Celebration Time

Before going to the pool hall tonight, I decided to grab a quick dinner at a fast food joint in Boston. When I went in, I saw a small family eating there, and I couldn't help but wonder if they were celebrating something.

As a child, my family had limited income, so our rewards for good grades, or chores very often amounted to very little. 5 cents per weed we plucked in the yard, or maybe an extra hour of television would be permitted that day for having mowed the lawn. But the most prized winning was when we brought home good grades. In my middle school, our grades were different than most others--we were given numbers 1-5. I guess this was supposed to make it feel less like grades, although in retrospect it seems to me that a numeric value would more easily allow for a quantifiable analysis of success. Nevertheless, they didn't grade on subjects anyway . . . they were broken down into categories that reflected how well we reasoned, or communicated with others, etc., rather than the actual work we produced.

Needless to say, I excelled at middle school. I brought home many 5s (or maybe 1s, I actually don't recall which was the favorable value). And as a result, our family would go out to dinner to celebrate. "Good job, son," my father would say approvingly. "Who wants to go to Pizza Hut!?" At this point, my brother and I would become wide-eyed and excited. Maybe they will let us get a soda this time! Yeah, we were fairly easy to please back then. As we grew older, we would find ourselves in even more sophisticated settings for celebration, like Western Sizzlin'.

I found myself smiling in the line at Popeye's, wondering what good deed these young boys had done to deserve such a treat. I pantomimed a gun with my index finger and thumb cocked back, took aim and fired at the young boys, winking. "Keep up the good work, sport."