Just like the Ebola virus, which no one
hopes they’ll get but seem sure to hear that it has somehow survived despite
humankind’s best efforts to stamp it out and wipe every trace of it off the
face of the Earth, I present to you the Greene Family Christmas Letter for 2014
. . . even if it’s a bit later than normal.
In the spring, Sam went out for his
junior high school’s golf team and made the cut. Making that feat even more impressive, let me
point out that the coach was the school’s computer teacher whose complete
mentoring and guidance for young golfers could be summed up in his own words:
“Keep your head down.” It didn’t matter
if Sam or one of the other team members was topping the ball, hitting a killer
slice, or was possibly suffering from athlete’s foot, that was the coach’s
answer. Let’s not be too harsh in
judging the cat: he was very busy driving the golf cart with his left knee
while he poured a bag of Corn Nuts down his gullet with one hand and held a
128-oz soda “keg” in the other. And,
under this Arnold Palmer’s tutelage, Sam and his team were able to make it to
regionals . . . by the grace of David Feherty’s golf god. In the fall, Sam began high school, which
meant that our carpool days were over for the moment – he and Jack ride to and
from school each day, which has met, thus far, with no casualties to the car or
miscellaneous road signs due to fighting over whose turn it was to scrape the
frost off the windshield (have Erin tell you about driving to school with her
sister – that poor stop sign).
As Jack began his senior year of high
school in late July, you would have thought he hadn’t a care in the world about
where he was going to go to college . . . because he didn’t, much to his
parents’ chagrin. Subtle hints like “do
you have an extra $40,000 lying around somewhere to pay for college” and “the
S.A.T.s don’t stand for ‘scholarships are toast’” didn’t seem to do much to rally
him to the cause. Somehow, though, he
woke up one morning and decided he better get his crap together (don’t jump to
conclusions, though: he’s not exactly burning up the internet with applications
and emails to every school possible), and one of the major things he realized
he needed to obtain was his Eagle rank in Boy Scouts so he could beef up his
academic resume. So, in October of this
year, he guilted a whole slew of people into helping him paint the fire lanes
at the high school as his project, and soon thereafter he completed everything
else required and passed his board of review.
We’re not sure when the ceremony will be held or what form it will take,
but we’ll be sure to take lots of photos to prove he actually did it. We’ll post them on Facebook – especially the
one in which he’s being presented the Eagle so I can caption it, “And the old
dude gives Jack the bird.”
As for Erin and myself, we’re trying to
find ways to make a little extra money so we’ve toyed with the idea of renting
our house out to a meth or crack lab, but the CC&Rs in our neighborhood are
pretty tight, and I’m not sure if we can find a loophole. When we’re not donning our entrepreneurial
thinking caps, Erin continues to seek out and cook meals that will elicit the
maximum amount of bellyaching from our sons; I am constantly trying out new
exercises that make me sweat profusely and completely fatigue me without
changing my body composition and muscle-to-fat ratio – it’s a hobby. We hope this note finds you well and healthy
. . . and Ebola free!
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