Enjoy your pumpkin soup!

Happy Thanksgiving. I’d be amazed if you’re actually reading this on Thanksgiving. Some folks get there NEWspaper on Wednesday, some don’t get around to reading it till the weekend. I’m sure you’re busy. If you you’re reading this a week later, I understand. No offense taken.

So what’d ya have? White meat? Dark? Did ya go the John Madden NFL route and have a “Turducken?” Mashed potatoes? Dressing? Green bean casserole? Let me guess, cranberry something and some sort of pie? Why is it that millions of us Americans eat pretty much the same thing on Thanksgiving?

One of my fondest Thanksgiving memories was when Beth’s folks were out and instead of taking I-5 up to our cousins’ in Northern California, we decided to meander up Highway 1 along the coast. It took way longer than we thought it would, so we spent Thanksgiving night near of Hearst’s Castle. The pizza and beer was Okay, but at lunch we had stopped in Morrow Bay and had the best clam chowder on earth in a practically empty restaurant with huge windows overlooking the Pacific.

Some people’s first reaction would be pity. Thanksgiving without turkey? Sacrilege!

The truth of the matter is that the Pilgrims didn’t even have forks. Sorry, no forks, but they did have spoons, knives, and their fingers. They wiped their hands on the same napkins that they used as pot holders and tongs.

Miles Standish and Pricilla Mullins also had to some how get by without desert. They had brought sugar with them on the Mayflower but by the time of the feast, they were probably out. Oh yeah, no ovens either. That meant no pies, cakes, cookies, brown-and-serve rolls or even bread.

According to the historychannel.com Much of the first Thanksgiving was seafood; cod, eel, clams, and lobster. That makes sense, Plymouth, Massachusetts is pretty much a seafood bonanza. Notice, Allan (my father-in-law), no oysters. Maybe they waited for Christmas Eve, like you. Personally, I hate oysters, but Bethany hates lobsters, you can’t please everybody.

I understand that the Pilgrims might have had a turkey or two (wild though, not a big fat domestic tom). They and their Wampanoag Indian hosts also probably had plenty of other fowl like goose, duck, crane, swan, partridge, and yes, eagles (is nothing sacred?!). Talk about a lot of “tryptophan.” That’s that enzyme in bird meat that makes you sleepy. I bet nobody was left awake to do the dishes in then either. I for one really enjoy pheasant, you just have to be careful to pick the bird-shot out of the wound.

I tell ya what, anybody on the Atkin’s diet would have loved the first Thanksgiving. Cholesterol was the least of their worries. They were much more worried about small pox and the plague.

The menu continued with Venison, Seal (I hope no PETA members just read that). They had a little bit of stone ground wheat flour, and of course… “Indian corn.”

There was some other vegetables to, like roasted pumpkin, not as a pie, more likely soup. That one was one of George Washington’s favorites. I guess that there are only so many things you can eat with wooden teeth. Of course, Washington was a century later, don’t get your history confused.

The Pilgrims probably topped off their feast with peas, beans, onions, lettuce, radishes, carrots, plums, grapes, walnuts, chestnuts, acorns. No Stove Top stuffing, no French's® French Fried Onions or Campbell's® Cream of Mushroom to make that green bean casserole, and no Cool Whip®. Worst of all, the Pilgrims had no cranberry gelatin goop that makes that “shloop” sound when it slides out of the can.

No Lions’ game, no Cowboy’s game, but it was only a couple of decades before they had some wicked witch-hunts.

This first feast in 1621 wasn't repeated, so it couldn’t have been the start of our tradition. In fact, the radically conservative Puritan Pilgrims didn't call it “Thanksgiving.”

To them, a “thanksgiving” was a religious day, so they went to church and thanked God for a specific event, like winning a battle. On such a day, no recreational activities were allowed, like playing games or singing. You can bet that there would be no way that pagan savages like the Wampanoag’s would be invited. The Pilgrims were actually pretty intolerant for having come here for “religious freedom.”

Our Thanksgiving in America really got started with George Washington who declared a one-time holiday. Abe Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November as"...a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens." F.D.R. moved it to the fourth Thursday in 1939, to keep a fifth week in November from cutting into the Christmas shopping season.

Tomorrow (the Friday after Thanksgiving), is now the busiest shopping day of the year. Save your sanity, join thousands of penny pinchers by observing it as the “National Buy-Nothing Day.” Believe me, if you even try to go to a mall tomorrow, you’ll wish you hadn’t.

Turns out that the Macy's Parade, was started in the 1920's by first-generation immigrant employees of the department store who wanted to celebrate with the kind of festival they loved in Europe. They put on costumes, borrowed 25 animals from the Central Park Zoo and marched 111 city blocks, drawing a crowd of a quarter million, which pretty much guaranteed an instant tradition.

You should have seen the parade of cars on I-5 backed up on the Sunday night after Thanksgiving full of pilgrims trying to get back home to L.A. I’m thankful that now we just go up to see our relatives Sioux Falls.

A little Sex, Politics, and Religion

I think I’ve shared with you before that I always hoped that this would be a place where we could talk about many different things, including the things people often avoid talking about. I even thought about naming the column “Sex, Politics, and Religion.” I certainly tend to write an awful lot about at least two of those three.

Almost every week I feel guilty about writing too long. This gets compounded when the paper comes out by Bethany’s sighs. Sometimes I get a little too heavy politically or preachy and I honestly do try to balance stuff out with some humor the best that I can. I even try to make every third column a light and fluffy humor column.

Some of you have shared with me that you actually enjoy how diverse the subject matter is from week to week. One person even told me that they liked how I tend to wander from topic to topic within each individual column. I knew my Attention Deficit Disorder would pay off someday!

Charles M. Schulz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip once said “…if you do not say anything in a cartoon, you might as well not draw it at all. Humor which does not say anything is worthless humor. So I content that a cartoonist must be given a chance to do his own preaching.”

I realize that a picture is worth a thousand words and believe me, I know I'm no Charles Schulz, but I like to think that I apply his philosophy to this column. Interestingly enough, I noticed that long time political cartoonist Pat Oliphant has a syndicated column too now. No doubt Dave Barry will be drawing his own illustrations soon.

I can't resist the chance to talk about sex, politics, and religion all in one paragraph. Here goes-CNN.com recently ran a headline that read "The House of Bishops voted Tuesday evening to confirm the Rev. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire, making him the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church's history."

Now that I've done it, I really shouldn't touch that one with a twenty-foot pole. Okay, I'll say this much, I understand that their own canonical law doesn't allow divorced priests to become Bishops. Robinson divorced his wife and now lives with a man, to whom he's not married. Therefore, although it's not my place to say since I'm a Lutheran, but whether or not he's gay is irrelevant, even if the Bible didn't call homosexuality a sin, the Episcopal diocese of New Hampshire still violated church rules.

Now, let's try giving sex, politics, and religion each their own paragraphs.

Politics: I'd have written Randy Steffen's name, but I showed up five minutes after the polls closed. I guess I drove too slow coming back from parent/teacher conferences in Dunlap.

I think I'm leaning toward Dean mostly because it looks to me like Gebhardt and Kerry are opposing him, more than they are Bush. It would take two or three columns to explain why I'd choose any of them over Bush, but I'll spare you today.

Religion: We took in the movie 'Luther' at the Donna Reed last week. It was much better than I expected. Of course, being a History major, you could expect me to enjoy a period piece like that. Even with the peasant's revolt included there wasn't nearly as much gore as 'Braveheart' or 'Gladiator.' There also wasn't any nudity, and barely any explicit language so it won't be a major box office hit.

I'm not only no Schulz, I'm no Luther either, but it was kinda neat to learn that he posted his 95 theses when he was only 33, since I'm only 33. Of course, he had a doctorate by the time he was 29 and I'm a long way from my Master's.

They sort of made it look as if Luther was a political cartoonist on top of being a theologian and musician. If I'm not mistaken Lucas Cranach the Elder and Albrect Durer handled most of Germany's propaganda art during the reformation.

Sex: no comment.

Humor: Well, Bethany tells me that I should update you about Halloween. The Spiderman costume came on time and Grace had a ball. Boy, that was funny. I missed trick or treating again. I was not sitting in a pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin, I was freezing my tail off watching Boyer Valley get beat up in Lake View. Or was it Wall Lake?

The cheerleaders didn't bug me about wearing costumes. That's because the boss (our principal, Becky Panzi, a former cheerleading coach herself) read one of my columns where I anticipated that problem, came into Yearbook class and read them the riot act. God bless her.

Hey, I just got an idea! Let's see how few words I can use in a sentence and still mention sex, politics, and religion…"God bless Senator Clinton." Okay, okay, I know that how many Republicans read this, but I refuse to damn anyone, even if I don't like them. For the Republican's sake I'll add race and humor (but not racist humor, at least I don't think it is): "God bless President Carol Mosely Braun." See, her candidacy is kind of a joke because she's not even one of the front runners, so that's the humor. Okay, it wasn't all that funny. Okay, that also went from just four words to six. I guess we'll have to keep trying

I really wasn't sure what to write about this week. Did it show? Well, as the German philosopher Goethe once said, “One never goes so far as when one doesn’t know where one is going.”

Parent-Teacher Conferences should be about kids

At the time I am writing this, Boyer Valley had just finished up Parent-Teacher Conferences. That’s where teachers sit in a gym for four hours grading papers, cleaning out files, reading or talking to each other about College Football while they wait for what few parents come to come. No, seriously, it’s a beneficial thing but no matter what school you’re at there are several things that are true;

The kids who’d parents the teacher most needs to speak to don’t come. Some parents feel very intimidated and defensive because they can’t understand why their child is doing so poorly. Some teachers feel intimidated and defensive because they can’t understand why they’re the ones under scrutiny when it’s the kid who didn’t turn any homework in on time with their name on it.

One year in California a parent stayed at my desk for nearly 90 minutes! His child was pulling an ‘A’ in my History class and had no real beef with me, although it was very important to the dad that I wasn’t teaching liberal politics. I’ve always prided myself on try to see and share both sides of every issue. My primary goal as a teacher is always to equip students with critical thinking skills so that they can do their own thinking and form their own opinions.

This parent complained about everything from the cost of filling chuck-holes to clandestine government conspiracies but spent most of his time preaching to me about the virtues of guns and the second amendment.

I tried my best to just listen and not attempt to dispute anything he said.

Another year I found myself under the scrutiny of a set of parents who were upset that their daughter didn’t make it back on to the cheer squad. There was a night that I probably would’ve tested positive for high blood pressure. Forty-five minutes into the meeting I made a mental note to myself; “for future reference; never schedule tryouts the week of or the week before parent/Teacher conferences.” Whew!

The thing I probably miss the LEAST about teaching History are those students, bless their hearts, who would have a coronary if they received a ‘B+’ or an ‘A-.’ You know, the ones who would fly off the handle about how I was ruining their lives and preventing them from achieving their dreams because of the grade I GAVE them.

Hello? Teacher’s don’t GIVE grades arbitrarily because they want to ruin you dreams. They merely REPORT the grades that you’ve EARNED. Studying helps. So does 1) actually doing the homework, 2) bothering to turn it in when it’s due, and 3) having your name on it.

My, conferences have usually been much less dicey since I’ve been teaching only Art. Let’s face it, you almost have to TRY to fail Art. When a student does get a ‘C,’ it’s usually because of a severe lack of effort. Their parent’s, fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it assume it’s because their kid just isn’t talented and Art isn’t important so why bother the poor teacher about it. Mind you, I’m the kind of Art teacher who sincerely and adamantly believes that EVERY student NEEDS to learn about Art, EVERY student SHOULD learn about Art, and believe it or not, almost anyone CAN learn to draw if he or she wants to.

I enjoy getting to meet the parents of my students. Sometimes it’s a lot of fun. Some times it can tug at your heart strings. I had a pair of parents who came on behalf of a student who’s living with them for the semester. Not an exchange student, not a foster kid, just a Senior who’s parents abandoned them and who’d last host kicked ‘em out. These new host parents, genuinely want to help him get into college. What hearts.

I don’t know how far off Charter Oak-Ute’s next batch or parent-teacher conferences is but, I’d like to offer some advice for three types of people affected by parent teacher conferences.

Students- Don’t fret and sweat so much. It’s a good thing if your parents attend these conferences. It means they care about you. Believe it or not, so do most of your teachers. They certainly didn’t get into their line of work for the pay. If you’ve been trying your best and don’t have anything to hide, parent-teacher conferences may be temporarily embarrassing, but are no big deal. As Disney’s Kim Possible says “So not the drama!”

Teachers- Make sure you listen more than you talk and make sure you keep your emphasis on the student and strategies for helping them. Don’t waste time either selling your program or trying to defend your teaching style. Parents want help, not a pitch.

Parents- Always remember that teachers are human. Well, most of us anyway. That means we need you to be a little patient and forgiving, but that also means not to put them on any kind of pedestal. What I’m saying is that you going to talk about your child is not the same as you being called into the principal’s office when you were a student, so don’t get scared. At the same time, these are professionals who have had a lot of training in what they do and sacrifice a lot to do it, so please hear them out.

Neither parents or teachers should go into conferences planning on attacking or being attacked. Their common objective is helping kids. Both parents and teachers should keep that in mind.

California Dreamin’

In case you didn’t know it, he name “Iowa” is derived from the French word “Ioway,” used for the Bah-kho-je Indian tribe that lived here when the first European explorers came through. The name “California” supposedly comes from a mythical Spanish island ruled by a queen named “Califia.”

I know better. “California” is actually derived from two Spanish words; “caliente,” meaning hot or burning, and “infierno,” meaning Hell.

Thus “Cali-fierno,” which became the English “California.” Or “Col-ee-forn-ee-ah,” if you prefer Governor-elect Shwartzeneggar’s pronunciation. To-may-to, to-mah-to, anyway you say it, it’s a hot burning hell, especially right now.

Roses in January and lounging by the pool in February is one thing, but what many of my friends and former students are dealing with lately is quite another.

The Associated Press reports that more than 522,000 square acres has burned in this year’s wild fires. That’s around 815 square miles for those of us who don’t farm. To give you some perspective, the entire state of Iowa covers only 56,276 square miles.

Sioux City and Council Bluffs are barely 100 miles apart. Los Angeles proper and San Diego are getting close to 200 miles apart. So imagine if the ring of fire Johnny Cash sang about was covered the entire Loess Hills, from the Minnesota border, all the way down to Missouri! Yikes. No wonder the smoke is visible from space.

More than 1,100 homes have burned down and dozens of people have died.

At this point if we wake up tomorrow to hear that Arizona finally has the ocean front property that George Straight sang about, I’d believe it.

“We've been breathing in smoke and ashes,” said Diane D’Agostin, one of our friends who lives in Camarillo, north of L.A., “they're not too close to us, moving away now. Although I heard a new fire started in Fillmore which is northeast of us.”

We also know a couple in Porter Ranch. Anne Beirling, who is originally from Wayne Nebraska, told Bethany that while their home was safe, the fires came just blocks away in the foothills. She compared it to a cross between ‘Armageddon’ and ‘M*A*S*H,’ because they could see the glow of the flames and heard a constant whipping of helicopters above.

One of my former cheerleaders is a Sophomore at UC San Diego. Remember San Diego? Sea World, the Zoo, the Wild Animal Park, the Tijuana Trolly? It used to be one of the most lush, beautiful parts of California. Much cooler and greener than L.A. Now, the Chargers had to play in Arizona because their stadium is being used as an emergency shelter.

“They are crazy! They are all over Southern California! San Diego is being burnt to a crisp! We haven't had school in three days! The air is pure smoke,” Jeraldin Kuerbiss told me. “It looks like it is finally clearing, though. There were four BIG fires in S.D. One was over 30 miles long at one point. Another has burned into Tijuana. It was pretty scary and close on Sunday, when they started. It was a little too close for comfort. Just the night before (Saturday) a bunch of us went to someone’s house right where one of the fires were!”

I for one wanted to leave after we lost our apartment in the 1994 Northridge 7.1 Earthquake. My fellow “Angelinos” and I used to scoff at “those darn rich people” who were “so stupid to live in the Malibu canyons. If they managed to survive the brush fires in the fall, then they’d lose it all in the mudslides come spring.”

But now what things hath God wrought?!
• Earthquakes
• Mudslides
• Wildfires
• Remember the energy crisis? Last year they put up with “Rolling Brown-Outs” because since they deregulated power companies Californians were gouged by high prices for electricity.
• A recall which left them with an action-figure governor-to-be who plans on repealing great sources of revenue (the $185 per vehicle per year car tax- do you know how many millions of cars there are just in L.A.?) in the face of a $38 billion state deficit! (Mind you, I’m glad I no longer live there to have to pay it, but still, why not quit your job in order to pay your bills? See my point?)
• Okay, MASSIVE, oppressive taxes, especially on cars and on gasoline.
• A mass-transportation workers’ strike. Granted, most everybody in L.A. drives an SUV, but thousands of people started trying to use the trains and the busses after the ’94 quake. Believe me, this is causing almost as much congestion as the smoke (on top of the smog.)
• A grocery store workers’ strike. Did I forget to mention that?

“They are picketing all day and night,” our friend Diane emailed me, “all about lost or decreased benefits -- which we're ALL facing! But to be supportive we've been shopping at Trader Joes (a small heath food chain that’s not among the stores being stuck against) -- the first week of the strike John went to buy milk and they were SOLD OUT!!! Even Target was sold out… I'm going to have to go to the store again soon. So, things are crazy here in CA!”

And yet my students are amazed that I ever wanted to leave L.A. “There’s nuthin to do around here,” they whine. Don’t get me wrong, I love California and have plenty of fond memories. It’s just that it’s a nicer place to visit than it is to live, although right now, even looking a mean Iowa November in the face, those California dreams are all nightmares.