A Prologue: "You Need to Have Your Head Examined"

Let me begin by saying I need to “have my head examined.” From a very young age my mother would repeat this little mantra about me every time I did something absurd. For instance, when I was four years old while playing with my action figures I decided to poke one’s head through the screen in the window. “Are you nuts? What’s wrong with you? You need to have your head examined.”

Or there was the time I managed to clothesline myself on the actual clothesline in the back yard while running laps around the yard like a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit when I was eight. “Is something wrong with you? Didn’t you look where you were running? You need to have your head examined.”

It was always either that or, “If you keep it up we’re going to return you to Doctor Mutch,” the family doctor who delivered me and for whom my mom worked. I always pictured myself bundled up in a little basket, not unlike Dorothy’s from The Wizard of Oz, neatly nestled beneath the door frame of the doctor’s office. Of course when my brother and sister were born, I fondly imagined them bundled up in the same picnic basket, wrapped in a red-and-white, plaid tablecloth on the steps of Doctor Mutch’s office, the winter snow falling softly on their twin, newborn cheeks.

Lately it seems as if I’ve been giving my mother a whole new wave of reasons to tell me I need to have my head examined: college debt, my insane work schedule, the beach house I decided to start renting with my friends at the age of twenty-five, and most recently, my decision to join People to People Student Ambassadors as a leader. “You’re going to take three weeks out of your summer to travel around God-knows-where with kids you don’t know instead of working a summer job? You must be nuts. You need your head examined.”

I got involved with People to People through an ex-student who used to do the program. They basically send tons of high school, middle school, and grade school kids abroad every summer, and send a handful of teachers along with them for free. As those of you who are teachers know, travel is often very expensive and not part of a teacher’s annual budget. So I probably do need to have my head examined, but I figured, “Hey, it’s a free way to see the world.”

At first I was scheduled to take a high school group to Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Russia. When not enough high school kids were enthralled by the beauty of Estonia and 60 degree temperatures in Eastern Europe, I was reassigned to take a middle school “Sports Leadership” group to the South Pacific.

I personally think the trip is going to rock, but my mom continues to think I need my head examined. I guess taking 17 hour flights with sixth, seventh, and eighth graders isn’t everyone’s idea of a vacation, but delivering fruit baskets isn’t exactly my idea of a great summer, either.

For the record I don’t think I can fit in a picnic basket any longer, and I’m not so sure Doctor Mutch would want me back anyway. Who would want someone who should have his head examined?