WILDEBEEST WONDERS

 Our school year doesn't end until this coming Wednesday. As one of the final projects, the students must put together a visual totem pole on paper. The object is to choose animals based on a chart of traditionally associated attributes and characteristics, or to choose animals to which they gravitate or that gravitate toward them. (Don't panic -- We aren't appropriating; this activity goes with the novel we read in class.)

This seems simple. At first.

I use examples based on several animals that I randomly choose from the chart and show students how to create the visual product. We focus on personality traits, such as being clever or helpful or funny or wise. 

Then, we veer away from personal human characteristics and start talking mystically. 

I tell them that I like to see the big cats at the zoo: jaguars, panthers, leopards, bobcats, tigers, lions. I like watching the way they move and the look of constant disdain in their eyes, while their faces seem as if they want to be petted. Yes, I like the big cats and even those pesky housecats, though most housecats seem to find me far less interesting.

I tell them about the girl I know who attracts dragonflies. Seriously, all she has to do is hold out her hands, and dragonflies flock out of thin air and land all over her like she is some kind of dragonfly royalty.

Several students nod with understanding. Then, it starts to get weird.

Are there animals which, for absolutely zero reason that makes any sense to the universe, they are drawn to and seem fascinated by? Recur in dreams? Seem to always catch their eye in books or movies or just out in the world?

Like a Spirit Animal of some kind.

Apparently, my Spirit Animal is the Wildebeest. Formerly known as a Gnu, this animal is mostly unremarkable, travels in packs, and is relatively butt-ugly. Wildebeests are preyed on by other animals, and they hide in plain sight around zebras and giraffes so the bully animals (lions and hyenas) might not notice their existence and pick them off the menu for dinner. 

I have no reason to be fascinated by them. They've never saved my life, appeared in my dreams, nor have I ever owned a stuffed Wildebeest.

As I advise my students, I decide to look up any totem-related traits of the Wildebeest: Strength; Teamwork; Strong resilience; Ability to endure tough conditions; Adaptable; Good at surviving changes; Persistence to overcome obstacles; Trust instincts to know when to move or retreat; Observe the world keenly through all senses.

I can live with those traits. Maybe the Wildebeest really is my spirit animal. But, don't tell my students, at least not until school ends on Wednesday. I don't want next fall's crop getting any ideas that might engage my Wildebeest characteristics. 

Perhaps for my own self-preservation, I will teach this lesson in the fall. Maybe then I'll know what I'm dealing with instead of being surprised by student behavior as the year progresses. After all, I might be good at adapting to changes, but I also know when to flee.

RETAIL IS DEAD

Retail is dying. As former retail management, I've been watching the signs for years. A decade or more. Retail. Is. Dead.

The only thing keeping malls alive these days is the abundance of restaurants. It used to be big anchor stores, but no more. For years the mall near my home was vibrant and bustling. It was THE place to go, especially around the major holidays. Then, it turned into a ghost town, and walking through it became dangerous and creepy, creepier than the chase and rape scene in Lipstick. My hackles rose every time I walked through the place.

The food court is still a happening place, for sure, but even the stores around the food court were (and some still are) shuttered. Until the outside restaurants came. Oh, the restaurants won't put the food court out of business. Not even close, because these restaurants are mostly high-end. 

It's a different kind of clientele on the outskirts of the mall than there is on the inside of the mall. Outside are the spenders, the drinkers, the fussy eaters. People with credit cards to burn. Inside the mall the gangs of unsupervised school kids still roam wild like some kind of retail Lord of the Flies ... or Fries.

I went into Target today, and not some random Target off the beaten trail, but a popular one directly off the highway and along a busy industrial road. I needed a card, a few supplies, and maybe a grocery or two or three. 

Easy, right?

Not so much. Oh, sure, if I needed a gift candle, they had them. If I needed paper towels, they had them. Snacks and basics? What I found were row after row and aisle after aisle of empty shelves. Missing merchandise. And, no, this wasn't a seasonal changeover situation.

I am one of the few people left who still goes into a grocery store to shop. Pretty much everyone else I know gets their groceries shopped for and delivered. I just can't get past the idea of some youngster who's never grocery shopped in their lives after age three going into the produce aisle to decide which avocado is best or if it can be substituted with kale.

I don't judge you if that's your jam. It's just not mine, and therefore I must suffer and drive to the store, park, get a cart, and push past ever-dwindling amounts of people to pick out things that many times aren't even stocked. Or properly dated. I remember a time when I just grabbed the milk and casually checked the expiration date. Now, it's a bloody battle to find a sell-by date that is not within forty-eight hours.

Customer service is dead. Selection is dead. Retail is dead.

SUMMER BEFORE THE WORLD CHANGED

One of my Blog Friends (another blog) asked our group what a throw-back to a 1990 Pre-Technology-Boom Summer might look like. Well, for me it meant raising kids and making sure I didn't forget one at a playground. But, long before that, I fondly remember my elementary school summers.

When I was really young, we lived in a small city on a residential street across from a professionally tended but small botanical (or, botanic, if you're old-school British Kingdom) garden tucked into the woods. The only kids in the neighborhood who were my age (up to preschool) were boys. Even though I had two older sisters and an infant brother, I tended to rough-and-tumble like my age-counterparts. We had a playground at the end of our street, and my sisters walked to their school, a school that I very much looked forward to attending until we moved mere weeks before I was due to start.

Then, we moved to a very small town an entire state away. A village, actually. For months while our house was being built, we lived in the heart of town, close enough to jump when the fire department alarm bellowed out its signals to the volunteer firefighters. Close enough to hear the church bells chime every fifteen minutes and bong out the hours. Close enough to walk to the post office, where we had a mailbox (#612 -- how I remember that, I have no sane idea). Close enough to walk to the one and only village store. Close enough to walk to school and the public library. Close enough to walk to playgrounds and explore cemeteries and stare at the Civil War statue and run around the town hall building.

Once we moved out of the town square, our house was a dream come true. Tons of room for all of us (and an additional brother), and three acres of woods loaded with climbable trees and huge boulders to fearlessly scale. We had two different swing-set areas -- one smaller for the boys in a fenced yard off the house, and one larger for the older kiddos just off the driveway. We built trails through the woods to ride through in the summer and to sled and ski through in the winter. Yes, we insanely downhill-skied through cross-country trails and slopes, and yet never crashed into trees. Eventually, a pool went in, as well. 

It was like living in the middle of the world's best kids' camp.

We often used the phone (connected to the wall) to call friends, but we more often just showed up at each others' homes, knocking on the door at all hours (nothing was too early nor too late) just to get together and play. Radio was AM via an old-fashioned spin-dial system. TV was five channels: ABC, CBS, NBC, and channels 38 (WSBK) and 56 (WLVI), and the only way to watch TV was to fiddle with the rabbit ears or move the monitor that would whomp-whomp-whomp the aerial antenna on the roof. My dad had an old typewriter, a Smith Corona, and that was the extent of our access to technology: phone, TV, transistor radio, and a typewriter with a moderately-inked ribbon and slow metal keys.

We played outside all of the time. It didn't matter if it was a heatwave or sub-zero with negative wind chills. In the summer, we sweated and scratched endless bug bites (I still have scarred legs from it). In the winter, we simply waited until frostbite set in because once we were numb, who cared. (This explains my Reynaud's Syndrome, of course.) If we were inside, we played never-ending board games (Risk, Monopoly, chess, checkers, Life, Stratego, Operation ...) or cards (Rummy, Hearts, Go Fish, Cribbage ...) or dolls or dress-up or hide-n-seek, or we drew, painted, colored, or wrote stories. We played school. We played rodeo on the fence posts (giving one brother the smaller gate that he named Breckody because he couldn't yet say Black Beauty). We played baseball and softball and tennis and badminton and basketball and hopscotch and jump-rope (Double Dutch, Peppers, and Chinese). We played Cat's Cradle and sewed and knitted.

And, yes, we drank from the hose, but only after letting the water run cool. Otherwise it was fire water from the sun. We drank from the hose because being caught in the house was like a death sentence -- someone might assign us a chore or tell us to clean our rooms before we could be released back into The Wild. No one wanted that to happen.

I am now close to retiring. Every time I think about the world being my oyster, think about all of the wonderful things I will be able to do if I stay healthy and manage my money, all I really want to do is go back to the woods, the laughter, the camaraderie, play a game, kick a ball, jump off a swing (without fracturing a hip). Maybe have a little fun, live a little, before I'm watching the world go by from the glass pane of a nursing home. 

You know, drink from a garden hose before it's a feeding tube.