I am a member of the PTA

How did this happen to me? I went to an open house tonight at Billy's school. I sat on hard bleachers while the 5th graders treated us to several selections on the recorder. My favorite was the blues ditty they tore up. Nothing screams BLUES!!! like the recorder. I picture Robert Johnson fresh off signing his soul over to the devil penning "Crossroads". He hears the recorder in his mind. If harps are the instruments of heaven then recorders are the instruments of hell.


When did I get old enough to be in the freaking PTA? Where did my life go? Listen carefully. I am not bemoaning the state of my life right now. Things are pretty sweet for me right now. It's just I never once dreamed when I was young that one of the things I would be at any point was in the PTA. I play bass in a rock band. I wear flip-flops to church on Sunday mornings. I am quite jiggy in several different areas. And yet I rode home from the school tonight with the realization that I am a PTA parent slowly descending on me.

Billy's teacher told us that he reads very good (she didn't say very good, I said very good and yes Ben and Jamie I know very good ain't good English). He behaves most of the time. I also noticed that he likes hugging girls. Good Billy. Chicks dig literacy.

Alas, I am getting old. One day I am going to show up at either Billy's or James Robert's house with a full diaper. I am going to walk right through the front door, go and lay down on their bed, raise my legs in the air and demand that I be changed this instant. I also plan on wearing plaid pants and striped shirts with a belt and suspenders. I think I will also wear a fedora.




And I took the first step towards this glorious end tonight. I am in the PTA. Or at least I think I am.

God Don't Make Junk

I refuse to cave in to the unrealistic image that women have of what the perfect man should look like. Men are plagued by unrealistic expections and feel the pressure to have the perfect body and perfect hair and cave under the weight of these expectations.

I have gone to church with women who have no inhibitions whatsoever about telling me how I should dress or groom. Here are a few quotes I have heard over the years:

"I can tolererate the beard but its starting to get a little thick."
"Why are you wearing that shirt with those shoes?"
"You could look good every Sunday if you would just try."
"At least shave your throat."

Even as I write this my lovely wife is picking at me like one of those grooming monkeys at the zoo. This is how the conversation (one sided) is going:

Kara: You've got to let me do something about that neck. Boys come at look at this long hair growing out of your dad's forehead.

Billy: Dad, I think you're going to get bigger. (And I think to myself, "But you might not.")

So I say this: Large and hairy men of the world unite. Refuse to succumb to unrealistic expectations laid on us by magazines (GQ and Esquire) and soap operas (General Hospital). Be glorious in the way your maker made you. Grow that beard thick. And under no cirumstance shave, wax, or pluck any part of your body. You're a fur bearing mammal. That is how God made you and God don't make junk. Psalm 139:14

The times they are a changin’.

Look at the picture to the left. Is this not the most Caucasian family in America right now. Not quite as Aryan as the Stinsons mind you. But quite Caucasian nontheless.

I went to McDonalds last Friday night for the same reason any parent goes to McDonalds. It is a place where my kids can play and they don't need constant supervision. While the Playplace at McDonalds has numerous discarded band-aids and is kind of sticky on the inside Kara and I have deemed it a safe place for our children. We went to the McDonalds in Forestdale because it has one of the cleaner Playplaces in the area and it is right down the road from our crib. I noticed something very encouraging while watching my kids play.

Billy is five years old. He is starting to interact with other people the way people interact. He can engage in conversation with other people who are able to engage in conversation. James Robert not so much. (Sidenote: I think I have found a suitable nick name for James Robert because I think all males should have a nick name. He will walk up to me and make a low barking noise that a catfish will make when it is out of water. Think about it. Catfish Kinnaird. Kind of cool and alliterative to boot.)

My kids were the only white kids there. I guess all of the white kids were playing at the Chick-Fil-A in Gardendale. I think it might be safe to say that we are the whitest family in America. I was worried that any offspring Kara and I would produce would be white to the point of transparency. I could have sworn that Catfish was born with a sunburn. I watched as Billy played with these little black boys and girls without any thought that he was different from all of the kids there. He was just as bossy with them as he is with most people. I remarked to Kara what a cool thing this was. I couldn't tell that he thought any thing about them being any different than he was.

I remember the first black kid that I talked to. I was six. You may think this odd since I grew up in Bessemer but I did not go to school with any other black kids until the 7^th grade. This was made possible because Bessemer annexed an area and about 30 black kids were now zoned for Greenwood Elementary school. Race was something I was aware of even at an early age. I knew that black kids existed when I was six. I watched The Electric Company. There were no black kids in my neighborhood. There were no black kids in my church. I distinctly remember being a little uncomfortable talking to this little kid that was my age. He seemed a little uncomfortable too. This was nearly 30 years ago. A generation removed from what I witnessed at the Playplace tonight.

Billy had no thought that any thing was different about those kids that he was playing with. I don't think that Billy is even aware that a work like nigger even exists. Sadly I cannot say the same for my own childhood. This has got to be just a little encouraging. Maybe by the time Billy gets a chance to fill in a dot to choose a president he will not think it odd in the least that he is electing the first black Republican for president. I think the dream that Martin Luther King Jr. had about people not judging a person based on the color of their skin but on the content of their character starts with little black boys and little white boys playing together in a Playplace in Birmingham Alabama with no consideration other than it is cool to take turns throwing a toy up the slide and watching it roll back down. The dream will not be realized in political debates and affirmative action programs. It will not be realized because blacks and whites can march together for a common cause. It will be realized when no one notices that their kids are the only white kids playing at a Playplace full of little black kids.

The Apostle Paul had a dream similar to that of MLK. In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, rich nor poor, male nor female, slave nor free. Just one family of children washed clean by the blood of Christ. Just a bunch of kids at a Playplace throwing stuff up a slide because it is better than doing it alone.