• Vulnerable

    Take your typical emotion. Now tie in a child. Many times that emotion multiplies when a child is involved. Take the issue of involuntary institutionalization due to mental illness. Imagine someone who suffers from an illness which leads them to go after people with a knife in anger. There is little question that this person needs to be put away, as a matter of public safety. Now imagine that this person is ten years old. Is the decision any harder? There was a story on NPR about a residential program out west which treats children with chronic mental illness. It treats those kids who previously fell between the cracks, the ‘tweeners who were not sick enough for long term, inpatient treatment in a mental hospital, but who were too much of a danger to others not to receive some treatment. The story talked about the previous “band aide” approach; intermittent hospitalizations to deal with crises as they arise. It featured the ten year old child who became a danger to his family.

    Picture the child placed in such a program. Imagine a therapist asking the child, “If you could ask your mommy any question right now, what would you ask her?” Imagine this child’s reply, spoken in a vulnerable tone: “Mommy, why did you put me in here?”

    That crunching sound you hear is my heart breaking.

  • As time goes by

    On this, the last day of school, I wonder what tomorrow will bring. No, I’m not talking about the next school year. I’m really talking about tomorrow. My daughter is the kind of child where you can’t take any day for granted.

    Yesterday evening after school Beth was excused to go to her friend’s house. Like a good parent I watched her walk down the street, presumably to make sure she got there safely. Why the act of watching her will make her safer, I have no idea. While she was walking down the sidewalk I was struck by the image before me. The whole situation seemed like the perfect metaphor for childhood. Beth walking further and further from her parent’s influence, the further she got, the less I could do to help, the joyful bounce in her step as she struck off on her own,.

    Clearly, I am not at all ready for this.

  • When something has to give

    As a general rule, metal is hard. When I say hard I’m speaking in relative terms, as in: metal is hard compared to human flesh. There are exceptions such as mercury, but we don’t typically run across open pools of mercury lying around; unless you work for the E.P.A. at a Superfund cleanup site.

    Take a piece of metal and anchor it to another, larger piece of metal, and it’s still hard.

    Run over that anchored piece of metal with your lawn mower, and it may become misshapen, but it will still be hard.

    As it turns out, lawnmower manufacturers do not recommend that you run over metal hammock stands with their products. Not only will it make a sound that can wake the dead in the next county over (not to mention scare the pigment right out of your skin) but it can and will reek havoc with the hammock, the mower, its engine, and your nerves.

    As a public service to all of you out there who may be thinking of trimming your hammock stand with a lawn mower, let me lead you through what might happen. This of course is all hypothetical. First, the metal of the mower blade rotating at approximately 3200 revolutions per minute will impact with the metal of the hammock stand with a loud metallic “WHACK”. The blade will embed itself in the metal of the stand. Depending on the quality of your hammock stand, it will not cut clean through. Due to the ringing in your ears, it will take a moment for you to realize that the engine of your mower is no longer running. It won’t take too much effort to pry your mower from the stand. When you do you will immediately see the effects of the impact on the stand. Now disconnect the spark plug and turn over the mower. Give the blade a couple of spins. You should notice that the blade now wobbles on the drive shaft rather than spinning cleanly in a circle. This is probably due to a bent drive shaft, which will require replacement of the engine (or more likely, replacement of the entire mower). Here’s how the service department of a lawn equipment dealer might describe the issue to you, “that blade is spinning 3200 times per minute and if it hits somethin’ then somethin’ is gonna give.” According to The Handbook for Better Business and Sales in the Lawn Maintenance Industry, fourth edition, this phrase loosely translates to Standard English as “you’ve got to be a special kind of idiot to run over something like that with a lawn mower.”