ever-fixed mark

Husband (to Aitch): OK, you can have a cookie, but as soon as you’re done you have to go upstairs and get dressed for school.

Me (to Husband): Hey, Pavlov, try giving the reward AFTER you elicit the behavior.

Husband: You have your way, I have mine.

Let’s recap: My way. His way.

This is the man who told me, before we had kids, that he fully intended to adopt his brother’s chirp as a child-friendly remote control.

To his credit, the father of the Most Argumentative Five-Year-Old in the World has finally seen the light. One morning when I was at work, the boys drove him so insane with their before-school dilly-dallying that he instituted a new rule in my absence: No one is allowed downstairs until fully dressed. It’s taken a few days, but Aitch has incorporated it into his routine and has forgotten he ever used to lounge around downstairs in his pajamas. Minor is another story (but isn’t he always?)— we sometimes have to lock the baby gates on the stairs and stand over him until he gets dressed. But it’s a vast improvement, because when it’s time to go, everyone’s ready to walk out the door.

Captain von Trapp would be proud.

A few weeks ago, a flyer came home in Aitch’s backpack that had a large star traced on it. The top said, “Parent project. Use this star as a tracer. Please keep your star the same size as the tracer. Don’t forget to write why your child is special! Please return no later than.”

My first thought was, what the hell, “parent project”? Why am I getting a project? I’ve already graduated from kindergarten! But the thing looked so random, and as it wasn’t signed by Aitch’s teacher and there was no explanation what it was for and no due date on it, I assumed that it was just one of those optional activities that she sometimes sends along. I tossed it in the trash filed it in the vast archive, organized by topic and date, in which I put all Aitch’s school papers, and I forgot about it.

Yesterday I got an e-mail from Aitch’s teacher asking me to PLEASE send in Aitch’s special star, because all the other kids had THEIR special stars, and Aitch was last, and the entire class cried real salt tears every time they looked at the bulletin board and saw that Aitch’s was missing, etc. I promptly e-mailed her back and asked, what was UP with that special star thing, anyway, because I couldn’t grok the context from the directions.

She fired back that the special star had been mentioned in TWO newsletters AND special detailed directions AND a template, and suggested that if our family had better habits with regard to managing his folder, we wouldn’t continually lose his papers. (She didn’t use the word “continually,” but alluded to the fact that we’ve lost his folder twice. I can hardly believe that doesn’t happen all the time, but the way this has been treated, we seem to be outliers.)

I exercised a great deal of restraint in not replying something like, “Listen, lady, you’re lecturing ME about developing good work habits? Until recently people paid me hundreds of dollars an hour to listen to MY advice on project management.” But I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. She doesn’t know us very well; she probably deals with harried parents all the time; maybe she thought she was being helpful. At any rate, I made a pact with myself when Aitch started school to avoid tangling with his teachers except when Aitch’s health or well-being was at stake. I’ve seen too many parents spend time and energy battling teachers over things that the teachers said or did which, while not ideal, are just part and parcel of being a flawed human being dealing with other flawed beings.

Meanwhile, I got the basics from another parent: It was indeed a parent project, something to do with a unit on teddy bears. We were to decorate a star with words and pictures describing why our child was special to us. Now, I am no slouch when it comes to limning my child’s extraordinary qualities for posterity. I shoot rolls and rolls of Aitch’s precious little face on real old-fashioned film, which I hand-develop in my basement. I’ve put together iMovies of his first years, scored to heartbreaking effect. I’ve written FOUR YEARS worth of blog posts about him, for Christ’s sake. Some people have a baby book; I have a multi-media installation. The one medium that is NOT represented, though, is paper. I can’t cut a straight line. I can’t handwrite a legible sentence. I can’t draw for shit. Why a paper star?

I bought paper and glitter glue and printed out a photo of Aitch small enough to fit on the star. Husband put it together. Early this morning I felt badly that I had not contributed to it, so I put together my own star in PowerPoint, printed it, cut it out (awkwardly), and glued it to the back so Aitch’s star had two sides, one for each parent. I sent it in with his folder.

I’m not sure if the teacher ever got it, though, because she sent me several papers about the star with a test Post-It note: “I thought the directions were very clear? Please read notices thoroughly!” Included was a sheet giving the background explanation for the project, signed by her, with the due date for the project. We had never received it.

Thanks for the scolding, Mrs. Kindergarten. You’re lucky I DON’T have a vast archive of Aitch’s school papers, because if I did, I would be sending a sheaf of them, with grammatical, punctuation, spelling, and usage errors all corrected in red pen, to your principal. Wouldn’t that be special?

Happy Evacuation Day to all the Bostonians and Cantabrigians out there!

For the uninitiated, Evacuation Day is a public holiday celebrating the retreat of British forces from Boston during the Revolutionary War. It is a completely serious, totally not-made-up holiday; the fact that it falls on St. Patrick’s day, allowing your public servants to spend their day off bending their elbows at their respective local pubs, is totally coincidental, and anyone who suggests otherwise is probably high on triphenylmethane (green dye #3, ingested with St. Patrick’s Day beer).

Last week, my friend C. and I took our dogs out for a walk in the woods. We had almost looped back to the car when we began to hear gunshots, and we thought it wise to keep the dogs close to the trail. Dog, the Velcro beast, had been underfoot the whole time, but suddenly he was nowhere to be found. I whistled and called and promised treats, and presently he bounded out of the underbrush, carrying something.

“What IS that?” I asked.

C. was closer to him than I. “It’s a big stick,” she said. “No, wait a minute, it’s not a stick. Yes, it must be…OH MY GOD THAT IS NOT A STICK.”

It was then I saw the hoof.

I screamed. I screamed. I screamed. You know those Scooby Doo episodes where Shaggy and Scooby see a ghost and scream to the camera, turn to one another and scream, and then turn back to the camera and scream? It was like that. I knew it wasn’t solving anything but I also knew as long as I continued to scream I could put off the moment when I had to WREST AN ENTIRE DEER LEG FROM MY DOG’S MOUTH.

Luckily, Dog showed some sensitivity to my emotional state, dropped the deer leg, and ran to me wagging his tail, with a look on his face as if to say, “What? What’d I do? Here, let me kiss you and make it better.” And every time his lips approached mine it set me off again.

It was by far the most disgusting thing he’s ever picked up, and there is some pretty stiff competition for that honor.

At long last we proceed with Act 2 of the three-part saga, “I Was (Almost) a Teenaged (Well, Practically) Spook.” (The radio station playing “Valerie Plame” was WERS, a really great college station, by the way.)
———————-
The preceding took place during winter break of my senior year in college. By graduation, I had still not heard from the CIA, so I got a job as a Yellow Pages salesperson in Amish country. (Ah, foreshadowing! Bet you didn’t see that coming!) My job was to travel around to small businesses in Lititz and Intercourse and Virginville in my ancient foul-smelling Volkswagen Scirocco and convince them to increase their ad space in one of the three local phone directories. I was taught to quote the price as the monthly bill (”A two-inch ad is only $7.98!”) instead of the yearly total, which concerned me ethically. I sometimes got to mock up the artwork and write copy, so it was practically like working in advertising.

I had been working about six weeks when the United States Office of Personnel Management contacted me to come to Langley for an interview. They would pay for me to fly down and put me up in a hotel overnight. Pre-internet, these arrangements involved reams of paper forms and hours of toll phone calls. Even so, it was so terribly exciting I could barely sleep. My first business trip! Paid by someone else! Visiting The Company!

The only problem was my job. I certainly had no vacation coming to me after six weeks, and I didn’t think I could muster up an illness good enough for two days off work. In a fit of honesty (see: those pesky ethics) I asked my boss for the time off, and he turned me down flat. So I took a chance and told him why I needed it: job interview, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, blah blah blah. He was sympathetic, but unhelpful. I could not have the time off. If I didn’t show up for work, I’d be fired.

Meanwhile, I happened to run into an old acquaintance from college at a party. He was a former fraternity brother of my freshman-year boyfriend, several years older than I. Like a lot of the guys in that fraternity, all of whom seemed to be named Eric, he seemed always to be propping up a wall near the dance floor, clad in a rugby shirt, beer in hand, stoned look on face. He was fairly cute and had improved considerably; now, he was able to hold up his end of the conversation in addition to the wall. He lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and he offered to take me out for dinner when I came down for my interview.

Naturally, I quit my job. Looking back, it seems like a very foolhardy move in such bad economic times, but given the sheltered life I had led, and my craving for adventure, I don’t see how I could have foregone jetting off to DC and a date with a handsome older man for a lifetime of writing ad copy for Shear Magic Hair Salon and Stoltzfus Plumbing. Obviously, the whole thing was meant to be, and in a few weeks I’d be searching for an apartment in Georgetown and shopping for furniture with my new boyfriend.

I’m pretty sure it was a prop plane that got me from Harrisburg to Dulles. I think I took a taxi to Langley, or maybe they sent a car for me. I remember getting checked in at the front desk and being assigned a badge — routine in office buildings now, but fairly awe-inspiring then. I remember an interview with a gentleman who explained the job to me (Reports Officer, under cover of the Foreign Service, posted to an embassy, gathering intelligence, and writing it up, although I have no idea how the intelligence was supposed to be gathered). I was interviewed in German by two elderly women to gauge my language skills. Then I went to the polygraph room.

When you apply to a government agency, you fill out a bunch of paperwork detailing every place you’ve lived or worked. This was a relatively easy task at this stage of my life. It would become somewhat more tedious years later when I applied to the Peace Corps, and by the time I started consulting for USAMRIID, it took hours. (I had nothing to do with the anthrax, but I did get a tour of the lab where it was probably grown.) But the CIA application has a special section where you detail all your past drug use.

Now, I am not now nor never was I a hard drug user. I was scared to death by Go Ask Alice as a child. But I was fresh out of college; I had certainly smoked pot a few times. Furthermore, I had an older cousin who was, shall we say, an avid consumer, and thanks to her I had been attending parties with people nicknamed “Darvon” who had mirrors on their coffee tables and scales in their bathrooms since I was eleven.

I had been warned that, whatever my past, I should TELL THE TRUTH about past drug use. “We’re not looking to eliminate anyone who’s ever smoked pot,” I was told, “but if you lie about it, it will come out in the polygraph.” I understood this, but I was twenty-one years old and I was NOT about to record for posterity in a permanent government record the 3.5 occasions on which I had smoked pot. So I lied.

The polygraph room was small with a table, two chairs, the machine, and a big mirror. I congratulated myself for not being fooled by this, for recognizing it as a two-way mirror hiding an observation room. The examiner hooked up the electrodes to me and explained the procedure. She started off with simple questions: Was my name X? Yes. Did I live at address Y? Yes. Was I 21 years old? Yes. Then she gave me a playing card, a seven of hearts, and instructed me to answer “No” to all the questions. Was my card the ace of spades? No. The three of clubs? No. The seven of hearts? No. She showed me how the output remained relatively serene when I was telling the truth, and spiked when I was lying.

Then we started in with the real questions.

She went through my paperwork, verifying all the items on my resume. Had I lived at X? Yes. Did I graduate from University Y? Yes. Had I worked at Z? Yes. Then we got to the drug questions, and it became a bloodbath. As soon as I started responding to the drug questions, the polygraph jumped. She tried to play good cop, telling me that any past drug use wouldn’t disqualify for the job; I just needed to admit it. Stupidly, I stuck with my story. She then tried bad cop, berating me for not telling the truth. She left the room, presumably to consult with the person behind the two-way mirror.

At that point, I reflected that I was currently unemployed, and prospects for this job were slipping away rapidly. So I admitted yes, ha-ha, of course I had smoked a LITTLE pot. The examiner modified her questions to try to pin down the exact extent of my drug use, but by this time I was so freaked that every single answer I gave made the polygraph jump, even the neutral baseline ones. The examiner accused me of hiding something big, and I countered that the results were obviously unreliable.

“What do you mean? I showed you how it worked in the beginning when I asked the questions about the card.”

“Yes, but now it says I’m lying even about my name,” I told her, pointing to the evidence.

She went to consult again with the people behind the mirror and then came back and said we had run out of time, and I would have to return some weeks later to repeat the polygraph. I was obviously not going home with a job offer.

I did have a date, though. Eric #8 picked me up at the office and took me to a Chinese restaurant. I was stupid enough to think this was exotic; “cheap” didn’t occur to me. It was a nice enough date, and when Eric #8 dropped me off at the airport I still had fantasies of moving into a cute Georgetown apartment with him, but now I realize that it hadn’t gone as well as I thought it had. Back then, I wasn’t critical about jobs or men. I never sat in an interview or a date and thought, “How is this for me? How would I like to be a yellow pages salesperson/CIA agent/life partner of a taciturn guy who wears a rugby shirt?” All I could think was, “Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!”

Neither the CIA nor Eric #8 picked me.