Yesterday morning Jez and I headed out for our morning trek through the neighborhood right on schedule. Anxiously awaiting my parents arrival for their annual trip to Chicagoland, I began to consider the life and times of the Green family—all the way back to the beginning of my mischievous, rotten ways that started around the age of 2.
“We had to set up a barricade to keep you away from the tree because you kept pushing it over,” I remember my mom telling me once when describing my first or second Christmas on earth.
With my mind racing through all the examples of my delinquent childhood, wondering how they refrained from sending me to military school, we came up behind a father and son getting ready to take a bike ride. They were fully prepared to hit the road—the only thing keeping them from taking off was some kind of complicated looking basket that Dad was trying to attach to the handlebars.
Jez stopped to eat some weeds growing along the fence, as the kid started questioning his father’s ability to figure things out.
“Dad, maybe you need the manual,” the little boy said. Dad was silent.
“DAAAD, do you have a manual? You probably need the manual!” the kid repeated. Once again, no response from Dad.
“Hey DAD, you should check the manual,” the kid said one last time.
With Jez still busy stripping leaves from a twig, I looked over to see how Dad was going to respond to all this pressure from a five-year-old with the word “manual” in his vocabulary.
“PLEASE BE QUIET,” he said calmly, as he went back to tinkering with the basket.
Good for you Dad, I thought. He wasn’t mean—he was direct. The kid seemed to understand and stopped harassing him immediately.
Honestly, I don’t know how parents figure things out. I know when I try to give my own folks credit for their accomplishments they just shrug their shoulders and say they’re not sure how they figured it out either. But I don’t believe it. I think they developed special skills in the art of dealing with rotten kids. Skills worthy of awards, cash prizes and all expense paid vacations to rocky mountain getaways. Or, in my case, a welcome-to-Chicago dinner at Moody’s Pub down the street from our apartment.
