The parent packing fail

Nine o’clock on a dark country road. Out in Keystone Heights. On the way to a CVS or Walgreens. Whatever we could find at that hour. Desperate. Forlorn. Feeling like the worst parents ever. EVER! “How could this happen?” my wife asked. “What kind of parents are we?” “It’s not our fault,” I comforted her. “It just turns out we’re not as smart as we thought.” We were on a retreat with Memorial Presbyterian Church. Out on a lake, amidst the wilderness and great expanse of mosquitoes and spiders and other critters who bite you in inconvenient places. We were unpacking when I heard my wife gasp. I felt the oxygen sucked out of the room. “I can’t believe this,” she told my daughter. “You don’t have any underwear!” A bear could have burst into the room carrying a flamethrower and it wouldn’t have had the same horrific drama, or intensity, or power. Parent fail. To make it worse, she also didn’t have any socks. And turns out, I didn’t have any socks, either. We had everything else. We had dishwashing detergent — in case we had to do dishes — and flashlights and rain gear and gardening gloves for a work project. Stuffed animals and I think even an encyclopedia set. But essential articles of clothing? NOOOO!!!! My daughter shrugged. “Oh well,” she said. “Can I go play now?” I pictured myself stitching together paper towels with dental floss to make primitive underwear and socks. “There go the Thompsons […]

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Weightlifting for tough-mudding dummies

I think his exact words were, “Hey man, you’re about to rip your shoulder off!” Or maybe it was, “Hey man, that’s a good way to shred your pecs!” Or possibly, “Guy, if you have three brain cells in your head, you won’t do that!” I was “doing” what I don’t do: lifting weights. There are exactly three reasons I don’t. 1) I’m scrawny — like two string beans lashed together by a rubber band. 2) You can rip your shoulder off. 3) Big, huge guys who look like 12 sacks of potatoes strung together with mooring lines stand around and say things like, “Hey man, you’re about to rip your shoulder off!” “So what if I am, big potato sack dude?” I want to say. “Just go over there and dead lift a car or something.” He was right, though. I overloaded one side of the bar with too much weight. I pictured myself toppling over sideways while lifting it. Pinning myself to the floor. My shoulder running for the exit while I meekly called out, “Yo, potato sack dude … Little help over here!” November is no longer so far away. The Tough Mudder is coming. It’s part endurance race. Part obstacle course. Part insanity. There are big walls to get over. Ropes to climb. Things that require muscles and upper body strength. Things I don’t possess. All my life I’ve been a runner. My idea of weightlifting is grocery shopping. Even that’s a stretch. I ask old […]

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The backup bomber strikes (Or I’m officially my dad)

I am officially my dad. Shame. Shame. As I backed the car out — in a light drizzle, in a parking lot with seemingly endless room, with plenty of light and with no glaring dangers to be seen — it happened. Crunch! Or did I feel it first? A little jolt to the vehicle. Ooops! And disbelief. Was I just struck by an iceberg? A meteor? A missile? Because I didn’t just back into something. No, I did NOT just hit another vehicle! Because I don’t do that. I don’t have those kinds of issues. The Backup Bomber! No, that’s not me. That’s my dad. Yet … well … there it was. The big dent in the back hatch of my vehicle. The over-sized, heavy-duty bumper on the 14-mile long pickup truck behind me still in mint condition. I could hear it laughing at me. “Not even scratched, and look at your car. Like you got hit by a train! HAHAHAHA!” The humiliation. The horror. And after all these years of making fun of my father. My dad used to have a knack for backing into anything, and especially those yellow parking poles that stick up out of parking lots for the sole purpose of sending poor suckers to auto collision centers. I have a theory that body shops actually install those poles to drum up business. And my dad could hit a yellow parking pole when there wasn’t even one for miles around. They had a knack for appearing […]

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The email scourge

In the early 1960s, John Q. Email revolutionized the world. He sent an encoded message across a computer network to a user 3 feet away. It said, “Hey, want to hear a joke about my cat?” After 42 messages and 18 cat jokes, email had been invented and John Q. was dead, victim of a co-worker who screamed, “I just want to do some work!” The weapon of choice: a letter opener. Rest in peace, John Q. OK, so I made all that up. But it’s how I envision the scourge we know as email getting its start. And how I picture the demise of the doofus who did this to all of us. Who unleashed this uncontrollable tsunami upon the world. Who figured he was doing everyone “a big favor,” yet really just created a communication vehicle for scams, credit card offers and cryptic messages from co-workers that read, “So, what do you think?” I think you shouldn’t have sent me that email!!! This was the fictional scenario I invented one early morning as I sat at the computer hitting delete as quickly as I could on work and personal email. It was a desperate attempt to keep my inbox messages to no more than six. Part of a pledge I made to always see a sliver of empty space, rather than an endless stream of unanswered messages. This was my solution after hundreds of messages backed up in an electronic junk jam. I feared warnings like: “Your email […]

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