Tag: Ft Peck

The Holidays are a Great Time to Lend a Hand!

The Holidays:  Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, Kwanzaa (whatever that is)… Time to think of others and be thankful for what you have, right?  Normally, I would take this opportunity to dog on each and every single one of these holidays.  I would bitch about everything I see as being wrong with these holidays… which is a lot.  But, then I asked myself, “What would Jesus do?” Jesus would not dog on the holidays.  Jesus would tell us too look out for our fellow man.  Jesus would tell us to put the needs of others ahead of our own needs.  Jesus would tell us all about Stacy Rock!

Stacy who?  Stacy ROCK!  Say it like you mean it… ROCK!  Although a few years younger than me, Stacy grew up in the same small Montana town that I did.

Whenever I think of Stacy, I think of her mom… Mrs. Rock.  Mrs. Rock was my English teacher in 6th, 7th and 8th grades.  All of the younger grades feared Mrs. Rock.  She was the kind of teacher who would yell at a kid down a long hallway if said kid was screwing around.  Mrs. Rock’s voice could be heard from one end of the school to the other and stabbed fear into the hearts of the young children.  We knew that, sooner or later, we would end up with her as a teacher.  There were rumors of children who had mouthed off to Mrs. Rock and just…  disappeared.  I held a suspicion that the Rock family had a freezer full of formerly-mouthy kids who were served — you guessed it — for the holidays.

When I finally reached 6th grade, I was terrified that I would end up as a Thanksgiving main course.  Mrs. Rock was not only the English teacher, she was the homeroom teacher for 6th grade.  6th graders are too young to die.  What was wrong with the Ft. Peck school system?!?

Well, it turns out, nothing at all was wrong with the Ft. Peck school system.  Mrs. Rock was an awesome teacher.  She was strict, but she was also kind.  She had a great, cynical sense of humor, which, of course, I loved.  Mrs. Rock ended up being my favorite English teacher of all time.  It was an incredible experience to watch Mrs. Rock yell down the hall at the younger kids who were misbehaving… knowing the fear that was building in them… some of them probably wetting their pants… maybe even a touch of the poo…  Good times!  In fact, I contribute all of my writing success to Mrs. Rock.  Yeah, this stupid blog is all her fault.  So the five of you who read it can blame her.

Back to the real reason for this post.  Stacy Rock is no longer a little girl.  Stacy Rock is now a soon-to-be rock-and-roll LEGEND!  She just needs a little help from whoever stumbles across this post.  After school, Stacy moved to the Big Apple in search of fulfilling her musical dreams.  She found some success with the release of her first album.  Now, she is attempting to produce a second album, and she is raising funds in the effort to make that second album come to life.  But Stacy isn’t just asking for money… she is giving out rewards at every contribution level.  The rewards sound pretty cool, too.  If it wasn’t the holiday season, I would have went for the $50 level just to get some of Mrs. Rock’s cookies, although I still suspect there may be bits and pieces of mouthy kids within (‘What’s the secret to your delicious cookies, Mrs. Rock’,  ‘Why, just a little Robert Jones, Mrs. Smith.’) If one were a great contributor to the arts, he or she could actually end up with a personal concert from Stacy in his/her house.  That would be pretty cool.  Check out Stacy’s story:

Currently, there are two semi-famous people from Fort Peck, MT.  One is Wayne Hawkins, who was like a guard for the Oakland Raiders or something.  The other is Ron Hauge, who is a television writer who wrote for The Simpsons, Ren and Stimpy, and I think he wrote an episode of Seinfeld or something.  Please, please, please help this small Montana town have one more semi-famous person to its credit: Stacy Rock.

Check out Stacy Rock’s Kickstarter page for more information on how you can help and what you get in return. There is a goal and a deadline, so don’t delay. Also, check out Stacy herself and her music at StacyRock.com. The holiday season is a great time to help someone out 🙂

The Dreams of Our Youth

Ahhh… remember back to the days of your youth.  These were magical years where your future seemed so bright.  Remember?  From the end of August to mid-May, you learned and played sports and hung out with your friends all day.  But summer was when the true magic happened.  Summers were a seemingly endless period of long, hot days and cool, enchanted nights.  You could ride your bike with your friends day after day and it never got old.  As young boys, my friends and I would ride bikes and play catch and start a pick-up game of kickball of football and hike paths and climb trees and hang-out at our favorite stores (… uh… it was Fort Peck, Montana, so there was only one) and swim at the pool or at the lake and, as we got older, appreciate the way our rapidly-maturing female friends were filling out their bathing suits in spectacular new ways… and the summers seemed to last an eternity.

As we got older, some of us started getting summer jobs, and some of us got jobs year-round.  School got harder, and we had to start really thinking about our futures.  Then, college called to some of us, and some of us went straight to full-time, real-world work; but we still held tight to our dreams.  Those of us who went to college soon joined our working friends.  During these years, many of us fell in love, got married, started families; the dreams were still there.

Our kids started to grow up.  Soon, we could see our kids enjoying many of the same things we enjoyed in our youth, and we were starting to feel a little old.  The dreams were still hanging on, but we began to wonder how we were going to accomplish them with a full family life.  Oh well, maybe after the kids are grown and on their own.

Soon, we start living vicariously through our kids. Maybe we want our kid to be that great sports star we never were.  Or maybe we want our kid to be the genius we were never smart enough to be.  Or perhaps we want our kid to be the singer or actor or musician we never had the confidence to attempt to find within ourselves.  Our dreams migrate to the purgatory of our consciousness, awaiting the day when they will either realize the joyous fruition of heavenly accomplishment or be cast to the inescapable torment of hellish failure.  We start trying to help our children with their dreams, which are merely extensions of the dreams we had in our youth.  We start to realize that our age is actually catching up with us.

We become obnoxiously proud parents, praising the accomplishments of our children as if they were our own… often to the major annoyance of most other adults around us.  Soon, we find that other adults begin to avoid us because they really don’t care how good little Jimmy’s baseball team did… or how excellent little Susie’s dance recital went.  We become monsters who seem intent at driving everyone away from us… everyone except our families.  We scream at the umpires or referees at a game because their calls made our kid’s team lose.  We badmouth the teacher who doesn’t truly see our child’s intelligence.  We harbor ill-will toward the second-chair trumpet player who screwed up during the concert and made our first-chair child look bad.  We become bearers of vehement hate toward every single person or thing that interferes with our child’s success.  Our age is no longer catching up with us; it has caught us and is a driving force in our lives.

Our children, meanwhile, are oblivious.  They are focusing on having fun and creating their own dreams.

Soon, the kids are off to college or work, and we have the houses to ourselves again.  We are still focusing on the dreams of our kids.  We give career advice.  We warn them of the mistakes we made along the way.  We tell them what they should do to be happy, which is really what we should have done to be happy.  Our hindsight is, for the most part, ignored by our children.

Our kids are now adults, they are working full-time, many of them are happily married… and before you know it, we’re grandparents.  Our kids seem to have put their dreams on hold in an attempt to help their kids create new dreams.  Finally, there is time for us to focus on our dreams once again, so we search.  We search our consciousness for those dreams of our youth.  We search for the motivation to once again bring them to the front of our minds.  Funny thing is, when we search for our dreams, the smell of brimstone becomes overpowering, and just the thought of trying to accomplish those dreams makes us very tired.  We have moved beyond old and are now ancient.

Ahhh… it was nice to have dreams.  Too bad we never found the time or will to accomplish them.  What to do now?  Ooooh… looks like the grand kids could use some help with their dreams…