Kinder garden scientist

Besides superheroes, art and bugs, it turns out The Boy also has a thing for the scientific process.

He and The Missus started up a bunch of little dirt divots last week, and in no time at all most of them had sprung sprouts, skinny little green things reaching for the sun.

The other day, The Boy got up early and I found him at the craft/botanical garden table, scribbling on 3x5 note cards. I assumed he was hard at work on his next intricate artistic aberration, but a closer inspection revealed two cards, filled with careful notes and observations on his plants. He was just finishing one, and the other one he did the day before.

All I had to do was remind him to date them on the back so he’ll know what order they came in later. I asked him if The Missus put him up to it, and he mentioned casually that it had been his idea.

He is a pretty interesting little dude.

This week also marks his ‘graduation’ from Kindergarten.

When I was a kid and Kindergarten year was over, we didn’t call it graduation, we called it summer.

But it was simpler times back then... [wistful sigh] When beating your children in public was fine, but being gay anywhere except lesbian stag films was definitely not.

You know: The Good Old Days!

I was telling my pal The Last Boy Scout recently how glad I was that, for all the uncertainty of the times, I’m glad our kids are growing up in the cultural landscape of today instead of the one from my childhood, ca 1962—on. He was bitching about celebrities using their soapbox to espouse liberal causes, and I was clearing my throat with names like Ted Nugent and Charlton Heston (out of respect for his debating prowess, I kept Ronald Reagan in my back pocket).

But one of the things that is not an improvement—well, I don’t think it is yet, but I am talking out of my ass at the moment—is this ridiculous imperative to hand kids mortar boards and sheepskin every time they successfully navigate the next logical step of their developmental progress.

I mean, I earned one diploma in my life, and I worked hard for that motherfucker. I did two years as bully-bait at the local Catholic high school—then a blissful year-and-a-half as Head of my class at the local P.S. when the parochial school dollars ran out. But I was owed that diploma for those first two years of social and academic hell.

And it was a big deal when I got it. I was three sheets to the wind, with a flask taped to my torso and a tube we stole from the chem lab running from it up to my collar, and I still remember the evening.

I’m not sure I would have, though, if that had been my thirteenth ‘graduation.’

We cheapen the value of real accomplishment when we label every workaday grade transition a graduation.

Uh, don’t we?

I have a feeling I may be eating my words later in the week, but I want to go on record now as saying “Sentiment! It’s all sentiment! I was right earlier in the week when my mind wasn’t clouded with all this silly sentiment!”