It is amazing to me what some people publicize about themselves. If you watch the Today Show on NBC, for instance, you can see some curious and sometimes bizarre signs that people who gather outside the studio in New York City hold up. There are the birthday, wedding, and engagement signs, the signs that announce where the person holding the sign is from, the birth announcement signs, the greetings to friends and relatives, etc. The other day a child in the front row held up a sign that said “I broke my collar bone.” Now that is something we all need to know and we should be grateful to a nationally televised program to bring it to us.
That incident reminded me of the time my family and I and some friends were taking a walk through a residential neighborhood in State College, Pennsylvania. The neatly groomed lawns in front of the upper-middle class houses were terminated by a sidewalk that traversed across successive driveways. In one of the driveways a boy of perhaps four or five years of age was riding his tricycle up and down and in circles. As he saw us approach his driveway he wheeled about sharply and headed in our direction, his face aglow with joy and excitement. As he was peddling furiously toward our little group of strollers he shouted with obvious glee: “I've got diarrhea!” We didn't know whether to pity him, congratulate him or just ignore him; we did the latter. I wonder if his parents ever took him to Rockefeller Plaza to watch the making of the Today Show – with a sign.
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