My youngest daughter has been keeping her hair long for years. When she had to get a trim it was just to even things out a bit and cut off the split ends. Yes, I know about split ends. I have three daughters. Locks of Love is an organization that supplies hairpieces made of real hair to cancer patients under eighteen years old who have lost their hair. This organization also provides hairpieces to children with a medical condition that causes hair loss. (http://www.charityguide.org/volunteer/fifteen/locks-of-love.htm) Today my youngest daughter went and got a big haircut today. Locks of Love needs a full ten inches of hair in a ponytail. It’s really closer to eleven inches. My daughter came home so proud of herself but not as proud I am of her.

Today is Flag Day. I will always remember Flag Day for that monster thunderstorm back in 1989. The skies darkened around 4 PM that afternoon. A downburst in Chevy Chase and northwest DC downed trees and power lines. Some homes were without power for three weeks. As strong as those winds were that day what caused massive trees to be uprooted was the wet May. We received over seven inches of rain in May of 1989. Officially 7.77” of rain fell at National. Ironically that was only good enough for 5^th place all time. Winds in excess of 80 mph had no trouble uprooting mature trees in Chevy Chase and Northwest. One estimate calculated that nearly ten percent of all large trees in Northwest were taken down in the path of the winds. Damage was estimated at over 28 million dollars.

While we are on the subject of exams I had an English teacher in high school that was absolutely brilliant. The entire class failed the first written assignment. His name was Jay Tolson. Jay is now a senior writer at U.S. News and World Report. Check out some of his articles. When the final exam came around we were all relieved when he announced the final would be open book. We all breathed a collective sigh of relief. When you stop and think about it, life is an open book exam. The answers are all around us we just have to take the time to find them. If I am not sure about a term in meteorology I can just look it up. You know what ? That English final was one of the most difficult exams I ever took.

My girls are finishing school in a flurry of exams.  I can remember those days vividly. I still have dreams or nightmares about showing up for a midterm or a final without having attended one class or so much as cracked open one book of the assigned reading. Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld and the creator and star of Curb Your Enthusiasm, attended the University of Maryland. A good friend of ours was his roommate one year in College Park. I think they still have them today but do you remember the blue books ? These were blank books with blue covers used for essay type exams. Well, Larry David was living the nightmare. He showed up for a final not having attended a class or read one book. I cannot remember the subject but the story goes like this. He sat there watching everyone else write furiously. Fifteen minutes went by, and then another fifteen, then another fifteen until there was five minutes left in the class. With five minutes left he writes on the outside of the blue book "Book Two". Larry then writes "in conclusion…." and turns in his blue book. Well, you guessed it the professor assumed book one was lost and gave him a C or a B based on his of the cuff conclusion.

My daughters and my wife always accuse me of being too competitive. I can't help it. As I get a bit older, though my mind gives my body commands it can no longer execute.  My Dad's nickname was 'Topper' because he always came out on top. This is a man who skipped from sixth to ninth grade. Topper is my real name given to me after my Dad's nickname. I digress a bit. Do you remember the movie Meet the Fockers ? There is a scene when Bernie Focker (Dustin Hoffman) is showing Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) his son's room. The room is a shrine to his son, Greg's (Ben Stiller)" achievements". De Niro remarks that he did not know that ribbons were given out for twelfth place. I was emceeing a function the other day. My job was to ask kids from several schools questions. Each school had a team of students. I asked the first question and called on a team that gave the right answer. I turned to the organizer and said "that's one for the orange team". She quickly said " we are not keeping score". It seems to me that with all our twelfth place ribbons and no score keeping that we are not preparing our kids for the real world. Twelfth place will not land you that job. Surely, and please do not call me Shirley, there is a way of building confidence in our kids and keeping score.

I had the pleasure of attending a fund raiser for the Potomac Riverkeepers this past Sunday evening. This organization is about seven years old and does a fantastic job of patrolling the Potomac, and Shenandoah Rivers, for trash and pollution. It is difficult to believe that some of us need to be reminded about just what an important resource the Potomac River is to the Metro Area.  I met many dedicated workers and volunteers. (http://www.potomacriverkeeper.org/ ) Their link is also on our website under Living Green Now. They have made some real headway in stopping some companies along the Potomac and Shenandoah from releasing more pollutants into the rivers than allowed by the Clean Water Act of 1977.  I felt like I was in an environmental time warp. Back in the seventies, and I have mentioned this before, there was a strong environmental movement to clean up our planet. This movement and any of its momentum just seemed to disappear in the decade of the 1980s. Folks starting thinking about pollution a little in the nineties but it seems to have taken until the 21^st century to revive the movement again. It is a shame that we have lost thirty years. Back in the 1970s we were going to rid ourselves of our dependency on foreign oil and start cleaning up our air and water pollution. Sound familiar ? Anyway I think we are back on the right track. Also in conversations that night some of us took solace in the fact that for our children environmentalism is simply a way of life.