Author: Brian J. Noggle

So my oldest child goes to preschool, and one of the tasks we were warned about in the parental orientation was that at some unspecified future time, he would bring home a Letter Bag and would need to return to school with a number of things that start with that letter to discuss. Wait, let me dramatically re-create the scene for you.

Teacher: And the list of things we don’t want the child to bring to school include toys, gifts or cards for individuals if not for everyone, candy, firearms, books by Al Franken or Barbara Ehrenreich, or anything whose radiation level exceeds 4 microrems.

Parents: Okay.

Teacher: We have the Letter Bag, where the child will bring back things that have the letter of the day in them and will discuss them. For example, if the letter is J, the child can bring in a jelly bean.

Child: A jelly bean? That’s candy. You said I wasn’t supposed to bring candy to school.

At any rate, you get the gist.

So the child today announced that the Awesome Letter Bag was coming home, and with this great power he had great responsibility. Well, he didn’t say that; although he loves Spider-Man at age 4, he’s not versed enough in the mythos to recognize that trope (and he doesn’t use SPIDER-MAN! as a power word or expletive like he uses STAR WARS!). But the letter of the week is C, so his task was to gather things with the letter C in them.

I am a bad daddy because my mind immediately went to inappropriate things that begin with C for a preschooler to bring to school and the accompanying explanations. Things like:

• Chianti, which Daddy makes us drink on nights where he cooks liver and beans for dinner.
• Castor beans. Daddy sometimes cooks these after I go to bed and wears gloves and a mask.
• Cat o’Nine Tails. Daddy has explained the rules as to when junior mariners can be flogged.
• Chihuahua. Of course, we’d have to get one of those handbag-adapted models. Which leads me to wonder, are those dogs specifically bag-trained?

In the end, of course, I did the right thing and he schlepped off with a number of toys depicting things beginning with C. Because I know that he’s got a permanent record at school, but I wonder if they’re also keeping a permanent record on me, the parent, and they probably don’t share my sense of humor.

Yes, I know, I think he’s an heretic for his stance on book hoarding, but that doesn’t mean James Lileks cannot be one of the bagger brotherhood. Just a heretical brother:

The clerk started beeping my goods, and I noted right away she was just tossing stuff in the bag. She was also talking with a friend who’d shown up, and they were chatting away in fine style about something or other. When she gave me my first bag I looked into its disordered depths, and sighed: no. So I repacked it. If she saw she didn’t care. The second bag needed repacking, especially since a huge bladder of orange juice was on top of some small easily-crushed items. Framing a bag is a skill, a challenge; it’s like Tetris, except all the pieces are differently shaped. There’s satisfaction in framing a bag properly, and I say that as someone who used to bag groceries for his salt.

I repacked four bags. When I was done I realized that she’d finished, and I hadn’t signed the card-reader, and the person behind me was glaring at me: GET ON WITH IT. So in a matter of minutes I’d gone from Mr. Generous, waving people ahead in line, to Mr. Obstacle. I apologized deeply – almost said “if you’d seen me wave someone ahead a few minutes ago you would know I’m a good person!” but they all say that; all the people who just don’t realize there are other people in the world think they’re good people – and moved along. Ran right into a manager. Now. Do I say something?

Damn right I do. If the clerk had looked new or harried or just plain not cut out for the job, or new at this, let it slide, but when someone stands there babbling away to a pal throwing everything into the bag so the bottle of spaghetti sauce is crushing the muffins, so to speak, sorry.

I jerked a thumb back to the checkout lane. “18 needs to watch the video on framing again,” I said. The manager looked at my bags. “I repacked them,” I said. “The wrong stuff was on top of small stuff.”

“Thank you,” said the manager.

In his Bleat, Lileks wonders if he was wrong to complain to the manager. Wrong or right, I’m the sort of cynic who wonders if Lileks’ complaint had any effect at all. Would the manager really spend even minimum wage money to make that particular clerk go through the orientation video again? Would the manager have a word with the clerk? Would the manager even remember the remark by the time he got back from the loading dock? I doubt it.

Stories like this one make me wonder if I would have been good enough to go to the championship:

In February, Scott Hall, a Price Cutter employee, will be in Las Vegas, competing for a $10,000 prize and a chance to appear on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

His claim to fame? Bagging groceries.

Hall, a part-time cashier/bagger at the Price Cutter store at Grand Street and Chestnut Expressway, recently won the state championship in grocery bagging to advance to the national competition.

Cue the Bruce Springsteen.

I worked at a Shop Rite while I was at the university, and I was the best damned bagger that Shop Rite ever saw. I could keep up even with Trudy and Carolyn, the fastest checkers, even when they were going full speed. Back in those days, brother, the stores did not have a second conveyor belt or turntable to leisurely ride the product to the bagger; instead, the checkers flashed the UPCs past the scanner and whipped the groceries down to the bagger. You had to be fast, or Trudy could break your hand with a can of peas.

I could distribute the goods among bags, I could double bag or even senselessly put paper inside the plastic bags (some people thought that gave the plastic bags the strength of paper bags, but really, it just put four plastic-punching corners in the bag with the focused weight of all the contents). I could face the frozen and the dairy quickly. I could hear a checker call for a price check from all the way in the back of the store and round the corner to the checkouts before the courtesy counter person got her hands on the PA microphone. I walked so fast to handle those price checks that I beat a checker in a race once where she ran.

Ah, but the grocery store was a world of up or out, and I got promoted from bagger to checker to produce clerk. I stayed with it for four years, working between 20 and 50 hours a week and carrying a full college load between shifts (literally: some mornings I’d work 4-7, ride down to school on the bus, attend classes, and ride back to the store for a couple more hours in the afternoon). But even in my non-fulltime days, I was still the best bagger in the store, and even now I elbow the lackadaisical parttimers away from the end of the checkout lane when I’m grocery shopping. A number of stores now feature those conveyances that prevent one from honing one’s skills, but some of the older Price Cutters still have manual ends. I’d guess Hall’s Price Cutter is one of those.

Could I have been a state competitor, champion, and representative to the nationals? I’d like to think so. But the best part of reminiscing about What Might Have Been is the ongoing belief in maybe, and not simply remembering What Was Not.

UPDATE: As seen on Neatorama.

As a parent, we try to give it straight to our four-year-old son. We explain to him about monsters and their unreality (except for gila monsters) and about dragons and their unreality (except for Komodo dragons). Of course, these exceptions prove the rule we’re trying to instill, and by prove, of course I mean it in the truest sense of the word: they test whether he can believe our assurances that the things we say don’t exist actually don’t exist.

Daddy, are guns real?
Yes.

Daddy, is Star Wars real?
Star Wars the movie is real, but the events and characters depicted in the story are not real.

You get the gist of our conversations and the hair-splitting things his father does to give him the full texture of the world and the many nuanced layers of reality.

As Christmas time rolls around, he’s starting to think of Santa as part of the narrative of Christmas. Younger children don’t get it, but by 4.5, he’s understanding that there might be something behind the red clad man. So he asks, inevitably,

Daddy, is Santa real?

Well, there’s a humdinger. Santa Claus is part of the mythology of childhood, part of Christmas that makes it magickal for the young and the young at heart. Although sometime in the coming Christmases, his sophistication will demand disbelief, but he could have a couple good years of putting out cookies for Santa and the struggle to stay awake to hear Santa on the roof. I mean, for crying out loud, we even have a fireplace, so he’s not trying to suss out how Santa Claus is coming into a small apartment in the housing projects whose sole sheet metal chimney leads right into the furnace. So I don’t want to blow it already with truth and reason, do I?

Secondly, there’s the vaccination thing. You know vaccinations are about keeping a population safe as much as about keeping an individual safe, right? If I tell the urchin that Santa does not exist, he will bring it up amongst his peers in preschool and Sunday School, injecting doubt into their celebrations. He’ll be Patient Zero in the loss of innocence. They might even fight over it, or at the very least point fingers and make those “Pkooh, pkooh” gun sounds that signal ostracization before they get cliques and Facebook accounts.

So I do what any overly analytical parent steeped in English degree obfuscation and essay exam extension techniques would do.

Saint Nicholas was real, but the Santa Clauses you see today are not the real Saint Nicholas but are rather earthly manifestations of his spirit, incarnations of him.

Great, now I’ve turned the jolly old elf into a sort of Krishna of the Bhagavad Gita, except instead of manifesting a many-headed and many-armed eater of men, Santa is a many-armed, many-headed, many-mall-dwelling dispenser of giftic justice. I’ve added an additional incarnation myth to muddy the birth of Jesus and its celebration. Most importantly, I’ve started the single lie that will lead to others. Is there one current incarnation of Santa, or many? Are the reindeer incarnation of the originals, or are they the immortal reindeer whereas Santas are mortal? What is the selection and succession process like?

Fortunately, something else caught his eye about then, and he asked about litter he saw outside his window, whether God liked the litter, and why man made litter but God didn’t and whether God made the houses under construction on our route. You know, the normal torrent of consciousness a child displays where the parent scrambles to keep up and to provide a chain of evidence and reasoning for everything in the world and some things that are not.

The Internet has produced another list to measure yourself upon, this time some list of 50 things every guy should know from a Web site called Guyism. As you can guess from its presence on a guy Web site, it involves essential skills dealing with beer and babes. Which is only “essential” in college, and sometimes not even then if you’re going on your own dime and have to work to put yourself through.

Still, I took my crack at the 50. They’re below in orange if I can do them, italics if I haven’t but expect I could, and stricken through if I think it’s a dumb essential skill for frat brothers.

Change a tire
Use a charcoal grill
Bong a beer
Throw a punch without looking like a sissy
Fry a turkey
Hook up the cable
Pick-up a woman with a one-liner
Get your money’s worth at a buffet
Some assembly required
Know your local professional sports teams
Pour a beer
Jump-start a car
Throw a football
Haggle for a lower price
Tie a tie
Erect a tent
Cast a fishing rod
Build a fire
Tap and operate a Keg
Use a chainsaw
Paddle a canoe/kayak
Choose a scotch/whiskey
Drive a manual car
Pick-up a girl using your dog as a wingman
Know how to navigate a road trip
Perform CPR
Iron a shirt
Shine your shoes
Do at least ten push-ups on command
Dance
Play poker
Parallel park
Unclog a toilet
Upgrade at a hotel
Rally after a big night of drinking
Spot fake breasts
Choose the right urinal
Sew a button
Unhook a bra with one hand
Open a bottle unconventionally
Talk your way out of a traffic ticket
Off-road without flipping the ATV
Buy a gift for a woman
Surf the web anonymously
Spot a liar
Drive in crappy conditions
Change a diaper
Make a drink
Shave
Make a mean breakfast

Pardon me while I get my chest thumping on here, but back when I was in college, not only could I do ten push-ups on command, but one afternoon while walking on the college mall with a girl I was trying to impress and another fellow, we were talking about push-ups or strength or something, and I dropped on the grass beside the mall and did ten one-armed push-ups with my book-laden backpack on. Back in those days, I weighed a buck twenty and had read enough Robert B. Parker to think it was a measure of a man to do one-armed push-ups, so I’d trained just for that. I don’t think the girl was impressed at all, but I was and still am.

Now, Internet Guy sites aside, what is the real measure of a man? For this, we must turn to Heinlein. From Time Enough For Love):

Change a diaper
Plan an invasion
Butcher a hog
Conn a ship
Design a building
Write a sonnet
Balance accounts
Build a wall
Set a bone
Comfort the dying
Take orders
Give orders
Cooperate
Act alone
Solve equations
Analyze a new problem
Pitch manure
Program a computer
Cook a tasty meal
Fight efficiently
Die gallantly

That, my friends, is a better list to gauge your Man Point Capacity. It doesn’t feature anything to do with drinking and easy things you can just check off. It includes things you can’t merely check off but must train for and aspire to. The difference between a boy and a man lies somewhere in that.