I followed the system for a time. I mean, it’s very imperfect, just like the movie rating system, but it probably is better than nothing, or at least it’s a starting point.

A group called the Barenaked Ladies rolled into town. They were giving a concert somewhere and my kids wanted to go. I consulted my system and it flashed red alert. Barenaked Ladies? What kind of a name is that? Surely these guys were up to no good. I mean, it’s not very modest a name. You can’t have bare naked ladies running all over the place. If bare naked ladies showed up at the Kingdom Hall, you’d tell them to cover up. I thundered my verdict throughout the house: “No kid of mine is going to any Barenaked Ladies concert!”

Alas, it pretty well spelled the death of my system. It turns out that The Barenaked Ladies is just a good-times band….a fun, mostly  innocuous, wittier and weightier version of the Beach Boys or the Monkeys. Circuit overseers hum their music, for crying out loud…..songs like “If I Had a Million Dollars.” And who cannot spot the joke behind "I Love You Intermittantly," a song whose arrangements and vocals suggests eternal love, or undying love, but whose words say the exact opposite? It’s hard not to like these guys. And you can always just call them BNL, as newspapers often do, though doubtless for brevity’s sake, not modesty.

After that debacle, I changed tactics. I went with my boy to a couple of concerts at the Water Street Music Hall. He was thrilled to have the judgmental old man along. That’s how I came to hear Weezer, who I liked well enough allowing for generational differences……wait a minute….what are they “wheezing” from?…..it better not be marijuana smoke……but there was no sign of it. All they were was loud. At the lineup to get in, everyone held their hand out to get stamped, so I did too. “You don’t need a stamp” the bouncer waved me by, a little disrespectfully, I thought. (The stamp was to verify you were drinking age) “Aren’t there any grownups here?” I retorted. Yeah, the boy was real happy to have me along. But, as stated, the group really wasn’t that bad and I wasn’t displeased I’d come.

I went to another concert later to see some other group whose name I have forgotten. These guys were a little less wholesome. I mean, they didn’t smash guitars or burn bras or anything, but their presence wasn’t quite as agreeable as the other group had been. After that, we both weaned off of concerts for awhile

Years later, when the kids were grown and gone, did I throw in the towel by going myself to the Bob Dylan concert?                           

The Communist and the Kids

I called on a old fellow in the door to door ministry who said he was a Communist. He wasn't especially pleasant, but he was genuine, and unique. Didn't the fall of the Soviet Union and its satellites disprove Communism as a viable system? I asked. (It had only recently happened) No, because Communism was imposed by force upon a agrarian country. It wasn't the revolt of the proletariat, such as one might have foreseen in the U.S. at one time.

He had a house full of antique inventions, among them an Edison phonograph.

I homeschooled my daughter then. A few weeks later I had her out with me in the ministry. She was about 9 or 10. I stopped in on the Communist.

"So how's the discipling going?" he asked (or something similar). "Just fine," I replied. "I'm sorry to hear it," he said. Had I not left myself wide open?

"So what do you want?" he demanded, more gruff than even his prior gruffness. Just as gruff, I shot back "I came to show my daughter your antiques!" He opened the door, let us both in, gave us a tour, explained the different machines, and could not have been more pleasant! How often does a child get to see such old gadgets?

Kids are useful in the ministry. Of course, we don't "use" them. You don't bring them along unless they're ready to come, and you don't let them speak unless they want to. But in my experience, they usually want to. Joel Engardio, producer of the documentary Knocking was raised a Witness but left for a career in journalism. Nonetheless, he assures us, as a kid he was the designated doorbell-ringer, a "cool job for a 4 year old." As a teenager, he continues, "I gave presentations at doorsteps around town in hopes of becoming a "publisher," or minister, of the Bible. I found fulfillment in telling others - anyone who cared to listen -that all of mankind's plagues would be solved when God's kingdom arrived." So there is something to training children in the ministry, when (and if) they are ready.

My kids, as with Joel, wanted to speak at a quite young age, so I obliged. But it seemed that I ought to introduce them. After all, when I approached a house with a waist-high child, and it was the child that did the talking,  I always imagined the householder looking at me as if to say "you dumb lug....why don't you say something?" And frankly, you'd want to screen householders.  Not all are the warm fuzzy kind that you'd want to feed your kids. So I'd say something like: "Hi, I'm Tom Sheepandgoats. I've got my boy with me, Georgie. We take turns talking and.....it's his turn." That was my son's cue. As long as he was willing and able to handle matters, I would stay silent. The householder might listen to him, but answer me, and I'd say "sorry....it's his turn." All this within the bounds of common sense, of course. In most cases, towards the end, I would chime in somehow. As the kids got older and more capable, they got tired of being introduced, it became unnecessary, and I chimed in less and less.

My kids are grown and gone now. I just got done working with Jakie, a 6 year old. Someone else's son, it seems to me he was bashful at age 4. He sure isn't now. Distributing invitations for the upcoming district convention, he would have none of "being introduced." So I said he could introduce me! Either that, or just take the door himself. He did every door, except 3 or 4 that were a little awkward, and so I took them. In some cases I'd tell the householder "I'm far too bashful to talk to you right here at your door, so I brought my buddy here to speak for me!" He did just fine. Most youngsters do when they can go at their own pace.

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"Is that your son?" the homeowner asked Dave McClure, our old circuit overseer, about a youngster he was working with. "Nope," he replied. "But if it was, I'd be proud of him."

Clamdiggers - Didn't Prostitutes Wear Those?

In the early 1960's, if you wanted to be cool, you wore clamdiggers. A blip in the adolescent fashion world - did they last more than a season or two?  They were, nevertheless, a necessary item. See, they weren't shorts. And they weren't full pants. Neither were they jeans. No, they were sort of cotton, light green or blue, if I remember, with a stripe down the side. They reached to the shin and were secured by a rope, not a belt.

I had a pair or two, so everyone thought I was cool, an opinion I could not elicit otherwise. I returned the favor to other clamdigger kids. But then summer vacation came and the family went down to the farm. The dairy farm, where my Pop's "roots" were, way out in God knows where, where they knew nothing of being cool and cared less. My hillbilly uncle takes one look at my clamdiggers and says: "Hey, how come you’re wearing pedal pushers?! Those are girls pants!"

They weren't pedal pushers, for Pete's sake! He couldn't see that? They were cool clamdiggers!

Of course, the fashion/ fad world, relatively speaking, left kids alone back then. Nothing like today where youngsters are targeted by every stylistic hustler.  So parents, as parents have always done, as I did when I was a parent, dig their heels in. No kid of mine going to dress like......whatever the offending style is! And some of them really are offending,  sordid in origin. The really low hanging pants, for example, the pants that hang so low that if you do a crime, the cops will instantly catch you, since you cannot run with these pants, find their inspiration from the prison world, were some guys are frequently called upon to drop their pants for unsavory reasons.

So parents take their stand. And probably over-take it, in some cases. And the young people chafe, as they always have. Like this one, who, after noting a respected sister in another congregation has a body-piercing wants to know:

"could i rightly get pierced? ABSO-FREAKING-LUTELY NOT. god, i can't even wear an anklet without someone going... 'you know, prostitutes wore those.'"

HA! Yeah, it is sorta that way. Don't “look just like the world,” and  don‘t “stumble people,” and "he who is faithful in small things is faithful in large," but you don‘t want to cross this line into an  area where people learn to judge by outward appearance. .

I've been there and I've got kids who've been there. There may be some mild hypocrisy to it, at least in its extremes.

I suppose, if absolutely necessary, a person can always do one or two of those small things and then, if people cluck about it, say yes, they admit it, they‘re not all that great of an example, rather than try to "out-righteous" everyone. People will probably move on. (but, alas, maybe they won't) There is a difference between what is important and what is relatively trivial. Of course, I'm not recommending this, but it's an option, and it beats chafing to such an extent that one leaves the congregation,which has happened, as may happen in this case: “Life is just not worth living under restrictions we all just need to break free!!!!!!!!!!”

Unless you're living with your parents - in that case I guess you really can't, or shouldn't, but that time will pass soon enough, and then you can do it if you want. You may not even care about it by then.

Or maybe you can view things like that woman did in "The Scarlet Letter," Hester Prynne. "Letter" is the story of a woman who’d borne a child out of wedlock, fathered by someone she would not name. Those Puritans made her wear a scarlet letter “A” (standing for adulteress) for the rest of her life. We all had to read that book in high school. Nobody liked it at the time, as with anything that is rammed down your throat. Later, though, some of us came to think it was pretty powerful. Nathanial Hawthorne’s short stories read like the “Twilight Zone” of his time

Said Hawthorne about his heroine Hester Prynne: "People who think the most bold of thoughts have no difficulty conforming to outward norms of society." It fits. (the reverse is also true) Jehovah's Witnesses think some very bold thoughts, decidedly different from that of the pack. Conforming to outward norms is not a big deal for many of them.

Still, older ones know that a lot of things they once insisted upon but which their parents opposed eventually entered (not necessarily for the better) the mainstream. Like rock and roll.

I know it’s only rock and roll
but I like it.                         Rolling Stones

Violet in the Old Folks Home. A Dirty Trick

They like Violet at the nursing home. She's good natured, always says "hi," and doesn't complain. She's lived there four years.

Once she presided over her own country farmhouse kitchen table, peopled with family and neighbors. Though they might not get along in all contexts, the table bonded them, cementing various degrees of familiarity, love, and dysfunction. Over the stove hung a plaque that read "Kissin don't last, cookin do"

Uncle Vic thought it a great joke when I "got religion." Over cards, he would challenge "you're prayin against me, aren't you Tommy? I'll bet you're prayin against me." I was only praying he'd take his turn.

Violet lived for years in that farmhouse after Vic died. Then she lived with one daughter, then another. When she got so she needed round the clock care, the daughters didn't know what to do. She fell a few times - no small matter for someone in their 80s. About that time she entered the nursing home. One daughter or the other visits her nearly every day.

Pop comes over from Rochester, 300 miles away, to visit his sister a few times each year. "Charlie, it's so good to see you! And Tommy, what a pleasant surprise!"  On a pleasant day, we wheel her out to the front walkway, where she remarks on trees and greenery and family history. "Gram will be so disappointed that she missed you," she laments. "Violet, Gram's been dead for years," someone says. "Oh yeah, that's right," and she resumes contemplation. That's how it goes. She freely mixes several generations, some living, some dead. Sometimes we correct her, and sometimes not.

She used to caution as the afternoon wore on "It's getting late. You'd better be going." Lately she's been including herself. "It's starting to get late. We ought to be going." "Violet, you're staying here. You live here now." "Oh that's right," she says.

"So who's cooking tonight," she observes after a bit. "Do you want me to cook?" Pop again explains that the home will cook, the home in which she lives, but she's not so sure anymore.

"Well, we should be going Vi," he says. "Okay, I'm ready, let's go" "You're staying here, Vi. You live here now." "Not me," she says. "You do," Pop says. "You have a room here, for several years." "I know, but I'm not ready to go just yet."

She gets progressively resistant, then alarmed, then pleading, then angry. "Well, that was a dirty trick!" she charges. "I wouldn't have come with you if I knew you were going to stick me here!" In the end, the staff wheels her back.

That evening, sitting at the cousins' own long kitchen table, a table that Violet rarely sees now, Pop wonders aloud how tomorrow's visit will go. Maybe it will be unpleasant. "No," the cousin says, "she will have forgotten all about it." And it turns out just that way.

Until the end of the visit. After initial maneuvering, Pop and the cousin tell Violet we have to be going. But isn't she going too? "Oh no, you're not sticking me here!" she snaps at us. But the nurse distracts her. "Violet, we're having vanilla cookies with dinner tonight. Would you like to have a couple now?" "No thank you," she says. "I'll just wait till dinner and have mine with everyone else."

They all want to go home. But none of them will.

Homeschooling and Manny Rivera

When Mrs Sheepandgoats and I decided to homeschool our 2 kids, 21 years ago, some challenged us. How could we expect to do better than professional educators? they wanted to know. We looked at it differently.

How could we do worse?

To be sure, had we lived in one of the suburbs, we might have been less confident. But we didn't. We lived in the City School District, which last year achieved a graduation rate of 39%. Yet I'm glad we lived there. Not only did our kids' homeschool education surpass what a suburban school would have offered, but they became "streetsmart," and learned to mingle freely with persons of all levels and cultures.

My daughter carries herself well. At her workplace, a spa that caters to the well-to-do, co-workers ask her where she was raised. "We lived on a side street off Hudson," she says. "Oh...," they murmur in confusion. (Hudson is in a poor area) But then they brighten... the street ends in better off Irondequoit. "You mean the part in Irondequoit," they say knowingly. "No," she retorts, and leaves them scratching their heads. 

But she would not likely have had such poise had she actually attended the Hudson Ave schools. Superintendent of those schools, Dr. Manny Rivera is just leaving, headed for greener pastures, taking an education job with the Spitzer administration. City! newspaper interviewed him on his tenure with the District. What had he learned?

"I learned that we couldn't do it alone," he says. "It's too big a problem to think we can handle it by ourselves. We needed our college and university partners." Also the "unions." Also the "business community."

We all want "higher performance," he says. "but you have to have systems in place to get there." The trouble is  [when speaking with the mayor] "we didn't get to a strategy for implementation.....If this community can come together and embrace key strategies, Rochester would get the results everybody wants to see."

We need "systems," "our partners," our "key strategies." Not only our key strategies, but we have to "implement" those key strategies, and to do that we need to "come together!" Fine words. How can one not be enthused? Yet the skilled interpreter of Educatese can without difficulty detect the underlying message: don't expect any changes in your lifetime.

Trouble is, this is the same baloney we heard back in 1986 from Rivera's predecessor. Had we entrusted our kids to them back then, would they be any smarter than cats today?

No, Virginia, Douse the Firecrackers

Virginia O’Hanlon asked her Dad if there really was a Santa Claus, and Dad wasn‘t sure he wanted to lie to his own child. So he did what parents have done since the beginning of time when they’re stuck. He passed the buck.

Why don’t you write the newspaper, he advised. If they say it’s true, then it is.

Editorial page      The New York Sun      September 21, 1897

"Dear Editor--I am 8 years old.
"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in The Sun, it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O'Hanlon
115 West Ninety-fifth Street

Probably, Virginia’s old man was hoping the paper would do what he was too chicken to do….tell his daughter the truth. Instead, they cooked up some gooey answer that syrupy folks gush over to this day.

But sometimes you have no choice but to pass the buck. Like when Sheepandgoats’ kid started pestering him about fireworks, for example, harassing him day and night. Do you think Sheepandgoats could persuade him (his own child) that fireworks were not legal in New York State? Not just dynamite, but also cherry bombs and even ladyfingers. They are illegal. You can’t blow them off in New York. Yes, they are legal in some states, but New York is not one of them. Tired of arguing with a kid who showed every sign of becoming just as pigheaded as the old man, Sheepandgoats sought a way to pass the buck.

Talk to a cop! What a brilliant idea! Sheepandgoats drove to the area police station. Were fireworks legal in New York State? No, they were not. What about ladyfingers? No they were not. What about on holidays and special events? No, that made no difference! What about…..LOOK, said the cop, you got a listening problem?! NO means NO.!! Now if you want to break THE LAW, go right ahead, but we’ll be coming after you!! All that was lacking was for him to draw his gun.

Elated, Sheepandgoats skipped home to grab his son and return. Yeah! Tell the kid what you just told me! Scare the everlovin daylights out of him!

But Joe Friday wasn’t there!! Instead, it was jolly Officer O’Mallahan! Well….he patted my boy on the head, with a twinkle in his eye, just be careful, and don’t blow them off too much!!

Thanks a lot, copper!!! If this kid grows up to be a pirate, I’ll know who to blame!

Yes, Virginia, You've Come a Long Way Baby

Virginia O’Hanlon, eight years old, wanted to know about Santa Claus, so she asked her dad. He dodged the question, perhaps uncertain whether it was really such a hot idea to lie to his own child. Instead, he suggested she write the newspaper.

Editorial page      The New York Sun      September 21, 1897

Dear Editor:
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Signed Virginia O'Hanlon

Virginia, your little friends are wrong……
They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. …..
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. ……
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

What a cute answer! It tells the true meaning of Christmas and Santa Claus and so forth. Syrupy folks have gushed over it for a hundred years, but two fundamental points should not be lost sight of, lest we all drown in sentimental slop.

1. Virginia asked to be told the truth.

2.  The paper lied to her.

To be sure, it wasn’t a bald-faced, flat-out, self-serving lie, like when that miser Tom Pearlsandswine told his kid that the jingle jangle of the ice cream truck was really the Devil coming. No, this lie was merely a white lie, and served as the framework for conveying transcendent symbolism on wonder, generosity, imagination, joy, etc, etc. It’s a great answer for adults. But children don’t pick up on symbolism. To an eight year old, it's a lie.

Indeed, even Pearlsandswine’s smart aleck answer was never meant to be taken seriously. It was said in obvious good humor, and the blockhead was amazed to find, years later, that his son believed it for the longest time.

All this brings to mind the sad saga of Sally Claptwaddle, who also asked her parents, when young, if Santa was real. The parents assured her that he was. There were some kids down the street, however, who told Sally the truth.

When she lost her baby teeth, her parents told her that there was a tooth fairy who would leave some cash under her pillow. The kids down the street told her the truth.

When Easter came, her parents told her about the Easter Bunny….a generous rabbit who would fill your basket with chocolate eggs. The kids down the street told her the truth.

Sally reached adolescence and her responsible parents told her about sex.

But she‘d never gotten a straight answer from her folks. It was always nonsense. The kids down the street, on the other hand, had never been wrong. And so, with regard to sex, they had a different take, and the boys among them offered to demonstrate. Sally grew up hating men, though later got considerable revenge when she landed a job with the GPS industry.    

Of course, this all happened to Sally, not Virginia. Virginia lived in a different age. A more secure age, an age in which the consequences of white lies were not so severe.

……………………………….....

Santa, the concept:  [a man who] stay[s] up all night distributing presents to children of doubtful deservedness. There is a point where altruism becomes sick.      The Twelve Terrors of Christmas, John Updike