Some Things Never Change

Dateline:  July, 2006.  We are on vacation from our home in Brussels, visiting with my parents for a month.  My then-three year old boy is taking a nap.  Angela is trying to rest.  My then-six year old daughter comes to me, sitting on the couch, and asks: “Can we go fly a kite, daddy?”

“I’m sorry, honey,” I say.  “We don’t have any kites.”

“No problem!” Grandpa says.  “I’ll take you to go get a kite!”

“But the weather is no good,” I say.  The most important thing is that it’s 672° outside, and there is 104% humidity, and the trees are wilting out there, and I have no desire to go try to fly a kite on a day like this. 

“I’ve flown box kites that weighed forty pounds in less wind than this!” Grandpa says.  “I can make anything fly.  I’m a master kite flyer.  Come on, let’s go!”

One trip to Wal-Mart later, we’re standing in a parking lot with a ladybug kite in almost no wind and I’m sweating and we’re trying to make this stupid thing fly.  I’m running up and down like a moron holding this thing up, hoping and praying that it will catch some wind and finally take off.  After about half an hour, the ladybug catches an updraft, and for once I can stop and watch as it begins to go up into the sky.

“Okay, honey, you take it!” I give her the handle and she takes it, staring up at the kite.

And then the strangest thing happens: my daughter, who reads on a tenth grade level, who can do complicated multiplication in her head, and who is capable of speaking two languages, lets go of the kite handle!  It goes bouncing across the parking lot pavement until the ladybug smashes to the pavement ignominiously.

“Honey, you have to hold on to the handle!” I am a little exasperated, especially by grandpa’s laughing.

“I didn’t know,” she said.  “I just let go.”

Sigh.  Despite our best efforts, the ladybug never did fly again that day.

Fast forward to today.  “Hey, dad, can we go fly kites?”

“Of course!”  I happily declare.  “In fact, we’ll go fly SUPER KITES!”

So here’s how this works.  Ordinary, normal kites come with ordinary, normal string spools that are about 75 feet long.  But you can buy a special kite winder that has 200 feet of string on it.  And you can also buy a 400 foot spool of kite thread.  And if you are a boy scout (and I am), you can splice the two lines together to make 600 feet of kite-flying awesomeness.  Because those planes aren’t going to come down to run into your kites: you have to go up and get them.

I spent all morning combining all the thread into one giant spool.

“Will that really work?” Angela asked.

“Of course it will!” I said proudly.

“Won’t it break?”  She asked.

“Never!”

“Won’t it be a pain to reel it all back in?”

“Not at all,” I said.  “It’ll be simple as anything.”

Off we went, armed with our kites.  Interestingly enough, we’d bought our kites at a video store.  Because this is Wyoming, where the wind blows 99% of the time, so anybody who wants to sell kites can probably get them moved. 

Angela had the ladybug kite from Tennessee all those years ago.  I had a kite with a whirly design thing on it.  William had his Ninja Turtle kite.  And Victoria had Wilson.  Because Victoria names everything, even her socks.  Which is weird, but not really the point of the story.

Alas, we only had three kite winders.  So Angela decided to fly the ladybug sans winder.  I, of course, had two spools of thread on a kite winder, and each kid had their kite on a winder.

First up: Victoria.  She took her kite out and unwound it.  Second up: William.  He took his kite out and unwound it.  Third up: Angela.

Oh, poor Angela.

I will admit to a certain amount of perverse humor watching her try to make the ladybug fly, jumping and cursing and running back and forth as it would soar to a majestic six feet before smashing into the earth again.  But try as she might, she couldn’t make it fly.

“Here, let me try,” I said.  “You’re just not doing it right.”

So I took the ladybug kite, and you know what?  I couldn’t even get it to six feet before it crashed.  I swear, the darn thing was broken!

“Daddy!” Victoria saved me from further humiliation.  “I don’t like the winder.  It bit me.”

Who was this wimpy little creature?  Bitten by a kite winder?  Geez, what’s next? Her mattress is too soft?

“Do you want to switch it out?” I asked.

“Yes, please.” She said.

“Do you want me to reel it in for you?” I asked.

“Yes, please.”

It took me a while, but I finally got her kite reeled in.  And I still didn’t know what the big deal was: this whole kite winder thing was no problem.  Quickly I had hers switched out and stowed away her winder.  I was just getting ready to fly SUPER KITE, pausing to chuckle as I saw Angela jumping up and down on the ladybug and yelling “DIE!” when William interrupted me.

“Daddy?”

“Yeah, sport?”

“I don’t like this kite reel.  Can you please switch it out for me?”

“Sure,” I said.  “Do you want me to reel it in for you?”

“No, I got it,” he said.

See?  This is why I like him more when it comes to kite flying. 

Quickly, I had him switched out and the old reel stowed, and once again I took up SUPER KITE, pausing to chuckle as Angela ripped the crossbars out of the ladybug kite and said “I think this one is broken now!”

Then it was time to fly.

My kite grabbed the air and began to ascend, to a place where even eagles fear to tread.  One hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet.  My heart soared.  Ah!  To touch the heavens!  To feel the sky!

My technique was a wonder to behold.  I would let go of the winder and allow thirty or forty feet to play out, then grasp it again and jerk hard on the kite to force it to rise.  Then I would play out another thirty or forty feet, and repeat.

Beauty itself.

I really didn’t know what the kids were whining about, until I’d gotten to about three hundred and fifty feet.  At that point, when I stuck my hand in to stop the winder…

A GIGANTIC PIECE OF MY HAND GOT SLICED OFF AND SPUN AWAY IN A BLOODY, GORY MESS!

“YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGH!”

“Are you okay?” Nobody asked.

Since nobody asked, I swore copiously.  I was bleeding, but couldn’t do anything but hold onto the winder.  That, and change my technique to play the line out in a bit calmer fashion.

I watched in tense anticipation as the knot splicing the two lines together passed out of the spool.  Would it hold?  Was I never to see this kite again?  I held my breath, watching, until I saw it:  SUCCESS!

Soon SUPER KITE soared at a heavenly peak of five hundred and fifty feet, barely a spec, almost imperceptible to human vision.

Then, disaster struck.

“Come back!” Victoria yelled from far off to my left.

“Oh God!” Angela said.  “She’s lost it!”

I looked over to see Wilson flying away, his handle dangling some twenty feet above the ground.  Hilariously, Victoria gave chase, arms outstretched, with just as much chance to grab a 747 out of the sky as she did her kite. 

“Come baaaaack!” she yelled.

Angela began chasing it as well.

“Don’t worry!” I said.  “I’ll come help as soon as I have SUPER KITE down out of the sky!”

And I began to reel it in.

And reel it in.

And in.

And in.

And in.

And take a break because my shoulder was killing me.

And then take another break because my arms were hurting.

“Can I have the car keys?” Victoria asked.  “Mom wants to go chase the kite.”

“Just hold on a second!” I said.  “I’ve almost got this reeled in and…”

I looked up.  The knot was about a hundred feet above me.  I said something then, a bad word, which I shouldn’t have.  “Yeah, here they are,” I said.  “I’m gonna be a while.”

So they left.  I continued to reel in SUPER KITE, and although it seemed like I saw them drive by about forty five minutes later, it probably wasn’t really that long.  SUPER KITE was no closer to the ground than he had been.

“Hey, dad, can I fly super kite?” William asked.

“Not super kite,” I said.  “SUPER KITE.”

“Whatever,” he said. “Can I fly it?”

I noticed that his Ninja Turtle had about three feet of string played out.  “Is there something wrong with your kite?”

“No,” he said.  “I just don’t want to pull a Victoria.”

See?  Prudence.

“Yeah,” I said.  “But be careful, these things can bite.”

“I know,” he said.  “I’m not stupid.”

“And this has a lot of pull on it,” I said. “Hold onto it really tight.”

“Geez, dad, do you think I’m some kind of WIIIIIIIIIIMP!”

The moment his hand grabbed it, he began getting hauled across the playground, and would have probably been lost forever if he hadn’t smashed into a bush.  I went running after him, ninja turtle kite in my hand, and finally dragged him back.

“You weren’t kidding!” he handed it back to me.

“I told you,” I started reeling it in again.

“What did you do to my kite?” he asked.  “It’s all bloody!”

“Oh, my hand got smashed,” I said.  “Sorry.”

“But it’s all gross!  I’m not touching that!  You clean it up!”

“If I clean it up you have to hold SUPER KITE again.”

“Okay, I guess it’ll just be a bloody ninja turtle.”

For the next forty-five minutes, this is what we did:

I wept softly and reeled in the kite.

He would ask “Dad, can we go yet?”

I finally got the kite back down to earth, my back aching, head spinning from blood loss, and both of us wondering what had happened to the female half of our family.

“Do you think they found it?” he asked.

“I’ll bet they accidentally drove the van into the river watching it,” I said.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if they were looking up and then they ran into a gas truck and there was a big fiery explosion and then that explosion blew the kite away and they’d be all like ‘we almost had it’.  That’d be funny.”

“Except for all the death,” I said.  “And the carnage.”

“I dunno,” he said.  “The carnage might be funny.”

We decided to hike on foot in the last known direction of the kite.  I’m really not sure what we were thinking: a kite is not a tornado, so you can’t follow the path of destruction.

Up on the horizon, though, we saw a spot.

“Is that a bird?” I asked.

“Where?”

“Right there!”  I pointed.  “Yeah, it’s a bird.  No, wait, it’s a kite!  No, it’s a bird.  Oh, no, wait, it’s a kite!”

“Just say it’s superman and finish the joke already,” he said. “I’m not going to fall for it.  Oh, wait, it is a kite!”

We’d found the kite.  What’s more, we also found Angela and Victoria, who had also found the kite.

Here’s where it was:

 

A la Charlie Brown, the tree is flying the kite.   The handle had finally gotten stuck in a tree branch, and now the kite flew majestically about 75 feet above it.

“How are we gonna get it down?” she asked.

“I’m thinking we won’t,” I said.

“Yeah, that kite belongs to the tree now,” Angela said.

“But…but…Wilson!”

“Victoria loves nature so much, she gave her kite to a tree,” William said.

Everybody but Victoria laughed.

“So tell me,” I asked.  “How exactly did the kite get away?”

“Well, I was pulling it in,” Victoria explained.  “And I reached out with my right hand, and I missed the string.  So I reached up with my left hand to grab it.  And to reach up, I had to let go of the handle.  And unfortunately I missed with my left hand, too.”

“So basically,” I said.  “It got away from you because you let it go?”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

And I remembered a day many years ago, sweating my butt off, when she did the EXACT SAME THING TO ME!

Sigh.

Some things never change.

Godzilla vs. Bambi

Imagine that there was a box full of cute, happy little gerbils, frolicking playfully and happy, and you took a rabid cougar with brass-tipped razor-sharp claws and laser eyeballs and tossed it into the box.

I kind of did that accidentally.

Here’s what happened:  Victoria loves to spell.  She got a taste of spelling victory last year, when she won top 6^th grade speller, and it gave her a thirst for spelling victory.  This year, when the spelling bee came around, she had me drill her on words to be ready for it. 

And drill we did.  There was a big long word list, and we spent a lot of time going over it and getting the hard words down and preparing for the county bee (there were 18 kids from her school going).  It must have been an hour a night we spent drilling, even on weekends, and I gave her extra assignments to write out words she struggled with and read and re-read the word list and everything.  But she worked hard and did a great job of preparing herself.

When the Bee day arrived, she was ready and focused.  Eye of the tiger.

“Victoria!” I said.  “What is best in life?”

“To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their parents!”

“Yes!”  I laughed.  And off she went.

When she got on the bus with the rest of the kids from her school, she discovered that many of them hadn’t even looked at the word list.  Ever.  “You’ll never win!” one kid said.  “You’ve got no chance!”

“We’ll see,” she said. 

Now back in my day, we used to do just the verbal rounds, and if you got a word wrong you were out.  Which is why I went out on the word “Lemonade.”  Because I spelled it “Lemonaide” like you see in the supermarket.  Stupid advertisements.

Anyhoo, now what they do is a 25-word written round, with the top 20 or so students advancing to the oral round, where they each get 10 words.  And whoever scores the highest out of the 10 is the winner, and the top 3 advance to state.

Lo and behold, she gets all 25 words right.  She’s thrilled.  Hooray!  But that’s not what she came for.  She came to win the whole shebang, and she’s just getting started.

You could tell a lot of these kids were nervous, and rightly so.  Here they are, speaking into a mike in an auditorium spelling for their lives.  But not her.  She’s calm, cool, and collected.  I was actually worried, as pride goeth before the fall and whatnot.

The first two rounds of the orals go pretty predictably, and there’s no real drama.  But on the third word, she gets “hors d’oeuvre.” 

“Hors d’oeuvre?” she asks excitedly.  “Hors d’oeuvre! H-O-R-S space D-apostrophe-O-E-U-V-R-E  Hors d’oeuvre!”

Then she sticks the microphone into the rib of the kid next to her and sits down, grinning.  You could have heard a pin drop.  The other kids are all looking at her, horrified, mouths hanging open, and she just nods.

It all went downhill from there.  The poor kid next to her started just whispering his answers and eventually crumbled.  After each round they’d start asking her if they spelled their word right or not, and she’d tell them.  As she picked up speed she just got more and more calm, rolling off words without any hesitation.

You know how kids buy time by asking about word origin and definition and whatnot?  Yeah, not her.  She’s just rattling off these words, and it’s just making the other kids around her more and more deflated.  By round eight, they’d all pretty much conceded the bee to her and were fighting for second place.

I didn’t know whether to be disheartened for them, elated for her, or start writing out the “you need to be nicer to those around you” talk with her.

Finally, mercifully, the bee was over and she was crowned victor.  Those kids went staggering out of there with shell-shock, eyes glazed over.  She tried to be humble (and failed), smiling and graciously thanking everyone for their congratulations, but I could see it in her eyes: she wanted that state trophy.

She wanted it bad.

"I think I'd like to take a few days off," she told me.  "Then we start again.  I want that state trophy!"

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste

There is a difference between raising a boy and raising a girl.  And I don’t just mean around the toilet; I mean the very things that they do are different.

For example, girls like to play games like “House” or “Hopscotch” or “Jump Rope.”  These are all fairly sedate games, and rarely lead to any kind of trauma.

Boys like games that involve knives, fire, or blood.  Particularly all three, if it can be arranged.

Last week, the boy was at school playing a game called “Wolf Pack.”  The rules of the game are somewhat sketchy, but they seem to be that there are packs of kids that roam around and occasionally savage each other.  If that sounds like some kind of latter-day playground horror movie dystopia, then I think you have the general gist of it.

They’re playing the game last week when William gets into it with “Alpha Wolf.”  Or rather, I guess he was in a tussle with “Beta Wolf” since Alpha Wolf told somebody to…oh, heck, it doesn’t matter.  Here’s kind of what happened:

There was a tussle.  Other Boy (we’ll call him) is shaking William, and then throws him to the ground.  William doesn’t get up, so Other Boy prods him with a toe and discovers that William is unconscious.  At that point the bell rings, and he has to go in, leaving behind his unconscious friend (these two swear they’re friends, even after the event).

Imagine the scene from A Christmas Story:  “The bell rang!”  So they just leave him behind.

Luckily a teacher is strolling by, and sees William groggily staggering around.  “Are you okay?” she asks.

“Peanut butter hot dog GET OFF MY LAWN!” he rants.  “Yes, we have no bananas.”  Then he peers up at her.  “Destiny is calling.  Will you accept the charges?”

She decides, wisely, that he perhaps needs to see the nurse.  Escorting him there, the nurse examines him and discovers that he’s a little woozy.  So she calls Angela to come and pick him up. 

“COMMIES!” he yells when his mother arrives.  “THERE ARE BUGS IN MY NOSTRILS!”

Well, as you can imagine, we’re all concerned, so they call in Other Boy for an interrogation.  I originally imagined that this scene involved hot lights and veiled threats and perhaps even threatened waterboarding, until I heard that the following phrase got used:

“Now, this is a safe place, and whatever you say is okay, and you can’t get in any trouble.  Please just tell me what you think happened.”

When did I start sending my kids to hippie school?  Back in my day, the principal blew cigar smoke in your face, and said things like “Our janitorial staff is all here on prison release and they have keys to the furnace.  You get me, punk?”

But I digress.  So anyways, he repeats the story about the incident, and by this point William is coherent enough to confirm that, yes, he does think that may be what happened.  And they’re both good friends.  But he would like to go home, since he’s feeling rather woozy.

The nurse administers the Brain Too Damaged to Leave test, which involves lots of numbers and counting and backwards spelling (but if you backwards spell on a drunk test, you can count on a DUI).  He passes with flying colors, and he comes home, and although he’s a little tired by that night he seems okay and then turns in and it’s all okay.

Then it gets weird.

His sister gets ahold of the sheet from the school that says “So you may have had a concussion” and reads it for signs and symptoms.  Then she starts in on me.

“Daddy,” she says.  “I notice that William’s eyes seemed less dilated than usual.  I also noticed that he seemed to slur some words, and be fuzzy, and have trouble with his balance.  And his breathing seems stressed.  I believe he has a massive concussion and needs to have an MRI immediately.”

“Bosh,” I said.  “Go away.”

“But dad!  He could be seriously brain damaged!”

“Go away!” I said.

“What if he slips into a coma? What if he dies?  How will you feel then?”

“VICTORIA I’M IN THE BATHROOM!” I yelled.  “GO AWAY!”

“Fine,” she said.  “But if he gets worse I’ll never forgive you.”

The next day he seems okay, so we just kept watching him and went on with our lives.  And then he got weird.

On Saturday we decided to go to see a movie, Escape from Planet Earth.  As we’re waiting for the movie to start, he leans over and says this: 

“Hey, dad, what’s my real name?”

“William Hollis,” I said.

“No, my real name.”

“William Hollis,” I said.  “What did you think it was?”

“That’s not my name,” he said.  “I mean what name was I born with?”

This is a strange question on many levels.  “That’s the only name you’ve ever had,” I said.

“No, it isn’t,” he insisted.  “I know I have a different name.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you said William Hollis, but you didn’t say Allen, so I was clearly born with another name.  A-ha!  You don’t have an answer for that, do you, you commie?”

Let me make this clear: I’m summarizing here.  This went on for TWENTY MINUTES!  It was like a bad Abbott and Costello routine crossed with some horrible ABC movie of the week where a girl sees her face on the milk carton.  Finally we promised to show him his birth certificate when we got home, whereupon he turned into a truther.

“I asked for that a long time ago and you never showed me!” he insisted.  “You’re hiding something from me.  WHAT IS IT?  COMMIES!”

He finally settled down, though, and the movie started.  Everybody but me liked it.  I hated it, but that’s only because it was bad and it stunk, and since I write these my opinion is the only one that counts.

When we got home, his mother showed him his birth certificate (note: if you ever accuse your birth mother of not actually bearing you, she gets a little ticked off) and he finally accepts that, yes, perhaps his only name is William Hollis. 

That night, at bedtime, his sister started working him again.  “Don’t you have headaches?” she asked.  “Nausea?  Vision problems?  Are you having out-of-cycle menstruation with heavier-than-normal cramps?”

“What?” he asked as he brushed his teeth.  “What are you talking about?”

“You need to get checked out,” Victoria said.  “Maybe an MRI, a CAT scan, and probably get a bone marrow sample just to be on the safe side.”

“I am feeling a little bad,” he said.

“That’s what happens!” she told him.  “You feel fine, and then, BAM!  You just keel over from concussionitis.”

“Stop winding him up!” I insisted.  “You’re only making things worse!”

“Why don’t you love your son?” she asked.

“COMMIES!” he yelled for no apparent reason.  “THERE ARE DUCKS IN MY EYEBALLS!”

At that point, we began to suspect that he did need to see a doctor. And when he also admitted that he’d been having flash migraines, his mother made an appointment to see his pediatrician.  That visit was on Monday, and she confirmed that, yes, his symptoms were certainly post-concussion syndrome (which I didn’t even know existed).  It can last for 1 to 6 weeks, and there’s not really anything to do but keep him rested and keep him out of gym and physical activities.

Here’s the upside of post-concussion syndrome: the conversations are fantastic.  As long as he’s not worried about the communists spying on him from inside the dryer, he’s usually a hoot (like when he was mooning me from the bathroom “because you like astronomy.”). 

Here’s the downside: vomiting and mood swings.  Now, the vomiting is okay, because it happened somewhere else while I was around.  But the mood swings can be a pill, like when he goes from happy to “DIE COMMIE SCUMBAG!” in about ten seconds. 

You’re probably worried now and thinking I’ve been making light of his condition, but never fear: he’s pretty much back to normal as of now, ten days after the event.  He only puked once, and again, not when I was around, so that’s okay.  And he’s been his normal chipper self all day, and was only punch-drunk twice in the evening.

Now, if he’ll just accept that his deodorant isn’t filled with mind-control chemicals and start using it again, I’ll be happy.