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March 05, 2009

Feb 05, 2008

Dec 18, 2008

The ides of March

“Beware the Ides of March!” That was the soothsayer’s warning to Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s famous play. You won’t find many Help Wanted ads for soothsayers on the Web, but in the Bard’s day these prophets were big news. And if they gazed into their crystal balls or monkey skulls and said something bad was going to happen on the 15th day of March, you’d better look for a change of address by the 14th. Caesar should’ve spent more face time with the local psychic while building Rome into a great empire. He would’ve been spared the fate of being turned into a human pincushion by some former friends.    
Old Billy loved a good tragedy as much as the next guy; he carved out a pretty decent career composing them. In fact, high school students have fallen asleep to his masterpieces for over four hundred years. I loved them. English Lit class always seemed to fall between math and science. Between droning lectures on the vagaries of trigonometry and calculating how many grams of liquid A would make solid B glow in the dark, we got to beat each other up acting out the assassination scene from Julius Caesar (Act 3, scene 1 for those of you keeping score at home).
Shakespeare’s work is as relevant in the cyber age as it was in the days of outdoor plumbing. We may not know it by the same name, but the Ides of March are still a harbinger of dark clouds on the horizon. We call it March Break.
Not everyone will cringe and shudder at its mere mention. A fortunate few avoid its wrath on tropical beaches, sipping multi-coloured concoctions that may or may not contain rum. In their euphoria they even agree to be buried up to their necks in beach sand by excited offspring whom, back home, they couldn’t surgically remove from in front of the Xbox.
Others are not so fortunate. For those of us who must remain to lord over our own little empires, we would gladly exchange our fate for Caesar’s. Our lot is to bear the slings and arrows of bored children sniping over a lack of entertainment while watching a week’s vacation go the way of the dodo.
The chorus of woe started on March Break Eve, if there is such a thing. Number one son (actually, the only son) was suffering from a lack of “stuff to do”. Alas, I recognized it as the onset of an annual affliction that descends upon our home at this time every year. But forsooth, I had an antidote for this scourge of our times. I had “The List”. It’s the most potent elixir in a parent’s medicine cabinet. It contains an itemized accounting of all the activities a bored child can choose from to gainfully bide their time. Things like: cleaning their rooms; writing a letter to Grandma; playing a board game with their sibling; vacuuming the living room; and the ultimate horror, doing their home reading.
Number one son had finished picking at his chicken tenders and fries, and was in the midst of a lengthy dissertation on the evils of a week with no friends around. I produced The List. If he was truly bored, I proclaimed in my best town crier vibrato, he could always help me shovel dog poop from the recently thawed front yard. For emphasis, I produced a pail and plastic bag from the laundry room cupboard.
Suddenly, he leapt from the kitchen table, yanked on his mud-encrusted boots, and raced out the front door faster than a drag queen at a tractor pull. Wouldn’t you know it, this was a perfect time to pull the hockey net out of the garage and work on his wrist shot. My favourite medicine had worked its age-old magic. Like a victorious gunslinger, I pretended my right hand was a pistol, blew the plume of smoke from my index finger, and returned the imaginary weapon to its holster.
After that, I didn’t need a soothsayer to tell me the March Break would go smoothly and swiftly into the ether. Thanks to The List, my wife and I could navigate the prickly reefs of boredom to the melodious strains of occupied children. 
 “The Ides of March are come!” and, thankfully, gone.