Someone asked my daughter if she had her Christmas list done yet. “No,” she said. “Not yet.” My jaw dropped out of my mouth. Oh yeah? Then what were all those sheets of paper littering my desk? They had piled up so high I thought a family of opossums had built a den on there. There were lists of animal figures with prices and multiple checkboxes next to them. So what were all those lists? Oh, simple, she said. They are just things she wants … but not specifically for Christmas. To be a kid! And at Christmas, no less. When you can dream big and put anything you want on a piece of paper and hope for the best. A real, live lioness and cub. A jumbo jet with spare tire. A teleportation kit (Real. Not fake!) To be taller. Why not? Put it on. It’s Christmas. A magical time. Dream big, or go home. That’s a kid’s motto. I always loved putting together my list when I was little. The sky was limit. And I asked for the sky once, too. But to be a parent, the gift list can be an all-enveloping, time-eating, stress-inducing whirlwind. And not because of the kid. Rather, it’s all the people asking what they should buy the kid. “What’s on her Christmas list?” they all want to know. No, no. That’s not right. They don’t “want to know.” They don’t ask to know. They DE-MAND to know. “Tell me! Quick! Hurry! Before […]

My wife had been explaining how PE was when she was in school. Comparing it to today. Explaining to my daughter the differences. And that is when the world came crashing down … “Mom,” the little 8-year-old said in a dignified manner, “we don’t do it like you did in the 1900s.” Ka-Blammo! The 1900s. At first I got a chuckle out of it. “Haha, honey. The kid just called you an old person from the … Hey! Wait a minute. I’m from the ‘1900s!’” My daughter smiled. I don’t think she realized what she had done. How she had wrecked our worlds. I mean, dang, the kid was right. We were from the 1900s. She was from the 2000s. A child of the future. We were old-timey pioneer folk from the distant past. “Ma, could you run outside and fetch a pail of water while I change the oil on the family cow?” I felt like I should be sitting in a straw hat talking about life during the dust bowl. “Yeah, sonny, it was literally a bowl, and it was made out of dust. We ate our cereal from it.” “Quick! Look it up on your iPad. What’s the old coot talking about?” The 1900s. He’s talking about the far away 1900s. No, no, my wife and I reasoned. The 1900s refer to that period before the 1910s. Right? A mere decade. The 1900s shouldn’t lump together decades and decades of people like we do with the 1800s, […]

Here is what the Merriam-Webster Dictionary has to say about the word “ready:” “prepared to do something;” “available for use;” “prepared mentally or physically for some experience or action.” Yep, exactly how I understood it. And then the definition I didn’t realize existed. The one that made it clear that it wasn’t our beloved children who fail to understand the meaning of the word. No, no, in fact it was us — the parents, the old folks, the ones who haven’t spent time in elementary school honing our legal skills in vocabulary class, diligently studying the meaning of words to one day use against us. For there, at the bottom of the list, sat the most eye-opening, the most startling, the most infuriating definition of “ready.” It said: “Almost about to do something.” Golly gee willikers! As a parent of almost 9 years I realized what a fool I had been. Because when I’ve screamed, “Child! If you are not READY for school in five minutes I am going to threaten something horrible and awful that I will never follow through on,” I only IMPLIED that she needed to be ALMOST ABOUT to go. And technically she was … even if her teeth weren’t brushed, and her hair wasn’t combed, and breakfast wasn’t eaten, and come to think of it … SHE WAS STILL IN BED!!! What a fool! What fools we’ve all been. We try to wield the English language to our advantage without fully understanding it. We’ve been […]

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 […]

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 […]

“Do those shoes fit anymore?” I asked my daughter as we headed out the door to walk the dog. I was shocked by what I saw. I thought she was wearing a doll’s shoes. I imagined little toes curled up inside like a roll of paper towels. That they might burst free at any moment. She looked at her feet. “Nope,” she answered. “They don’t.” “Then why are you still wearing them?” I asked. “That looks incredibly painful.” “Yep, it is,” she said. “I can’t feel my left pinky toe. And something just popped in my right foot. I think it was a bone. But I just LOVE these shoes. I can’t think to give them up.” She batted her eyelashes and smiled. “Let’s go!” she said before hobbling down the steps. Looked like a girl with two peg legs. Like many houses this time of year, it’s back to school shopping time at mine. Lists for school supplies have arrived, and every day I come home to find more bags stacked floor-to-ceiling with pencils and Crayons and notebooks and other third grade-related items. We could open an office supply store in my living room. If a hurricane comes, we don’t have a bottle of water or a can of tuna fish to survive. But if the school supply apocalypse arrives, we’d be set for months. Then there are the clothes. Back-to-school clothes. About this time of year we ignorant parents (I’m primarily referring to the male species here) always […]

We can bottle, freeze-dry, package, can, concentrate and shrink-wrap anything. You name it, we can vacuum pack-it. We can seal it up nice and fresh. Ready to open at a later date. Enjoy! So with all of our technology, with all of our ingenuity and know-how — all of the means at our disposal! — why hasn’t anyone thought to bottle a vacation? I’m sure it’s doable. And incredibly lucrative for the successful inventor. I would buy it. I would pay almost any amount of money for it. Well, if that amount of money was $6.52. That’s about what I have left after a 10-day vacation to the mountains of North Carolina. I’m a week back from that wonderful, amazing, soul-refreshing, rock-climbing, stream-dashing, gem-finding, deer-spying, flying squirrel-flying (not sure where that last one came from) curvy road-riding vacation, and I am longing to be back there. Free from the reality and the pressure and the stress that is real life. How I would love to go into the refrigerator right now, grab a can of vacation and pop the top. Just stand there in the kitchen soaking up its wonderful effervescence. Returning to that vacation state of mind. “Ahhhh, mountain air, take me away!” Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t you buy that? Right now millions of Americans are returning from vacations, struggling to re-acclimate themselves to the routines of regular life. Grocery shopping. Bed making. Bill paying. Waking up at a normal hour to go to work. Remembering that drinking […]

It’s what I imagine being inside an exploding firework is like. Blinding light. Deafening noise. All oxygen consumed. Furious, tornado-like winds. Finally, in a millisecond, you’re blown out of your senses into a thousand tiny pieces. That was the experience as I walked in the door. “Oh crap,” I said. KABLOOEY! I’m still not sure what the place is called. Or what the place is. A screaming arcade and kiddie playland mixed with a screaming sports bar and adult playland. An inside bowling alley with football games and pop videos displayed above each lane so you can watch Nicki Minaj while you roll into the gutter. Behind you bleeping, screeching, blurping, crunching, blasting, ca-chunking video games. Over there a band warming up. Over there a baby crying. Over there … wait a minute … what the heck is that? AND HOW DOES IT MAKE SO MUCH NOISE!?! And the lights. Fourth of July with a side of sunspots and a laser light show sprinkled on top for added seasoning. “I like this place,” my daughter told me, squinting. “Let’s go play.” My daughter used to hate these kinds of establishments. Too busy. Too noisy. Too overwhelming. But now she storms into them, bouncing from game to game, desperate to win enough tickets to buy something incredibly cheap in the reward shop. “Two hundred and fifty tickets for this!” I called out. “Do you realize the mark-up?” “Dad!” a voice chided me. Only, it wasn’t my daughter’s. It was a little […]

I like a campfire for its technological simplicity. Pile up some sticks. Crumple up some newspaper. Light it. Stand back. Watch it smolder out. Curse and repeat until you have a roaring fire, or you burn down the forest after resorting to gasoline. Simple. Technology-free. Back to basics. Analog in a digital world. So different from everything else in our lives. Our technology-saturated and digitally-dependent lives. No app on my iPhone will start that fire. My family and I spent a week in a cabin in Blowing Rock, N.C. It was a re-charging, liberating, technology-freeing experience. A gurgling little stream rolled through the property. Cell phones barely worked there. It was back to basics time. Well, certain basics. We didn’t have to shoot a moose for dinner or forage for pine nuts. But most of my modern-day cares melted away. For once, technology wasn’t omnipresent. That wasn’t the case on the way in. On the road, all I thought about was how much technology had changed the monotonous haul for the better. How road trips had been vastly improved by devices and satellites and anything with “Mac” stamped on it. Like satellite radio. Who needs terrestrial radio when you can get music from the stars! Anything you want. Anywhere you want. The radio on long trips used to be the pits. My memories of childhood rides to the Rockies or the Sierras in California were of my finger glued to the radio scan button in a desperate dash through endless […]

I knew what I was in for when I played the voicemail message and heard what sounded like a train wreck being swallowed by a tornado to the tune of whirling banshees. Children. Three of them. All staying at my house. One of them mine. Two from out of town. They had decided to leave me a message: “BONGO JIMMY,” they screamed. A phrase I made up. Played back to me it sounded like an ice pick to the ear drums. I considered phoning a travel agent and booking a trip somewhere quiet and peaceful and heavy on the Mai Tais. I’m not used to “children.” I’m used to a “child.” One child. An ONLY-child. Three kids in a house? I once flew onto a Navy aircraft carrier in the middle of war games. That was like a high school study hall compared to this. Three kids — two 8-year-olds and a 5-year-old. No volume control. They scream everything. As if they’re on a construction site shouting over heavy equipment. Or a sinking ship trying to rise above the crashing waves and churning engines. Such urgency. Such bellowing. So many profound statements that the world — the ENTIRE world! — must here like: “CAN I HAVE SOME MORE ORANGE JUICE?” or “HOW COME YOUR TOILET WATER SWIRLS TO THE LEFT?” I DON’T KNOW! HOW COME WE’RE 5 INCHES APART AND SHOUTING? Kids don’t understand sarcasm, do they? They answer back, “I DON’T GET IT. DO YOU WANT ME TO SHOUT […]