Mango Minds

Halloween costume day at school is an example of what I think it means to innovate. Innovation begins with a problem, in this case, the problem of Halloween costume day and the dreaded question, “What do you want to be this year for Halloween?”   That a child can only dress up as one thing at a time is tragic.  As with any problem, you have to have the motivation and resource s to work on any solution… why invest the time and energy to create something new or different? Do you even have the material or intellectual resources necessary to solve it? In this case, motivation is clear—our children—but our resources are very different. Whether you set out to make a costume (and kudos to you parents who achieve that! WOW!), or did as I did and went to the Piex, Oca Loca, or Burbujas, you were motivated and used the resources at hand to end up with what was basically a garment and props. Now, I specifically use the description of garment and props, because these ...

My mother loves white beaches, rolling waves, and warm water, so each summer we joined the ranks of most of The South, packed up our car, and headed to Florida. Of course we always traveled by car, and, coming from personal experience, Texas is a large state, so these annual road trips meant some ten-plus hours nonstop that my brother, sister and I had to endure in the car together.   Sharing a confined space, such as a car, requires a great deal of self-control, specifically body control. And so, on one of these voyages, when my younger brother, probably 5 years old at the time, had some digestive issues that caused him to become gassy, it pretty much caused general olfactory discomfort for the whole family. Instead of stopping the car for a bathroom break, hating to lose-out on the good time that we were making on the road, my father’s response was what is now one of his classic fatherly lines, “Now, son, you can control that.” After her outburst of laughter, my moth...