infobong.com

One of the things I enjoy most about going home for Christmas is casually bumping into people from my past. This morning at the liquor store, I saw my old Scoutmaster Mr. Horowitz, so I went up to him and said, "Hey Mr. Horowitz! It's Chris McConnell from Boy Scouts."
I finished my Eagle Scout badge when he was the Scoutmaster, so I thought he would remember me. I looked at me for a moment, smiled, and said, "Oh hey! I always mean to ask your parents about you when I see them. Where are you living these days?"
"Oh, I'm down in Austin, working on a PhD."
"Austin? That's the capital, right?"
"Yeah. I'm at the University of Texas."
"What field are you in?"
This is always a tough question for me to answer. Sometimes I just say "Communications," but I thought Mr. Horowitz would enjoy that I was doing something a little offbeat, so I said, "I'm in media studies. I study TV and movies and things like that."
He asked the inevitable, "What are you going to do with that?"
"Oh, I want to teach at the university level. Right now I'm teaching kids how to make Web pages and do computer animation. I'll teach kids how to make movies."
Mr. Horowitz is a CPA in Tulsa so that might have blown his mind a little.
My mom asked him what his kids are up to. His son is a physical trainer and his daughter is a social worker of some sort.
We wished him a merry Christmas, grabbed a bottle of champagne, and headed for the checkout.
At the checkout, he asked, "They have all kinds of programs at the universities, don't they? Now what university are you at again?"
A little confused, I said, "Um, The University of Texas at Austin?"
"Now that's just, 'Texas'?"
"Yeah, its 'Texas Longhorns' Texas," I explained, suddenly feeling self-conscious about the crimson "Oklahoma" sprawling across my hoodie.
I guess he's not a college football fan because that didn't seem to make sense to him. He just said, "They have all kinds of programs these days, don't they?"