Today Owl-Chatter celebrates its 100th post! It all started back on October 6th of last year. We are celebrating by sharing this story about Sam that I told at his wedding. Giving the guests access to free alcohol for an hour before I went on was a good idea.

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When my son, Sam, was in third or fourth grade, we went to parent/teacher night at his school.  His teacher was Mr. Elko, whom Sam (and we) liked very much.  The meetings took place in the school gym where rows and rows of tables were set up with seats for the teachers and parents.  There was also one area off to the side, cordoned off for privacy.  This is where they brought you, for example, if they found grenades or an AK-47 in your child’s locker, and you would meet people from Homeland Security who would explain that they have taken your child away and you would never see him again.

So we lined up outside the gym with all the other parents waiting our turn.  After 20 minutes or so, Mr. Elko came out, introduced himself, and invited us in.  Engaged in the appropriate small talk, we started walking towards the central area with all the tables, but Mr. Elko stopped us and said, “I think we might be more comfortable meeting in this private area,” and ushered us towards the cordoned-off terrorist place!  Yikes!  Linda and I gave each other a look, sat down behind the barriers with Mr. Elko, and braced for the worst.

“First of all,” Mr. Elko started off, “let me just say that Sam is a wonderful boy.  Everybody loves Sam.  He is smart, and funny, and a pleasure to work with.”  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I was thinking, “let’s get to the part with the grenades.” 

“But there was one unusual thing I thought I should bring to your attention.”

“Okay,” we said.

“In anticipation of this meeting, we asked the students to put together a sort of autobiography.  You know, do they have brothers or sisters, do they have pets, what is their favorite TV show, things like that.”

“Okay.”

“And the last question was, ‘What do you love most about your family?’  And most of the kids put down things like, ‘I love visiting grandma and grandpa because they give me so many presents.’  Or ‘I love when we go to the shore over the summer.’  Or ‘I love our trips to Minnesota to visit my cousins.’  You know, stuff like that.”

“Okay.  And what was Sam’s answer?”

“Yes.  Sam wrote: ‘What I love most about my family is that they keep the milk cold.’”

“Say what?”

Before repeating it, Mr. Elko showed us what Sam had written in his adorable 9-year-old’s handwriting.

“’What I love most about my family is that they keep the milk cold.’ Do you know why he might have written that?”

I shifted into defense-lawyer mode:  “Well, it is true.  We do refrigerate the milk in our home.”  But I conceded it was an unusual response.  We thanked Mr. Elko and assured him we would ask Sam about it when we got home.

Sam was up in his room when we got home and we told him the meeting went well, Mr. Elko thinks you’re terrific, blah, blah, blah.  “But then he showed us that little book you made:  What’s with the cold milk?  The thing you love most about us is we keep the milk cold?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sam explained.  “Earlier in the week I was visiting Greg for a play date and his mom came in and asked if we wanted a snack – some milk and cookies.” 

“Your favorite,” I noted.

“Right, my favorite,” Sam went on.  “But when she brought it in, the milk was warm.  It tasted horrible.”

“What did you do?,” I asked.

“Well, I didn’t say anything.  That would not have been polite.”

“Right!” I said.

“So I realized how good it was that in our house the milk is cold.”

“That’s it!?,” I said incredulously.  “That’s what you love most about our family?  That we keep the milk cold?!?  What about our visits to Lil and Irv and all the gifts they lavish on you?  What about the trip we took last summer to the Grand Canyon?  All the great stuff we do??  It’s the milk?

“Well,” Sam said, “it wasn’t just the milk – I couldn’t enjoy the cookies either.”

“Okay, okay,” I said resignedly.  “It’s okay, it’s fine.”

From that day on, in our house, leaving the milk out of the fridge for 3 extra seconds was the biggest crime you could commit.  We would scream at Caity – “What the hell is wrong with you!! Put the milk back!  Sam’s going to leave us!  It’s the only reason he loves us!”

Sam finished up through the Chatham school system and went on to Michigan for college.  On one of his visits home, I guess about 10 years after the Elko meeting, we were taking a walk on a beautiful fall day and the milk story came up again for a good laugh.  

“Admit it,” I said to Sam.  “You just didn’t understand the question, right?  You didn’t know it was about things like visits to grandma and vacations, right?”

But Sam stuck to his guns.  “No, no,” he insisted, “I understood the question completely,” he said.  “I thought about it carefully and that was my answer.”

I have been teaching law and taxation in the accounting program at Hunter College since 1986.  I like to tell jokes, riddles, and stories, at appropriate points in class, usually when we finish a topic and are ready to start a new one.  “It cleans the palate, like the wine tasters say,” I tell the class.  The students love the stories I tell about my kids and I make sure to find time each semester for Sam’s cold milk story.

So I was on the subway heading up to Hunter, and I was going over the milk story in my mind.  I thought I might tell it in class that day.  And it suddenly hit me what Sam’s answer really meant!  (It was about 17 years since the meeting with Mr. Elko:  I guess I’m a little slow.) 

I think Sam’s answer was his way of saying that what he loved most about his family was that we loved him, and took care of him, and worked as hard as we did to give him a good life and all the things he loved, and that he knew how lucky he was.  I think the warm milk at Greg’s house made him feel a little sad for Greg, as silly as that might seem.  And it made him appreciate all the little things he had in his life that he took for granted.  I think without realizing it, Sam was making the milk a metaphor for his happy childhood. 

What a wonderful answer!  So much richer, in its way, than listing a vacation or a pile of gifts.  What Sam loved most about his family was simply that we loved him, in a million ways, little and big, on a daily basis.  As we certainly did, and as we certainly do.   I am blessed to be reminded of that now, every morning, when I pour a little into my coffee (and hurry to put it back in the fridge).

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Good night everybody. I’m going to leave it at that for today — I’m too tired from my classes to put together any new nonsense. See you tomorrow!