"What?" I asked. I was confused. Halloween.....er, Harvestoween had passed. The posters of mummies had been taken down. The books about feisty witches were removed from the classroom shelves. I had no idea what the boys were talking about. And frankly, neither did they.
"Are you going on a field trip to the cemetery?" I asked. They shook their heads, no. I pushed a bit more. "Well, did your teacher tell you how you were going to celebrate the people in the cemetery?" Blue answered, "She said we were going to sit criss-cross-applesauce on the floor of the cafeteria."
Ah! An assembly! "Is someone coming to talk to you?" I continued. "Yes," Green replied. "It's gonna be a soldier that plays a horn." Things were becoming clearer. I had a feeling that the arrival of the tooting soldier meant that Blue and Green were going to have their first ever lesson about war.
Michael and I have kept the boys pretty sheltered. They don't play video games. They haven't seen many movies. They don't watch the news. And they don't really know that people, if left to their own devices, are not always very nice to each other. Basically, we've done a crackerjack job of preparing them for a world that doesn't exist.
So on Friday, I anxiously sent the kids off to school to learn about Veterans' Day. I think my trepidation was influenced by my own experience with Veterans' Day assemblies. When I was a kid, veterans' organizations were working to get folks to remember the horrors of the Vietnam War. The people who came to speak to us didn't bring cheery tales of heroism. Instead, they talked about their Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. They talked about the innocent people they killed. They talked about friends that had died. It was grim and gruesome and shocking.
Apparently the message has changed over the last 30 years. This was not an assembly about war. This was a military pep rally! Blue and Green broke away from their morning lesson on squirrels to listen to the high school band play a medley of foot stomping, patriotic tunes. Then a member of the Air Force spoke about the meaning of the flag. And get this: each child was given an Air Force football as a souvenir. It's the kind of trinket that recruiters give away at their booths on college campuses. RECRUITERS.
The boys love their footballs, but they may have missed the message. On the way home from school, I asked, "Boys, what is Veterans' Day about?" Blue answered, "It's about the military." "And what's the military?" I asked. Green shrugged. "I dunno. Something about Yankee Doodle." OK, I guess they're not signing up for service just yet.
Of course, Blue and Green had some Veterans' Day homework to complete. Each weekend, a kid in the classroom gets to take home the class "pet" (a stuffed mouse puppet). The student's job is to write a booklet describing all the things that the mouse did with that particular family. And this weekend was Blue's weekend. On the way out of the classroom, the teacher said, "It would be great if you could take the mouse to do something related to the holiday. You could go to the cemetery!"
What is it about the cemetery?! No, I was not going to drag the kids and their smelly puppet around the cemetery in the rain. Instead, we went to visit one of our favorite veterans, who kindly pulled out all of his pins and medals to educate the rodent about the armed forces.
Thanks, Grandpa.
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