Soapbox

August 1st, 1997

So I’ve got this kid…and she loves her dog very much. Well’ he’s a pretty good dog, who has settled down a lot in the past few months, and hasn’t laid a lip on a piece of furniture or a Barbie doll in ages.
Lately he has become the darling of Katie and all her neighborhood girlfriends. She had a slumber party a while ago, and when I poked my head downstairs to check on why it was so quiet, there was Boomer in the middle of the bed, with a little girl snuggled on either side, arms thrown over him. He raised his head when he heard me, and if a dog can look sheepish, he did. I gave him a highly skeptical look and he crawled out of bed and slunk upstairs after me.

This summer the door will suddenly burst open on a previously quite afternoon and several shrill voices will start calling, “Boomer!” “Boomie-dog!” “Here Booms! Here boy!” Boomer goes dashing off to greet his adoring public with great delight. But he has learned that it’s tough to be a pre-teen idol. The girls take him up to Katie’s room with much giggling and squealing and shut the door. I’m not sure what all goes on up there, but usually after 5 or 10 minutes there will be a scratching at the door and Boomer will burst out and tear frantically through the house to find me. He plops down at my feet while the sirens continue to call,
“Boomer! Come Boomer.”
“Come here Boomie!”
“Oh Boomer-boy!”
I look down at him and he looks at me pleadingly. Usually I take pity on him and say, “Girls, I think the dog has had enough for now.

I told him now he knows how it must have felt to be a Beatle.

Saturday August 23, 1997

So I've got this kid….and over dinner the night before a family trip to the Cleveland Zoo, she asked her dad,
    "What kind of animals do they have at the zoo? "  Bear in mind, this is the same father who, when asked what is for dinner will unhesitatingly respond, "Weasel casserole." or "Albatross on a stick" or even, "Frog goulash", the man who insists, when asked "What is 2+2?" you should always reply "2 what plus 2 what?"  So you might think the kids would have had some inkling of what was to come.

   "Dogs and cats, basicaly." he answered.

   "What else?" she asked.
    "Well, that's pretty much it. You see, they have lots of stray dogs and cats in Cleveland, and they made them into a zoo, and people go see them. Then the animal handlers bring them by on leashes, and you look at them, and that's about it ."
    "What? That's totally stupid!" shouted her brother, who is not big on surprises.
    "Well, I guess playing with dogs and cats would be OK…" Katie began.
     "Oh no, there's no playing with them. This is a zoo, guys; you just look."
    "Isn't there anything else there, Daddy?" she asked, not at all sure that this trip was going to turn out to be a good time. Mouth twitching, I suddenly developed a great interest in buttering my roll.

   "Well… there is that special exhibit called Poodle Town. Yeah, they have a bunch of different poodles in this one big area that's made to look like a giant house because they want it to look like their natural habitat. There's a big sofa and a table and chairs and like 30 poodles running around. The trouble is, sometimes they all go and lay behind the sofa and frankly, you can't really see much. But that's the way it is in zoos."

Katie was trying really hard to keep a good attitude and look on the bright side.
    "Poodles sound interesting, I guess…"
Her brother wasn't trying at all.
    "This zoo sounds totally dumb! I'm not going to such a dumb place!"
    "Well, sorry guys: that's pretty much it, isn't it Trace?"
Oh ho, throw the ball into my court, will you? Well, right back at ya, buddy!

   "Is that touring Rat Land exhibit still in Cleveland?" I suggested, batting my eyes.
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Written for a creative writing class assignment.

The front door flew open with such a bang that my fingers jumped at the keyboard and came down on the wrong notes.
"Hey- slow down!" I called as my 7 year old son and his cousin Grace raced in off their Grandmother’s porch and headed for the TV room. "What’s the problem?"
"It’s going to rain!" Grace replied. "Look!"

I stepped to the door and pushed open the screen. From my mother’s front porch on a hill in Athens, Ohio, I had a good view of the sky. It was dark overhead and nearly black to the west. The first fat drops began to hit the hot street before me as a breath of cool air stirred my hair. Within moments, as my sisters Julie and Becky joined me on the porch, the sprinkle turned into a shower and the shower to a massive downpour.
"Wow!" I called against the cacophony of sound. "This is amazing! I think this is what the Navajos call a male rain: you get a week’s worth in about 5 minutes!"
"Remember when we were kids and we loved to play in the puddles when it rained?" Becky said, looking out.

Although Mom’s house sits on a hill, the rain was coming too fast and hard for gravity or the storm sewers to keep up, and the gutters were already overflowing. The summer air was filled with the smell of wet concrete and mud and the clean scent of rain.
All 3 of us smiled and for a moment saw ourselves in our swimsuits splashing through the huge puddles that would form in front of our childhood home during a good rain. We remembered the sheer joy of the feeling of rain on your skin on a hot day, when just being alive was a darn good thing.

"Too bad we don’t have our bathing suits" Julie murmured. I turned and gave my big sister a challenging look.
"Who says we need them?"
"What- in our clothes?" Becky asked.
"We’ll be soaked" said Julie.
"Exactly!" I grinned. "I will if you will!" We looked out at the rain, thundering down.
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So I’ve got this kid…and she informed me that we were going to have a mother-daughter camping trip. It seemed only fair, since there was a father-son trip in the works for the same time.

Since the guys called dibbs on most of the equipment, I thought we would make it a fairly low-key trip. We’d motor a quick 20 minutes north of our house to the local state park, grill some dogs, she’d ride her bike around the campground and then we’d hit the sack (or bag, as it were.) Up in the morning, scarf a few doughnuts, take a short hike,do a little swimming and then head home. The trip worked out beautifully, except for one minor catastrophe.

We headed off together with me singing one of the silly little songs I always make up. She loves them.
"..Oh Mom and Kate are going camping,
’cause it’s a mother-daughter thing to do.
They’ll take a hike and go swimming,
or maybe they’ll just rent a canoe.
Oh they like to..."

Katie cut me off. "Uh, Mom, what are you doing?"
"I’m just making up a song about our adventure."
"Yeah. Um, why?"

Ouch. Cut to the quick. Guess she outgrew the silly songs while I wasn’t looking. Ok, well, on to the camp ground. Uh oh, what does that sign. say?  CRAP! Oh No! I try to act unconcerned and put a good spin on things.

"Humm. It says "Full Camp". Well that’s just a tiny bit annoying, isn’t it? Ha ha. Oh well, guess we’ll have to choose somewhere else to go. that’ll be interesting, won’t it?"
She wasn’t fooled by the casual approach, and burst into tears. "Our camping trip is ruined!" she wailed.
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 So I’ve got this kid…and he decided that he needed to have a virtual pet. A friend at Cub Scout camp had one, and he was enthralled, like millions of other kids this summer. I had never heard of the things until then.
    There are virtual puppies and virtual kittens, but the particular kind he wanted was a Tomagatsu, which is a cyber alien. Now personally, I think the things are about as exciting as a stop watch and will soon go the way of pet rocks. I suspect that Tomagatsu is Japanese for "Laughing all the way to the bank". But he had $25 in birthday money from his grandma, so we told him that he could buy his own. Easier said than done, as it turned out.

    We traveled to 3 stores and called 3 more and succeeded only  in getting put on a waiting list for the next shipment. A few weeks later Stephen found, not a virtual alien, but a virtual dinosaur. For a child whose alter ego used to be a dinosaur, what could be better?
          Oh, the excitement in the Meisky household when the egg hatched and out popped a LCD blob that was supposed to be a baby dinosaur! Imagine Stephen’s thrill when he got to clean up his first virtual poop.  Updates on "Tommy’s" growth and development were shared with the neighbors and with cousins over the internet.
         Of course, as with any relationship, things weren’t always easy. Stephen had a distressing habit of putting the thing down and then forgetting where it was. Once his baby cousin hid it in a box of magic tricks. We could hear Tommy calling, like a tiny pager, for food or a clean-up or whatever it was he wanted, but we couldn’t tell where  in the room the sound was coming from. We spent 20 minutes like wildlife researchers tracking a tiger with a radio collar.  We were trying to triangulate on the signal, standing in different parts of the room and  pointing to the direction we thought the signal was coming from. ("I think it was over near the bathroom." "No, it sounded like it was near the computer.")

     And there were conflicts over cyber-care responsibilities. I asked Stephen if he had decided what he was going to do with Tommy when school starts, since he clearly can’t be taking time out of his math test to be putting a hat on his cybersaur because his display screen says he’s too hot. He suggested that since I’m home during the day, I could babysit.
          "Oh no!" I said. "I watch your cousin, I look after the dog and I even clean up after your sister’s turtle. I absolutely draw the line at cleaning up after your pet watch!" Stephen  gave me a look of horror and disbelief.
          "Mom, I can’t believe that you would let Tommy die! You know if he isn’t cared for properly, he’ll get sick and die. How could you do that?"  I forbore mentioning that the thing was a couple of silicon chips in a cheap plastic case and just walked out of the room.

           Well, as luck would have it, Tommy didn’t live to see the start of school. He fell victim to a tragic childhood accident when his father wasn’t watching him close enough. Tommy’s "Aunt" Katie accidently sprayed him with the hose, and after a day or two the moisture started corroding the contacts inside the case. He underwent 45 minutes of intense surgery by my husband, the Computer Doctor, and seemed to be making a good recovery. The next day he was caught in the crossfire of a neighborhood squirtgun war. Stephen rushed him home and Ted got the hairdryer to dry out the components. I was next door, and got a phone call over there.
       "Um, Trace, yeah… where did you get Tommy?" Ted asked me muffled voice that told me he was casting furtive glances over his shoulder to  be certain Stephen couldn’t overhear the conversation. "I had the case open and the phone rang and I bumped it off  the table when I got up to answer it…and it’s history now. So I"m going to try to buy him another one real fast."

        The truth came out when Ted couldn’t find the exact same virtual toy, but hey, "Dinky" looked like alot of fun, and Stephen said that he would do. Until 11:00 that night when he appeared at my bedside, clutching his new toy, and whispering that he just couldn’t stop thinking of Tommy and missing him.
    Oh, the urge to tell him what I thought of his wasting my night’s sleep was mighty strong! Gritting my teeth, I managed to say instead that I sympathized with his sadness and suggested that he occupy his mind by thinking of names for his new pet. I suggested a couple of silly ones and he was giggling to himself when he went back to bed.

          Since that day, Dinky has been a part of the family. Many’s the time I’ve put aside the ironing or stopped washing the dishes long enough to yell, "Stephen! Dinky wants you!" We watched together as Dinky "grew" arms and legs. One morning, Dinky sprouted wings, and none of his buttons seemed to work. We wondered if this is just what happens when a cyberpet is all grown up, or if he had a malfunction. I suggested waiting for a few minutes and trying again, but Stephen had his mind made up.
         "I’m going to erase him and start again." he announced.
    I could hardly believe my ears.
         "For crying out loud, son! For someone who was upset at my cruelty for refusing to babysit your toy, you’re mighty quick to perform euthenasia now. Give the little bugger a chance!"
         But the deed was already done. The screen now showed nothing but a little egg, rocking gently back and forth. Oh callow youth!

         Dinky II  is a few days old now, and has another two weeks to "live" until his owner goes off to school and Mom is faced with the moral dilemma of letting him starve or pulling the plug.
    Or, I suppose I could push a few buttons on the dumb thing…as long as no one is watching…