Archives for April 2013

"I just saw a drug deal right in front of my house! What do I do? Eek!"

At a conference
I attended recently, a speaker quoted Ricky Van Veen, the cofounder of the online website
CollegeHumor as saying, "Documenting the experience is becoming more important
than the experience itself."

Van Veen's bland
observation reminded me of a ballsier one that my late mother made in a memoir she
wrote 35 years ago:

"Told my dad, many
Christmases ago, as he swung from the chandeliers with a new Polaroid and rest
of family huddled on couch and said cheese for two hours, you either record
having fun or you have fun."

My pal Pat McGuire is a newly elected State Senator in Illinois, and he invited me and Scout and her pal Samantha Green and Sam's dad Jason to the state capitol of Springfield to see how business is done.

As it is with kids of all ages, the train ride was the best part.

But the girls got to spend three hours on the Senate Floor, actually voting on bills (as directed by Pat, of course). I wasn't permitted to film in there, but halfway through, the novelty became a routine, and the kids started to look comically like the wizened "Senates" that they were pretending to be.

As I told Pat afterwards, you never know what your kids are going to remember and discard, and you only hope they remember useful experiences.

In Springfield, Jason and I were happy to know for sure, for once, that we were making a memory that our kids would always draw on.

A memory, and a formative theory about elected officials:

That they're all just like Pat.

And if they're not, they should be.