By Rick Kaempfer
After the last Boy Scout trip, an overnight stay at Detroit’s Greenfield Village, the Scoutmaster had a little chat with me when he dropped off my son.
“I really think you should come along next time,” he said. It didn’t sound like a request.
“Was there a problem?” I asked.
“Well…” he didn’t want to say it, but I’ve been living with Tommy for 12 years. I knew.
“Did he wander off?”
He looked relieved. “Yes.”
I promised him I would go along the next time.
I should explain the Tommy dynamic to you. Tommy is the classic absent-minded professor type. He’s a brilliant boy intellectually…so much so that he has a few deficiencies in other areas. What he really needs is a personal assistant–someone to remind him to do the little things in life, like put on his pants, eat, and open the door before walking through it–you know the sort of things that people tend to notice.
That job has fallen to me, largely because I was the same way (minus the intellectual part) when I was boy. I was one of those kids that we now refer to as a “creative type.” I had the same issues as Tommy and (sort of) managed to overcome them. That makes me uniquely able to handle him. I can see the problems that are going to occur before they occur.
Which brings me back to scouting. Now that I’ve described our unique father-son team, try to picture the two of us on a Boy Scout trip. The Boy Scouts have managed to encapsulate all of Tommy’s and my weaknesses into one handbook, around which they’ve created an entire organization. It’s the main reason I wanted him to join. I was hoping somebody would help me teach him the things I can’t teach him. Now it looked like I was going to have to do it after all.
Last weekend was our first Boy Scout trip together.
We went in caravan to Iowa to something called “Merit Badge University.” I chose this as our first trip because I figured we would be able to handle it. It was being held on a college campus (University of Iowa), and I love college campuses. There was no camping involved, which meant that we wouldn’t need to set up a tent. Tommy was working on his computer merit badge–which is certainly NOT among his weaknesses. There were ten dads going on the trip so I wasn’t going to be in a position of responsibility. What could go wrong?
It took less than twenty minutes.
As the caboose in the caravan, I somehow got separated from the other cars in a traffic jam just past Chicago. Even though we were each given walkie-talkies to stay in touch with each other, this is what I heard through the speaker.
“Sy9oie3navoeinvca;’lie8″
I found out later that the garbled mess was telling me to turn onto the next highway. I missed the turn, and just like that, we were lost. Luckily another dad was in my car and he helped me figure out how to get back on track. Even luckier, we caught up to the caravan when they stopped at a truck stop near DeKalb. I was practically tailgating them the rest of the way.
When we arrived at the lodge in Iowa, I exhaled. Even though we would be sleeping on the floor, it was a nice lodge. We were segregated by age–dads on one side, boys on the other. We also segregated the bathrooms by age–dads using the women’s restroom, boys using the men’s. I think it might have had something to do with keeping the boys away from the gigantic supply of feminine hygiene products. That wasn’t a discussion we felt like having.
As I nestled in my sleeping bag that night, I thought, “This isn’t so bad. I think we’re going to be able to pull this off.”
The next morning we drove to the University of Iowa campus. Again, the other dads almost lost me, but I managed to find our final destination. I also helped Tommy find the right classroom for his merit badge study (and wow would that have been a disaster if I wasn’t there–he started walking the exact wrong direction).
Tommy’s teacher, however, was having a bad day. He couldn’t figure out which key to use to get into the classroom. Once we got in the room, he couldn’t figure out how to log onto the computers. He looked around for help, and the only other parent who decided to stick around was me. I saw the look in his eyes. That’s when it hit me. What kind of a dad volunteers to teach the computer class (as opposed to knots, survival skills, aviation, rocket propulsion, etc)? The same kind of dad as me.
I hopped right in to help. Between the two of us, we finally figured out how to handle the computers: by asking the kids. These kids, most of which were just like Tommy, were wizards on the computer. One helped us decipher the sign-on codes. Another one managed to identify the IP address of each computer in the room. Still another worked with the other dad to take apart a computer and point out what each part did. Another one walked the rest of the class through databases on Excel and Access. Tommy showed some of the kids how to use Powerpoint.
At lunchtime, Tommy informed me that my services would not be needed in the afternoon session.
“Why?” I asked. “Am I embarrassing you?”
Before he could answer, I stopped him. It didn’t matter. He knew that he could handle the rest of this day by himself, and I wasn’t going to be needed. That was good enough for me. It’s what I wanted to see.
I picked him up after class and we quietly took a tour of the University. He had a big smile on his face. I could tell that he was invigorated by the atmosphere. It was an institution of higher learning, and there was nothing that Tommy enjoyed more than learning…as long as it was his kind of learning.
That night, after a long day, we had some time to kill back at the lodge. While the older scouts were playing poker on one side of the room, and the younger scouts were having a full-fledged pillow fight on the other side of the room, Tommy got into his sleeping back and fell asleep.
The scoutmaster was concerned that something might be wrong with him. When he asked me, I just smiled.
“No,” I said. “He’s going to be just fine.”
This originally appeared on my blog at NWI Parent, "Father Knows Nothing." If you haven't yet checked out "Father Knows Nothing", there are several new columns there that I haven't shared here at Suburban Man headquarters.Click here to see them.
