Towernaut and Tree Sloths

Fellow blogger JayCee posted some photos on Monday from a trip she took to Costa Rica several years ago. Her post included pictures of sloths, which triggered something in my memory that led me to go burrowing into a box of old documents and other items in one of our closets. Here is some of what emerged from that burrowing; the sloth connection will soon become apparent.

I found the certificate above, which was given to eight-year-old me during an elementary school field trip to a Florida Division of Forestry fire lookout tower. These metal towers used to be found all through rural Florida, where the forest rangers could use them to spot wildfires. This one was known as Gower Tower, near the small community of Gowers Corners (which is now heavily developed suburbia, but back then was little more than an ancient gas station and a lumber mill).

As you can see, I was  deemed a "Towernaut" for making the "grueling ascent" to the top of the tower -- along with my entire class, I'm pretty sure. Did I ever take advantage of the "rights and privileges thereunto appertaining," whatever they were? (They also misspelled my name, which hopefully won't nullify my rights and priveleges, which I fully intend to exercise at some point in the future.)

Note Smokey the Bear in the lower right corner, reminding us that "Only YOU can prevent forest fires."

I also found this fancy parchment-paper certificate for "community and civic participation" during the Bicentennial. What on earth I did to deserve this, I have no idea. Again, it was probably some class project and we all got one. I'm not sure why it came all the way from Atlanta. I think the Constitutional Press had something to do with the newspaper, which was known at the time as the Atlanta Constitution. It later merged with a competitor to become the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, or AJC.

Dave and I have often wondered at many modern schools holding commencement ceremonies to mark students' passage from elementary to middle school, or from middle to high. I'm sure I have confidently exclaimed, "We never had anything like that when I was a kid!" And yet I found this certificate of promotion from the sixth grade -- so apparently we did get some kind of recognition. I'm pretty sure there was no ceremony, certainly nothing involving parents. I'd remember if my mom or dad darkened the door of the school, because that was a rare occasion!

OK, now we're coming to the sloths.

I found my collection of buttons and badges, including two I had made in our high school library featuring tree sloths. My erstwhile high school girlfriend, Barbara, had adopted the panda bear as a personal "spirit animal" -- she even used to sign things PQB, for Panda Q. Bear. That year, our school library got a machine that could custom-make buttons -- as I remember, we could bring a picture or message on a circular piece of paper, pay something like 50 cents, and the librarian would turn it into a button. Barbara had a button made featuring a picture of a panda bear she'd cut from a magazine.

I decided I needed a spirit animal too, and I chose the sloth. I'd like to say that I was trolling Barbara -- that I had some awareness of how silly this whole spirit-animal thing was, and thus deliberately chose a modest underdog of an animal as my totem. But I don't think I was that smart. I think I just liked sloths.

I used to wear those sloth buttons on my jacket, which must have perplexed my classmates, to the extent that any of them noticed.

The other buttons are just things I picked up here and there. The Nixon button came from a flea market, purchased as a kind of joke (as Nixon was thoroughly disgraced by that time). I genuinely was a Reagan/Bush fan when I was in high school, though I ultimately wound up voting for Mondale in 1984 -- me and about twelve other people.

A few years later, I was much more politically active and actually campaigned for Dukakis at my university, as well as Steve Pajcic, a Democratic candidate for Florida governor. In both cases, we know how well that went.

The anti-George W. Bush button is something I picked up when I lived in New York, during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, which I was steadfastly against. Remember when George W. Bush seemed like the worst thing that could possibly happen to the American presidency? Ah, those were the days.