Most of what I pretend to know in life can be traced to a sitcom. If it isn’t Seinfeld, it’s Mary Tyler Moore. If it isn’t Sex in the City, it’s The Brady Bunch.

That’s probably why, when my daughter came home from her first day of high school today and listened wistfully to her brother talking about his first day in junior high, I thought of the Brady Bunch episode when Marcia pretended she was sick on her first day of high school.

Frankly, I was surprised Carol and Mike fell for this but of course, Carol called the doctor, who of course made a house call and diagnosed, with a hearty chuckle, first-day-of-school-itis. You could hardly blame Marcia. A big wheel in junior high, she was now attending a high school where apparently she was the only student from her entire district and thus knew no one.

I’d be sick, too.

When her parents made her go the next day, her brother Greg said he’d introduce her to his cool, football player friends who all looked 35, right down to the receding hairlines. But Marcia was suitably impressed and trying too hard to be mature, she embarrassed Greg by telling one of his friends that she looked forward to the “intellectual stimulation” of high school.
(Note: While I am embarrassed that I remember this right down to the exact dialogue, I am also secretly proud and would be willing to bet big money that I am right.)

Anyway, Greg comes home humiliated at his wacky sister’s behavior – or maybe it’s her bell bottoms. Kidding, of course. Marcia was wearing a tasteful skirt and pumps. And he urges her to be herself, which she agrees to do, going back the following day and signing up for all eight clubs in the school until she finally tells her parents she has to be herself, so she’s sticking with the rugby club. Kidding again. She drops everything but ceramics as I recall.

I’ll have to remember to ask Amanda if her high school has a ceramics club and tell her to check the bulletin board.

You would have thought Greg would’ve been a little more patient with his sister, given his first day of high school a couple seasons earlier resulted in him demanding that his father give up his den and make it into a mod bachelor pad. Greg, too, was trying to be too mature, translating to his outfit of fringed vest, headband and shades, and he, too, was laughed off campus.

I find these stories to be instructive and am sure my kids will take some important lessons from them as they transition to their new schools.
And in the absence of a sitcom, I can always reflect on my own childhood, which often was funnier than The Brady Bunch.

Aside from the kid on the kindergarten bus who threw up out the window, I remember one other first day — coincidently my first day of high school — when I called my good friend Bari the night before to ask what she was going to wear.

This was of critical importance because designer jeans were just coming into vogue and it would be a little daring to wear them on the first day of school when all of our mothers would be horrified that we weren’t more dressed up. Bari assured me that the jeans would be saved for the second day of school, so I wore my powder-blue polyester pants with the narrow glittery belt and shimmery polyester blouse with the seascape design. Stunning, huh?
Except that Bari, in an apparent last-minute conference call with every girl from our junior high, elected to go with the Gloria Vanderbilt’s, thus leaving me humiliated. Really needed texting.

Despite all of this, I stuck with Bari the following day and when it was time to find our bus home, I decided that I would wait for her, even though she had a tenth-period class and I was finished after ninth. It was either that or board the wrong bus and end up having dinner in Morton Grove (not my suburb).

Trying to be casual, I passed by her class to make sure she was there and that I wouldn’t miss her when she came out. Then, with nothing else to do and still concerned I might miss her, I passed by her class again. Over the next 50 minutes, I would circle the first floor of the school and pass by the open door of her classroom approximately 43 more times until every kid as well as the teacher became acutely aware of me and giggled every time I walked by (naturally, I did not know this until Bari came out afterward and told me).

I am thinking that if my children are at all anxious over these next few days and weeks that these stories might calm their nerves and let them know that we’ve all been there and that eventually we all adjust and move on.
And maybe if they’re lucky, they won’t remember it in vivid detail 35 years from now.

I realize it seems like an awfully suspicious coincidence that the Cubs disappeared at about the same time my blog did last week, but I can assure you one has nothing to do with the other.

I can say this because while I grew up in the northern suburbs surrounded by Cubs fans, I was, by birth, a White Sox fan and therefore have never been privy to that particular brand of angst.

Other kinds of angst, for sure. But not that. And so I have observed each season as the Cubs created new and usually exciting forms of losing with a mixture of awe and yes, empathy for my fellow Chicago fans. It’s not that I haven’t, at various times of my life, been wracked with frustration over the Sox or the Bears, the Bulls or the Hawks. But no one knows despair like that of the Cubs fan.

If I had any doubt of this, my friend Jerry pretty much convinced me with a recent e-mail that both moved me and made me want to get him professional help. The Cubs were in mid-freefall last week and he was giving me his opinion on their current state, which then gave way to his perspective on life as a Cubs’ fan.

I feel I must share this, in part because it is such an exquisite slice of Cubdom and in part because, if you think you have problems, this might cheer you up:

I am convinced that my entire being was shaped in 1969.  I was 13.  I was so into the Cubs and then the final couple of weeks of the season hit and my life began to change.  I firmly believe that my outlook on life was planted in those memories.
 [Jerry referring here to the Cubs’ collapse to the eventual world champion New York Mets]

I wait for the other shoe to drop.  I look at the half-empty glass and know that at any minute that glass is going to fall and break.  I know that the promise of tomorrow is all we can hold out for.  I know that yesterday was crappy, today will probably be just as bad, but tomorrow will be better.  Then tomorrow will come and it will be today and the cycle will repeat all over again.
 

Then we somehow got to 2003 and I remember being at the playoff games and feeling like I was kicked in the head. Too painful to go back.
 
[Jerry referring here to the Cubs’ collapse — just five outs short of their first World Series since 1945 — to the eventual champion Florida Marlins]
 

And another year goes by and another year of season tickets.  And another year of hope.  And then another “wait until next year”.  Next year will be better. 

Then next year is this year and next year will be better.  It repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats.  I can’t stop the madness.
 
Dr. Missy, what can I do?   
 
Dear Jerry,
 

Though I am not, by trade, a psychologist, I feel I could be one if I really wanted to be. Thus, I feel more than qualified to address your problem.
You should have pulled the plug in ’69.

I realize this is like asking most Cubs fans to have a sex-change operation even though they aren’t inclined to switch to the other gender; that it’s not that easy to change one’s orientation from birth. But something should have told you at 13 that you were headed down a dangerous and self-destructive path.

I realize that’s a tender age to make such an important determination, but just think of how your life could have been entirely different. You could have cheered for slugger Dick Allen (just don’t call him Richie)  in the early 70s; could have enjoyed the “South Side Hitmen” wearing the most hideous uniforms in the history of organized sports in the late 70s; then gloried in Tony LaRussa’s team’s “Winning Ugly” in capturing the ’83 division title.

In the 90s, you could have actually watched baseball in a sparkling new stadium (provided you didn’t try to do it from the upper-deck seats, thus contracting altitude sickness); seen some more uniforms come and go; and observed Ozzie Guillen develop from a crazed young shortstop into a crazed young manager.

And finally Jerry, in 2005, you could have celebrated a WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONSHIP. A World Series, Jerry.  That’s when the two best teams in baseball, one from the National League and one from the American League (your Chicago White Sox) meet to determine the WORLD SERIES CHAMPION.

Since you are my friend, I may have even brought you a souvenir from that series, which I not so proudly swiped from outside the winning lockerroom in Houston. You see, I knew that my brothers being Sox fans, would appreciate a little trinket of some kind. So breaking every sportswriting code and all journalistic ethics, I removed a used champagne bottle from a dumpster and smuggled it back home, still sticky and smelly and carrying germs of unknown origin.

I brought it to show to my daughter’s fifth-grade class and then I kept it because I thought it was cool and my brothers didn’t seem all that thrilled or grateful enough at the gesture. So Jerry, I probably wouldn’t have ended up giving it to you. But I may have showed it to you and then you too could have shared the thrill that my family and I experienced.
You could, on this very night, be watching the White Sox lose another heartbreaker to those no-good, nickname-stealing, bad accent Boston Red Sox. But at least the White Sox are still in the playoff hunt. Tonight, your Cubs beat one of the few teams in baseball worse than yours, the Washington Nationals, which means that despite the fact that they’re still nine games out of first place in the division with only 38 games to go, you might have just a teeny sliver of hope again. You know you do, Jerry.

And hope is never good. You said it yourself.
It’s madness.

Fall is a strange and harrowing time for me.

My birthday is in fall, but I’ve never had a problem with my birthday except that one moment of panic I had when I turned 27 and couldn’t remember how old I was until I did the math.
Football season is in the fall, which, given that I live in Chicago might explain this feeling of impending doom I have been experiencing lately. But then the Bears are full of hope, what with their new quarterback and everything, so that doesn’t really explain it.

Maybe it’s all this talk about superbugs, but I don’t think so since I have no idea what that means.

Nope, I think it’s just fall and the knowledge that no longer will my biggest decision each day revolve around which popsicle flavor to choose (no wait, that’s my son Alec’s biggest decision). But it’s definitely school starting and everything that implies – the hectic schedules, the responsibilities, the lack of family fun time (and oh, what a day that was).

With one child starting high school and the other, junior high, in a matter of days (see, now I’m nervous I’m going to forget which day it is, and my kids will miss their first days of school), there is anxiety aplenty. I believe this dates back to my first days of school and again, it’s probably my parents’ fault.

They never sent me to nursery school as they called it then. Either they forgot because I was the youngest of four or more likely, my mother did not want me to leave home. As a result, I was hardly prepared for my first day of kindergarten, which is why I remember everything in such vivid, terrifying detail, beginning with Ed, the bus driver, peeling me off my father’s leg and continuing as we pulled up to school and someone whose name I had not yet learned, throwing up out the window.

School is simply nerve-wracking, period. My brother Barry, at 57, still regularly has that dream where he can’t find his class, shows up late, finds out it’s the wrong class but that he has a final he didn’t study for. I have that dream too. I believe it’s the classic dream of an overachiever. Either that, or an obsessive-compulsive neurotic, I’m not sure which one.    

My children appear to be OK, though my husband and I did a little checking and discovered that
ours was not the only incoming freshman who forgot her name when going to pick up books. I would have made fun of her, but Rick reminds me he had to accompany me to Northwestern that same day last week to help me park. Really, that’s not true. I could have parked alone. But it was scary finding the right building where I had to bring forms for a class I’m taking.

I find I am almost paralyzed these days by simple tasks, which explains the weeklong dearth of blogs (my apologies and thanks if this caused great concern or threw anyone off their normal routines). For a while there, I thought I was done, had nothing significant left to say anymore. Then, thank goodness, I realized that having nothing significant to say had never stopped me before and in fact, goes right to the heart of what my blogs are all about.
Furthermore, I think I need these blogs more than ever as my anchor and a sort of repository of insignificance as life becomes that much more complicated.

I am quite sure, in the coming weeks, that this faculty class I am taking will cause me great angst. I should mention the entire class only lasts 10 days, but they’re accelerated days and since I did not understand the course outline, I am a bit concerned.
Also, in case either child decides for the first time to ask me, and not their father, for any guidance on homework, this could cause some anxious times as well. The books look very scary this year.

Then there are the Bears, which have always made me a little nauseous. And this continued quest toward re-invention, which people now want me to actually speak about as if it is
something I have figured out.

This is what I wanted, I keep telling myself. Back when the Tribune told me that in a cost-cutting move, they didn’t want me anymore but then started hiring people and finding other ways to spend the money they had saved, and all I could see was a big void in my future, I wanted to be busy. And honestly, there wasn’t a single day, including the day I left, that I haven’t been busy.

I am, in fact, much busier than I have ever been. And happier, I should add.
This much I have figured out.
The fall? Not yet.

I wonder if this happens to men, too.

I wonder if they can report on stories without at some point filtering them through their perspective as parents.

I can’t help it.

When Patrick Kane said today that the worst part about his arrest a little more than a week ago, was his family seeing him in handcuffs, his voice caught in his throat. And my throat closed up.

Kane is the 20-year-old Blackhawks’ star accused, along with his cousin, of attacking a cab driver in Buffalo over what the driver initially claimed was a dispute over 20 cents in fare. We still haven’t heard Kane’s side of the story and he said Monday that he hopes we never will because that will mean charges were dropped.

Clearly, there is a big part of the story still missing because even alcohol does not explain why a multi-millionaire athlete whose behavior has never before been questioned, would suddenly beat someone up over 20 cents.  

But all I could think about as Kane answered his questions, was how his mother felt when reporters called her cell phone to ask about her son’s arrest, and her biggest problem before that was getting him to stop playing with his mouth guard.

I pictured the first time Kane faced his parents and told them his side of the story and no matter how innocent he thought he was, knowing how destroyed they were seeing their son in handcuffs.

When Kane looked into the cameras and spoke into the microphones and said, “My family didn’t raise me that way,” I had a feeling that’s what they told him.

I thought of Kane’s three younger sisters, who make scrapbooks and “Welcome Home” signs every time he comes back to Buffalo, who struck deals with him when they were little – “We’ll play hockey with you, if you play dolls with us” – and how they must have felt when they first heard the news about their big brother.

And I thought of his grandpa, who lives next door to his parents’ house and who played cards with his grandson and laughed and who told Patrick he “added a couple years to his life” just by what he accomplished.  

I wondered how many people in the Kane’s South Buffalo neighborhood conspicuously stopped talking when they saw Donna Kane in the produce section of the grocery store last week; and how many who thought nothing of coming to their house at all hours to ask for autographs and mementos of the local hero, now whispered and pointed at the house.

I thought about Kane working out at home last week because he didn’t want to go to the gym. And I wondered how you go from the top of the world to sitting up at night wondering how quickly your entire world can change.

I wondered how a parent deals with something like this and how you never stop worrying, even when they’re 20. Maybe especially when they’re 20.

And I wonder how I can ever report a story like this one and forget I’m one of them.  

My husband Rick is, all in all, a good sport. He barely blinks when people call him by my father’s name, “Mr. Isaacson.” He knows to double the time I tell him I’ll be finished writing. And he hardly ever complains when he accompanies me to sporting events only to never actually attend the actual sporting event. 

Today, he came with me to Bourbonnais and Bears training camp. And because, if you happen to read my blogs regularly (and, by the way, thank you so much for that) you already know how I feel about training camp, I will write this blog through Rick’s eyes.

Today, Rick’s eyes told him that most football players are jerks, only he used a worse word.

Fans obviously have a different experience than journalists do. Granted, I was working today, but while I was interviewing players, eating lunch in an air-conditioned cafeteria, writing in an air-conditioning press room and watching practice from along the sideline, Rick was sweating along with the thousands of other spectators, my son Alec and a few of his friends, behind the ropes.
(A quick disclaimer here to note that my husband, while possessing many manly traits, is not one of those men who relishes sweating with thousands of strangers.)

Still, all that was fine and he even managed to squeeze in a trip to Culver’s for one of their famous butterburgers (OK, tasty, but they’ve got to change the name). The part that had him complaining later was what he considered rude behavior by the players.
(Another disclaimer here to note that my husband, while perfectly secure in his own right, still has a bit of a problem every time an athlete of even superb ability turns down a multi-gajillion dollar contract to sign one for 10 bucks more. I’ve tried to explain the concept of fair market value to him but he doesn’t want to listen.)

The main objective today, besides eating butterburgers and watching the Bears run through drills from a vantage point in which he could only see quarterback Jay Cutler’s socks, was to help the boys get autographs.

He didn’t really even have to help, just mostly point them in the right direction and make sure they didn’t get trampled in the process.

His opinion is that this is a spectator-friendly event. Fans attend for free. There are interactive games for kids to play. Adequate parking. And there really is plenty of space to watch practice (I, personally, do not think he had to watch Jay Cutler’s socks and could have tried harder to improve his vantage point).

There is also lots of room to spread out along the ropes where players leave the field and try to collect autographs. The Bears even set up a special autograph area for kids 12-and-under, where players have to pass through to leave the field.

But in the 45 minutes Rick spent observing, only a handful (maybe five or six) of the 78 players on the field bothered – and this is a direct quote from Rick –  “to pause long enough to smile, say ‘hi,’ wave or high-five, much less sign an autograph.”

Many ran past the kids. “Couldn’t they have just slapped hands or something while they ran past?” Rick suggested.

New Bears quarterback Jay Cutler sped by in his golf cart, though I don’t think he can technically be ripped for speeding since he was not driving.

“All the kids were fenced in this special area,” Rick said. “All they really wanted was to be acknowledged.”

If I didn’t think he would turn cranky, I might suggest to my husband that most probably expected more than an acknowledgement, but I agree that a passing wave would’ve been nice.

All that said, there were some very nice players, the names of whom did not surprise me. Tight end Dez Clark, who had his adorable little girls with him, still signed autographs for at least 20 minutes. Running back Kevin Jones took off his cleats and tossed them to two grateful kids (I’m assuming cleat side up as Rick did not mention any bloodshed). Alex Brown was terrific, giving Alec’s friend Joe the thrill of a lifetime when he handed him his sweaty, practice-used glove, complete with autograph (Joe does not have the same aversion to other people’s sweat as Rick does).

Joe also finagled an Adewale Ogunleye signature for their pal Jake. And third-string quarterback Brett Basanez spent considerable time signing autographs, among them for Alec and Zack, and perhaps introducing himself to the kids in the process.

In my opinion, roughly six percent of the team was not a bad turnout. But Rick is not buying it.

He may be a good sport, but he’s a tough customer.