Well, if I count Barley's shitting on the basement floor last night as an early present, maybe you'd call that a rocky start, but maybe Barley has subversive political ideas and was just making a comment on Patriot's Day.
Barley the Dog-Faced Infidel?
Ahem.
No, aside from getting stalled out in traffic again, a pretty decent birthday. Nice card from work, the boss bought me lunch (Max's Autodiner, yum). And after work, the traffic wasn't bad at all. I breezed right through, only hit one slowdown near Gardner. When I picked up the honyocks, it was with visions of a quick supper, a little celebratory snack and the maiden voyage of Big Bird and the Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, the pair of two-stage rockets I've been building.
Mo had made me a card. She loves birthdays because she loves blowing out candles. Any candles, anytime, anywhere. Try keeping a candle lit around her, I dare you. I double-dog dare you.
Em oozed out from under the carpet of her mother's house and did her best to invisibly sneak to my car. At first I just thought it was her being eleven, but then I got my present. Her report card from school.
We had a progress report that showed a D- in math and we'd been riding her about it, promising dire consequences if she didn't bring it up and so on. And she did bring it up to a C.
Imagine my surprise at the F she got for the quarter in Language Arts.
Language Arts is, for the record, also known as English class. It's her native tongue. This is a kid who could spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious when she was two. The kid who showed me where my gastrocnemius was when she was in kindergarten. The kid who reads novels that take me days on end in a sitting.
An F? An F???
Of course she's grounded. And I couldn't see where going to launch rockets to the amusement and distraction of her neighborhood friends fit with the schedule. I haven't decided how long she's grounded for, possibly the quarter. I told her I just might put the kibosh on the Friendship Circle's activities until she brings me a report card that shows an effort.
I mean really, a kid this bright, a C is unacceptable. The hardest assignment she's ever had was within her range for an A if she actually tried for it.
And yes, I'll be in touch with her teachers and all over this like evil on Hilary Clinton.
Okay, full disclosure: I've been on the other side of this ugliness. I had a teacher grade my sloppy, rushed-through assignments when I was in fourth grade, resulting in what my Dad referred to as a 'big, fat, rosey D' on a term paper that was the source of much gnashing of parental will and rending of what I thought were my rights to privacy.
So I asked to see Em's 'done' homework and sure enough, first math problem she had 5 x .18 coming to .93. And you could tell she wrote it as fast as possible be cause the three was almost an 8 and wasn't quite on the same line as the rest. She could write more legibly while falling off a cliff.
I told her to hit it again and take her time, and she was outraged. And I told her she'd hurried through it to get it done and she said, 'Grownups can read minds! Ugh!'
At which point I explained that a piece of homework like that was like Cool Ranch Dorito breath, you don't need psychic powers, it has a unique scent that can be detected without effort from around the corner. Saying she didn't rush this math homework was like saying 'What Dorito's?' with little yellow crumbs spewing out on the consonants and the rumpling of the bag clearly audible.
So that's where the title of this blog post came from, the Was (Not Was) song that kind of echoed through my head as I looked at that F in Language Arts and all it adds up to.
I did have some awfully good ice cream to offset this.
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