This week I'll be posting a few of my old Father Knows Nothing columns that didn't quite make the final book. This one is from 2009.
DANGER RADAR
When your children are
little you develop a sense of radar for danger.
It begins when the kids
are very little. I’ve seen many parents (including me) down on their hands and
knees crawling at toddler level, looking for sharp edges that needed to be
padded and potentially toxic items that needed to be moved to a higher shelf.
Unfortunately, we usually don’t do this until something unexpected has already
happened. (Who knew Junior would open the pots and pans cabinet and smash his
head with a sauce pan?)
As the kids get older,
we become a little more proactive. Disaster doesn’t even have to strike for the
radar to kick in. What parent hasn’t watched their kid carelessly playing on
the monkey bars without visualizing the inevitable emergency room fall?
The problem with the
radar is that you may be on alert, but you aren’t quite equipped with the
proper communication skills to convey the potential seriousness of the
situation. Your words say “Be Careful,” but you’re thoughts are saying, “If you
fall on your head, you could break your neck and become paralyzed, and then
we’ll be taking care of you for the rest of your life.”
Some parents get lucky.
They have children that recognize the risks and take steps to avoid the
potential hazards. I have one of those kids. My oldest boy Tommy.
But I also have two that
are not like that all.
And one of them almost
gave me a heart attack over Christmas break.
We were skiing in
Michigan and I was urging the boys to be careful. They are relatively new to
skiing, but have a ridiculous amount of confidence in their still developing
abilities. My youngest son Sean, in particular, thinks that he can tackle any
hill at the fastest speed possible, despite the fact that he hasn’t quite
learned the art of stopping.
He had a few minor
mishaps in the first few days, but one incident on the last day took several
years off my life.
It was a wet and rainy
day on the hill. The combination of the rain and the snow and a very dense fog
made it difficult to see more than twenty or thirty feet in front of you. It
was our last run of the vacation–the one that led us toward the lodge at the
bottom of the hill.
This run was considered
a green (easy) run, but there were several potential hazards. For one thing it
was a very narrow path. In addition to that, each side of the path posed
definite risks. On one side there was a steep drop-off that even I wouldn’t
tackle in these conditions (and I grew up skiing in the Alps). The other side
of the path was lined with trees (remember Sonny Bono?).
And have I mentioned you
couldn’t see more than thirty feet in front of you? You couldn’t even see the
drop off.
I was in the middle of
urging Sean to be careful when he and cousin screamed: “It’s a race!”
They just went straight
down the hill, side by side, inches apart, as fast as they could on a path that
barely had room for two skiers. Any false move by either of them, and one would
have fallen off the edge, and the other would have gone crashing into the
trees. I was so shocked at what was happening, my voice betrayed me. Before I
could utter a word, they had vanished into the fog.
When I finally screamed
out, they were long gone.
I can’t recall the last
time I was that scared. I went down the hill as fast as I could, trying to
catch up with them, but I knew it was no use–they were going way too fast. So,
with my heart in my throat, I scanned the trees looking for bodies, and prayed
that they hadn’t accidentally fallen off the edge.
When I got to the bottom
of the hill I saw Sean standing at the end of the lift line. I could tell he
was scared too, but it wasn’t because of his near death experience.
He was anticipating
another one at my hands. He knew he was in big trouble.
I was so relieved that
he was unharmed that I didn’t know what to say or do. I just took off his skis.
He shied away from me waiting for the other shoe to drop, and I was trying to
figure out how to drop it, when my mother, who we had also taken along on the
trip, intervened on Sean’s behalf.
She reminded me of the
many times I had done exactly the same thing to her. One time when I was 15,
they even had to send the ski patrol looking for me because I got lost in the
woods. I didn’t make it down the mountain until it was dark that night.
She pointed to her gray
hair and said: “Where do you think this came from?”
I think I actually saw
her struggling to contain a smile. What goes around comes around.
That’s when I came up
with my plan to deal with Sean. All I have to do is wait thirty or forty years
for him to have his own son or daughter.
I’ll grant you it’s a
long term plan, but judging by the look on my mother’s face, it may just be
worth the wait.
