Scout Moves

Small Town is at war, sort of. The state has declared our high school to be unfit, one of the worst in Ohio as far as the structure goes. The foundation is solid, but the rest is falling apart, and we'll get $9 million toward the construction of a new building if we can get the community to pass a levy to raise the rest. So, now there is a big fight over everything related to the subject—where to build, why to build, when to build. People are accusing the administration of not spending operating funds properly, suggesting that if they had been more frugal, the building wouldn't be in bad shape. I think they would rather make that accusation than accept the blame themselves. If they had passed previous requests for increased operating funds, we could have updated the building over time. But they repeatedly rejected pleas for more funding, so there was never enough money to keep the boilers operating, to repair the roof, to update the plumbing and wiring, or to provide updated ...

I'm looking back at the events of yesterday and breathing a sigh of satisfaction. Not a sigh of relief or resign, just simple and gratifying pride. The orchestra performed two concerts yesterday, and while I committed more than my share of mistakes—I will not kick myself for them I will not kick myself for them I will not...—it was all a job well done, I think. At some point last spring, I emailed our conductor and asked if he had ever thought of programming a concert aimed at kids. We've been thinking of ways to attract a younger audience, and I thought that if you bring in kids, you bring in their parents, and eventually you develop a more sustainable audience that won't die out in the next ten or twenty years. Not to sound harsh, but this is the situation orchestras are facing. He said he had thought about turning the dress rehearsal of our October concert into a mini-concert for kids because we would be performing fun and creepy Halloween stuff, and it would be easy...

Hey there Little Red Riding Hood... I walked in a parade the other day, my first since being in the marching band in high school. I never cared for parades in those days because they were long and dull, and by the end, we would all be exhausted. The Labor Day parade always did us in, and several kids never failed to pass out from heat and dehydration. I wasn't one of them, but still. This time around, I walked the route to help promote an orchestra event, and our little entourage had a ball. The Lion's Club of Small Town hosts an annual Halloween Parade, and it's interesting to note that more people show up for this one than show up for other parades, like the Memorial Day or Labor Day or Christmas Parade. What does that say about us? Kids and their parents line the route, that isn't as long as a mile, and they hold out their plastic bags for candy as if they won't be trick-or-treating in a few days, and all kinds of people participate. There was a pontoon...

I met the owner of one of Small Town's largest companies the other day, and he was complaining that he has trouble attracting new employees who are willing to live in this town. They'll take the job he offers, but then they buy a house in Jackson or Perry, parts of Canton north of here where there are better restaurants and better shopping. The schools are better, and the atmosphere isn't so inbred. He was actually making his complaint in the context of a conversation about upgrading our high school. If we had a better high school, he said, people would live here, which would do wonders for our real estate market, our general cash flow and the overall growth of the community. In turn, more businesses would be attracted to the area, which would bring more people and so on. We all know that it isn't just the schools that send people north on the highway, and we have a long way to go to be appealing to the outside world, but I saw his point. Start with the schools, and t...

As afraid as I am of spiders, my fear of real poverty tops it. I'm not talking about living on a budget, eating out less or skipping vacations several years in a row. I know how to do that. The kitchen in our first apartment was a renovated walk-in closet with a one-piece oven/sink/mini-fridge unit that looked like Lucile Ball could have used it in black and white. I drove a 1978 Datsun that was given to us as a gift—in 1985. The finish had worn off, and I had to have it tuned up once a month or so (remember when you had to do that to cars?) because it would stall every time I came to a stop. Try driving in New Jersey under those conditions. And we ate Meatless Mondays (and a few other days of the week) before Meatless Mondays were cool. I have a particular memory—in the heat of the summer, we had one window air conditioner that we installed in the bedroom, and we would sit at the foot of the bed eating our spaghetti and watching our tiny black and white TV with the cat, Franklin...

Bringing a puppy into the house has created a dilemma. Well, it's not so much a dilemma as it is a question that needs answering—Where to take the dog to pee and poo. We have a fenced-in yard, but the space within the fence is filled with swimming pool, which is surrounded by brick patio. That isn't conducive to potty training, and we don't want to take the dog for a walk every time he has to do his business, so we designated a section of planter for that sort of thing. At one end of the patio, there were small evergreens, but Husband thought they were ugly and had them removed, so I turned the space into a small and untended herb garden, filling the space with sage, oregano, parsley and thyme. And there was a lavender bush and some petunias there as well. Then came the puppy. He ran and played and plowed through and soiled so that you wouldn't want to use the herbs even to look at, even if you could find a seemingly untainted leaf. If I were to snip some sage fo...

 For a full week after Steve Jobs died, my Facebook newsfeed was filled with tributes from people who either loved Mac products or admired the man's work ethic or were moved by his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. I was about to link to that speech, but seriously, it was quoted so many times I'm surprised you don't have it memorized by now. One of Husband's brothers works at a Mac store in Chicago, and he posted some moving photos of the store front that week—people had plastered the window/walls with Post-It notes like tiny sympathy cards. You couldn't turn on the television without some kind of news coverage about Jobs or the speech or the history of Apple. But then one day one of my more cynical Facebook friends called Uncle. And her comment inspired today's column in Small Town Newspaper . We need a hero, and more than one who innovates and creates, we need one who cures cancer.

Lately, I feel as though I ran the zoo, even though I have just two animals. I need the dog to go out, but the cat tries to squeeze through and dart out the door while the dog stands by and watches. I grab the cat with one hand and snag the dog's collar with the other and shift them to their rightful places—the cat inside and the dog going potty. Today, they both got out, and the dog chased the cat, and the cat ran up the hill where I couldn't get to him. And then he slid under the fence and took off through the neighborhood where he roamed for at least 30 minutes. I just wanted to sit down. Along with the mammals I seem to have some creepy crawlies to watch as well, spiders that have camped out in my yard. Actually, last night I walked out onto the enclosed back porch and was startled by a big, meaty, black spider that was meandering across the floor. He didn't seem startled by my gasp and "holy crap" outburst, but he was startled when I turned my empty glass o...

...to the man who led the way for font geeks everywhere. I am one of those font geeks, or at least I used to be. There was a time when I could spot a font on a bill board or on a package and name it within seconds, and WYSIWYG was my favorite tool of all the tools on my Big Mac. (If you don't know what WYSIWYG means, you aren't a font geek). I am a little rusty with my font identification skills because I have been out of practice, but I love the shapes of letters and how they relate to each other, and I am fascinated with the history of font development and how personally some people take their fonts. There is a story floating around about a man who developed a font years and years ago, and it was so dear to him that when he quit using it, he threw the plates off of a bridge so that his creation would die with him. It's that serious. So, here is my private tribute to Steve Jobs and how he effected fonts and font development and font geekdom forever.

I am a Mac fan, as are most graphics types. The big computers are easy to use and powerful, and Adobe products absolutely sing on them—Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator.... Not that those amazing applications don't also work well on PCs, but they were designed with the Mac platform in mind. In 1990, I got my first computer for graphics, and all I remember is that it was a PC with a black-and-white monitor. I learned on the thing and created four-color projects on it, but then I was given what was considered an upgrade, a Mac with a color monitor so that I could actually tell if my catalog text was the green I had hoped it would be or if the photograph next to it was sepia or color or grayscale or what. At some point, we bought a small family Mac that the kids used for games, and we loaded it with some great things, like Thinking Things, an Atlas game and Power Pete, the best computer game of all time. Unfortunately, Power Pete hasn't been updated since the mid-90s and ...

For some people, life is a mixed bag, and they think about various things in any one 24-hour period. They have ideas and form opinions and keep up with current events. They keep in touch with friends and call their mother. But me...I'm all about this dog. It won't always be this way, I'm sure of it. He'll get beyond this very-needy puppy stage, and I can get back to normal life. Although it may be a new normal. Until then, here all I think about—what I have written in today's edition of Small Town Newspaper.