07 February 2003

Just like Bob Ryan told me last night on the Washington Weather, there is a pile of snow outside and a Winter Storm Warning in effect until one o'clock this afternoon. The flakes are moist and heavy on the balcony. It does not look like we got that much here in town, but they reportedly got hammered to the North and west. Six to nine inches out there, and the density of this fall means it is compacting and turning to ice. The commute looks to be brutal, and the sound of it from the highway down below is muffled as the slush piles up in the wheelwells of the eager-beavers with important memos to write or wars to manage.

I checked the Office of Personnel Management homepage immediately upon rising, which was fifteen minutes late. I have it bookmarked on my computer, and brought it up right after I turned on the coffee. In the Clinton Administration there was a cute little icon of an arctic bird in a jaunty to click on to determine if there was a weather delay. We used to joke about "double-clicking on the penguin" to see if we had to work in the bad weather, but that is long gone. The old director of OPM got nailed for being out on the campaign trail for her President during one freak snowstorm, and a lot of us bureaucrats were seriously inconvenienced. It was a little like Mayor Barry vacationing in LA in the great blizzard of 1986-he didn't seem to think the seventeen inches was a problem out there, and he extended his stay in a luxury complementary room.

Anyhow, everything is about perceptions. The Mayor couldn't have done anything more to remove the blanket of snow, and the Director of OPM probably could have had a functionary to update the hyperlink behind the penguin a little faster. But stuff happens. They are both gone. The Bush Administration is much more sober in their approach to the closing of the Government. The penguin is gone, too. Now there is a little button that says "operating status" that is perfectly bland, equal to "employment opportunities."

I double-clicked on it and was disappointed to see that your government will be at work today, albeit with special permission from OPM to arrive up to two hours late. Since they are supposed to move my worldly possessions out of my office to make room for the new faux-mahogany furniture which will enable me to more effectively wage the Global War on Terrorism. In self-defense, I probably should show up. The people that are doing the move are paid by the hour, so I anticipate that they will be on the job.

Their labor is directly connected to their dinner and rent. The linkage to mine is a little more tenuous, but I will honor the social contract.

The snow has caused the cancellation of school in districts across a wide swath of Virginia and Maryland. One of them is the County District where my younger boy is finishing up his Senior year before heading out into the Wide World. He is taking a certain cavalier attitude to some of his academic pursuits. The winter is busy for him. He is coaching youth basketball and playing in an intramural league himself. He has practice and an aggressive social life that reminds me a great deal of my own 35 years ago. He also, quite reasonably, thinks the die is cast on his grade point and test scores, and the colleges that will take him have already got the information they need. One has already committed to his admission, and that is good enough for him.

He is an eminently practical young man. My fear is that he will meltdown in one of the last courses in the last half of the last year of the thirteen-year marathon. His older brother did, only partly his fault after the exhausting resume-building to finish the demanding process. So I have elected to help him in the one course in which he does not have an intuitive command. Advanced Placement English is his bugbear. He is in the course because his mother was convinced that it would burnish a resume that was just on the cusp of getting into a really good school. My son is not a reader. He has a quick and agile mind, and he has no patience for sitting still. Deep contemplation is something he does not do. He is clever, and makes snap decisions on the fly, enroute some party or another, consulting with his friends.

It has been a bit of a challenge. In the winter he is busy. This week he had two games and a fitting for a tuxedo to do an ad for the yearbook. He has that Senior sense of entitlement, and I don't blame him. But the midweek visit for dinner and homework has gone by the board, and I only catch him on the weekend. I knew there was a major project coming up in English. We had talked about the State of the Union for his AP Government class. I did some notes and we exchanged e-mails about it. I hope it worked. I never see the outcome of our collaboration.

English is more problematic. I was disappointed in his failure to read Catch-22 in the modern American section of the class, since it was one of my favorite books as a teenager. I gave him what I could on the formatted "major works data sheet (MWDS)" which is one of the tools the teachers have to use since the advent of the Internet. Recognizing that the kids have access to every word ever written, and armed with the ability to cut and paste them into what passes as original work, they faculty has taken a creative approach to scholarship. I recall a term-paper whose format decreed "No linking verbs." Try that one out for size. Drove us crazy. Another approach is to assign a topic is so bizarre that it is unlikely to have a match on the Google Search Engine. The last one he was assigned was a comparison of the old-English hero Beowulf and the modern anti-hero of Catch-22's Yossarian.

I guarantee you that there is no match on Google. I tried.

The MWDS is another tool of the same ilk. The kids are required to fill in a dozen blocks of information in a special format. Even if they copied the information verbatim, it has to be edited to fit. They have to read the material, if only to cram it into the little boxes. They are reading Shakespeare now. We struggled through Hamlet. The Melancholy Dane did not resonate with my son. Next came King Lear, the play that is on the table now. I had been bugging him for the deadlines for the homework but he was evasive. The marking period ended last Friday, and he was of the opinion that nothing was happening.

Yesterday I got up to address the great issues of the day with Vicki Barker and Bob Edwards and opened the e-mail queue to find:

"Lear MWDS is due tomorrow." That was all there was. One line. I had a full day ahead and a social engagement I wanted to make that night. The MWDS takes at least eight hours to complete, and one should probably have read the play first. Cold beads of sweat ran down the back of my neck. I canceled my plans to write a vignette on the growing crisis in the Mideast and hit Google to find a timeline of events in Elizabethan England, and a brief bio of William Shakespeare. I ran out of time on that and had to go to work. I was back at it late that afternoon, and realized there was no way to complete it.

I talked to my son, and he was of the opinion that he could hand it in on Monday.

"How many points will you lose?" I asked.

"It doesn't matter" he said, full of the existential certainty that June, and graduation will come inevitably.

"Yes, it does" I said, uncomfortably aware from the summit of my age that when the inevitable arrives, it is always molded in the shape you make it. We hung up and I worked at more boxes, themes, plot summary, characters. When I could do no more I shipped it off to him as an attachment to an e-mail. This morning I got up to see the snow, and wished I had a penguin to double-click. I heard the wave of school cancellations mixed in with the BBC Speaker's Corner, which featured an insufferable Brit from Saint Mary's College in London who opposed the coming war, and America in general, on high moral principle.

I listened and typed a note to my son:

"Son, excellent planning on the paper- no point on rushing when school when was going to be canceled anyway.

Oh, I think the date for Lear is 1606- it needs to be fixed in the "date" section. The significance of the last act box also remains to be filled in, and I don't think the comments on the opening scene are strong enough. Also need the list of quotes and their meaning. Why don't you do that today when you get up and we will polish it off this weekend. It needs to be your document anyway.

Let me know what the game schedule is this weekend and we'll work around it.

Get back to me- I will be headed into the office a little bit late this morning. They were supposed to move my furniture out to replace it with some spectacularly ugly new false-mahogany stuff they bought for the whole staff with counter-terrorism money they couldn't spend on anything else late last year.

Glad we dodged the bullet."

Love,

Dad"

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra