A Future In Chicago Politics

Thing 2 is now in Kindergarten, and with that comes an inevitability......school fund raisers. In the past, the first two weeks of school meant the arrival of Sally Foster catalogs, which then involved Thing 1 calling every aunt, uncle, grandparent, close friend, etc, and begging them to buy wrapping paper, disgusting chocolates, kitschy notepads, etc (one friend of mine once bought 20 notepads from Thing 1 at $5 apiece....6 years later he still has several left).

Now that Thing 2 is in school, however, the school has abandoned Sally Foster as their main fundraiser (I guess everyone around here has more wrapping paper than they know what to do with) and switched to magazine subscriptions. They send home a booklet with 10 address cards. You fill out the name and address of close friends, relatives, etc and this company mails them out, playing on sympathy, telling your friends/relatives/etc that if they subscribe to these magazines, a certain amount of that money will go to Thing 2's school. We did not put down friends who live near us because they have the same fundraiser, and we omitted one of my brothers because he has 2 kids, and that will just incite him to include us on his kids' fundraisers, so we were ultimately left with a 6 of the 10 cards in the booklet filled out.

The next day, Thing 2 came home with the booklet and explained that the teacher wanted her to fill out all 10, and she couldn't turn it in until they were all done. See, Thing 2 doesn't realize there's no punishment for not turning it in, in Kindergarten being told they could not turn something in was akin to a failing grade. So, we were left to fill out the remaining cards with some creativity (it was then we realized there were 11 in our booklet....did they add one as punishment?). So we included a friend of mine, and his wife....who lives at the same address. My wife's uncle lives in the same house as her grandparents, who are already getting one, but what the hell, he needs mail too, right? And so on.

While coming up with names, Thing 2 looked up at us, and very seriously asked, "Can't we also put down the names and addresses of people we know that died?"

This of course brought images to mind of Mayor Richard J. Daley's campaign slogans such as "Vote early, vote often," and voters in his ward having a home address that happened to be the same address as a cemetery.

On the one hand, I admire her clever problem-solving ability. On the other hand, I'm more than a little frightened of her potential as an evil genius. I guess it remains to be seen which way she goes. We'll know for sure if, during a soccer game, I hear her tell her teammates, "he pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. THAT'S the Chicago way."