OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO!

I’m already headed places, thank goodness, now that I’ve graduated with my master’s degree. I am looking forward to it all. For graduation, my parents bought me two gifts, one practical and one sentimental and I love them both.

The first was a new television. Funny story. Whenever my mother and wife send Dad and I out to buy something … well, there’s really no telling what we will come back with. That day my wife was at work and my mother was visiting friends in the hospital. So, she sent Dad and I out to pick out a new TV for our kitchen/dining room area. (I love to watch the news while I make breakfast for the girls.)

When we got to the store, Dad pointed out the silliness in buying a new LDC television for the kitchen when I have an old school TV in the one room we watch the most boob tube. I love his way of thinking. So we started looking at slightly larger sets down the big boy aisle, and we came home with a 47-inch widescreen big dog. Boy howdy can you watch movies and game on this puppy. There’s no longer glare on my TV. None. Zip. I can have every light on the house on and have no glare. It is a thing of beauty and we love every minute of it. Skinny Kitty is especially enamored with watching with insane hugeness her favorite jewelry craftsman, Jay King, on HSN.

The other gift, which came first, is equally worthy of blog space. My mother, with her artistic eye and infinite creative juices bought a slipcovered version of Dr. Seuss’ gradation book, Oh the Places You’ll Go! Inside, she scrap-booked on the pages using old greeting cards, thank you notes and other memorabilia. The result is a handmade book that I absolutely adore.

One particular page is very sentimental. My parents ran my high school Sunday School class. Two things I remember from the years they took on that endeavor: the biscuits and gravy and her mantra. Every story, every lesson, every unique teaching moment my mother impressed upon us teens this bit of ideology: God uses ordinary people to do extraordinary things or a version thereof.

The point, of course, is that one person can make a difference and that regular old folks can be heroes and influential in the world around them. I like that message. I like the idea that heroes are really just ordinary people who have endured a journey in which they emerge from the other side as someone great.

Much obliged, parents, for the gifts and the lessons and most of all the love and support. (They have done a lot to help put me through school.) It definitely took a village to raise this child.