Tag Archives: Sons

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!”

Cranky old men aren’t what they used to be

Big Man is in 4th grade, which is weird because, in my memory, he started Kindergarten yesterday.

After school, I strain to contain my impatience with the car line so I can drive him the five minutes to home.

On rare afternoons, we find ourselves driving behind a bus from his school that passes within 30 yards of our house. Whenever this happens, I threaten to put Big Man on that bus the next day.

This is an idle threat, as the amount of paperwork it takes to get a kid onto a school bus these days is another thing beyond my patience.

I don’t know if Big Man takes the threat seriously, but he feels he must provide resistance to it, just in case I do harbor such a crazy idea as putting him on a school bus.

The idea is revolting to him. “No, I will not ride the bus!” he insists.

“You’ll love it!” I tell him. “Bus friends are the best friends!”

“No, they’re not,” he responds. “Bus friends are the worst friends!”

The last time we had this exchange, I asked him what was the big deal? It’s only a five-minute ride. “When is was in school, I had to ride a bus for an hour to school and an hour home again,” I told him. “And I had to do it from Kindergarten until I graduated high school.”

  In my day, we were grateful to have a school bus to ride.

He didn’t care about childhood troubles from the olden days, and he likely thought I was exaggerating anyway. In truth, I was exaggerating; the bus ride was probably only 55 minutes each way.

As I considered this, I realized I had given him the classic, old-man, life-was-much-harder-in-my-day gripe. Making myself a cliché was bad enough, but this was as wimpy an example of the old man gripe as has ever been griped.

I didn’t walk 10 miles, through three feet of snow, uphill both ways. I walked 20 feet from the bus door to the school entrance – on level pavement. Yes, the bus ride was a good 10 miles and more, and there was sometimes snow, and no doubt a few hills, but I was riding the bus for cripes sake!

One time the bus got stuck in a snowbank, but no one died. No one even got chilly. We were inside a heated bus. It was exciting, in a completely non-life-threatening way, to hear the bus driver softly swear as he spun the tires backward and forward until the equally comfortable replacement bus showed up.

And that was it. That was the pinnacle of my hard-luck childhood. I had to sit still for nearly two, non-consecutive hours per day. The horror!

I fear the future of a nation whose old men’s exaggerated stories of childhood hardship are so soft and squishy.

For this reason, and to avoid the administrative headaches involved, I don’t think I’ll try to put Big Man on the bus.

How many reasons do you need?

Our town has its summer fireworks display in late June as part of its annual celebration of itself. I don’t know if this move from July 4th is because fireworks rates are cheaper in June, or if we’re collectively sticking it to Mr. Jefferson, or if we’ve quietly switched over to the Julian Calendar. I’m sure there’s solid reasoning is behind it. It’s a win-win for us; a week later we drive to the next town over (their board members haven’t read the most recent socially corrective scolding from Vanity Fair Online) to watch their morally tainted display.

This year my wife and some friends went to our town’s annual self-congratulation early, to sit in the beer tent. I don’t want you to get the idea my wife is a big beer drinker; she is not. In fact, she never touches a drop of the stuff. Not a single drop. She snuck a bladder of wine in with her.

My job was to bring Buster and Big Man to the event in time for the fireworks. The boys had a friend over, and they were having so much fun playing together, they decided to skip the pyrotechnics altogether.

Just as I settled into the idea of sticking around the house, the friend went home, leaving Buster and Big Man each with only a brother to play with. As any brother can tell you, this is unacceptable. Suddenly steeped in abysmal boredom, both boys decided they would like to see the fireworks after all.

Now we were late. As we drove, we saw the beginning of the display from the car. The boys became eager to get to the action, but we were stopped a particularly long red light.

No other cars were visible. “Just go through the light,” Big Man instructed.

“I’m not getting a ticket so you can see the fireworks you didn’t want to see five minutes ago,” I said.

“Just go through it,” Buster demanded. “Mom would!”

“No. She wouldn’t go through this one.” I know Mom does what she has to do to compress time, but this was a major intersection, quiet only because everyone was at the fireworks show.

“She would totally run this!” Big Man insisted.

“Yeah,” Buster agreed. “Because she’s late, and she has someplace to be, and nobody is here, and she’s grumpy. That’s four reasons to run the light, and Mom only needs two.”

“And Mom’s always grumpy when she drives,” Big Man piled on. “So she only really needs one.”

While they were listing the reasons to run the light, it turned green. We got to see some of the fireworks in the open air.

When we caught up to Mom, she wasn’t grumpy at all – probably because she had no idea just how far under the bus her kids had thrown her.

This might have been worth running a light to see, assuming you could see it in color.

Editor’s Note: There is no admissible evidence that any person named herein has actually run a red light or is a grumpy driver. Any insinuation of either occurrence is merely hearsay.