My Name is Corn Bread Junior and I'm Hongry

Vonda’s Views
March 28, 2010

The Great Spring Break Road Trip of 2010

The people that followed my ‘tweets’ of our Spring Break Trip to the west coast and back have been asking for more details of the trip. You know, little things, like would I travel by bus again, and was the trip really fun or did I just make it sound that way. Then there is the question of WHY did we do it straight through like we did.

Would I do it again? Yes yes yes I would and YES I would do it on the GreyHound Bus. Not that it was all glamorous or that I was sitting in the lap of luxury. It was just a great way and an economical way for us to take Anna to across the USA and to see as much of it as we could in 9 days.

There were all sorts of things that happened to us that I found amusing as well as semi alarming but it was also things that were eye-opening experiences for us.
Take for instance, our arrival in Dallas, Texas where we were to transfer to the Los Angeles bound bus; just before we pulled into the bus terminal, our driver began giving us instructions on picking up our luggage and taking it with us to the next bus and telling us how long we would be waiting before we departed on the next leg of the trip. He also told us that even though there is security in the bus terminals, not to leave our luggage unattended as the occasional homeless person or panhandler would come in and start begging for money. His advice was to not give them money, ignore them and call security over. He said sometimes they really were not homeless, just deadbeats looking for an easy target.

We were standing in line with our luggage waiting for the new bus when all of a sudden we heard this voice coming out of the crowd, “My name is Corn Bread Junior and I’m homeless and hongry! Will you give me a couple of dollars so I can get me some food?” Most everyone took one look at the guy and thought uh oh! Ole Corn Bread looked a mess. He had matted hair, was dragging one leg like it was injured or deformed and holding one arm like it was useless, nasty clothes and smelled to high heaven but I noticed his teeth and he had some pretty good teeth that he was flashing around so I was skeptical.

He disappeared into the crowd as the Security guards started looking his way. Soon we heard his voice again, “My name is Corn Bread Junior and I’m Homeless and sleepy and I need a couple of bucks to pay the Salvation Army so I can go get a bed and sleep.” Then he had a cup he would stick in your face and shake at you. I told him I didn’t have any cash on me. By this time, his body odor was really starting to get to people.

Our eyes were watering and some of us were trying to see how long we could hold our breath before having to inhale again. Then he made his final appeal, “my name is Corn Bread Junior and I’m homeless and I need to take a bath!” That one worked because she smelled like he had rolled in Catfish Charley and then got sprayed by a skunk! People were digging for pocket change and anything else they might have handy to put in his cup so that hopefully he would drag his smelly personage away from the terminal.

After he collected his ‘bath money’ he left and some of the folks stood watching him as he left. Sure enough, when he was out of the building, ole Corn Bread Junior started using the bad arm and hand to count his money and his bum deformed leg started walking straight and without a limp. He had seen his target and made the bull’s eye and some honest trusting people became skeptical cynics that morning.

Vonda’s Views
March 12, 2010

To paraphrase Dorothy in the Wizard Oz, “WE aren’t in Mississippi anymore girls!”

By the time this is published I will be on the second or third leg of our great Spring Break Road Trip to see America in 9 days. I decided that we would take the ‘south western’ route out to LA and see Dallas Fort Worth and all of the beautiful deserts through New Mexico and Arizona.

On the return leg of our trip we may have a large detour to make in the Denver area as several tons of boulders the size of semi tractor trailers slid down onto US 70 and that is the main passage through the Rockies. From what I have seen on the news, those are some pot holes that won’t be able to be patched with a little bit of cold patch! The detour is going to make the trip about 4 hours longer but it is also going to take us through the scenic route. As if there is anything more scenic than the Rocky Mountains!

I have an Atlas and I am marking all of the little places that we will be seeing and passing through and it will be fun for me to pass on to my kids a few things about the US. Geography and History has always been one of my stronger subjects.

In the mean time, if you are reading this on Thursday then we are already on the bus going through the Mojave Desert and it might be lunch time in Las Vegas where we will be stopping. I’ve never been there and it will be enough for me just to pass through the city and gawk a little at it.

Anna and Erin will be excited to be heading toward Chicago and our little excursion into the Sears Tower before getting back on the bus and heading to Memphis where Scott and Ariel will be waiting pick us up and bring us home. And as much as I love to travel and see new things, I will be clicking the heels of my red Crocs together 3 times saying “there is no place like home.”

Planning an adventure

Vonda’s Views
March 7, 2010

I love a good adventure story and now I am about to write one of my own.
I have been planning a Spring Break trip for the two high schoolers in my house. We started talking about this back in the Fall after our exchange student Anna arrived to live with us. Anna was trying to grasp the concept of just how big the United States is and we thought that it would be a great idea to take a cross country trip and see as much of the USA as possible in a short period of time. I started researching and came up with the idea of traveling by train or bus. There is nothing like letting someone else doing the driving and navigating while all I do is sit and watch the landscapes and cities go by.

We decided on Chicago and Los Angeles as our destinations; Chicago just long enough to go up in the Sears tower and then on to Los Angeles to see the Pacific Ocean and other points of interest. After contacting friends in the LA area and making arrangements for a place to stay then the fun began; how much money or how little can we make this trip for and just how are we going to get there?

While I really wanted to travel by train, the schedules just were not going to cooperate with us. I want to go out there one route and return on another so that we can travel through as many states as possible. While traveling by train is surprisingly very cost efficient, some routes are only traveled 3 days a week and as luck would have it, it was not the 3 days we needed. So the Greyhound Bus has become our mode of travel.

The girls have been researching all of the ‘free’ things that we can do while we are out there. There is the La Brea Tar Pits at Hancock Park and the Hollywood Star Walk of Fame; Graumans Chinese Theater and all of the Hand and Foot prints of the stars is nearby as is the Hollywood Sign and Griffith Observatory in Griffith Park. I would love to be able to look through that huge telescope into the cosmos! There are many other things that we want to do that will cost money. There is Disneyland and we can’t pass up going to the original Disney theme park. I want to go to the Pacific at Hermosa Beach which is where we lived in 1959 before my Daddy decided to move back to Mississippi.

Anna is from Armenia so we are going to go to visit the area of Los Angeles known as Little Armenia and my friends tell me there are many wonderful Armenian restaurants there so I will finally get to eat some Armenian food. We have found it amusing that Los Angeles has more Armenians living there than do in her native land.

I am busily trying to plan something on paper so we can cram as much as possible into every day as we will only have 4 days to see and do as much as we can On the way out there we will have meal stops in St. Louis and Denver and Las Vegas and then on the trip back we will have meal times in Phoenix and El Paso and Dallas before finally getting to Memphis. Its going to be a long ride but we will travel through 12 states seeing everything from the Plains to the mountains to the deserts and a little of everything else in between. I will be journaling the whole time and taking pictures.

I love adventures and taking a bus trip with a couple of teenage girls to LA so we can say we wet our toes in the Pacific should be a good one.

15 minutes of Fame

These days it seems like everyone is famous for at least 15 minutes. Or maybe its just five minutes but it sure does appear that everyone, especially young people are obsessed with being a celebrity. Look at all of the reality type shows on television now. People standing in front of so called industry judges singing (very badly I might add) at the top of their lungs trying for fame and fortune; or prancing up and down a runway or posing vogue in front of cameras aiming to be the next top model.

We sit glued to the television listening to people say that they want to have plastic surgery so they can look like some glamorous model or we hear these wannabe singers talk about living the dream and failure is not an option for them or they gush that they have worked all their life to reach this moment and most of them are not even past 20 yet!
Even in the sports arena, you see young people thinking that every one of them going to be the next great quarterback of the NFL or something along those lines. They all want to be rich and famous. What lofty goals our young people have now days.

Young people think fame is their birthright. They have a sense of entitlement that is bigger than anything I have ever seen. Kids (as well as some adults!) look at these reality shows and think “I can do that” and that becomes their life’s ambition. The majority of kids leaving schools today no longer want to be study to be doctors or lawyers or architects or teachers or rocket scientists or plumbers or electricians; they want to be famous. They want to be celebs; they think being a celebrity is the short track to wealth and happiness and they are firmly convinced that it will bring them everything they ever wanted. There is an entire generation WORLD WIDE apparently, that thinks if you have a lot of money and material things then you will be happy and they don’t understand that nothing worth having is going to come without a lot of blood, sweat and tears, work and scrabbling to the make it.

As a parent I have always tried to tell my girls that they can be anything they set their mind on but that it takes hard work and perseverance as well as being in the right place at the right time. I am a classically trained artist and a good one. I had the opportunity to work in a couple of major cities where the world of commercial art is strong but I choose a long time ago to stay in Mississippi. Would I have been rich and famous had I gone somewhere else? I can’t say. Maybe. Maybe not. Do I regret not taking the big leap? Nope. I had and still have the talent but having the talent isn’t the be all and end all of it. I was not cut throat enough to survive and I saw that pretty early on in my career. So I chose to stay close to home to be with family and to raise a family. Even now at the age of 56, I still am not cut throat enough for some things.

Watching all this debacle about the state of education in our state has made me think about a few things. I have never thought kids get a good enough education in our state. Not on the public level anyway. The teachers might as well be hog tied for all of the restrictions and for the things they are required to do. And how they do it with what little they get paid…well my hat is off to them. But I do get tired of buying reams of copy paper for each of my daughters’ classes. I have complained about that ever since they reentered the public school system.

I home schooled my daughters until their junior years in high school. Why? Because I could and because I felt that I could offer them a much broader education than they would ever get in the public school system. It was hard work for 9 years and we all learned a lot and did a lot of things. They sometimes thought I was crazy for the things that I presented to them to learn about but the one that is now a junior in college finally understands some of the things I was pushing her to learn. I knew when she got to the university level she would understand. Now both my girls are looking forward to their higher education and making plans for their future.

I haven’t heard the phrase ‘I want to be famous’ out of either of them but the spark is probably there. With a good solid education and a lot of hard work, hopefully they will have learned a good trade and have a worthy career and find their 15 minutes of fame and hold on to it. I just hope and pray that there are kids out there that still think being a nurse and doctor and a tech is good. There needs to be more respect for the plumber and the electrician too. Those are very worthy careers. It’s better to be a great in demand electrician and plumber than a mediocre singer or anorexic model.

Traveling with Teenagers on a field trip

I’ve said it before and I will say it again….traveling with a group of teenagers is like herding cats. It is always an adventure!

Last week, I and Donna Williams the Regional Director for AYUSA in Mississippi, took a group of 12 exchange students down to see our state Capitol and some of the other sights to be seen around Jackson. We left bright and early Tuesday morning and started picking up students. I had warned all the kids to pack light and only bring the necessary stuff . Just because I drive a 15 passenger van does not mean it has room for people AND luggage. It is sometimes an either/or situation.

At any rate we got everyone and their stuff into the van. The first little casualty of the trip happened down in Grenada. We had just picked up the last 6 kids and we stopped at a quick stop store for the last rest room break and for coffee. One of the girls, Julia, was sitting on the very back row and she decided to climb over the back of the seat and go out the rear door. IN the process of doing that her blue jeans ripped right in the rear seam. IT turned out that was the only pair of pants she had brought along on the one day trip. I told her we would just have to wait till we got to Jackson to purchase her some new jeans.

The trip down went pretty quickly. We had decided to spend the night in Canton because the rooms in the motel there were not as expensive as in Jackson and the budget was already tight. We arrived in Canton and checked into our rooms and we unpacked the van and everyone quickly got ready to go on to the Capitol to meet State Rep. Jim Beckett. Jim had a arranged a tour for us so we needed to get there quickly. But before we could go there was the matter of replacing those jeans. I was not about to let that child go into the Capitol with her a large portion of her leg hanging out.

Trying to find a Wal-Mart, when you aren’t looking for one, is nearly impossible. But I did find a Kohl’s. The second I pulled into the parking lot all the other girls shouted ‘SHOPPING’ and Donna and I were shouting NO! I got out with Julia and we headed into the store. I told her it would be a fast trip. I spied the jeans in the junior department and steered her in that direction. We found the one pair in her size, she tried them on, I approved of them, she paid for them and we were back out the door and in the van in 15 minutes.

Then we were going to grab a quick lunch and that was when Donna discovered that she had left her wallet back in Canton in the room. So we drove back to Canton to retrieve the money, Julia put on the new jeans and we raced to eat some lunch and then to the Capitol. After driving in circles for what seemed like forever, I finally found a space large enough to park the van in that was close to the Capitol building. We started walking and then everyone had to take pictures and more pictures and by the time we got inside we were late for our tour. We were beyond late actually and our tour guide was not a happy camper.

She warmed up after hearing the convoluted story of the ripped pants, search for a store, the hurried pants search and the forgotten money. She gave the kids a very good tour and they sat in the gallery of both the Senate and the House and they asked questions. I just took pictures to document the events and kept to the back of the line to make sure we didn’t lose anyone!

After we left the Capitol, we were invited to dinner at a friend’s home out in Brandon on the Ross Barnett Reservoir. I relied on the GPS to get me there with some directions and landmark advice from my friend. We found her home and the kids were treated to a beautiful view, some great food and Mardi Gras fun and a few games of billiards. The adults hung out in the kitchen discussing the joys of hosting international exchange students while watching kids from 9 nations talking and interacting.

After a great dinner we returned to our motel rooms and had a good nights rest and the next morning went to the Museum of Natural Science before heading back home. It was a quick trip and we wanted to do more but that will come another day. For the exchange students, their time here is rapidly coming to an end as most will start going home in May. Donna and I are already looking for family’s to host students for the 2010-2011 school year. If you have ever thought about hosting, now is the time to look. I am already looking forward to planning trips for next year’s group of kids.

Taking them places may be like herding cats, but it’s a fun thing to let the cats out of the bag as they learn what life is like for teenagers in Mississippi USA!