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Davis Young
- Aug 16, 2022

DY: In Just a Few Words (#96)

It's always hard to let go.

We have three granddaughters, each terrific, smart and interesting in their own way. Halle is 26 and has a degree in musical theater performance. She teaches small children about music using Broadway Show tunes to reach them and recently booked her first post-COVID theatre role in Chicago. Izzy is 15, a high school sophomore at Hawken School, and a terrific French student. She’ll be going to France later this fall to experience living with a French family. And, before we get to the third granddaughter, a big shout-out to our grandson, Jake, who has a strong artistic bent. Jake is Izzy’s twin.

Our middle granddaughter, Carly, will be 23 at the end of this month. Later this week, Carly officially leaves the family nest in Michigan and is on her way to a new life in Richmond, Virginia. Yes, she does have a boyfriend in Richmond, but she is striking out on her own in a new job with new colleagues in a new city. Very smartly, she has already joined several groups that mix new, young people with each other and to all that Richmond has to offer. That, plus her job, plus selecting new items for her apartment means a busy Fall.

Carly is an alumna of Belmont University in Nashville, where she majored in music business. Thanks to COVID, she graduated in her parent’s living room. She then surveyed the job market and decided to stay at home until conditions improved for meaningful employment. In the meantime, she completed an MBA program at Wayne State University and held several part-time jobs, including working at two Detroit-area entertainment venues.

Lots of terrific memories as she sets out on a new journey. When Carly was about three, I had a bit of a coughing jag one day. With a very concerned look on her face, she came running up and asked, You O.K., Grandy? A couple more good coughs and I responded, I’m O.K., Carly. To this very day, if I cough or something goes down the wrong way, Karen will ask, You O.K., Grandy? And I will reply, I’m O.K., Carly.

In her early teens, Carly was the lead singer for an all-girl band called Unusual Symphony. They won their local Talent for the Title. Carly then won it as an individual performer a couple of years after that.

When she was just 16, Carly entered a competition at the annual Michigan State Fair. Lo and behold, she won the title of 2015 Michigan State Fair Superstar. Which led to our starring roles as youngest performer and oldest attendee at western Michigan’s Electric Forest music festival the summer before her 17th birthday.

We also can’t forget the summer Carly interned with her Uncle Denny, who was in the early stages of building a music festival business. She performed there, too - both as an individual performer and with her all-time favorite group at the time, Time Flies.

All this music stuff has upsides and downsides. The upside is that performing in public builds confidence that carries over into all aspects of life. The downside of performing is that for all but a tiny fraction of the thousands of talented people who want to become the next big thing, it’s an unrealistic dream. It’s o.k. to pursue it, but it’s probably best to know when to drop it so you don’t find yourself singing in some bar till midnight, then piling into a crummy van and traveling 300 miles to the next town to do the same thing the following day.

Fortunately, Carly was mature enough and smart enough to pull the plug on the performing thing. And, beyond that, she ultimately pulled the plug on the business side of music and entertainment as well. An 18-month forced break from working at music venues - thanks to COVID shutdowns - showed her that cleaning a venue until 2 a.m. was not for her.

So, you never know where your journey will take you. In Carly’s case, it’s Richmond, Virginia, where she will put her MBA to good use as a team member in a financial services firm. Kids grow up and move on. They spread their wings just like we did.

Please join me in wishing Carly great happiness going forward. And, let’s all take a moment to be thankful for our children and grandchildren wherever they are and whatever they’re doing to make their own mark in the world we all share.

I’m O.K, Carly and you’re going to be O.K., too.

DY: In Just a Few Words is a blog that comes out when something needs to be said or every Tuesday - whichever comes first. Davis Young is a communications professional who adds 50+ years of experience and perspective to issues of the day. His emphasis in DY: In Just a Few Words will be humor (a touch of sarcasm here, a pinch of facetiousness there...). Once in a while, he will touch on something a bit more serious - but hopefully not too deep or depressing.

This blog is a product of DY Author & Speaker LLC. Feel free to quote content with attribution. Respond. Agree. Disagree. Share the content with your friends. Heck - even invite him as a speaker for your group! Enjoy!

Davis Young
- Aug 9, 2022

DY: In Just a Few Words (#95)

EVERYONE deserves a trophy.

Lots has been written about so-called participation trophies for kids - much of it negative. They take away the hard work to be truly excellent. Kids are rewarded for being mediocre at best. These awards destroy the incentive for kids to become all they can be. Children don’t learn to compete and that will be bad for their future careers. On and on and on it goes, sometimes laced with angry political statements from the extremes of our society.

Back in the day (think early 1970s), there was a guy in our neighborhood (we’ll call him Coach) who really liked kids. This was a neighborhood with lots of young families and there was an abundance of children. Kids who played outside, often unsupervised, until dusk. There was very little traffic on our street in those days, so playing IN the street was also not frowned upon like it is today.

Lots of weekend days (and sometimes after dinner on weeknights) Coach and his two kids would start tossing a football around in the street. Very soon an avalanche of neighborhood children would join the fun. There were only two rules. When Coach yelled CAR, these kids knew they were to get up on the tree lawns immediately and stay there until the street was once again clear. And no one dared to knock over Coach’s beer. That resulted in multi-game suspensions worthy of the NFL.

So what was this all about? Football for little girls and little boys and anyone else with the courage to show off their talents at catching the brilliant passes coming from the arm of the street’s world-class quarterback. Simple, easy tosses for five-year-olds. Learning routes and the importance of always keeping your eye on the ball for the older, bigger ones. Probably good things for children to learn at an early age.

It wasn’t a game, it was just a learning experience where a good play was appreciated and sportsmanship was always stressed. It was not at all unusual for 30 kids to be in the action waiting patiently in line till they were the next boy or girl up. Never any sassy talk. No parents interfering, telling Coach how to do his thing better. Just a large bunch of kids and their street coach and supportive parents.

At the end of one season, Coach decided to award each kid with a trophy - the same trophy in every respect, but with an individualized marker attached to the trophy recognizing their improvement. Best catch. Longest catch. Shortest catch. Great improvement. Best route run. First catch ever. Rookie of the year. You get the point. Every kid was recognized in a positive way for doing something right.

I’m sure you have figured out by now that I was that coach who bought all those trophies and made sure every kid got their 15 seconds of fame. Despite public criticism of every kid gets a trophy, I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. Those little rascals loved streetball and so did I. They played nicely and felt good about each other and most importantly about themselves. They were all winners. What’s so bad about that?

Both my kids were participants. It didn’t hurt them a bit. And, among those who benefited was yours truly. I got a lot out of neighborhood streetball - witness the fact that I have given new life to this memory from 50 years ago or so.

It was all about fundamentals, focus and fun.

I miss it. And, I sincerely apologize to any kid who's had a miserable life because I once gave them a trophy for just being part of our streetball bunch.

Bad me.

Davis Young
- Aug 2, 2022

DY: In Just a Few Words (#94)

Wish I could say I was one of them.

Do you remember the really cool kids from high school?

In my world, they were so cool they even spelled it Kool, as in the brand of cigarettes they carried around in the rolled-up sleeves of their t-shirts (unless, of course, they smoked Pall Mall, Chesterfield, Old Gold’s, or Camels). Those – weeds as they were called back then – and an occasional beer were the drugs of choice for the cool kids in the 1950s. Twenty five cents a pack vs. about $7.00 these days. The kids from better-off families had lighters, heavy silver lighters you had to hand feed with fuel. The kids from poor families just looked around for matches and could often be seen catching a light off a friend’s cigarette.

In four years of high school I never heard the word marijuana mentioned even once. For that matter, I didn’t hear it during four years of college.

What defined a cool kid? They were all guys. There were no cool girls in the ‘50s. How can you be cool when you wear saddle shoes and skirts below your knees?

Guys who were cool were all car guys. They had fast rides. They thought kids with bicycles were something to sneer at. The cool guys' cars went through a lot of tires. That happens when every time you start up from a light or stop sign is a moment to celebrate by peeling out. There were a lot of tire marks on the streets of my New Jersey hometown. Probably still are.

You could also identify a cool car by the fact it had no muffler. It made more noise than a 747 taxiing down the main runway of Newark Airport. When two cool cars got side-by-side and accelerated the noise was terrifying.

The cool guys mostly (maybe all) had haircuts that were called a DA. That’s a family-friendly term for duck’s a–. This blog is intended for family consumption, so you’ll have to fill out the rest of the meaning of DA.

Something else about cool guys was that they never dated girls who wore glasses. In today’s vernacular and to make a bad pun, that was not a good look. A long ago philosopher put it perfectly when he said, Guys never make passes at girls who wear glasses. Saddle shoes and glasses were the kiss of death and pretty much eliminated the possibility there was a cool guy waiting for you out there. You can only imagine the friction this caused in families that had a cool son with a loud car and a glasses-wearing daughter who was a good student. And, I forgot to mention that high school girls are always smarter than high school guys. Hopefully with the help of good counseling, those families have worked through their issues by now.

Confession time.... I smoked in high school and way, way past high school. But I was far from a cool kid. I’d hide a Pall Mall in my wallet, go off to school, sit on it all day, then light up when school was out. Flat as could be, but still very smokeable. That was the extent of my coolness. I got my first car as a sophomore in college. It had a perfect muffler. Purred like a kitten. It was a huge, black four-door sedan that looked more like a funeral home vehicle than a cool kid car.

Today, I have redefined the word cool to fit my lifestyle. I quit smoking 37 years ago at the behest of my two children. I have been married for a long time to someone who wears glasses. I drink really cheap wine. We drive two Fords. We live in a semi-rural setting adjacent to several lovely suburbs. By any reasonable measure, I am a cool adult, albeit my coolness is slowing down now that I’m 83. I’m working hard to be the coolest guy ever, or at least the coolest guy to ever reach 100.

At the moment – just so you know – I’m considering going back to high school for an advanced degree. Is that a great idea or what? I think I’d fit right in.

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