On This Date in 1998

I’m using a different approach in this letter. These “news reports” are written in the third person, as if I’m some unbiased observer.

Andy & Eddie Headline News 

“Missing” Son Worries Forgetful Father
Middleton resident and library director Paul Nelson returned home with his younger son Eddie late Thursday afternoon. He was puzzled to find the house dark. He expected that his older son would be home from school.

Figuring that his son was at a friend’s house, Nelson didn’t make any immediate efforts to locate his son’s whereabouts. He unloaded seven bags of groceries from the car and then proceeded to fix Eddie something to eat before the boy’s 6:15 Cub Scout meeting.

“In spite of the fact that the cupboards were replenished with food,” Nelson said in a conversation with his wife later that evening, “Eddie still settled for a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. But then I, too, fixed something I eat almost every day – a turkey-and-cheese sandwich.”

As six o’clock approached, Nelson started to become increasingly worried. His worry then started to transform itself into anger.

“Andy is going to be grounded big time,” he barked. The comment was made in Eddie’s presence but not specifically addressed to him. “If he thinks he can still have a sleepover at Tim’s house this weekend, he is sadly mistaken.”

Nelson had checked voice mail, hoping to be reassured by the sound of Andy’s voice, but there were no messages waiting to be played. The phone rang twice between quarter of six and six. Both times the slight pause after his saying “Hello” told Nelson that is was only another pesky telemarketer. He stayed on the line just in case.

“Is Miss JoAnna Marie there?” the first voice, a woman’s’, asked.

“No one here by that name,” Nelson answered sharply and slapped the phone back into its cradle.

“Is Mr. Nelson there?” asked a young man’s voice ten minutes later.

“No,” he lied and abruptly cut the connection.

The phone rang again five minutes later.

This time it better be Andy, Nelson thought.

It was.

“Andy, where are you?” his dad asked, wavering between a reprimand and a plea.

“I’m at bowling,” he answered. “I’m here with Ross Parks and we need a ride home.”

Duh, that’s right, Nelson thought. Andy bowls on Thursday afternoons after school, and usually he’s done at four-thirty or five o’clock.

“What have you been doing the past hour? Why didn’t you call me?” “I called the library. Pat said you went grocery shopping and would pick me up afterwards.”

And, of course, one of Nelson’s staff members at the library wouldn’t assume that his boss would abandon his kid at a bowling alley.

Luckily, Nelson was able to pick up Andy and Ross and drop off Eddie at his Cub Scout meeting by the 6:15 deadline.

Nelson blamed his forgetfulness on a hectic week. He had left the house on Thursday morning at an unusually early time – 6:45 – to attend a city department heads meeting with the newly hired city administrator, Mike Davis. Both boys were still asleep when he left the house.

“I was out of town on Thursday of last week and this week I was much too focused on my own Thursday schedule. I was lucky to remember to pick up Eddie at After School,” he confessed.

(Editor’s note: The following headline is a good example of the use of hyperbole, i.e., extravagant exaggeration.)

Son of Prominent Middleton Couple Involved in Schoolyard Brawl 
Eddie Nelson, Elm Lawn second grader and son of library director Paul Nelson and well-known political operative JoAnna Richard, was involved in a case of inappropriate behavior on the school playground on Thursday. According to an eyewitness account, which was verified in a letter from principle George Mavrolis, Eddie threw a hard plastic paddle mitt at another student and struck him just above the eye.

“It was an accident,” Eddie is reported to have said to his skeptical dad on the drive home from school.

“The other student suffered a cut and swelling. The paddle narrowly missed the eye itself. He came very close to needing stitches,” Marvolis said, indirectly discounting the possibility of this incident being an accident.

This is Eddie’s third infraction of the year. As a result, he will lose all of his recess privileges for an entire week.

When hearing of the news, Ms. Richard put some of the blame on herself.

“I forgot to give him his medicine this morning.”

According to school records, Eddie has been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and takes methylphenidate twice daily. 

News Extra 

Former Warren Resident Gets Chuckle Out of Rep’s Math Even though he lives almost 700 miles west of here, former Warren resident Paul Nelson, son of the Rev. and Mrs. Carl Nelson, keeps in touch with Warren activities with a subscription to the Times Observer.

“My mom used to clip certain article and picture and enclose them in her letters, but now I can make sure that I don’t miss anything,” he explained.

A recent front-page article about the 75th anniversary of the Allegheny National Forest caught Nelson’s eye. After reading it, Nelson wonders if U.S. Representative John Peterson needs to take a remedial math course. The representative was quoted as saying, “As we celebrate, we need to be diligent that in 100 years, we’re celebrating the 100th anniversary.”

Nelson notes that the 100th anniversary of the Allegheny National Forest will be celebrated in 2023, or 25 year from now.

“I hope Peterson is not on the House Appropriations Committee,” Nelson quipped.

Late-breaking news briefs 

City budget proposal includes funds for Sunday hours
Last Tuesday, the City of Middleton finance committee made a final recommendation on the 1999 operating budget. The Middleton common council will vote on the budget at its December 1st meeting following a public hearing.

Included in next year’s budget are funds requested by the Middleton Public Library board to open the library on Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. The new service is scheduled to begin on March 7 and will be offered during the school year, from the Sunday after Labor Day through the Sunday before Memorial Day weekend.

“I won’t be surprised if these four hours turn out to be the busiest time of the week,” Library Director Paul Nelson predicted. “Participants in a series of focus group discussions the library held last year told us that Sunday hours are the number one service improvement that we could offer. I’m pleased that the city has seen fit to honor this request.”

Middleton schools close for teacher in-service 
Last week all Wisconsin public school students enjoyed a four-day weekend as a result of a two-day state teachers’ conference. This week, students in the Middleton-Cross Plains School District get a bonus: a three-day weekend. Some parents questioned the scheduling of a teacher in-service so close to the annual conference. On the other hand, some families have taken advantage of these two shortened schoolweeks to insert a fall break into their vacation schedule. Some children knew of friends who were out of school for the entire week, spending time in Florida and other warmer regions of the U.S. To add insult to injury, temperatures in Wisconsin rarely climbed above 40 degrees for the past week. Cloudy skies and windy conditions have given the air a wintry chill.

“We now return to our regularly schedule programming….”

On This Date in 1998

I woke up at 4:30 this morning to the sound of rain, which has continued unabated throughout the day. It’s not a drizzle, but a steady, drenching rain that has plenty of dry earth to soak into. Up until yesterday evening, the texture of our back yard resembled concrete. I could have cut a two-inch-square chunk of soil out of the ground, thrown it against a hard surface, and watched it shatter into a million pieces. The hardness of the soil and the lack of precipitation – it’s been very dry here during the past month – has resulted in a slowdown of the lawn repair I initiated earlier this year. I’m still trying to get the grass to bounce back from the trampling it received during our Bastille Day party. Only a couple additional efforts at reseeding and a daily watering has kept a section of the back yard from returning to the big, ugly patch of bare earth that taunted me at the beginning of spring.

After a call from Eddie’s teacher and a visit to his pediatrician last Friday, JoAnna and I decided to have Eddie take the drug Ritalin as a way to control his behavior. He’s already been sent to the principal’s office twice this year, and I’ve had two phone conversations with Mrs. Magnuson, his teacher, about how things have been going in the classroom. She reports that Eddie has had good days and bad days, occurring in no predictable pattern. On bad days, he cannot control his impulses. On Friday during recess he hit someone with a stick. Rom her perspective, Mrs. Magnuson did not think it was deliberately malicious. His teacher is also concerned about Eddie missing a lot of work at school due to his inability to focus. He finds, as she phrased it, a lot of things stimulating in the environment. In other words, he’s easily distracted.

JoAnna and I are starting to see more frequent examples of Eddie’s impulsiveness, his ability to become easily frustrated, and his contrariness at home. At soccer practice, too. When I picked him up Sunday evening, I learned that he had refused to run a lap with the rest of his team at the conclusion of the practice.

If you recall, Eddie and his teachers (not just classroom but art, gym, music, as well as his special reading class) participated in a 4-week-long Ritalin blind test this past May. One week he took the drug, the following week a placebo. Only the doctor knew which was which. Based on his review of the results, he said that Ritalin had a very obvious stabilizing effect on Eddie’s behavior. When the doctor asked Eddie is he would mind taking the drug, he answered, “No, ‘cause I won’t get in so much trouble.”

Eddie will start taking Ritalin next week. His teachers will start to keep a record of his behavior this week, which will be used as a base line for measuring any changes that take place during the drug therapy. I hope that this will not turn out to be the long-term solution for Eddie’s difficulties in school. One of the fulltime staff members at the library told me that her son was on Ritalin for 9 years, from 4th grade through high school. I’m hoping that’s not the path that Eddie will have to take. Yesterday I placed a hold on a book that might offer some alternatives to Ritalin: The Myth of the A.D.D. Child: 50 ways to improve your child’s behavior and attention span without drugs, labels, or coercion. It’s not that I’m questioning our pediatrician’s diagnosis. He certainly hasn’t pushed us into taking this route, but I’d still like to investigate the options that might be available to us. At the same time, I won’t be accepting at face value everything I read about the alternatives to drug therapy. A lot of nonsense manages to worm its way into print. It is obvious to the doctor, as well as to JoAnna and me, that Eddie has some ongoing problems that are not related to (or cannot be blamed on) the different personalities of his teachers. The impulsive and other behaviors that Eddie has demonstrated consistently throughout kindergarten, first, and now second grade point to a deeper problem. We’re just thankful that Eddie has been able to maintain a very positive attitude about school. It would be an especially onerous situation if we had to struggle to get Eddie out of the house each morning, if attending school was an activity he was determined to eliminate from his life like a bad dream. Yesterday after I dropped the boys off – rainy day taxi service – I parked the car in the school lot and walked to Eddie’s class to deliver the behavior monitoring form to his teacher. When I returned to the car, I found a mother standing between her van and my car gently coaxing her distraught daughter, who looked to be a first- or second-grader, to leave the passenger’s seat. I caught a glimpse of the girl’s face and saw a mask of sorrow, eyes reddened by crying. The open door of the van was position in such a way that I was unable to get into the driver’s seat of the Saturn. The women immediately noticed this and, closing her door slightly to give me access, said almost apologetically, “We might be here for awhile.” Both Andy and Eddie have always been enthusiastic about attending school. It has sometimes been a struggle getting them off in the morning, but that’s never been a ploy to avoid school.

We celebrated Andy’s birthday yesterday. Meaghan joined us for dinner: lasagna, tossed salad, garlic bread, and a white cake (with those little rainbow color bursts in the batter) with cherry (!) frosting for dessert, a menu selected by the birth boys himself. Andy loves the basketball pants. In fact, he tried on a pair on Saturday afternoon when I took him shopping for new jeans. He was disappointed when I vetoed the purchase, but he was very mature about hearing the word “No” for a change of pace. No whining. No pleading. If he had persisted, I might have blurted out something like, “You can’t get them because that’s what Grandma and Grandpa got you!” But I was able to preserve the element of surprise. We got him a Packer jersey (Antonio Freeman) with a white turtleneck and a long-sleeve navy blue shirt that JoAnna thought would look especially good on him.

In spite of the relentless rain today, Andy’s football practice wasn’t cancelled. I picked up the boys a little bit earlier than usual, their coach not being a sadist. I covered the upholstery of the Saturn with blankets and towels, which was good planning on my part. Otherwise, the interior of the car would have become a disaster area. The boys – Andy, Drew, Cole, and Riley – were thoroughly drenched, a bit muddy (not as much as I expected, fortunately), and slightly chilled, but were in surprisingly high spirits. In spite of the weather, they seemed to have enjoyed themselves. It was a chance to slop around with compunction.

On Saturday evening, JoAnna and I attended a reception at Music Hall on the UW campus, which was followed by a preview of an opera-in-progress, based on a controversial 1954 film that was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. (Neither JoAnna nor I have seen it, but I did place a reserve on the video version that the Madison Public Library owns.) The story deals with the anti-Hispanic racial strife that occurs in a New Mexico zinc mine when union workers organize a strike. Most of the singing is in English, although some of the lyrics are in Spanish. The program was made up of selected scenes from the opera, so the story the audience heard was quite disjointed. The voices of the UW students who made up the cast were outstanding and made the evening worthwhile.

And what about the boys when we were gone? Andy is now our designated babysitter. JoAnna and I were gone from 6:45 until nearly 10:00. When we returned home, everything was as we left it. We told Andy that if everything goes smoothly we would pay him $3 an hour, below the market rate for a regular sitter but not a bad starting rate for someone just shy of his 11th birthday.

On This Date in 1998

This may seem like an odd thing to say, but I can’t believe that August isn’t over with yet. And that’s not meant to be a complaint. Four weeks ago, Andy was playing in a baseball tournament in Reedsburg, JoAnna and Eddie were at the Richard family reunion, and the boys and I were a day away from our trip to Pennsylvania. It just seems like so much has happened this month, much more than what should logically fit into a 31-day period. Actually, this entire summer has been a most enjoyable and expansive experience, one that has had an unusually carefree aspect to it, as if the passage of time was of no concern to me. That description could easily fit my summer between 4th and 5th grades.

The boys were on their own during the day for the 2½ weeks before the start of school. The day camp program we enrolled them in this summer ended in August 7th, and we didn’t make any other arrangements for child care. So JoAnna and I decided to put our faith in Andy’s sense of responsibility. The library being only 5 blocks from the house certainly helped to make our decision an easier one. After their first day alone, we had to reinforce some guidelines, such as keeping their activities to the kitchen and family room side of the house. When I came home for lunch, I discovered that they had spent some time in every room of the house. They left behind visible signs of their presence everywhere – a rumpled comforter in their parents’ bedroom, pillow laid out in a baseball diamond in the living room, to cite two examples. Throughout the 2½ weeks, I had to constantly remind the boys to clean up their debris – toys, dishes, clothes – every parent’s losing battle. Overall, though, it was a successful experiment. For the most part, the boys got along very well together. Andy has a tendency to pick on his little brother, but it’s never anything malicious or hurtful.

Right now JoAnna and I are enjoying a quiet afternoon. I just spent about an hour organizing a couple hundred loose postage stamps into a stock book, stamps that date mostly from the 1920s and 1930s and were a gift to me from my Grandma Luthgren. (I’ve managed to hold onto them all these years.) JoAnna’s watching this sappy movie on TV, My Six Loves, starring Debbie Reynolds and Cliff Robertson (not to mention supporting roles by Eileen Heckart, David Janssen, and even a bit role by the actress who played the nosy neighbor on Bewitched and the kid actor who played the adopted brother on My Three Sons.) The boys and four other neighborhood tykes were playing in the garage. Andy had asked us if they could play Hide-and-Go-Seek in the house. I let out a shudder before responding with a firm “No!”

“It’s too nice of a day to play indoors,” I explained further. And indeed it is a gorgeous day – bright sunshine, hardly a cloud in the sky, temperature in the mid-70s with no trace of the uncomfortable humidity we’ve been experiencing lately. It makes me wonder why I’m sitting in front of the computer right now. 

Today’s weather is a carbon copy of yesterday’s. Andy’s football team played a series of 15-minute scrimmages between 1 and 3 p.m. They’d run a series offensive plays until it was time to play against another team. Then they’d be on defense. They didn’t play a single game against one opponent, more like a patchwork of 6 quarters against different opponents. It felt so different watching Andy in full gear playing football as opposed to watching him play soccer or football. He really seems to enjoy football and looks very confident, like he really knows what he’s doing on the field. Since our return from Pennsylvania, he’s had 12 practices, or 4 per week. Next week, with school in session, they’ll practice on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday evenings, from 5:00 to 6:45. His first game is scheduled for Saturday, September 12. The season runs for 7 weeks.

Eddie is playing soccer again this fall. He’s had three practices already, with another one scheduled for later this afternoon. Most of his games are scheduled on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so there will be a conflict on the weekends with Andy’s games.

Two days into the school year, Eddie had his first trip to the principal’s office. His class had a picnic on Friday, and he started throwing food around. His teacher told him that this wasn’t an appropriate behavior, and that he’d have to go inside if he did the same thing again. A few minutes later, she observed Eddie bent over and shaking his booty in front of some of his classmates’ faces, “as if he were mooning them”, as she describe it to me when I returned her telephone call. After this second incident, Eddie had a chat with Mr. Mavrolis, Elm Lawn’s principal. During my phone conversation with Eddie’s teacher, she mentioned that from the hallway she could observe Eddie walking around the classroom while the rest of her students remained seated at their desks. Based on his kindergarten and 1st grade experiences, this is typical Eddie behavior. As a result of Eddie’s misbehavior, I made an appointment with his pediatrician, as we had never followed up with him about the Ritalin blind test that was administered during the last quarter of this past school year. Obviously, we are going to continue to have some behavioral problems with Eddie this year. I hope that the special reading program he is participating in will have some positive result before the end of the year. I know a part of Eddie’s frustration in school has to do with his inability to read. But I also think he has a “class clown” personality. He likes to be “on” and enjoys the attention he receives from his classmates. 

We were very proud to discover that one of Eddie’s artworks, one that was exhibited in a schoolwide art show last spring, is featured in this year’s school calendar – on the September page, no less. I think extra copies of the calendar are available at the school distinct office, so I’ll s top by tomorrow and pick up a copy to accompany this letter.

We’ve been serenaded by a barking dog this weekend, both Friday and Saturday nights as well as during the day, but it’s the nighttime noise, of course, that is the more irritating. Our neighbor, the single guy who works for CUNA, recently bought himself a boat and he and his new boyfriend are away somewhere this weekend on a christening cruise. The dog, a brown Akita, has been left on his own, and he’s not very happy about it. I actually called the police this afternoon, if for no other reason than to make sure they’d have a record of this disturbance. Someone who leaves a dog on its own for 48 hours doesn’t know much about taking care of animals. The dog almost succeeded in digging an escape route under the wooden fence next to the garage. The devil in me was tempted to unlatch the gate and let the dog escape. Those of us who lost sleep over the weekend wonder how someone who’s always been a good neighbor since he moved here 5-6 years ago could be so inconsiderate of his neighbors all of a sudden. This morning I woke up shortly after 2:00, the quiet soon shattered by the dog’s sometime hysterical barks. Trying to escape the noise, I moved myself to the family room, closed all the windows, turned the fan to the medium setting to provide some white noise, and wished I had a pair of ear plugs. Fortunately, I was able to fall back asleep within a half hour.

How are things going with you? Have you made any plans for this winter? We plan to visit my folks during the Christmas holiday, but we haven’t decided on the exact dates of our trip yet. I have a weird feeling that this may be my dad’s last Christmas.

We’re all doing well and keeping busy here. (So what else is new?!)