Liminal
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On Keepin It Real this week, Cam Marston makes some observations on this odd stretch of the calendar between Christmas and New Years. ----- This is a strange time of year every year. Kinda a liminal space between two big holidays. My instinct says I need to be working but the buzz of my email – a reflection of how busy my work world is – is so quiet. It’s hard to get anyone to make decisions right now. Beginning around December 18th, we enter the “let’s circle back on this next year” stretch of the calendar. We go from opening small talk with “So, are you ready for...
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Russians
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On Keepin' it Real this week, Cam takes us back to 1988 when he and his team lined up to upset the world order in an all out international rowing competition. It was one for the record books. ----- It was the spring of 1989 in Augusta, Georgia. I was a member of the Tulane University Rowing team and we were there to train for Spring Break. Crew teams from across the south and many of the elite crew teams from the northeast came to Augusta and this perfect stretch of the Savannah River to train during the week and race at the end of the week. A call went out that the organizers were throwing...
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Top Hat
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week's Keepin It Real, Cam Marston has just returned from a few days in Fort Lauderdale. It's a different world down there, Cam says. One that he might have envied at one point in his life. ------ My wife and I returned from Ft Lauderdale Saturday. We were there for a corporate event where I was giving a speech. My client generously offered an extra couple of nights in the host hotel and our room was on the 26thfloor overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. I watched the sun rise each morning as I sipped coffee and read. It began as a faint glow on the horizon to a disk coming out of the water....
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Regrets
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week’s Keepin It Real, Cam hopes you have no regrets from Thanksgiving. And if you do, that you learn from them. ----- Well, how’d it go yesterday? Any family flare ups? Any thoughts you wish you’d kept to yourself? Thanksgiving gatherings are famous for finding people’s boiling points and the election having been just a few weeks ago, some are still gloating and others still licking their wounds. Any regrets from yesterday? I heard Dan Pink speak last week at a conference in San Francisco. He’s a New York Times best-selling author and his most recent book is called The Power...
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'Tis The Season
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week's Keepin It Real, Cam Marston wants you to know he's NOT A CYNIC. But there are things this time of year that just kinda get to him... ----- ‘Tis the season for pensive and sappy messages. I’m so sorry but it’s true. They’re appearing in TV commercials, in client and vendor emails. Letters received in the mail about the joys of the season and now’s the time to be grateful and all that. I hate being a cynic, but it all appears to be virtue signaling to me. The people I know sending these messages are savage businesspeople and it’s like times running out and they’re...
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Cats
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On the way home from Oxford Saturday, Cam and his family stopped at a service station which led to him thinking about what NOT to put on his Christmas list. ----- For years I had my children convinced I was allergic to cats. I told them the reason we couldn’t have a cat as a pet was that my head would explode in a fiery ball. They wanted a cat. They asked regularly and finally accepted that I was allergic. I’m not allergic to cats. I’m not sure how they found out, but the cat-pet requests are back. Frankly, I want nothing more to do with anything that requires fuel or any sort of...
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Owls
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week's Keepin It Real, Cam tells us about some early morning attacks that are happening in his part of town. You'd be surprised at who is doing the attacking. ----- On the top of the Tangles Hair Salon on Bit and Spur Road in Mobile sits a hat and a headlamp with its light on. The headlamp is the type that an early morning jogger wears before the sun comes up. How it got up there is a heck of a story. Dennison Crocker jogs before daylight nearly every morning. His headlamp lights the way. One dark morning near Bit and Spur Road, a giant thunk, thud, and whoosh caught Dennison off...
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Can I Transfer?
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week's Keepin' It Real, Cam recalls a time when he was very much out of his element and was slightly afraid for his life. ----- About midway through the fourth quarter of Alabama’s loss to Vanderbilt, my son, who is a student at the University, sent me a text. It read, “Can I transfer?” I laughed. As a Tulane student we were fond of saying that on Saturdays in the fall, the New Orleans Superdome hosted a cocktail party for students to mix and mingle in the stands. Occasionally we would look up and notice that a football game was going on in front of us, but we never let it...
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FBI
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week's Keepin It Real, Cam Marston tells us about a bomb maker he met who sends the bombs he makes to his friends. Oddly enough, you and I should be happy he's doing it. ----- There’s a man on the outskirts of Mobile who spends a good part of his days making bombs. He uses items he finds around town and buys from retail stores. He then sends his bombs to his buddies to see if they can disarm them. It’s a game and, believe me, it’s a game you and I should be grateful they’re playing. I’m participating in a seven-week course called the FBI Citizens Academy. For two hours each...
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Infantilized
Keepin' It Real with Cam Marston
On this week's Keeping It Real, Cam Marston reacts to a book review about society and how we're raising kids. It's not the kids fault, Cam says, it's definitely the parents. ----- The Economist magazine reviewed a book called Infantilised: How Our Culture Killed Adulthood. The author, Keith Hayward, argues that western society is keeping kids less mature than previous generations. He tells of a young lady who insisted on spelling the word hamster with a P. When corrected repeatedly, she called her mom and put her on speakerphone to tell her boss not to be so mean. That’s laughable, but...
info_outlineMy wife and I were at Bama Bound this week for my son's college orientation.
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I am oriented. It’s official. My wife, my son, and I spent a day and a half in Tuscaloosa this week at Bama Bound – the school’s orientation for students and parents. Roll Tide! Or as my wife says “Rowl Tihhhdee, yall”. We heard a lot of that these past few days. I attended out of curiosity to see what a parent’s college orientation includes. Here’s my review. And since this commentary broadcasts from the University of Alabama, if you’re hearing it, it cleared the censors:
First, the director of campus security assured us there are many ways our cherub-like son could get arrested. He listed them all. There is no shortage. One included domestic violence from parents and children fist fighting on move-in day due to disagreements over dorm décor. Apparently, it’s happened. I’ll need to remember that in August when we move him in.
Next, there are 687 different student organizations including ones for watching Disney movies together and another made up of guys who gather solely to discuss trucks. “Rahwl Tidde.”
At one point in the business school session with my son, I suggested that this degree sure sounds like a lot of work and maybe we should just go to the book store buy a degree. He shook his head. Rolled his eyes.
I learned I must get my son’s permission to see his grades and to see where he’s spending our money. As the parent, the bill payer, the bailer-outer, the “hey, what’s going at school-er”, I’m not allowed to see his grades or how our money is being spent without his permission due to privacy laws.
In a parent’s only session, we had a group of students there to take any random questions we had. The room had some super-moms and Karens and some super-dads and we’ll call them Darrens. Super Karens and Super Darrens ran the show. They asked questions that I had never considered. We had to cut the session short. Suffice it to say that there are parents leaving no part of their children’s college experience for the children to enjoy or figure out on their own.
There is a part of me that wants to know where my son is and what he’s doing when he heads off to Tuscaloosa in August. There is another part that wants him to discover much of it on his own. For him to solve some problems and tell me about them when he comes home. So, somewhere between knowing everything and knowing nothing may be the Goldilocks zone. May be just right.
Leaving the event I stopped in the campus bookstore. There is nothing on God’s green planet that cannot be branded with an Alabama logo. At the register in a big cardboard bin were blank diplomas and a Sharpie marker. I’m now have a Doctorate in Average Parenting and he has a double MBA with a concentration in College Football. All for forty bucks. I’m going to display mine in my office and hold his until he gets that other degree in, I hope, four-ish years.
I’m Cam Marston and I’m just Keepin’ It Real. Rahl Tyde!