school assignments

I have always enjoyed school assignments.  I like to be graded (kind of like Angela I guess).  I have also enjoyed helping my kids and my younger sister with assignments that were creative.  

Ethan is a smart guy.  Really smart.  Everyone thinks his greatest strength is in science and math and indeed he excels there, learns easily, and likes it. What is not as well known is that he is also good and language arts and history.  In fact when he took the career assessment test that all freshmen take his number one match was historian...followed by several different science related careers.  He is really funny and has a good vocabulary, those two traits combine to make a good writer. This morning I found an English assignment open on the lap top, so I read it, and I laughed and decided to save it for posterity my future reading pleasure.

Ethan Utzinger

October 20th

Carbajal

Vignette

           

Gourd

            Matt was over at my house one day, we were nailing pictures onto the wall when my sister took the hammer and softly as landing butterfly landing on a flower tapped the table, tink, and whispered in a hushed tone. Ethan do you know what this is. Matt responded to Hannah “Uhhh a table”. “No” Hannah replied then stated cooly such an odd phrase that Matt must have thought she had early onset Alzheimer's. My sister finally revealed her cryptic message and said three words… “It's a gourd”. At first she could not be understood because she spoke so softly so she repeated “A gourd” Now poor Matt still did not understand but I finally realized Hannah was alluding to a moment on the past.

I began explaining to Matt “We went camping on the beach one day and while relaxing under the cool welcoming shade cast by the leafy palm trees we talked. Our conversation was a bumble bee buzzing from place to place. Eventually we began playing a game where one person would think of an object and the rest of the group would have to guess what it was. ‘Is it a fruit?’ ‘No’, ‘Is it edible’ ‘Yes’ We eventually found the object was a gourd. Grace then asked ‘What is a gourd’. We all sat pondering her question for a moment. We probably looked silly, sitting silently simply thinking of how to supply answer to my sister. Then someone said as certainly as you would say 2+2=4 ‘Something is a gourd if you can hit it with a hammer.’ ” Matt still stood in a stupor processing the insanity of what he just heard. It seems nobody can fathom my family’s joke. For now on only we will ever enjoy the humor behind the word gourd.

A scary story

We were staying at my sister’s house in Buffalo. She lived in a small place with one bedrooms and her husband. Everyone used the one room. It was quite tight and hard to have a private conversation yet Hannah and I managed to have one.

She came over to the blow up mattress I was on and leaned down to tell me something. She said, “Do you want to here a scary story”. My sister is a bit of a wimp so I was not prepared for the ferocious tale I was about to hear. She leaned in and said, “One very cold day I was walking home from school and saw a flower. It was the only flower in a barren field. It was so pretty and I was considering walking over too it when a bird came landed next to the flower and bit it just below the petals. The one pretty thing was taken from the field. This had an affect on me because I thought that the flower had represented my calm nature in such a violent world and I felt it was gone now. This gave me a violent feel and when I arrived at home I saw Grace so I punched her in the face.” At this point me being a 10-year-old boy, and my sisters story obviously a build up to basically say I came home and saw Grace so I punched her in the face, I laughed hysterically I was a choir at a church and I could not be silenced. What my sister said was gold to me. It was hilarious and made me laugh. Suddenly my Mom telling me to be quiet so that everyone could sleep cut my laughter short. I guess that by me not being done laughing then just stored the laughter to make that a funny memory whenever my sister and me secretly enjoy the memory of that night.

Nicknames

I was born in Texas, if you have never been than this might be news to you, but every boy in Texas is named Bub. Your family would just call you Bub for no apparent reason. My family called me Bub. That is not too difficult to reason. What is inconceivable is that my sister calls me Michael now because of that name Bub. She reasoned that Bub sounds like bubble. So for a few years she called me bubble. Than she moved from bubble to Buble as in Michael Buble. Than after years my sister called me Michael Buble and recently Michael. When people are over at our house sometimes I am called Michael. This is cause for great confusion as people are confused by what my sister is saying. They ask questions like “Is Michael your middle name?” or “Do you have a brother named Michael?” I must explain to them the whole process of how I am now called Michael. My sister Grace also has a nickname she is called Goose, Lue, Lucy, Graco, and sometimes smelborp. These all came about because of some reason or another my sister was called by one of these names and then they stuck. I call my sister Betty-Linda sometimes because we went on a youth trip with our church and we had to engrave some utensils needed for eating. My sister could not make it so I had to engrave hers too. To show my indignation I put Betty-Linda on her utensils. My mom is called Cita, and the family penguin because once when we were in the snow my mom was in a large coat making her look like a penguin and then she rocked back and forth to try and get warm. Someone noticed she looked like a penguin than to and now it has stuck.

Percy

            Percy was a good cat. I say was because he is dead. I was spending the night at my friends house while my parents were out of town when I received a call from my sister. She said on the phone while in a state of hysteria “Bubster the cat is dead.” At first I was taken aback. I thought she was joking. But my sister said “Yes he really is. I came home and I saw him drinking water but when I walked over to pet him I noticed that he wasn’t moving like at all. So I called Mom and sent her a picture and sure enough she said ‘Yep that is a dead cat’ so i covered him with a towel and had Maddi come over.” Oddly upon learning this news I wasn’t really all that sad. We only had him for 6 months, and he was like a walking sprinkler soiling the carpet, beds, couches, etc. making it so we had to use the spotbot to clean up his mess. It’s whirring and loud sucking sound along with the motor that said “Brrrrrrr”, was quite annoying. I didn’t see him that much anyway, and this wasn’t the first death I’ve been through so I just wasn’t really phased by his death. I thought for a second then asked “What do you want me to do.” I thinking about what I possibly could do when she said panicked “Come Bury him”. How do bury a cat in a yard covered in astroturf. “Again what do you want me to do!! I’m not home right now how am I supposed to bury the cat?”. “I don’t care just come home and bury the cat”. By now she was on speaker and my friend and his dad could hear what Hannah was saying. “I can drop you two off if you need” “Ummm thank you” I said and we went over to the house and sure enough when we got there there was a towel covering some lumps on the ground. He looked like a bag of potatoes spilled on the ground. I walked over to the towel and lifted it up slowly. I heard a small squeal then my sister said “No don't” I could smell him before I could see him the putrid bitter smell was absolutely rancid. When I could finally see him he didn’t look very different then when I saw him a few days ago. The only obvious sign at a quick glance was the stained wood around him the stain coming from him. He was stiff as a steel bar and hard as one too. We didn’t know what to do with him.

Eventually we decided to decorate a box stick him in it and bury it. As my sister worked to decorate the box with pictures of his favorite things, I was trying to stick him in the box. The issue was the box was not large enough to fit with his petrified arms. I was a baby trying to put a square box into a round hole. As I bent his arms to fit into the box you could hear him cracking. It was done. The cat was in the box. Percy was dead.

I different assignment: he had to write an obituary for someone (strange assignment but a sweet sentiment expressed)

            My mom is the best person in the world. That’s actually her contact in my phone and she is just so great and she will be missed. Believe it or not but my family has planned this moment before. We always figured that someone would stand up at the funeral say, “Hello Mom was short but her prayers were not.” We never imagined it would be such heartache to lose her. But really we should have known that my mom would be missed. She will be missed because he was loved and one of the most loving people ever.  She would always have fun ideas that could remind us of how much we meant to her. One Valentines day my mom thought it would be a great idea to write hearts of what we love about each other and put them in each other’s rooms then take them down during March.  My mom’s message to me stayed taped on my wall for months.  She was so nice and kind and approachable one time her car broke down in DC and she had to get It towed home, I guess she was just so recognizably kind or something but the tow truck driver basically just told my mom his life story to some random stranger.  But she wasn’t really random she was the best. I will miss my mom the best person in the world.