Tag: wisdom

A Plea For Sanity

I have seen terrible things.

Horrible scenes of carnage and mayhem. Broken bodies scattered on the landscape. Wonderful joyous days instantly transformed into nightmares of pain and grief. Who can make sense of it? It’s never easy when the victims are so young and fragile. We look on and shake our heads and wonder, why did this have to happen?

I am writing about the Bethlehem Town Park sledding hill.

For some reason, the children of my proud community have never been taught rule one of sledding: walk up the side, not the middle.

Not that this isn’t entertaining to watch. Being struck by a sled tends to produce spectacular head-over-keister tumbles worthy of an NFL Films Moment of Impact DVD. Imagine Brandon Jacobs slamming into your six-year-old. But if it’s your kid it’s not so entertaining. And if your child caused the damage, suddenly you’re not thinking, “Wow!” You’re thinking, “Lawsuit.”

One time I saw two kids walking side by side up the middle of the hill carrying a toboggan. Suddenly, a young child headed right for them. His parents started shouting out: “Duck! Duck!” He looked around, maybe trying to see the duck they were yelling about, and turned his head back just in time to catch the toboggan square in the forehead. I have supplied this diagram to help you better understand the incident.

I implore parents everywher -especially now during this holiday season- to take your children by the hand and tell them this: walk up the side of the hill. Not the middle.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I cross posted this on the Times Union’s Bethlehem Blog. Click to read the idiotic comment somebody left.

Legends of the Fall

I was at a meeting recently where someone stood up and said, “Fall is here, so please remember not to drive through piles of leaves along the road. There could be children playing in them.”

I’ve heard that a hundred times, and a hundred times it sounded like something that grew out of urban legends. On the flip side, we were told as kids not to play in the leaves near the street for the same reason. As usual, this drove me to the internet. Low and behold, SNOPES.COM does not dismiss the warning as a myth, but cites several horrible accidents as proof that playing in the leaves can have deadly consequences.

But there’s a more pressing reason you shouldn’t play in the leaves, particularly not the leaves piled on the street in front of my house. That’s because they are filled with dog poop. Those are the leaves I raked from the backyard over the weekend, and while we try to stay one step ahead of the dogs, it’s tough in the fall. The problem? Their droppings are camouflaged by nature’s colorful bounty. That sounds very poetic until you stroll through the leaves, or worse yet, you spend three hours raking them up. Then nature’s colorful bounty is a stinky, disgusting mess.

So, don’t play in the leaves and don’t drive through the leaves, and for Gods’ sake, wear clean underwear in case you get in an accident.

Flaming Corsage

I can cook and clean and do laundry as cheap nfl jerseys well as cheap jerseys my mother, but let’s face it: there are some things that men are not able to handle. No, I’m not talking about childbirth, I am talking about corsages. Do not trust a man to order a corsage unless he’s given specific and exact instructions. We don’t know what you are wearing or what goes with it, nor do we particularly care. Yet if Clothes we call the florist to order a corsage -like I did for Easter today- the conversation goes like this:

Florist: What color flower would you like?
Me: I don’t know.
Florist: Well…what is she wearing?
Me: I have no idea. What goes with everything?
Florist: White.
Me: White pour is perfect.
Florist: What color ribbon would you like with that?
Me: It comes with a ribbon? Does that cost extra?

You get the idea. I ended up with a single white rose and a pale yellow ribbon. The ribbon, by the way, cost me nothing but goes with most everything. I will teach my sons that on Easter and Mother’s wholesale jerseys Day, flowers are nice but something that your wife can wear around all day long is even nicer.