KIDS
Here is a poem called Tackle that describes my first attempt at teaching my twin boys how to play football. They were three years old and they were not familiar with the word “tackle.”
Tackle OK...FOOTBALL,
This is a football,
Here, hold the football,Now,
Tackle,Go on,
Tackle,He, he...he, he, he...he, he, he, he, he...he, he, he...
What are you two little guys doing?
Hey,
Get up,OK, here's the football,
Now tackle,He, he...he, he, he...he, he, he, he, he...he, he, he...
Come on, tackle,
Oh, I get it,
Tickle,
no...he, he...
Tackle.
Kids, old people, and dogs- these are my favorite things. Didn’t someone once say that?
Oh, yeah, I said it just now.
Why hasn’t anyone else ever said that? What else in the world could be really important? I have an idea, why don’t we put all three of these things together? Let’s make a nursing home that has kids and dogs.
OK, how are we going to do that?
It’s simple; just have three buildings on a triangular block. One building is a nursing home, one is a dog kennel, and one is a day care center. In the middle is a playground, dog run and benches to sit on. How hard would it be to make something like that?
This idea would work except how would we ever know who farted?
I suppose the old people would want to discipline the kids a little different than current standard day care procedure would dictate. Actually, every mom thinks she knows exactly how every little thing must be done in regards to child rearing. Who is really right anyway?
In regards to child rearing, who is right?
"Spoil the rod and spare the village?" Wait, I know, “In the big playground of life, you can’t swing alone.”
How about a few real quotes:
Parents can only give good advice or put children on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.
Anne Frank
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
Harry S Truman
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
Frederick Douglass
Teach my children to love! They'll learn to hate on their own.
David Allan Coe
I prefer this one:
Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time
Me
(Actually, it’s anonymous but I figured, “What the hell?)
The main reason it’s hard to write a chapter about kids is that everyone and their dogs have already done it. There are so many books, movies and T.V. shows about children and child rearing that every idea I come up with has already been done. Therefore, I’m going to skip all the Erma Bombeck crap and just talk about what pisses off Stupid Levystien.
First, “Why do parents not tell their children when someone dies?”
I think the discussion goes something like this, “Little Johnny is only 8 years old so he won’t be able to deal with the death of uncle George.”
I know, “We’ll take a picture of the dead uncle George and make a rubber mask of his face and then put it on an actor who will pretend to be uncle George when Johnny comes over.”
“Cool, I’ll start pouring the rubber.”
What are these people thinking? We have to prevent Johnny from ever crying at all costs! Like he doesn’t cry every day about all kinds of things?
If we don’t tell him then maybe uncle George didn’t really die. Or, maybe, Johnny won’t find out until he’s old enough not to care.
I suppose the assumption is that children have a harder time dealing with death than adults do.
"Is that true?"
No.
"Really?" Then, what is the truth?"
The truth is that adults are the ones who have the hardest time dealing with loss. It’s a funny thing but the more you experience loss, the harder it is. Each successive loss of a loved one is harder than the previous loss. I think maybe we bury the hurt deep inside and when it happens again it opens up a bunch of buried feelings.
That’s backwards from how you would intuitively think it would be. You might think that the more you experienced loss the stronger you would be and the easier it would be for you to handle it when it happens again, but it’s just the opposite.
Also, death is a more abstract concept to kids. Remember, we lied to them about people going to paradise after death and they believed us. Even adults who fervently believe in heaven often have a tiny bit of doubt. Kids don’t.
Plus, kids are a lot farther away from dying themselves. After all, it’s your own death that really frightens you.
I've got an idea, why don’t we put our loved ones in video games and let the children play these games after their loved ones are dead. The kids will never have a sense that anyone is gone at all. In fact, dead uncle George will play with your kids more than you will.
Second, “Why do you physically assault your children?”
Why is it socially acceptable to hit your kids? I think that the real quote goes something like this, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” How is hitting your kids related in any way to spoiling them?
Why do most people equate hitting with discipline? There’s tons of discipline in the military and no one ever gets hit, except with bullets that probably came from some guy who was beaten as a child. There’s also tons of discipline on most sports teams but no one gets hit. In fact, there’s tons of discipline in a day care center or in a first grade classroom and absolutely no one gets hit. Why would anyone ever hit a kid?
In reality, and to my chagrin, it really doesn’t matter if you spank your kid or not. The important thing is that the discipline is fair and consistent. My point is that discipline does not require any type of physical assault, so why do it.
One, two, three…time out…loss of privilege…and rewards for good behavior. It’s pretty easy and it really does work.
My mom tried really hard to spank me, and I’m sure I deserved it, but she just didn’t have it in her. She would make me give her one of my belts and then she would hit my butt with it but she couldn’t hit me hard enough to hurt. I would laugh hysterically at her and she would eventually give up. I know that sounds pretty pathetic but I turned out OK, sort of.
Here is some irony: A while back I heard a guy at a bar say, “I came home from work and my wife was physically assaulting my five year old son from a previous marriage. I got angry and bitch-slapped her. Guess who spent the night in jail?”
Of course, if you are trying to teach your kid not to get into fights, then physically assaulting them makes perfect sense. It’s not as if they learn more from what you do than what you say, right?
Third, “Why would you toss your children in the water to teach them how to swim?”
This one actually happened to me. 37 years later, I remember the moment it happened quite vividly. Of course, in my case it could easily have been that the teen-age swim instructor was just fed up with my shenanigans. Who knows? Did this ever happen to anyone else?
Fourth, “Why would you send a seven year old to bed without dinner?”
Is it good nutrition that causes children to misbehave? If we starve them won’t they be calm and well adjusted? Surely they won’t be more irritable? If they are denied food long enough then I am sure that they will slow down but I’m thinking this is not good. What do you think?
Fifth, “Why do moms blame everything on sugar?
Hunger can cause children to be irritable (see number four) but sugar is usually enjoyed and causes happiness. My boys love to eat sugar. I can even get them to clean their rooms and do their chores if I reward them with some candy. Would you like some candy little girl? OK, maybe the perverts use this line and I can see how that is bad.
"Moms claim sugar causes their kids to be hyperactive. Is that true?"
Sort of, but not exactly the way moms tend to think. The human body produces insulin that tightly regulates sugar in our blood stream, so the idea that you can eat your fill of jellybeans and then be high on sugar for several hours is flatly false. There will be a brief period in which there is a spike in blood sugar and this may be a time when you have more energy than usual but it is unlikely that you will be truly hyperactive. Also, there will then be a significant drop in blood sugar as the level of sugar in your blood stream overshoots its return to baseline. This will result in mild somnolence. It’s why you like to take a nap after lunch.
How much energy do you really get from sugar?
In the military they put a Hershey bar in a soldier’s backpack. The chocolate is eaten right before a battle to get a little extra energy. I think the Aztecs taught us this little trick right before we used it to kick their butts and steal their gold. Perhaps, it’s the caffeine and not the sugar. Do you think?
Have you ever heard of an army man eating a jellybean right before a battle?
Kids are hyper regardless of sugar intake. Thus, like pouring gasoline on a fire, giving sugar to a kid is redundant. The greatest cause of energy in a kid is youth, not sugar.
Sixth, “Why do people force their kids to do what they could not do?”
My mom, who can’t carry a tune, forced me to take singing lessons and participate in the church choir for a number of years. The only little tiny itsy bitsy problem is…I CAN”T SING!!!! I mean that I really can’t sing. Adults fall out of their chairs laughing when I get a wild hair and break out in song.
I remember one Sunday in the choir when I decided to put a little volume in my voice. The choir director literally gave birth to a live cow right there next to the piano. The funny thing is that I actually have medals for years of duty in the church choir. I really do.
In Texas, the most common thing is to force your kid to play football. Most dads did not grow up to be Roger Staubach but they all think that their sons will. Troy Aikman’s dad is the only dad whose kid did grow up to be, well, Troy Aikman. The only thing is that Aikman grew up in Oklahoma and his dad was a farmer who didn’t watch football at all.
Country music legend Tim McGraw plays the role of a Texas dad who wants his son to win the state football championship in the movie Friday Night Lights. He is enough of an asshole to actually walk out onto the practice field and physically assault his son in front of his teammates because he kept fumbling the ball.
Surely there are a lot of girls from New Jersey who think that this character is not genuine, but believe me, this character is most definitely real. In fact, it’s the rule rather than the exception in Texas. And, did you notice, the coach doesn’t intervene at all? The coach is just as pissed as the dad about the fumbling. That is how it is.
And, you know what, it’s kinda nice. I would rather be around people who are that passionate, even if it’s slightly misplaced, than be around people who are uninspired.
•
How about some true anecdotes from when Levystien was a kid?
I remember one time when I was about eight I said to my dad, “Hey, dad, come into the bathroom with me for a minute.”
He followed me in and I got on the floor on my back and pulled my pants down. He starred at me and I’m sure wondered what I was up to. Then, I held my hand out and motioned him closer with my index finger. When he bent over I pissed on his leg.
Needless to say I was in big trouble. I can’t really remember why I did it but I think that I saw someone else do something similar and screwed up the reenactment. I don’t know.
•
Another time when I was around eight, my friend was spending the night and the latest craze was streaking. There was a song called something like, They Call Him The Streak. The word "streak" means to run naked.
I had a door to the outside in my bedroom and my friend and I got naked and went out this door. We ran across the street and a car saw us. By the way, brave little fucks weren’t we? In any case, we ran back in and got our clothes back on.
I’m not an exhibitionist and I never repeated this streaking thing again and I really don’t know why we did it. I do remember the strangest feeling, though. It felt good and stupid at the same time.
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On another occasion, probably also when I was about eight, we snuck out my back door and taped a crepe paper streamer across the road in front of my house. We taped it at about windshield height. When headlights came over the hill we barely made it back to the bushes. The first car hit the crepe paper and skidded like it had actually hit something substantive.
We got back in my house and joined my mom in the T.V. room like nothing happened. The doorbell rang and my mom answered it. From the other room, we could hear a man yelling at her about some asshole kids. I guess that because he started yelling at her before even talking to her she got angry and responded in a very wicked voice. She said, “I am an old woman and I live here alone. Either you leave or I will call the police.” I love my mom but until that moment I had no idea how cool she was.
•
It occasionally snows in Dallas and when it does you can have a lot of fun throwing snowballs at passing cars. By the time we were about eight most of my friends had tired of this activity, but not me. One day they all wanted to make snowmen but I wanted to throw snowballs at cars. They all watched while I hit a car with a snowball. A teenager got out, chased me down, and beat the crap out of me. When I finally returned to my friends one of them calmly said, “So, you wanna build snowmen?
•
When I was about eight, the big deal was to spot an unidentified flying object (U.F.O.). I think this had to do with all the reports out of New Mexico about space aliens that later turned out to be the US military testing spy balloons with fake rubber men inside.
My friend David and I were pretty sure that we could fake a U.F.O. So, we used all kinds of things like lampshades and hood ornaments etc. We put these items on strings or threw them in the air. We then took photos at different angles and in different lights. Then, David called me on the phone very excited. He said, “There’s this new thing you can get at the dime store that glows green all night.”
It was a neon green glowing light stick. Wow…what a find. It even had a small hole on one end so you could hang it on something. We wasted no time putting a fishing line through the hole and casting it over the antenna on top of our house and then to the treetops across the street. The line was snaked into the house through the back door and up to the front window. We could then raise and lower the light stick over the street at will.
We would hang the light stick about five feet above the road and when a car came we would raise it to about thirty feet. Usually, the cars would turn around and drive back by. They would actually hang out of their windows to get a better look at it. At times we would have three or four cars turning around and driving back by at the same time. Back then nobody had ever seen a light stick and they had no idea what in the hell it was.
•
When I was a boy we used to get a day off school every year to go to the State Fair of Texas. One year, when I was about eight (are you seeing a pattern on this being about eight thing), I went with my friends Matt and Frank. My mom decided to allow us to ride the sky ride by ourselves. She said, “I’ll be waiting for you boys near Big Tex.”
We got on the sky ride and as soon as my mom was out of site we began spitting out of the window. We rode through the middle of the fair, right past Big Tex, and all the way to the other side of the fair grounds. We got off and walked back to where my mom was waiting near Big Tex. When I tapped her on the shoulder she turned around steaming mad and said, “I’ll have you know that I looked up to see if you boys were coming past and I was hit in the cheek by a wad of spit.”
We felt ill and apologized profusely and she took us home. Later that evening she confessed to me that she was not hit by spit at all. She said, “I knew you guys would be spitting and I was just trying to be funny but you believed me so strongly that I couldn’t tell you that I made it up.” To this day I can’t figure out if she was being cool or silly.
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In my neighborhood there were no curbs. Instead, there were large drainage ditches on either side of the road. To us young warriors this was like having trenches that you didn’t have to dig. It was just like WWI and perfect for a rock fight. You could stand up and throw a rock and then get back down and be under cover.
You would think that there would be one rock fight and someone would get hurt and then it would never happen again. In fact, there was a rock fight about once a month the entire time I was growing up. Of course, someone would always get hurt. The battle on that particular day would come to an end but the next month there would be another rock fight. The funny thing is that each time someone would end up with a bloody forehead we would be just as surprised as the time before.
•
Coach “T,” or Melvin “Tomcat” Thompson, was a football coach and drafting teacher at my high school. He was blind in one eye and deaf in one ear and had a heart that was bigger than Texas. We loved him dearly but can you imagine trying to manage a classroom full of guys like me with three hands tied behind your back. His heart being “bigger-than-Texas” was the disability we took advantage of the most. I am genuinely embarrassed to admit that.
In any case, he had trouble pronouncing certain words due to his hearing impairment and he especially had trouble with the letters “L” and “W.” Any word like “lake” would be pronounced “rake.” So, one day we were in an especially playful mood and wanted to get him to say words that began with the letter “L” so we could laugh at his mispronunciation. The conversation went something like this:
Mitchell: Hey, coach, who is the guy with the name “of Arabia?”
Coach T: You mean Omar Sharif, or I mean Peter something?Kent: Coach, if you aren’t first then what are you?
Coach T: Well, you could be second?Me: Coach, who is our savior?
Coach T: You mean God?
Me: No, who died on the cross?
Coach T: Jesus?
Me: Well, what do some people call him?
Coach T: Some people call him the wee wee baby.Everyone laughed hysterically and the term “wee wee baby” was often repeated thereafter.
I used to get a blank hall pass and trick Coach T into signing it and then I could skip class whenever I wanted to. I always had several of these passes in my wallet just in case I would need one. One day I skipped class and I was bored so I decided to peak in on Coach T’s class. There was always a lot of talking and general mayhem going on but for some reason when I peaked in on this particular day everyone stopped talking and looked at me. Coach T looked around and said, “Yeah, what do you want?”
Caught off guard and not intending to have gotten everyone’s attention, I was speechless for a second and then collected myself and said, “Ah, coach, dis is jus Reby. I was wantin’ a rittle rook out da rindow.”
Everyone laughed. He didn’t get it and later I felt kinda bad.
There is a happy ending to the Coach T saga. After toiling thanklessly for many years helping kids grow and mature but never really being able to be the head football coach that he had always wanted to be, he finally retired and I learned that there would be a small get together to say good-bye to him. My friends and I spent $150.00 on a fancy plaque that commemorated his career and poignantly proclaimed our appreciation for him. (By the way, we didn’t do that for anyone else.)
I imagined a small dinner at Appleby’s where my friend Kirk would give him the plaque. Turns out that over 400 former students from all over the country showed up at the school gymnasium and there were no less than six other groups that got plaques. Also, there were all kinds of other flowers and gifts. When Kirk reported this event to me, and how it affected Coach T, I must admit that I actually cried. I’m crying right now as I write these words.
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OK, I guess we can’t leave the kiddy section without at least one anecdote about my twin seven year olds.
True and Austin are trainmen, so I took them to the Georgetown Loop Railroad when they were about four or five. Georgetown is an old gold mining town and there is an old mine shaft that you can actually enter. They have a tour guide and require you to were a hard hat and it’s pretty neat. When little Austin stood in front of this old mineshaft with his hard hat on he became scared. He claimed that there might be monsters and he did not want to go in.
The tour guide was an elderly woman who I assumed would understand about kids…silly me. I told little Austin, “Ask the nice lady if there are monsters in the mine.” Obviously, I was expecting gentle reassurance from her but she responded like this:
Austin: Are there any monsters in the mine?
Tour guide: Oh, yes, we have all kinds of monsters. There are big ones and small ones and…
Levystien: Noooooooooo! There are no monsters at all!! Ahm, Ms. Tour guide, tell little Austin here that there are no monsters…blink, blink, nudge, nudge…
•
Just now, as I am writing this kiddy section, my seven year old son entered my office and asked, “What are you doing daddy?”
I said, “I’m writing a book.”
He said, “What's it called.”
I hesitated then said, “Ahm...it’s called This Book Sucks.”
His eyes crossed and he looked at me in a strange way and said, “That’s a stupid name.”
I replied, “I know.”
He said, “I think that you should call it This Book is Great. No one will buy a book called This Book Sucks .”
I said, “You know, you’re right. However, I don’t care if anyone buys it or not. In fact, I will be embarrassed if it is too popular since that would mean that my book was enjoyed by a lot of people who didn’t get it.”
He said, "Yeah but This Book Sucks is a really stupid title."
I said, "You know, you're right. Why don't I call it This Book is Great.
He said, “Let’s play battleship!”
I said, “OK”
•
I’m sure I have a few more stories that have no particular point and I’m sure that some of you would love to hear them but since most of you would prefer that I shut up, I’ll just move right along. I think the next chapter is going to be about medicine which is a topic you might think could not possibly be funny…he…he…read on my friend.
Before we go let me show you what my boys did. They had their aptitudes tested when they were in pre-school. We won’t talk about reading and math but they were off the charts in artistic ability. Therefore, I enrolled them in art classes. Check this out:
