A vote for equality

My son attends scout meetings in the basement of the Methodist Church, a stately 85-year-old building at the corner of 4th and Main streets in the bright little town of Rushing Waters, Kan. (pop. 900). Next week, he'll "cross over" from cub to Boy Scout.

I love watching my boy, Max, grow and have fun as he works on projects like building a tool box, carving his initials into a leather wallet, and of course, designing his Pinewood Derby car. I'm especially proud that my son belongs to an association that instills values in young boys.

Here is the Scout Law, quoted from Max's Cub Scout/Webelo handbook: "A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent."

I try to impress upon Max that those aren't just empty words. They mean something. For me, they especially ring true in light of the resolution recently voted in by Boy Scouts of America:

No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone.

I expected the BSA would lift its ban on gay youth someday. I didn't expect it to come this soon, however. But with the Supreme Court deliberating over gay marriage, gay couples increasingly adopting children and news reports of gay teens being bullied and commiting suicide, the issue's time has come.

For the most part, I was confident that the council in Grapevine, Texas (a suburb of Dallas) would do the right thing in its voting. Still, I had some trepidation. How much sway did the conservative element have over BSA? I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard on my car radio that the BSA voted to end this antiquated 103-year-old ban. http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/23/us/boy-scouts-sexual-orientation http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/23/18447459-boy-scouts-vote-to-lift-ban-on-gay-youth?lite

It gives me better peace of mind, knowing that my son's personal enrichment and character are being shaped by an organization that's come out against discrimination and lives up to the values it espouses.

A friend from work is gay. I asked this man if he would buy some popcorn my son was selling for a cub scout fundraiser. This guy could've went on some bitter diatribe about how scouts are a prejudiced organization and all. Instead, he ordered popcorn and said, "Oh yeah, you get to go hiking, learn to tie knots and do a lot of neat things in scouts."

For years, this guy has been ordering boy scout stuff and girl scout cookies from people in the office. How could I ever look this guy in the face again and ask him to support an organization if it discriminates against people like him?

To some degree it still does. The BSA only voted on whether to admit gay youth, not on lifting its ban on gay scout leaders. But that's coming. Jennifer Tyrrell, an Ohio mother who was dismissed as a den leader in 2012 because she's lesbian, has expressed confidence that the ban on LGBT adults in leadership positions will be discontinued.

Of course what people like Tyrrell and myself consider to be a good thing, others view with sadness and great disappointment. They act like a funeral's taking place. Opposition groups have formed from within individual scout troops and disgruntled scout leaders and their children are talking about taking their money and support somewhere else and starting their own groups.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry said he is "very disappointed" with the BSA's vote. Naturally, he is. Perry would like for Texas to seccede from the United States, wave confederate flags and live under Christian sharia.

Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, has bemoaned this decision as the end of the scouts' "legacy of producing great leaders." You may have seen Perkins on Sunday morning news-talk shows, feigning some guise of legitimacy, but that ignores the charges that he launched his right-wing organization with help from former KKK grand wizard David Duke. Oh, and he's also spoken before the Louisiana Council of Concerned Citizens -- an organization that expresses in its mission statement, opposition to "all efforts to mix the races of mankind." http://cofcc.org/introduction/statement-of-principles/ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/picture-worth-thousand-memories http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2011/03/reminder-tony-perkins-is-racist.html

BSA has given in to "moral compromise," Perkins says. I guess the separatists could bury their heads in cotton and play to their antebellum fantasies. If their oppostion to homosexuality is so great that they'll morally compromise their souls and join hands with a KKK sympathizer, that's their deal.

That's their mindset. When the Supreme Court ruled segregation based on race to be unacceptable and the federal government enforced the Constitution, many public schools in the South suffered from white flight. Several private "christian schools" opened up as a way of circumventing racial integration laws. I'm sure they felt their values were under attack. There were public schools in the South that actually closed their doors and denied an education to all children so they wouldn't have to offer equal rights to African-Americans.

Remember a few years ago when a Mississippi high school chose to cancel prom and deny a fun time for all its students, rather than admit a young woman and her girlfriend to the dance? http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-10-noprom_N.htm?csp=34

The prejudice of these people outweighs any concern they purport to have for children. By contrast, the BSA council's winning vote was cast with the best interest of children in mind. Wayne Perry, BSA president, said as much in an op-ed piece for USA Today,  urging the council to adopt the resolution allowing gay youth in the organization.
  http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/05/22/boy-scouts-president-let-in-gay-boys/2351907/

"Our vision is to serve every kid and give them a place where they grow up and feel protected," Perry told a news conference. No matter what one may think of homosexuality "our view is that kids are better off in scouting.

 "It was never our intent to prevent young people from being part of this organization."

I'm proud of my boy and all he's accomplished and has yet to accomplish in scouting. I'm proud to be a scout parent, and I'm happy that the enriching, eddifying opportunities offered through the Boy Scouts will be open to all boys.

This decision is neither an endorsement nor a condemnation of homosexuality. It's about keeping the window of opportunity open for our youth. As for people who say they're worried about the next step, accepting gay scout leaders, I want to allay your fears.

First, being gay does not make one a pedophile. Second, Boy Scouts take great proactive steps to prevent even the appearance of impropriety. Take it from someone who has gone on scouting trips. No other child but my son is allowed to sleep in my tent, and I cannot allow another child inside my car unless the scout leaders have permission, written or verbal, from that child's parent.

Yes, scouting, like all other youth activities, has been hit by predators. Unfortunately, that's the world we live in. But the inclusion of gay scout leaders is no more a safety risk than having straight adults look after children. Gay is not synonymous with pedophile. But if you're a parent with concerns, I say volunteer and go with your child to scouting events.

I don't think the organization will suffer at all from this decision. It may even attract more recruits.  No, it's not caving in to "pop culture" as the right-wingers claim. Parents and youth within scouting largely promoted reform. The decision at the top level, favoring inclusion came from within the grassroots of the organization.

A world that respects people and diversity -- that's what I want for my kids. Some thirty years from now when they're around the age I am now, a person's sexuality will be a non-issue. I applaud the Boy Scouts of America for staying true to its values and preserving the ideal of equality that's been in the American bloodstream from the beginning.

Manzarek

Goodbye, my friend. Hope you're in deep conversation now with Jim. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6353302

To my fellow blogger, friend & amateur rock historian, I say Jason it's past time, Man. We gotta go out and have that beer together. http://jasontheemperor.blogspot.com/ Communion, you might say.

Prayers for Oklahoma

In the 3 p.m. hour Sunday, I picked up Mom at her house and took her to McDonald's for a late lunch. The clouds were rolling up and close, thick and dark in the sky. Mom was a bit antsy.

"Let's just order something and I'll take it home," she said.

"We have time," I told her. "We can eat inside. Look at all these other people out here."

I'm relieved to see it's Brandy behind the register when we walk up to order.

"Hi Vickie," she says to Mom.

There's a familiarity because Mom knows Brandy's mother, Jacycee, an assistant manager at the McDonald's. Known her since she was born. Ginger, the matriarch of the family, lived next door to young Vickie McElroy and her family on 15th Street in Jett, Kan. She and her former husband knew Mom as a little girl, long before Jacycee and her older sister was born.

As we stand around the lobby, Jaycee walks in. She comes into Mickey D's a lot. I'm glad to see her because Mom is steadily becoming more high-strung and I'm thinking -- hoping -- Jaycee can bring her down. I figure I'll probably be giving Mom an Ativan when I take her home.

We sit at a two-seat length table, just off from the standing area. Mom babbles on, mostly ignoring her chicken sandwich, as Jaycee listens intently.

"I've been independent all my life," Mom says. "I've lived through floods."

I help myself to one, then another, then two or three of her fries, in between sipping a strawberry shake, the only menu item I ordered for myself. Storm talk travels thick through the room and I get into a conversation with the fellow at the next table. Pretty good guy, says his name is Nate.

He motions to the window and his 2011 GMC Sierra 1500 XFE Crew Cab Pickup parked next to the building. Not a hail dent on that baby. Nate, although he doesn't know me from Adam, talks with me as if we've hung out forever. Young, and a single guy -- I can tell -- Nate talks about barely missing a tornado one dark evening on his way home from a Bible study. Says he has a friend who's a professional storm chaser and how rocking that is. He plans on taking the highway south and bypassing the approaching storm on his way home.

"That wind can get out of here. Let it all go to Oklahoma," I say.

Words I'll later lament, having said.

Reaching the driveway to Mom's house, I see my brother, Jimmy, and his 10-year-old daughter, Tori. No doubt, Tori's softball games have been cancelled. Jimmy communicates some bit of information to me about watching Mom, unable to resist trying to run my life. He's one of the banes of my existence.

Driving home, I see the other one.

"Well look whose fat ass is on my porch," I say to myself as I park the car at the curb.

"Hi Jeff," my father-in-law calls out to me as I walk up to the house. He's sitting there with my daughter Gabby. No doubt, he and my mother-in-law have come over to take shelter at our house if need be. We have a sturdy basement.

My in-laws really are consummate professionals at this grandparent thing. Deep down, good people. I guess I could feel guilty about being standoffish toward the old man if I let myself be. But no, I've been burned too many times.

We get an inch of rain, but by and large, the worst of the storm misses us. My friend Al is in town and I invite him over to see me, the wife and kids before he heads back home to Texas the next day.

The next day I'm communicating with Al's sister-in-law Doxie up in Iowa. She said she texted Al because she was worried. He'd made his skin-of-the-teeth escape. Only 30 minutes earlier he'd driven through Moore, Okla. Now I-35 was littered with cars that had been picked up, hurtled through the air and smashed to the ground.

Doxie wouldn't be letting Al's 91-year-old mother in the nursing home know her son was that close to death and destruction. Just like they don't let on to her about all the fires he has to put out at the refinery where he's operations manager. It's best this way. There are things we do in life that we NEVER want our parents to know about.

'It looked like Hiroshima'

Late Monday afternoon. I sit at the dining room table where I always hang out after work, joking around with my daughter, while my son plays xbox in the living room with the kid from next door. My mother-in-law is there, faithfully watching the kids as she usually does when they get out of school. Her cell phone rings for the third time.

Her husband -- who gets more worked up, the older he gets -- has been watching CNN and MSNBC.

"That old man won't leave you alone, will he?" I say to "Mom."

The tornado is worse than we were expecting. He said there was rubble strewn all over. It looked like Europe and Japan during World War II.

"He said 'it looked like Hiroshima'" "Mom" said. He also said something about kids being trapped in a school. But they have tornado shelters in schools. This is what they have tornado drills for.

That evening, while sitting on the porch, we'd catch our friends Brent and Diane off on their nightly fitness walk.

I say something about the kids trapped inside two destroyed buildings, babies unaccounted for...and Diane, a fifth-grade teacher comes within an inch of crying. We look at my kids' school, Longfellow Elementary, across the street and literally -- not figuratively, literally -- thank God that the bond issue passed.

A debris-carrying wind one-to-two miles wide leveled the town of Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City. Over 240 people have been hospitalized, 51 people confirmed dead and that number is expected to rise, awaiting the medical examiners final reports.

I sit on the wicker love seat with my daughter Gabby. I'm thinking of those school children.

"I don't know what I'd do..." (long pause, suck it in J. Guy, keep composure)

"If that happened to me," my little girl finishes my sentence.

"Those kids are just like you," I say.

"But they're in a better place."

A few long seconds. I look in my girl's face. Her tongue's stuck out, mouth wound out.

I chuckle a little. "What are you doing, Goofy?" I ask her.

"The best way to stop someone from crying is to make them laugh."

Shameful stowin' away life

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Winning kid

I was in the staff lounge of the elementary school where I work, pouring myself a cup of coffee when I glanced at a fresh copy of the latest Longfellow Elementary newsletter. My eyes were stopped at the top left portion of the page and the picture of that young fellow.

"Student of the Month," the headline read.

This kid, let's call him Jack, isn't the brainest kid in the fifth grade -- or the school. You won't find his name on the honor roll, but he gives more than most kids born with so much more in their reserves. The text of the newsletter said it perfectly:

Jack has a heart of gold and a lot of integrity. He enjoys school and always arrives with a smile for everyone he sees. I love to hear him read because he brings such expression to the words. He perseveres through many frustrations and never complains -- a true inspiration to staff and students alike.

I worked with Jack so much last year, trying to help him focus and remember what he'd read only seconds ago. How I wished that things would come easier for him, that someday everything would click. The lights on and bright. But the times when he would arrive at an answer and I could slap him a high five in acknowledgment of his accomplishments -- that was everything.

My friend, Dawn, his teacher, nominated Jack for the honor, in part to boost his confidence. "I see naturally talented kids who squander what they have," I told her during lunch later that day. "Where would this kid be if he had more to start with?"

"He'd be on the honor roll," she said.

Usually, the "student of the month" is an honor roll student, a boy or girl who gets a lot of A's. That's good because those students work hard for what they get and they deserve the recognition they receive. But it's nice to see the Jacks of this world receive an accolade too once in awhile.

A slight salty drop descended, dampening the paper. The kind of the thing likely to happen if I read certain things for too long. I shifted gears to look as if I were strictly cleaning my glasses and I clasped that newsletter into my hand, removing all evidence, and taking it up as if it were any number of papers and books I can be seen carting around in the day.

As far as anyone in this institution is concerned, Mr. Guy is a tough taskmaster, the type who will cut to the quick any nonsense spotted from little sweathogs-in-training.

The truth, though, is that I've always harbored a soft spot for the Jacks of this world. When I saw he'd received that "student of the month" honor, I felt a happiness rush through like I hadn't experienced since my son Max received a citizenship award at his own school two years ago. For the kid out there who doesn't make it every time, yet keeps pressing forward, never losing that genuine goodness so much a part of his character -- well, I'm pulling for him. Or her.

For Jack.

Disco line

Do I know this guy? Maybe I do and maybe I don't. I've known a lot of fat guys in my time. They all wore their fatness like a badge of pride. The fool in this picture --- do I call him that? He might come back with, "The Bible says you're not supposed to call people fools." Does your Good Book say anything about dancing with cows? Or dancing disco with a line of cows framing you as if they're a stillife? I don't pretend to know the answers to deep questions circling the disco ball of the earth and accompanying cosmos. But it's like this. Years ago, my friend Steve and I saw Chris Farley, his fat gut bobbing, as he auditioned for Chippendales, cheered on by a muscular Patrick Swayze, on Saturday Night Live. "What'd'ya think of the fat guy?" I asked my buddy.

"I love him," he said.

It's kind of like listening to a Muddy Waters tune about getting a hook on with some big, smokin', up-to-here, dusky thing. You gotta love it.

Mother's Day 2013

It's here again, Mother's Day -- a holiday originally proposed by Ann Jarvis in 1858 to improve the lives of impoverished women and their babies in the Appalacian region of America. The day has grown and let's hope -- to God -- that there is never ever a paucity in the love we show our mothers.

There's so much to do for my mother right now, but thankfully I get help here and there. My mom was far from the model of preparing for the end of the tunnel, but she did well in one area that's paying off with interest. She was adept at making friends -- through church, the neighborhood, civic clubs, work...One of those friends, a woman who knew mom through an organization they both belonged to around 20 years ago, offered to drive her to and from church.

"I really thank you, Nancy," I told her. "Are you going to take her to Sunday school, too?" Yes, Nancy told me she planned to do the Sunday school thing as well.

"She may not understand everything you're talking about, but she'll enjoy the social connection," I told her.

Everything went beautifully, Nancy told me later. Mom thouroughly enjoyed Sunday school as well as the preacher's sermon afterward.

"She answered this question about a parable of Jesus," Nancy told me. "She expressed herself so articulately. I couldn't repeat exactly what she said. She understood the parable in a way I hadn't thought of."

People like Nancy are a blessing, not only for their helping hands, but for the way they raise your spirits. Aren't we in need of hope today? A revival?

"Your mother never talked bad about anybody else" in the organization they belonged to, Nancy told me. "She was always ready to help other people, always positive. Other women there gossiped like crazy, but Vickie never got into that."

Hmmm. That's not exactly how I've always known Mom to be. I could tell some other stories. But isn't it interesting how a family member might present herself among others, how others might have perceptions of her that broaden your own?

                                                           Mom and my son Max

Anyhow, my mother was born Sept. 24, 1945 in Larned, Kan., a Western Kansas town that has been unfairly stigmatized over the years for being home to a state hospital for the mentally ill.

"Oh, that's why you're like you are," a bunch of nimrods would say when they learned of her birth place.

Her parents named her Victoria Lou after her paternal and maternal grandmothers, respectively. She goes by Vickie. Her last name was McElroy, and when she was in elementary school, the little imbeciles called her "macaroni."

Mom never wanted to be here, going to school with the little boneheads anyway. She held a grudge against her parents well into adulthood for leaving the beloved mountains of Colorado where she lived as a small child and began school.

Her dad ran a sawmill out there. A fellow in a company truck got killed in a wreck. There was some kind of lawsuit, it cleaned my grandfather out financially, but I don't know the particulars. Neither does Mom. She was, but a little girl at the time. Some say Grandpa could've rebounded and made a go of it in Colorado, but he was too emotionally tied to the land where his mother had lived out her last years and died 20 years earlier. So it was back to Kansas.

The family lived in a shack in the town of Jett, Kan., population 3,500 at that time. Her girlfriends from school were surprised when they came over and found out she had to share a room with her brother. In those middle childhood years, she didn't know the family was poor because her mother did everything she could to make it a happy home. As she got older and entered junior high, she became self-concious.

There were only two houses in Jett, still without indoor plumbing, and Mom's was one of them. Sure it was fancier than some. A concrete floor. Two-holer. But it was still an outdoor shitter.

Her dad worked in construction where the work was seasonal. Her mom worked as a waitress in several restaurants before she hired on at Ben Franklin, the dime store where she would work for the next 23 years.

"So where'd you get your clothes, the salvation army?" some girls at school would ask her, hotsy-totsy types who thought their shit didn't stink. "Your mom still work at the DIME store?"

Screw 'em. Mom had her pocket of friends she was comfortable with and that was her circle, exactly the worldview her son would take some 20 years later. She did want to join Pep Club at the highschool, though. With envy, she looked on those girls with their pretty, pleated skirts, the kind she wanted so bad. But her parents didn't have the money to buy her a pep club outfit.

Her dad had a hot temper, but he had good moments too. When Mom's black cat, Nosey, ran away, she cried for three days, but one morning her dad opened the door to a shed at a construction site he was working at and..."Look, what I found," he told the girl, holding the cat in his calloused, carpenter's hands, that evening. He didn't even like cats.

It was a good time when the radio would play, what forawhile, was her favorite song. It was -- even for then -- an old, outdated radio, a 1940s wooden Philco floor radio, the size of a bookcase. Mom could be at one end of the house, but when she heard that song, she'd sprint forward and turn up one of the bakelite knobs that adjusted the volume.

Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket
Never let it fade away

Her favorite teacher at Jett Highschool was her English teacher, Mr. Ralston. I looked him up in an old yearbook. His first name was Melvin, but he went by Duke.

"Nobody wanted Duke Ralston for English," she said. "He was tough. You were gonna learn something in his class or else."

Mom wound up learning more in his class than any other in high school. She never accumulated more than, maybe nine hours of community college. My dad was just out of the Army when they started dating and she married him, mostly to get out of her parents' house. They divorced, she married a second time, and divorced a second time. Never married again.

But that's life. I have friends, some married, some who've been divorced two, three times. People struggling to bring up their kids, people who have lived through job losses and other indignities of life. That's been Mom's life, and no, I haven't always seen her positive as her friend Nancy has. But she's always loved gardening and Mom has planted a few good seeds in life.

In the early '90s, thirty years after she'd had him for a teacher, Duke Ralston was back in town, selling real estate or something like that. When someone suggested to him that he hire Vickie McElroy as an administrative assistant, he remembered her fondly.

"Oh, she struggled in my class, but she worked really hard," he said. "She made out pretty well."                                                                                             

                                                       Melvin "Duke" Ralston, Mom's
                                                       favorite highschool teacher.


All those years later and he remembered her.

I take her walking around the city lake, frequently. She loves the breeze, watching the bicyclists and joggers along the path, the geese babbling along the water.

"You're in good shape, Mom," I tell her. "I know 30-year-old lardasses who wouldn't make this as well as you."

I ask her about her about things like working with her mother at the dime store. She remembers with clarion recall.

"My mom was assistant manager," she said, adding that her mother didn't want any appearance of nepotism. "She always made sure I worked in a different department than her. If I came to her with a question, she always said, 'Go ask so and so.' She wanted me to fend for myself."

I change conversational topics as if they were waves shifting in the wind.

"So what do you think of Texas, Mom?" I asked her.

"Well, I don't like it," she said, then gets some of her information correct, some half-correct and some completely incorrect. "Jeff had some job there at a newspaper after highschool, but some bad people came along and wouldn't let him write. I don't know the whole story."

"That's me, Mom," I said. "I'm Jeff.

"You're Jeff?" she said.

"You betcha," I answered and she laughed into the halcyon breeze.

Her dad had Alzheimer's and died at age 78. I knew there was a possibility she would catch it some day, but I didn't expect her to show signs of dementia in her '60s. What can I say, you play with the deck you're dealt. Not that I say that with any sense of bravado. I think the whole damn thing sucks. That phrase, "It is what it is" -- I hate that. Hate it almost as much as that freakin' serenity prayer: God grant me wisdom to accept the things I can't change.

Later, we took a walk to the library. I took her to where the old Jett High School yearbooks were shelved and grabbed the one dated 1963. "I haven't seen that in years," she said. (Her yearbooks were destroyed in a flood.) I turned to a page full of senior photographs, she pointed to a picture of young girl in a black dress cut low to the shoulders and said, "That's me."

                                                       

                                                            Mom's senior picture

Extracurricular activities were listed next to Mom's picture. She was in glee club, worked as a student librarian, belonged to a Christian organization called Y-Teen, maybe one or two other things. Interestingly, pep club was listed as one of her activities. Did she get one of those skirts after all?

These days, Mom loves eating at the senior center, dining out with her friends and God forbid if she misses church. She laughs more than ever, loves to rave over my kids (her grandkids) and how they're growing up even if she doesn't always remember their names. Sure, she could have hatred and bitterness toward people, but she chooses to think positively. There's still time to learn things.

still time

Your mother has a story. If she's around today, and even if she's not, it would do you well to find it out. It's your story too.

"Catch a Falling Star" -- Perry Como

Shockers: Believe again

I'm sad that Wichita State, my alma mater, won't be playing for the NCAA championship tonight. It was a heartbreaker, but my sadness is mitigated by the fact that they played their hearts out. The Shockers played mean, with no let-up, right to the end. They owned the court for most of the game.

In the end, the only thing standing between the Shockers advancing toward the NCAA championship game was a controversial call by a ref in the final six seconds of the game. At that moment, the die was cast. Up to then, a Shocker championship was a real possibility. What seemed unrealistic at the start of the season was, near the end, plausible. The loss was a close shave.

I'm so proud of the Shocks. They never let their fans down. Their rise from obscurity to national prominence and the eyes of the world this season was miraculous. They lost most of their starters and scoring power from last year, they were undervalued, underrated. (They were picked fourth to win the Missouri Valley Conference.) They didn't even win the conference, yet they came back to prove the "experts" wrong at every turn. Beating a no. 2 ranked Big 10 school -- Ohio State. Beating no. 2 seeded Gonzaga!

I remember when upstart school, George Mason -- an urban school much like WSU --made it to the Final Four in 2006. Who were they? And to think, this year it happened for WSU. Was afraid I'd never see this again.

When I was a kid, my parents took me to see the Shockers play at the old Henry Levitt Arena during the Shockers old glory days of the late '70s-early '80s. There were all these dry years afterward, but now the Shockers are seeing a new renaissance. It's actually better because the coach Greg Marshall is really of a higher caliber than the old Shockers controversial coach Gene Smithson of some 30 years ago.

Marshall is a class act. Read up on his record. All the Shocks are upstanding, hardworking guys and they deserve all the love, all the praise they are getting from the community -- all the respect they have earned from their competition and the nation.

My son told me to calm down as I yelled at the TV, but it's all right. We got home from his Pinewood Derby tournament just in time to see the game. Gotta go to a Scout meeting now. Love my boy. Love my friends. Wish I'd been watching the game with my buddy Adam. Wish my old journalism instructor Les Anderson was here, but it's all right.

Life is sweet. It's time to believe again.

Play angry

Busy morning. Getting tight here. Time drawing near. Writing and re-writing. Wife's coming home from Dallas today. Gotta take my boy to the district Pinewood Derby race. Registration by 1 p.m. Have to be back to watch the Shockers play at 5 p.m. For any non-WSU alum or readers not up on sports, they are playing Louisville.

In Atlanta! My friends and I have fb messaging back and forth: "Final freaking 4!" "Un frickin' believable!" "Wild!"

They're on a Wheaties box and the cover of (damn!) Sports Illustrated. Oh I bought that thing. This may never happen again. It's a keepsake.

So much I want to say, but I gotta get my ass 'outa here. A lot to do, but I'd be remiss not to put something up here before the big game tonight. I do want to say, though, that the Shockers have earned everything they've got. They have worked, sweat, cried, sacrificed -- individually and as a team. They have earned the right to be where they are.

I'll be back. Go shocks!

P.S. Here are some articles from the Eagle. Enclosing an interesting article on former Shocker coach Mark Turgeon who turned the then-faltering Shocker basketball program around in the late '90s and '00s.
http://www.kansas.com/2013/04/03/2745015/shocker-families-head-to-atlanta.html http://www.kansas.com/2013/04/05/2748197/turgeon-will-have-his-eye-on-shockers.html http://www.denverpost.com/colleges/ci_22967503/wichita-going-wild-over-final-fours-wichita-state

http://www.kansas.com/2013/04/05/2748125/bob-lutz-wichitas-success-story.html

At the movies with Ebert

I was on flat Kansas highway, too close in propinquity to where the damn road started for me, when it came over my car radio -- via Robert Siegel and All Things Considered -- that Roger Ebert died. The day prior I'd read on social media that the cancer was back and he was taking a break. It's the kind of announcements celebrities make right before the inevitable. Gene Siskel made such an announcement 14 years earlier before dying of his own cancer.

Had I never watched an episode -- had Siskel and Ebert at the Movies never existed -- I would have nevertheless discovered and played in the art of film criticism somewhere, but it would have come harder. As is life, from cradle to the hearse, the road's had a lot of potholes and drop-offs anyhow.

I was elated to win awards for film review writing on my campus newspaper at Wichita State University (Go Shocks!). My editor friend Mary -- a talented review writer who considered pursuing a PhD in film studies -- encouraged me. Like Ebert, who considered his newspaper columns his identity, Mary and I both caught that sickness unto death like it was yellow fever. "It gets in your blood," she said of reporting and newspapering. Unlike Ebert, always original in his critical style, Mary did like Blue Velvet.( "Heineken! Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!") Of course, Mary, myself and our contemporaries are as far away from Ebert's raw talent as a coke-addled 1970s Dennis Hopper was removed from reality. We're unfit for many things, the least of which --- kissing Roger Ebert's ticket stub.

Tributes to Ebert have been falling over cyberspace like the papers rolling off the presses and on to the sidewalk newsstand at the opening of every Siskel and Ebert show. He generated respect, while alive, as evidenced by his Twitter followers and the readers of his blog. But it was respect acquired over time, deadline stress and tears.

"The skinny guy's all right sometimes. I can't stand the fat guy."

That's the kind of thing my classmates in the community college theater department would say about those two guys on TV who (gasp) dared to dis top Hollywood stars and the money making crap they squeezed out.

"I think they were no-talents who couldn't make it as actors so they have to tear everyone down," the young thespians would say.

Actually, the only real thing Siskel failed at was his plan to become a lawyer. Ebert? He never got that English lit doctorate. Damn.

Back then, the only one of my friends who shared my appreciation for these film reviewers was my fellow writer-and-cigarette-smoking friend Steve. When I mentioned to Steve that I liked watching Siskel and Ebert, he replied, "I love 'em." We respected these astute critics for one reason:

They could back up everything they said.

Steve and I would sit in front of the TV at 10:30 p.m., Sunday nights and critique the critiquers.

"I hate reviews like that," he said, feeling their review of Naked Lunch was wishy-washy. "Be definitive. Make a damn statement."

On a special At the Movies, in which they discussed "guilty pleasures," Ebert admitted a fondness for a maudlin Bette Middler movie, Stella about a feisty, uncouth singer and single mother, tending bar and trying to give her daughter a better life. Not my thing.

In a regular episode of the show, Siskel gave Rocky IV thumbs up and said, "I can't wait to see Rocky V". No Gene. Should've stopped after one.

What I now realize is that we were studying Siskel and Ebert and they were teaching us to become informed, critical thinkers and consumers of film art. From them, we learned that reviewing a movie -- or anything -- is much more than saying, "That movie rocks! That sucks." Judging a film's merits entails evaluating the dialogue, scenery, camera angles, writing, film editing, direction, plot believability...more than a critic can summarize into one review. It's the writer's role to discern the most salient points to mention.

Siskel and Ebert called the Hollywood Establishment to the carpet, when they felt it was warranted. These guys weren't taken in by celebrity, weren't like "insider political reporters" getting drunk on the power of a cocktail party. They were critical of the pomposity, prejudices and politics of the Oscars academy.

It's appropriate that non-actors and non-filmmakers scrutinize movies. We're buying their mansions, dishing out a ridiculous $10 a ticket, paying for the Netflicks and the damn popcorn. Probably what I've most taken from Siskel and Ebert, is that as an audience member I don't want to be taken for granted.

Around 20 years ago, Sly Stallone made a sorrowful action comedy, Stop or My Mom Will Shoot. One look at the trailers and I was saying Siskel and Ebert are 'gonna slam this." A week later I saw them on Letterman with Ebert calling it "the worst movie of the year."

And it probably was. It was laziness. It was Mr. Hollywood Superstar saying, "Hey, you love me. You're 'gonna pay to see me. I wrote my brilliant Rocky script in the '70s. I don't have to work for your love anymore." So he --- you know the formula. Mr. Action Star shows his softer, comedic side with some hackneyed, rehashed storyline about the perfunctory Tough Cop who's secretly a mama's boy. This Big Boy meets his match when diminutive spitfire Mom Estelle Getty comes to town and we're supposed to laugh when Little Miss Golden Girl takes down the criminals herself, while babbling about her little boy's diaper rash.

I'm calling bullshit. I'm offended, pissed off, when cynical Entertainment-Complex types insult my intelligence like that.

Apparently I owe a big thank you to a guy like Roger Ebert. He helped me see outside the Entertainment-Blockbuster-Complex box. A film about two guys having a conversation from across a table might be more entertaining than something chockablock with fight scenes and explosions. A documentary about a pig farmer or kids gearing up for a spelling bee might be riveting. If not for Ebert and his skinny rival, would I have written a review of a foreign film, Cinema Paradiso? Not at 20 years of age, not for an English assignment, I'll tell you that. I learned that if I were to watch a documentary about black drag queens in Paris and give it a thumbs up, I wasn't going to turn queer. (It was much more homophobic times 20 years ago.)

So yes, Ebert, like any gifted writer would, enlarged my mind. As his online columns of recent years have shown, his own mind was wide open. Along with his reviews, Ebert also weighed in on social issues like the Tea Party, racism, gay marriage and right-wing textbook revisionists. Not surprisingly, he was liberal. You can't be a puritanical social conservative and be an evaluator of art as he was. It'd be impossible.

Ebert's worldview complemented his approach to watching movies. As I listened in my car, NPR played archived audio of an old Ebert interview. He said through watching a great movie "I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief."

It's happened in my lifetime. On occasion, a great film has prompted me to question, change or modify a particular view. Watching for and noting such things is part of what makes film review an art form.

The form been devalued in recent years. In the 1980s, my metropolitan area newspaper, The Wichita Eagle, had two film critics. Now it has none. Local TV stations will sit two bubbleheads on stools and they banter about how many boxes of popcorn to give a movie without any substantive explanation why. Critiquing is a craft and not everyone has a talent for it.

At the Movies jumped the shark after Siskel died and somewhere in Chicago, a balcony is closed forever. But when talking about Ebert's death, think about saving the art of film comment in our clickety-ADHD generation.

Loved it when they would fight.

Pungent air and piss

Maria, her brother Matt and I were gone --- a narrow, torturous road stuck in place camaro-hot purgatory. Road was a narrow staircase of crude tar patches. No shoulders to wake you up when you get slit-eyed at the wheel. No warning before that long drop into the dry weeds of this time forgotten,

Nothin' like driving south with the one you love. Oklahoma, baby. That's where our salvation awaits. The poker and blackjack tables. Slot machines. Lucky Ducky. Liberty 7. Kingdom Cash. Maria would go gravitating toward that thing before the night was over -- a game. Just stick it right in the slot. Nothin' like an electronic device called Girl's Best Friend. Yeah, I got your best friend right here, baby.

We never made it to one of the swanky gaming houses in the more prosperous of Indian nations. But the place wasn't complete confederate flag trash either. A moderate level above low life, I'd say. Classy crowd. People were there to gamble, not get drunk. Air was a zeppelin-like cloud of tarred nicotine bearing over a puddle of piss.

Maria lost $20, got $15 back. Matt won $20, lost $50. It's the nature of casinos. People win and lose a dollar, a five here and there. Once in a while some smart, lucky or cheating sonovabitch hits pay dirt.

The woman screamed ecstatically, breasts bobbing up and down as she jumped with unbridled joy. She placed a dollar at Mr. Moneybags and here she hit a jackpot of -----

Six thousand dollars!!!

Because there is no love and happiness like material possession. Especially the kind you lucked into. She was all over her husband, gropin' and scopin', kissin' and a-huggin' as the tears drew black mascara down her face like it was erosion. It was an emotional moment. Probably a relief. Why not let it out? Why hold back?

She was so excited she (I couldn't believe it. My mouth went agape.) undid her jeans and dropped trou right there. Head still cackling with laughter as she squatted her big ass over the tile floor. She must've pissed the Cimarron River over that floor.

By the way, April Fool.