The differences in the way men and women think is a constant source of amazement to me.  Here’s a recent example:

Last week, we gave away tickets to Celine Dion, who’s coming to Atlanta in January, and the stage production of Mamma Mia, which is at the Peace Center this week.  We were bombarded with calls!  We got a call from one young lady who normally gets up at 10:30 AM (no, I don’t know what she does for a living!), who got up at 5:25 AM all last week just to have a shot at the Celine tix! 

In all the hundreds of calls we got about these two shows… not one guy.  Not a single male caller.  Now how can something SOOO popular with one gender, get a collective yawn from the other?

I’ll give you another example- when the Momma Mia movie came out several weeks back, I knew my wife would wanna go see it.  And just on the off chance that she would expect ME to go, instead of one of her gal pals, I actually MADE A LIST of things I would rather do than see the Momma Mia movie! (I won’t reprint it here, except to say that it included drinking out of the Reedy River!  Yup.  I felt that strongly about it…)  

Here’s one more example- Greer and some other local communities recently passed water restrictions that include a recommendation for a 5-minute shower.  I don’t know one guy who has said to me, “How do they expect me to get everything done in there in just 5 minutes?”  We don’t even think about it as abnormal.  However, I have heard that very comment from a number of coworkers – all of them women.

Anyway there’s been a growing trend lately, especially in academia, of pretending that men and women are the same.  That our only differences stem from our social precepts.  People who believe that should stand on a street corner and hold up a pair of Celine Dion tickets!

Tyler with his sisters, Jordan and Ellie (Photo courtesy of Charles Bordner)

This weekend, my son Tyler leaves for college.  And, as I think about that, here’s what I’d like to know- how has this happened so quickly? 

Tammy and I were in our mid-twenties, excited about my first big job and enjoying our first (decent) apartment, when we found out that we were expecting a baby!  Since then, Tyler has become a young man and the center of the universe for our two younger daughters.  There’s just no way those eighteen years have passed so quickly..!

Some of you may have heard me on the show, fighting back tears as I described our first visit to Tyler’s college campus this Spring.  I’ve toughened up (a little!) since then.  Tyler and I spend a lot of time together and it was - and still is - hard to imagine him being gone most of the time.  Trying to come to grips with the idea that my relationship with my son will “turn a corner” and never be the same…  Well, it’s been difficult.

Now, I know some of you are going through this with me in the next couple of weeks and maybe you’re struggling also.  Well, I read something a couple of months ago that’s helped.  I read this, of all places, in a book called A Look at Life From a Deer Stand, by singer/songwriter Steve Chapman.  It’s a lyric that starts by telling parents that “the moment your child starts to walk, they start to walk away from you,” and then it concludes with this:

Can the sparrow ever learn to fly
If the nest is all it knows?
Can the arrow ever reach it’s mark
By remaining in the bow?
You have to let it go.

Sure, it’s a pretty simple lyric, but it illustrates what I think is a profound truth.  Every lesson and every struggle over the past eighteen years, from the gazillion skinned knees to that “why are girls so frustrating?” talk- all of it has been in preparation for this moment.  And, through God’s grace, I know Tyler is ready (even if his parents are not).

It’s time to let the arrow go. 

Monnie and Walt were talking about managing their mobile phone contacts list, so I decided that, since I hadn’t purged my phonebook since about 1995, I would delete my old contacts too.

Almost immediately I came across the name of my maternal grandmother, who we lost a few years ago at the age of 95.  I stared at the name for a while and thought how much I would love to just press “call” and talk with Grandma about Tammy, the kids, the price of gas…

Grandma Ethel, as we called her, was always smiling and she loved to laugh at my jokes.  One of my favorite things to do was to enjoy one of her home-cooked meals while talking and laughing with our family.  I remember once making her laugh after she took a sip of tea, and from then on, I would try to cause her to spit her tea out!

There were several other numbers in my phone for friends and family that were no longer around to talk to.  Tammy’s grandmother (she passed on in 2006), my favorite aunt (we miss you Aunt Alpha!), and a co-worker who died of cancer a couple of years back.

So, as I stared at Grandma’s name and number, I decided to try this some other time.  Deleting her number just seemed like saying that I didn’t want to talk to her any more.  I think I’ll leave some of these old numbers in my phone for just a while longer…