Life Goes Better with a Memory and a Smile

By Michael Harris

Brighten your day with a memory and a smile!

Retired educator and jack-of-all-trades, Dr. Michael Harris offers short, entertaining stories that will evoke memories of your childhood and remind you of a simpler, less politically correct time in life.

From clothes shopping to picking out a birthday present; from the uselessness of grits to surviving a road trip in the backseat of the family car in the 1970s, there are few subjects Dr. Harris is not willing to tackle in this collection of stories from his youth – all set against the beautiful backdrop of the mountain ranges of the American landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wheredepony Press
• Release date: Jul 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393789390

Book preview

Cliches That Will Destroy the World

There are some cliches used in today’s conversation that have become an entity of their own.

As I tell you about them, please feel free to think of others and add them to the list. This is a problem that is ruining the little bit of creativity young men and women have left. We’ve been asked to teach creativity in schools, at home, in colleges and trade-schools, and in every writing class that was ever created.

When I was in school, you didn’t teach someone how to be creative. The people who were creative were born that way and changed the world in some way. They thought out of the box, like we encourage kids to do now, just before we remind them to get back to work and on task. It’s kind of sad when you expect someone to teach your child to be creative when they have no clue how to be creative themselves. Creative is what you either are or you are not. It’s not something you become.

Who told Thomas Alva Edison it was dark and we needed to invent a light? No one. He figured that out for himself.

Who told Albert Einstein that Energy always equals the Mass multiplied by the Constant squared? No one. He spent years finding that out himself. Who told Louis Pasteur milk needed to be heated up and stirred vigorously so it would be clean and bacteria-free and last a long time, without letting the cream float to the top? He saw a need and figured it out by himself.

For many years when folks saw a need they took care of it. They were creative. They didn’t go around asking, Anybody need anything? Nope. Sorry.

They saw. They created. They built. Then they left it for us to improve upon.

We don’t do that anymore. The politicians and government have taken away the time and the ability and the need of a person to be creative. They just figure out, by using their Infinite Wisdom, what you need and give it to you. No one has to think anymore. We just have to know what to ask for and where to get it – hence, Google.

How about our language? We don’t have to know any particular way to express ourselves. All we have to do is read mass media. We have become good at that. We don’t talk. We don’t write. We text. We tweet. We email. We Instagram. That is called communication; but the truth is, as George Bernard Shaw says, The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. It hasn’t.

How many times have you heard an insurance person explain your policy? A million? Maybe more? You don’t know what you have in insurance until you use it. Most of us are then shocked at what we don’t have. Insurance isn’t the only enigma in our lives. Think about the medical explanation of your physical. So, how are ya? Do you really know?

We now have certain phrases available to us that we use that prevent us from having to think for ourselves. All we have to do is rehearse those certain little phrases a bit and it takes the place of our creativity and our ability; thus, our need to express ourselves in a clear, concise manner. We have no reason to think of something nice to say. That now has become a worthless, unused skill.

Let’s be very specific.

You are beautiful inside and out. You didn’t think of that. You didn’t even mean that, even if you thought you did. Have you ever seen the insides of someone? Let me tell you, they aren’t beautiful.

You have heard that so many times from other people, who have heard it so many times from other people that no one even pretends to make an attempt to spice it up or add his own flair or really even care what it actually means. I’ll tell you what it really means.

Nothing. It is not from your heart and you have put forth no effort or any signature of yourself. Most folks say this several times a day, especially if they are on social media. You know what? You could easily teach a parrot to say that phase, and it would have just as much meaning. It requires absolutely no creativity in the least.

And, I’ve gotta tell you, just like you don’t even know what you said, the person you are saying it to doesn’t know what you mean, if anything. Communication: zero. Maybe that’s what you intended. To say nothing, but to be nice. If you meant anything, THAT would require thinking and we are just too busy for that. If you love someone like that, find your own words and put them in a way that is original and really creative. We have thousands of words out there just waiting to be used and quickly being forgotten.

Love you to the Moon and back. REALLY? When did you go to the moon and how did you get there? Was it better going or coming back? You didn’t mean you love anyone to the moon and back. That doesn’t even make sense in the slightest.

Besides, that particular love has a finite distance and time. What happens then? You don’t love them anymore because the statute of limitations is up, and the trip is over? Do you think you have gone the distance? Do you even know how far the Moon is? Do you double it if you love someone there and back? I wonder how gravity would affect the trip there and then the trip back. So many questions and so few answers.

Awesome! WHAT?? Everything is awesome and that comes from the fact that there are no losers anymore. If you pass gas in these times, that is now Awesome!

Even things that are expected and required are awesome. Let’s look at what awesome really means according to the Oxford dictionary: extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear. Not everything we do and say is awesome. How shallow!

It’s not like we don’t have any other words to use. If you are at a loss, here are some that will do, OR you could be creative and think of your own. We can even make up our own words in America. After all, this is the Land of the Free and Home of the people who have lost their creativity.

Here are some examples of alternate words for awesome: BREATHTAKING, AWE-INSPIRING, MAGNIFICENT, WONDERFUL, STUNNING, STAGGERING, IMPOSING, STIRRING, and IMPRESSIVE, to name a few.  Maybe using these words could kick-start the dormant creative gene in your DNA and bring back some of those vocabulary words you learned in middle school.

Some of us try to keep it simple and use another term that we have almost worn the edges off of: AMAZING! Everything is AMAZING!

It. Is. Not.

Very few things in my life have I seen that were amazing. God’s creations are amazing. The trees and mountains; the creeks, streams, and lakes; and of course, people are amazing – truly amazing – in one way or another. Not what we DO, but who we are. Things we now call amazing are what my dad would have taken for granted and called doing your job. That’s not amazing. If your kids are told to do something and they do it, that is amazing. Okay. Depending on your kids, it might very well be amazing. Not in my Dad’s eyes. That’s what my dad called expected, and most of the time required.

If you do love someone, appreciate something or what someone does that is truly out of the ordinary, or think they are beautiful, then I invite you to search the recesses of your heart and mind and find some words, symbols, gestures or whatever, and be creative with what you have or can create.

Remember, you don’t have to copy someone else. Intent, sincerity, and creativeness are directly related to the effort put forth in this case. An action (from your creative recesses) will speak volumes that a simple, overused cliché someone else thought of will not even begin to touch.

Floyd Saves the Day

Sometimes things happen , and at the time they seem so frustrating. In all of our earthly wisdom we suddenly discover we really don’t have all the answers. I have finally come to the realization that it’s okay not to know some things, even when you are a teacher and are really expected to have all the answers. I wouldn’t want that to get out, so keep it to yourself.

In most of our classes in school, the teachers, professors, and givers of great bodies of knowledge have all the answers at their fingertips. I suddenly realized the reason they have all the answers is that the students have grasped the fact, after a very short time, that you have to stick to the subject and not deviate.

Very young kids just don’t get that. You never know on any given day what may be asked, where the question comes from, or what a child has in mind when the question is asked.

I remember well my first year of teaching some forty-five years ago. My first day, I really began to doubt whether I had enough knowledge or information to lay on those sweet, young minds that were so eagerly looking to me with sparkling eyes full of expectation. After all, in retrospect I was not much older than they were. They were ten and I was but twenty-one. I started thinking I really didn’t know cumulatively, based on my short life, enough information to fill an eight-hour day.

All of my new fourth graders came in with great expectations of learning exactly what they needed to know, for now and in the years to come. NOW they had a MAN teacher. WOW! Most of these kids had always had teachers that had been much like their mothers-kind and gentle women who would give them a hug and an encouraging word at just the right time.

I suddenly was facing the fact that I had never had to do that and that just a short time ago, I was looking for the same thing they were looking for now.  The roles of my life were somehow reversed, and I had a new and different position. I was the GIVER and not the TAKER.

I found out filling that long, seven-hour span was not the problem; the problem was getting what I needed to teach into such a short time. The kids did that for me. I owe them so much. I found every year of the forty- five years I taught that I learned more than I ever taught. To be fair to myself, there were more of them. In Michigan they outnumbered me thirty-three to one!

I planned and planned very well, every day. Fear – true fear – will cause you to do things you never thought possible. For me, that was to organize and plan. When I made a mistake or things just didn’t work right, I recorded it and tried not to do the same thing again. I had always been this kid that shot from the cuff and now suddenly had responsibilities and duties I had never even imagined. While sitting in that college classroom, perfecting all of the skills anyone would ever need to manage an elementary school classroom, I thought I had it all down pat, only to find I didn’t have a clue what to do. After forty-five years, I still get that insecure feeling of being somehow lost. Experience teaches you one thing well: hide, but live with, your insecurities.

I did fairly well in school, but when I started college, I never dreamed of being a teacher. I was not the person willing to spend those long, hot days doing what I so disliked.

School for me was not a happy place. It was sort of a jail I had to go to, with some redeeming factors. Yes, there were other kids to play with and talk to. (That part hasn’t changed much. I still have other kids to play with. I am the teacher, but I am also the student.)

My next step in the world of academia was so very different. I suddenly KNEW what I wanted school to be, and I came to the realization that I was the only one in the world who could give those young and positive students the joy of learning that I didn’t have until college.

I recalled so well the days of sitting in that hot classroom as a student and learning multiplication and division, reading endless boring stories and thinking it must be near the end of the day, when in truth it wasn’t even close to lunch. Here was my chance to right some wrongs and a chance to change all of that. I was the Agent of Change.

I have to say, by lunch on my first day of teaching, the time had flown by and I found I loved those eager and willing children already.

Floyd, a little fourth-grade munchkin, had already saved or attempted to mediate, a tense situation that, at the time, I thought could have been a career-ending mistake. I was writing a sentence on the board and all of a sudden, my mind went absolutely blank and I