And Good Will Toward Men...

I try to make it a habit of maintaining my composure around my children.  Language, demeanor, and common courtesies are areas that have been a constant work-in-progress since our first was born.  Our parents raised us a certain way and we are trying to do the same.  It’s not that I’m some sort of hothead or foul-mouthed hooligan or anything.  No comments from the peanut gallery, please.  It’s just that on those off-chances that I do lose my composure, it’s often quite colorful.

One of my mother-in-law’s favorite accounts revolves around the time that my father-in-law and I hung crown molding in our dining room.  I had cut the last piece of molding a full inch too short.  Already frustrated with the general expertise required in geometry, I snapped.  Calmly and without a word, I picked up the molding, walked out onto our back deck, and launched it like an Olympic javelin.   I estimated a good thirty yards through the air.  With my obvious shortfalls in tape measure usage, it may have well been closer to sixty.  I’m talking Nike sponsorship material here.  After cooling off, however, I walked into the backyard, wiped off the grass stains, and worked around the problem to complete the job.  Slightly insane?  A wee over-the-top?  You could make that argument.  However, spectacularly colorful. 

Most of the time, I incoherently mumble through my locker room repertoire and continue with the task at hand.  However, there’s always the “people factor”, coupled with my lack of patience for them, to consider as well.  Being that eternal cynic, I always expect people to behave like…well, people.  Society as a whole expects others to act as if they have some trace of common sense.  However, I happen to agree with the anonymous skeptic who once penned that “the problem with common sense is that most people are morons.”  More gently put, if you don’t expect too much, you’ll never be disappointed.

Normally, I find people-watching an amusing spectator sport.  There is that handful that really seems to draw my ire though.  Generally, they’re the ones that pose some sort of threat to what’s near-and-dear to me. 

Driving home late on Christmas Day, it snowed the entire way home.  The roads were clear until we reached our county line.  Literally, right at the county marker, the roads went completely untouched by snow removal equipment.  From that point forward, I couldn’t tell where the road ended and the ditches began.  With my wife, three kids, and a few dozen Christmas presents jammed into my car, I tried to take it slow and steady.  Anything over second gear seemed to result in a loss of traction.

“That handful” of people were also on the road that night.  The ones who, on snow-covered roads, decided to tailgate six inches from my bumper.  If there is one major pet peeve that I have, it’s tailgating.  Blame my years of navigating DC traffic as first-hand witness to thousands of mangled bumpers.  What’s the saying?  “You can take the boy out of the city, but not the city out of the boy.” 

Here I have my entire family in this car.  If I had to hit my brakes for any reason, this guy is basically in my backseat eating cheese sticks with my kids.  I flashed my hazards a few times.  Even resorted to physically waving him off.  Clueless.  I felt my face began to heat up as I rapidly approached that “slightly insane” stage.  For the purposes of safety, I pulled over in an effort to let him pass.

As he drove by me, I opened my window and stuck my head out in an effort to enhance our personal line of pleasantries.  Somehow, I managed to only shake a fist at him while keeping all five digits in the downward position.  However, I then followed it up with a booming “you’re an IDIOT” at the top of my lungs.  Yes.  That “boy-city” thing again.

After putting the window back up and carefully getting back on the road, a small voice appeared from the backseat.  It was my five year old daughter. 

“Daddy, it’s not nice to call somebody an idiot.”

Oops.  I have passengers.

Privately, I patted myself on the back.  The fact that only a closed fist and an “idiot” were outwardly expressed was really a testimonial to my overall progress.  Before children, I was liable to offend a busload of Marines and sprain a finger…or two.  Exemplifying the true decathlete of vulgarity.  However, she was right.  The next five minutes resulted in an extended conversation on how it wasn’t nice to treat other people that way.  How we have to control our tempers and be courteous to others (even if they are idiots).  It turned into an extremely beneficial moment for us, as parents, in teaching both tolerance and respect. 

Through these discussions, my blood pressure stabilized and body temperature normalized.  My family was safe and that’s all that really mattered.  At that moment, a truck blew by us in a no-passing lane, weaving and darting to get in front of me.  Unfortunately, my mouth is occasionally a good second or two faster than my brain.  This was one of those such instances.  “Now go ahead and wreck” immediately fell out of my sarcastic mumbler.

I physically cringed as that little voice returned from the backseat.  “Daddy, why do you hope he wrecks?”

Luckily my wife, with fifteen years experience in defusing the repercussions associated with my oftentimes irrepressible outer-voice, was fast enough to orchestrate an impromptu word scramble to smooth the situation.  The natives seemed satisfied.

As for me, I simply nodded intently.  Better to slouch down and keep my mouth shut at this point.  Not tempt kiddy decorum any further.  Somehow, I managed to keep my language in check.  Demeanor and common courtesy, on the other hand, were systemically launched by a colorful, albeit slightly insane, Olympic gold medalist.  Twice.

This time, I’m demanding the IOC and Guinness folks provide the official measurement.

The Inquisition

“It just seemed like a good idea at the time.”  “I just wanted to see what would happen.”

Just a couple snippets of the inner thoughts of a child.  Well, mine anyway.  I’m a living case study concerning all matters “parent-child psychology”, but I can vividly remember mumbling through a few of them myself as a child.  I still have the scars, dents, and fracture-related arthritis to remind me of the associated aftermaths.  However, it’s my charismatic children that now stand to serve a refresher crash course, specifically for my wife and I.

Recently, I went into the garage to grab some nails from my tool bench.  What I found, however, were a couple of nuts.  Sitting on the floor of the garage was my daughter.  Bicycle helmet on, looking down towards the ground, bracing herself.  My son, standing directly in front of her.  Foam-covered wiffleball bat raised completely over his head, ready to swing down.  I must have caught him at “T-minus-two” because I received a surprised, half-hearted smile and customary shoulder shrug after breaking his concentration.

I simply looked at him with my hands motioning to my daughter.  “Really?”

“What?  She has a helmet on.”

The “facepalm” was nearly involuntary.  Involuntary, due to the number of times in a week that I find myself performing it.

Frankly, he had a point.  They had at least taken a helmet into consideration.  If it were my brother and I as kids, we probably wouldn’t have thought that far ahead.  The plan would have been considerably more rudimentary and, let’s be honest, a wiffleball bat simply would not have achieved what he and I would have envisioned as a respectable rate of downward velocity.  I am fairly certain, though, that my son’s experimentation with physics, freak accidents involving bicycles and wiffleball bats, and the biological fundamentals of cranial flexibility would have quickly escalated until true blunt-force-trauma was achieved.  Better to have broken up this party in the research and development stages.

 “Is that really such a great idea?” 

It was your typical, rhetorical question that every parent feels compelled to ask in response to performances such as these.  Personally, I have to.  The cheap amusement that I get out of seeing his wheels spin, in a desperate attempt to formulate an acceptable explanation, is just too good to pass up. 

So starts the Parental Inquisition. A full fatherhood tribunal involving his specific actions and their potential consequences.  I presented my own lengthy dissertation as to why “bat” and “little sister” do not belong in the same sentence together.  However, the more I talked, the more I could see his eyes wandering further out of focus.  The wheels were spinning, but not necessarily on anything that I was spouting.  Most likely, he was mentally flowcharting his next initiative.  I heard accountability and responsibility coming out.  He heard Charlie Brown’s teacher coming in.  “Wa-wonk, wa-wonk, wonk”.

Unfortunately, much like my facepalm ritual, the Inquisition has quickly become an encore performance these days.  A recent example accompanied my son’s gravitational theories concerning the centripetal force required to successfully spin a hammock-full of four year olds, 360 degrees around in a circle.  Unfortunately, only enough force to achieve 180 degrees was reached that evening.  My daughter and friend found themselves with a faceful of mulch.  Back to the drawing board for Sir Isaac Newton... 

Yet another Inquisition was conducted several weeks later, following my son’s aspirations of a winner-take-all game of “chicken” down our driveway.  Son and daughter pedaling their big wheels full-speed towards each other, then veering left or right at the last moment to avoid sure carnage.  My daughter lost that bout too, by the way.  Amidst the mayhem that morning, I firmly believe that James Dean would have been proud of her unwavering moxie.  In hindsight, I think that I can also officially rule out any career for them in statistics, as they both failed miserably in determining their individual success rates in carnage avoidance.  Insurance adjusters perhaps?

Ultimately, it all seems to come back to the old “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” theory.  Improvised bike ramps that would have failed every building code known to man, backfiring potato cannons full of butane, and homemade rocket launchers involving aerial fireworks and my father’s pipe clamps were just a few personal debacles of note.  Most led to friends-turned-M*A*S*H* personnel in frantic episodes of dragging battered comrades back to their respective houses for bandaging and antiseptic.   Shouting wildly at each other along the way in a desperate attempt to get our stories straight for the mom. 

No one ever got seriously injured…not that anyone would admit to anyway.  It was pretty tough to mask the dozen stitches and accompanying skull staples for yours truly though.  From that point forward, heaving coffee cans full of carriage bolts at each other was unspokenly frowned upon amongst friends.

Deep down, you can’t say that it really gets any better with age either.  I’m willing to bet that over 50% of the weekend emergency room visits for 18-50 year old males start out with the phrase “wanna see what I can do” or “hey man, check this out”.  I have personally witnessed at least a dozen of these events.  Probably been a direct party to twice that.  That’s all that I’m willing to admit to on-the-record though, without an attorney present and a gratuitous sound-bite of Jack Palance’s “Believe it…or not”.

Even though it’s inescapable that my son will continue to navigate youth with his father’s genetic idiocy coursing wildly through his veins, I have at least highlighted the need for him to start leaving his sister out of his master plan.  Glass-half-full, I have been the beneficiary of sprint-related cardio workouts after overhearing “go ahead, try it” from the next room.  However, as his ideas grow more elaborate, I also see my odds of success significantly fall in the area of preemptive catastrophe interference.   

I take it back.  The bike helmet was a magnificent idea.