Dead Man Below Deck

Chapter 12. Homeschoolers Are Hardnosed

Wednesday started badly. The cat decided it would wake me up a bit earlier than usual. It walked on me for a while, it stuck its paw in my face, and when I tried to burrow under the covers, it kept poking me with its paw. They say cats stroke their owners because that was how they got milk to let down from their mothers’ breasts when they were kittens. I doubt it. If a kitten poked it’s mother in the breast the way that cat poked me, it would go hungry for awhile.

After I had slid even deeper under the covers, the cat started knocking around the items on the bedside table. Glasses went on the floor along with the cell phone and a paperback book.

Enough. I got up, started the coffee, and showered. For some reason, I was tired. Most likely, the stresses of the past week were getting to me. Dead bodies, police inquiries, undercover work, more dead bodies, more police inquiries…it wasn’t fun anymore. Then, when I weighed myself, I was up two pounds. Didn’t that just add icing to the cake?

After trucking down to the convenience store for the paper, I took Betty her half along with her coffee. She took hers with cream whereas mine was black unless we were driving somewhere. Under those circumstances, you couldn’t trust what you were buying, so I asked for sweetener. Better safe than sorry, right? The stuff may have been sitting on the burner for hours.

The paper contained some interesting commentary on the Democratic convention. The Democrats were coming on strong for national security. This stance appeared to make them indistinguishable from the Republicans on that issue. The Democrats wanted to spend a lot of money on new social programs, of course. They could get away with saying that because in the Clinton administration the federal budget was balanced whereas the Bush administration had run up the deficit. The Republicans had lost their ability to present themselves as the gurus of fiscal responsibility.

For most of us, these were not the real issues at stake in the election. The two major parties were asking us to choose between two rich guys who never had to worry about paying the light bill, who never bought bologna in order the stretch the meat budget. One party wanted to give our tax money to corporations, the other wanted to give it away to other groups, some of whom deserved it and some who did not. What a choice.

Shrugging off politics, I went in to work on the computer. Dr. Lee’s cancer project, a bioterrorism drill project, and revising a manuscript for a journal all danced around the screen. I was multitasking to beat the band and it was stressing me out. Why did I do it? I was on vacation for Pete’s sake. I guess I did it because not doing it stressed me out more. By noon, I was exhausted and needed a break.

Dragging my tired brain out to the deck, I stretched my legs out and tried to calm down. Jorgenson was rushing by, his fat legs moving at a rapid clip on the sidewalk below. “Hey, Moody! How’s it goin’?” I called down to him.

He slowed down then turned to walk back toward me. “The usual thing,” he said. He looked pretty harried.

“Come on up and have a cup of coffee. You look like you need a break.”

He hesitated then replied, “I think you’re right. Be up in a second.”

After making a brief call on his cell phone, he climbed the stairs. Coffee mugs in hand, we settled on the porch.

“Read the paper this morning, Moody?” I asked him.

“Sure, I flipped through it. Politics, politics, politics.”

“Yep, both parties are big spenders, aren’t they? But neither one seems to understand what the little guy needs.”

Moody looked at me. “You know, Ed, I can’t figure you out. Sometimes you sound like a Libertarian, other times you’re a Green. What gives?”

I tried to put it succinctly. “It’s like this, Moody. Like it our not, lots of people are working for low wages with minimal benefits. We can’t keep increasing taxes so we can give them financial help. That would require perpetual economic growth, raping the environment, and constant pressure on the people who are actually paying the taxes. Keeping the cost of living low would be a better idea. We don’t need to constantly come up with new consumer goods that are just overpriced toys. Slow economic growth is better than a mad frenzy. Otherwise, we will all end up going crazy.”

He wasn’t buying it. “Yeah, yeah, I understand your words. But why do you care so much about the little guy? You’re smart, you seem to have made good money. You don’t have to worry.”

“I couldn’t disagree with you more on that one. None of us are safe. You and I are only about six months away from being greeters at Walmart. A lawsuit, a big health problem, or a bankruptcy could destroy our revenue stream and wipe out our retirement assets. Heck, after retirement it is almost guaranteed that, if we live long enough, we will end up broke. When we get to that spot, we will want the cost of living to be damn low.”

I leaned forward. “Fact is, the reason I worry about the little guy is simple: ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. And I can’t think of any reason why God should continue giving me all the lucky breaks.”

His faced turned gray and his shoulders slumped. “You may be right,” he said. “Maybe we are all just one step from the poor house.”

He stood up slowly. “Well, enough philosophy for one day. Time to get to work. Sometimes there is no getting around doing the tough things and making the hard decisions. Business is a gamble and sometimes you just have to take the risks and deal with the stresses.”

I was not sure what he was talking about, but since I had upset him enough for one day, I let him go away without further comment.

Back I went to the computer, getting more and more stressed as I tried to deal with my anxieties by getting more accomplished. The faster I worked, the more I worried about making mistakes and misjudgments. But my value in the world depended on providing what people expected of me: intelligent work, delivered faster than anyone else. Maybe I was just like Moody Jorgenson, hustling to stay alive.

By five o’clock my back was killing me and my head hurt. Betty found me on the deck and reminded me that we had agreed to attend a church social with her cousin. I groaned.

“You said you would go,” she pointed out.

“I know. I’ll go. Just let me smoke my pipe for fifteen minutes.”

“Okay. I’ll be getting ready.”

The church social was actually a good thing. I found it relaxing. The group was small and appeared to be composed of regular people, mostly working class folks. If they were like most Americans, they tended to want bigger houses and better cars. No doubt, they lived mostly on credit from paycheck to paycheck.

We took our paper plates through the food line, eating several kinds of ‘hot dish’. I parked myself and my plate at a table with Betty and her cousin. It was a large round folding table, so a few other adults joined us. Betty’s cousin Wendy had a husband and a couple of kids who were seated at another table with several teenagers. The man and wife who sat with us were sober in appearance. The man wore a white shirt and tie and black slacks. He had a bushy black beard. The woman was dressed in a rather plain print dress.

We chatted about home schooling for awhile. All of the people in the church seemed to be into that form of education. Apparently, they helped each other in order to share the load. We talked about the differences between virtual education and home schooling. From their point of view, virtual education was a bad idea because it involved supervision from the school. The parent was provided computer programs and other curricular materials which she passed on to the child. About every two weeks, more often if needed, the teacher from the school would touch base by email to see how the student was doing.

It sounded perfect to me. Kids would only advance if they mastered the material, teachers could handle a lot more students than they could in face-to-face instruction, and the kids would be exposed less to the bad habits they might pick up from other kids. Why wasn’t virtual schooling the way we could get local school budgets under control? The only thing wrong with the idea that I could see was that virtual schooling seemed to have started with the primary grades. I could envision it being more useful for high school kids. High school was largely a waste of time when I went through it. You could have learned everything you needed to learn in about half the time if virtual schooling had been available.

The people at my table disagreed strongly. They were homeschoolers through and through. They wanted no involvement from the school system. And, they either wanted their property taxes cut since they didn’t use the schools or they wanted the school district to pay them back for the value of the education they provided. They were pretty hard core.

“But why are you so set against getting help from the school system? They can buy materials like computer software in bulk and get better prices. They can come up with a standard curriculum, so you don’t have to do that.”

This really got us to the heart of the matter. “Because of government propaganda,” the man with the bushy beard asserted loudly. “The government pushes crap like evolution and accepting homosexuality. The government wants us to become Godless and accept a secret dictatorship.”

His wife hushed him. There was a moment of silence. “This is interesting. I sure would like to hear more about your point of view,” I said.

The man and his wife exchanged looks. “Sorry,” he said. “We are better off keeping our opinions to ourselves. Government agents have been known to persecute people like us when they realize we are onto their agenda.”

This made me chuckle. “That seems a little paranoid. It’s not like you’re the Fist of God militia or something.”

The man and his wife looked startled. “What about the Fist of God?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” I backpeddled. “I thought it was an urban myth. Does it really exist?”

“No,” he said belligerently. “It does not exist and never has.” With that he and his wife got up and left the table. No one else would speak to us, so Betty and I went home. Add that church to the list of places I can’t revisit because of my big mouth.