My oldest son Tommy turns 27 years old this week. Since I featured a whole week of Sean when it was his birthday, I thought it was only fair if I did the same for the other two boys. All of these columns I'm posting this week are Father Knows Nothing columns that didn't quite make it into the book. This one is about scouting...
After 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
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.
This Frick and Frack Combination
(Father and Son) actually took the next 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.
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 we did that to keep 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. I helped Tommy find the right classroom for his
merit badge study. 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 whom 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 bag 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.”
