What could possibly go wrong?
“Let’s pitch the tent … there,” I said.
“Over the septic?” the kid asked.
When my wife, Posh, said she was leaving for a long weekend, I assumed it was in a theoretical sense, as in, “What if I just went away for a weekend and left you bozos to fend for yourselves? What then?”
It seemed, like North Korean missiles, a hollow threat. There was lots of luggage around the house, sure, and she’d pretty much emptied the retirement accounts. But she’s been threatening to leave since our troubled and underwhelming honeymoon.
Then:
“See you Monday,” she said and was out the door, off to see the college girl for a mother-daughter weekend. Full of glee, Posh clicked her heels as she left.
At that point, our heaven seemed to implode.
“I miss Mom,” the little guy noted 30 seconds later.
“Just wait,” I warned.
At that point, the little guy and I pinky-swore that we would look after each other for the next four days. He seems to know where everything is in the house — the detergent, the foie gras, the hamster food. I can drive a car. Between the two of us, we would somehow survive.
Besides, Posh left a list of five friends we could call if there were an emergency, the thinking being that five friends over four days should be sufficient for two guys who didn’t know anything. The first friend would tire of our whining by Day 2 and quit taking our calls. So we’d work our way down the list.
“Hello?”
“Yes?”
“How do you put out a grease fire?”
Stuff like that.
In truth, the kids and I did pretty well the first couple of days. It was a frat house approach to hygiene, of course, but you never hear of frat guys succumbing to bad hygiene. Heck, they’d all be dead.
None of the beds got made. We washed clothes only when they failed the sniff test. I think a wild animal died in the fridge.
“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” I kept telling them.
“Dad?”
“Huh?”
“I smell a gas leak.”
Turned out that was just dinner. By the way, I always get a little hungry right
after I eat, so some nights we had dinner twice. Two seatings: at 6 o’clock and again at 7.
With their mother away, this was the children’s first exposure to the traditional patriarchal household structure. The older kids, now in their 50s, discovered this wasn’t quite for them and decided to finally move out.
That left just the little guy and me. We fulfilled our obligations, made our appointments, kept a hectic and frenzied pace.
You should’ve seen us attacking the schoolyard during the Cub Scout cleanup last Saturday. “We’re going to spruce up the grounds,” some authority figure declared, so we showed up with smiles and shovels.
No one seemed to know quite what needed to be done, so several dads took out a tree just because. As I left, they were bulldozing the brand-new cafeteria to create more green space. Give a guy a power tool, or a bulldozer, and great things occur.
From there, we moved to the little guy’s baseball game, where all went well, except I think we came home with an extra kid whose name no one knows, including him.
If you’re missing a
child, please call immediately. He’s polite and only mildly flatulent — which is how I know he’s not one of ours.
Honestly, it wasn’t until the little guy and I turned the backyard into a campground that things got slightly out of hand. In doing so, we’d expanded our sphere of responsibility in new and dramatic ways. If we couldn’t keep a house in order, why were we, in essence, adding another wing?
It would be like tiny Alsace-Lorraine annexing Germany. What would be the point? The culture is so different and the food so heavy. Like bombs.
Yes, moving outside for the night made no sense at all. Which was a major part of the appeal.
Next week: The glories of a backyard campout.
