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Father’s Day is tomorrow, which is nice, because it means I will eat grilled meat.  I eat grilled meat on days that aren’t Father’s Day, of course, but tomorrow all the bad stuff, such as the carcinogens and cholesterol, will simply evaporate in the smoky goodness wafting from the grill.  Or so I’ve been told.  By myself.

Now, since tomorrow is Father’s Day, it goes without saying that this column will be about fathering.  (“Oh great,” the audience moans, “another 900 words of self-indulgent folderol.  Pass me section B, please.”)

But wait.  After some intense editing, this column is entirely free of any “Wonder Years” style of self-actualization or child-induced enlightenment.  In fact, this column is more of a confession, really.  It is the confession of an oldest child who never really grew up.  It is the confession of a first-born son who, for the better part of the 1980s, enjoyed the privilege of bossing around his younger brother and sister, and who loved being the older cousin to another set of brothers who did not question the safety of hanging onto a rusty wagon as it was dragged behind a lawn mower.

You see, back then, I was the Hannibal to my own A-Team; the Captain America of my own Kid Avengers.  For years I decided what it was we would play and how it would be played, whether it was water guns or super heroes or fake wrestling, which, at the time, did not seem all that fake.  This is the confession of a guy who one day woke up to find his brother and cousins bigger than him and much too cool to play another round of “Jump Out of the Grain Truck like Indiana Jones.”  This is the story of an older brother whose sister one day looked in the mirror and asked the question, “Why am I holding a set of nun chucks made out of duct tape?”

Because that is really why I enjoy being a father.  It isn’t about the cuteness or the hugs or the genetic perpetuity.  It isn’t really even about having free labor to someday mow my lawn.  It’s about playing and being a dork.  We play games that I get to make up, and my kids play because they don’t know any better.  Yet.

My favorite game, because it combines laughter with a healthy dose of utility, is “Fresh Warm Laundry.”  To play, one obviously needs a load of freshly dried laundry.  The laundry is placed in a basket, the basket is placed on a shoulder, and then I declare throughout the house “Fresh Warm Laundry!  Fresh Warm Laundry for sale!”  The kids, five and three, will then almost always drop whatever they are doing and squeal “fresh warm laundry!” and sprint to the living room, lie on the floor and smile in apprehension.  “Fresh Warm Laundry, in 5-4-3-2-ONE!”  Then I get to throw the fresh warm laundry onto my own children, who will, if they’re playing by the rules, giggle and struggle and begin to toss the clothes onto each other.  Soft towels work best; try to avoid denim with hot metal buttons. 

Another game, a bit less enjoyable but no less important, is “Please please don’t be milk!”  To play this game you need a sippy cup half full with milk, water, or juice.  Give the cup to a child, and then instruct them to hide it somewhere in the house.  Wait a week, and then find the sippy cup, which is usually hidden beneath furniture or a large toy.  When you find the sippy cup, you whisper three times very fast, “Oh please, please don’t be milk!”  You take the sippy cup to the sink and open it up.  If it’s milk, everyone loses.  This game is not my favorite.

The best game we have invented, though, has to be “Pirates and Princesses.”  This game begins when we discover the Princess Herald, a Cinderella Play-Doh molder, standing in a conspicuous spot, indicating to us that our services are needed, immediately, in the princess castle downstairs.  We sprint downstairs, grab our pirate swords, put our pirate swords down at the door of the castle—as princesses do not allow weapons in their home—and then enter and wait for our quest. 

The quests vary but all have consistent attributes.  We always use the downstairs trampoline, fueled by their jumping, as our air ship to move around the place.  We usually need to sneak into the “Library of Secrets” to borrow the “Map of Legends” out of the “Book of Doom.”  After figuring out where it is we need to go, we fight various monsters—dragons, giants, trolls—we ascend Ice Mountain, (the stairs), get some advice from the Elf King, (Grover from Sesame Street)  and then snatch the needed item and run back down to the princesses, whom always reward us with copious amounts of pretend food.  It is delicious.

As to why Disney princesses feel compelled to hire pirates to retrieve their missing stuff, I don’t know.  It just made sense at the time and no one was old enough to ask any questions.  When that day comes, when my son is taller than me and my daughter is too cool to play “ninja practice,” I suppose I will have to find another hobby. Perhaps then I will focus on recipes for grilled cholesterol-free steak. 

Address

Perhaps the scariest thing about raising children is that nine times out of ten they will basically follow your lead.  For example, a couple weeks ago my three-year-old said he had to go potty.  Generally this consists of him sitting on the toilet for an unnecessarily long time, scratching his belly and saying things like “Just gonna’ sit here and ‘lax.”  On this particular evening, however, he did not want to sit and ‘lax’ and instead wanted to stand up and go “like a big boy.”  Generally this consists of him standing on a step stool entirely naked, sticking his mid-section out like he’s fishing, and then going on the toilet seat.  This evening was no exception, and so I did what I assume any normal adult would do in that situation. I grabbed a quick dash of toilet paper, soaked up the mess, and then tossed it into the bowel. 

Mess gone, right?  Sure.  But now he needed to sit and finish what he’d started, so he turned and took a seat.  I left the room, and when I returned less than a minute later he had absolutely followed my lead by almost filling the bowel with wadded up balls of toilet paper.

“What are you doing?”  I asked, “You’re gonna’ clog up the toilet!”

He pouted and put his head down.  “Just tryin’ to clean.”

So I felt bad.  I owed him an apology.  We all went to bed for the evening, but I decided that the next day I would “pay him back” by doing something special.  It was too wet to play at the park, so I offered him what I thought was the next best thing:  a Happy Meal at McDonalds.  I had a coupon, plus I’m just as addicted to terrible fast food as the next guy, so we went to the restaurant and ordered.  Based on my initial reasoning, he will grow up and reward his own children with artery-clogging fast food.  I am a bad person.

Sometimes I think that instead of expecting kids to follow our examples, which are typically dubious at best and often just downright stupid, we should pick out some of their better behaviors and follow suit.  We should follow the lead of EJHS seventh grader Colby Heaton, for example, who earned some well-deserved media attention lately when he and some of his friends initiated a fundraiser on their own time to finance the purchase of new geography materials.  In case you haven’t heard about Colby’s efforts, he was concerned about some slightly outdated atlases being used in his classroom.  Many of us in such a situation would have reacted in one of two common ways.  We would complain about the lack of funding and perhaps even use it as a crutch to justify poor academic effort on our part, or we would simply accept that the maps were outdated, swallow the status quo, and move on with our lives.

Colby, though, accepted neither of those options.  He, along with some friends, actually took it upon themselves to design, create, and then sell bookmarks in order to generate the needed funds, which were presented a few weeks ago to EJHS geography teacher Angela Denoyer.

Did they make much money?  Of course not.  They were selling bookmarks to a group of mostly unemployed adolescents.  They did, however, solve a problem.  Perhaps more importantly, they gave lie to the misconception that our young people are inherently lazy and unmotivated.  They proved that people, even young people, can effect positive change in not only their own lives but other lives as well.

On a much larger and more heart-wrenching scale, we also could learn a tremendous lesson about courage from the nearly 300 Nigerian girls kidnapped from their school last month.  As girls attending school in an area of Nigeria prone to violence, they and their parents knew they were targets for Boko Harem, the Islamist terrorist group.  They knew, each morning when they walked to school, that they were taking a risk just for doing what most of us take for granted:  getting an education.  Despite these risks, they walked on.

Of course, we do not know how their story will end.  We do know, however, that their story proves once again that courage is not an attribute bestowed only upon adults.  As Colby and his friends have reminded us, resourcefulness is a virtue that our youth often display in droves.

As another graduation season comes to an end, those of us who ended our schooling long ago are often tempted to address our youth with sage advice garnered over decades of living, which is often a good idea.  Occasionally, though, I think they’d be better off if we “grown-ups” just stepped out of their way and let them clean.