Tag Archives: boys

The spirit is unwilling

Every so often, our schools have “Spirit Week.” Students are encouraged to dress within a common guideline each day.  I’m unsure what spirits they’re conjuring, but it hardly seems like school spirit. One day is for wearing school colors, but the other four could more accurately be termed “Dress Up Week.”

Our older two boys were, to put it mildly, never very keen on Spirit Week. Big Brother tried it in kindergarten. After one Spirit Week, the thrill was gone. It was too much like homework.

Buster was never interested. If you’d asked him about Spirit Week, Buster would have replied, “I don’t know what it is; I don’t know when it is; and I don’t care.” Maybe you can see why Buster is a Gen X dad’s delight.

Big Man, the youngest of the three, is more interested in Spirit Week, though not fully indoctrinated into the cult of uniformity. He does not always observe a full Spirit Week, but on occasion he remembers that he’s supposed to wear a tie-dye T-shirt on a given day.

Unfortunately, he remembers this within two minutes of needing to leave for school.

Also unfortunate, his dad ranks Spirit Week low on the list of events worthy of last-minute disruption. His mom, though more sympathetic to the cause, is not prepared for an unexpected deep dive into the closet when she’s holding car keys in her hand.

This leads to Spirit Morning Strife.

Exhibit: Thursday, September 24, 2026.

At school commute -3 minutes, I was informed that it was “Anything but Backpack” day.

When I was a kid, nobody wore a backpack. We carried only what we needed at any given time. I wish it were that way still, but it’s not. Young hermit crabs, carry all their belongings on their backs. I don’t love it, but I’ve accepted it. A backpack is core to the routine.

Except this day. With tardiness looming, our kid announced that he must transport everything in his backpack to school in something that was not his backpack.

Once we get the laptop, gym shoes, and sweatshirts packed, we can move on to the real school supplies.

I told him he had two minutes to find a substitute.

“Daa’ aad!” he whined in the tone that attempts to dump responsibility for his fiascos on my shoulders.

I said he might better just use his backpack, but he was invested in this ill-conceived special occasion.

He tried a picnic cooler, which fit his water bottle and nothing else.

“Use a garbage bag,” I said.

He shuddered and attempted a wicker basket, which was too awkward even for him.

Mom appeared, noted the spilled backpack contents, and raised her voice. After the squall, she used some mom magic to produce, from thin air, a huge food service bag with straps.

Big Man frowned as his parents’ faces told him this was his last option.

The sulking boy loaded school supplies into the bag. He was last seen lumbering behind and tripping over the unwieldy parcel that would make him late for this episode of Spirit Week.

I’m glad I was young at a time when our schools left us responsible for our own morale.

That was now; this is then

In June, 2013, I posted this: Eavesdropping on the class of 2026. It was a conversation between Big Brother and his best friend, two months before they started kindergarten. Last week, Big Brother graduated high school.

In 2013, the class of 2026 was a nebulous concoction of little children. It was little more than an idea about an entity so far away as to be thought of as infinitely distant.

Last week the class of 2026 wrote its name in stone, when Big Brother and his classmates walked across the stage.

The come-to-fruition class of 2026 is an accomplishment, a relief, a new beginning, and a bunch of other good things. It is also a gentle sadness for things lost to the greedy arms of history.

In 2013, it was hard to imagine Big Brother as a high school graduate. It was hard to see him as a middle-schooler. In a different way, it is now difficult to picture him as that little guy who snuggled between mom and dad on the couch. Sure, there are pictures and videos, but we can never hold that soft, little hand again. We can’t carry that peaceful, tiny bundle up to bed. I certainly can’t lift him out of bed anymore; my back and I learned that lesson around the time he became a sleepy teenager.

In that year before Big Brother’s Kindergarten matriculation, Buster was still a toddler, Big Man was not born yet. Mom was at home with her little boys, and the spare tire around Dad’s belly was still the small kind you can’t drive faster than 50mph on. Though I’m a little rounder with time, I had already reached peak baldness back then.

As Big Brother sets his sights on college, Buster is a summer away from high school. Big Man is equally near to junior high. Mom has been back to her career for seven years. Instead of blogging with disciplined regularity, I spend my time signing field trip permission slips.

It will be another four years before Buster graduates from high school, and two additional for Big Man. There will be many hectic, stressful days in those six years. Day to day, it will seem a slow slog, until all the slogs have melted suddenly into a blink.

How did 2030 get here already? Or 2032? I can’t prove that they are here as readily as I can prove 2026, but they are here. They just haven’t revealed themselves yet. 2013 is still here; it just drifted away a little so that it’s a bit fuzzy through the mist.

I can’t reach 2013 anymore. I can’t hold onto the little boy there. But I can still hear his laughter.

Halloween relic

Halloween came and went, and it took something with it.

Halloween gave us candy. In exchange it took part of my fatherhood experience away.

For the first time in 17 years, I did not go Trick or Treating. I was no longer needed.

Once upon a time, I pulled a wagon, with a baby passenger, from house to house. I walked with a toddler, holding his hand, until he asked to be carried home. I brought the younger brother, hurrying with him, so the older brother didn’t get too frustrated by the anchor around his candy-gathering ankles. I flitted among three boys of varying ages and speeds, struggling to keep the herd together as three lengths of legs progressed at different strides, slowing down the fast and speeding up the slow so that no one got lost and no one lost faith.

It was exhausting; it was wonderful. Everyone needed Dad to facilitate the fun. As the night grew dark, no one worried, as long as Dad was in sight. Dad was always in sight, because these were his boys, and this was them together.

More than any of them, Dad wished to stay out until Trick or Treat was officially ended. This unifying quest was two fleeting hours, and when it ended, it was ended for an entire year.

After Halloween last year, it ended for always.

Perhaps, Dad should have known, but the hope for one more time is difficult to subdue.

This year, the two boys who still had interest in Trick or Treat, looted the neighborhood under their own authority, which was only right. They had grown into that freedom. They ran with their own pack, as time had long determined they should do.

Dad stayed home, warm and dry, as old people should be kept. He had no more babies to protect. Only memories of babies. Memories don’t make new memories; they stay home too.

One more thing put away in the scrap book, the way it was always meant to be. But I claim the right to cling to the fraying strand of nostalgia.

The way we were.

Killing me softly

If you have teen or pre-teen children and you don’t realize they are plotting to kill you in a myriad subtle ways, you’d better get wise. Society won’t forgive you for leaving those poor, helpless, homicidal maniacs orphaned when you might have done something to prevent it.

One of the ways my children are trying to kill me is through diabolically altering the volumes of their voices so that I hear everything I don’t want to hear and nothing I do want to hear from their mouths.

The things I don’t want to hear are many and pervasive: the screams that rattle my skull from boys chasing each other around the house; the high-decibel appeals for parental intervention as they take turns hitting each other in fully justified counterstrikes; the shrieks of tormenting laughter from two kids who have teamed up into allied mockery against the third, and the wailing, whining cries for justice from the outnumbered victim.

And all of this is before they have friends over.

You would think these children would never struggle to make themselves heard.

This is the paradox; they often speak too softly, though not as often as they scream too loudly.

I possess a supernatural power to make my kids inaudibly quiet, and all I have to do is ask them a question.

“What do you want from the drive-through?”

 “*Whisper, whisper, whisper*, “and a vanilla shake.” (They make sure I hear about the shake; a $6 add-on will hasten Dad’s demise nicely.)

“Is your homework done?”

“*Mumble, mumble, mumble*”

“Did you brush your teeth yet?”

  *Shrug*

“Is your homework done?”

Even in the prime of my youth, I struggled to hear conversations when there was background noise. This is how I unknowingly agreed to random things in crowded college bars by smiling and nodding in response to unintelligible conversation. My children know this about me.

Over the many years since the prime of my youth, my eardrums have aged substantially. My children know this too.

This is how the plan to get me. They drive up my blood pressure with their screaming and yelling. Then, they amplify my hypertension to a crescendo by giving answers I have no hope of hearing when I ask a question.

They have made a sharp skill of looking away, or sneaking behind me, when they offer their mild answers to my questions.

If you are not careful, children will practice speaking to you from a different room, which is a skill I’m sure they learn from wives.

I plan to avenge my own death by not dying at all, not right away anyhow. Instead, I will continue to lose my mind. They will have important questions to ask me soon:

“Can I borrow the car?”

“Can you co-sign for me?”

“Why do you keep running away from the nursing home?”

“Have you made out a will?”

I will answer all these questions with a clear voice and a distant, glassy stare: “I want a vanilla shake!”