The Raging Elitist

Easter weekend 2025 was a lesson delivered by the children in what we ought to consider “inappropriate.”

It started on Thursday, the last day of school before break, when I was invited into Cartter’s classroom as the “mystery reader” for the week. I’d thought that Cartter might not want me to participate in this potentially embarrassing activity, but apparently both he and his teacher were very eager that he not be left out, so at 9:30 a.m. I went into his classroom armed with Animal Land Children, Hans Christian Anderson, Tales from the Arabian Nights, and Watership Down intending to let Cartter choose which I would read. The teacher sat me in a rocker and Cartter in a chair next to me while his classmates sat Indian-style or sprawled out on the rug in front of us. When I pulled Watership Down from my backpack, Cartter said through a taut smile that it was “inappropriate.” Then, when I presented the other options, he decided it would be alright after all. I read the opening chapter and the first of the rabbit folklore tales, both of which I find stirringly poignant, and I made sure to read with real feeling for the class. A still hush fell over the room as I read Fiver’s premonition about the warren’s doom, and right as I was about to reveal his terrifying vision, Cartter broke the silence with a sheepish warning, “Don’t do it, Daddy.”

“The field,” I read in Fiver’s breathy, panicked voice, “It’s covered in blood!”

All the little girls seated up front burst out in unison, “Ewwwww!”

Cartter and Scotty had that same reaction when Danyelle and I kissed in front of them later that afternoon. Among Scotty’s declarations of disapproval were the lines, “They’re kissing;” “Don’t look;” and “It’s disgusting.” We were in the kitchen, and Danyelle’s slender stems were on display in a medium-short yellow dress and white Keds, a girlish get-up that continued to earn her a lot of “inappropriate” attention throughout the evening. After the aforementioned interaction in the kitchen, we took the golf cart for fried seafood at The Wreck for dinner, and as we walked back across the Shem Creek Bridge to the parking lot, I was seized by the desire to hold her hand and to pull her in for a little smooch. At the sight of this, Scotty put his palms together, held his arms out in front of him, and marched between us, cleaving us apart before reaching up and taking his mother’s arm himself. Then, making our way down past the foot of the bridge and into the gravel lot, the heavy aroma of marijuana smoke caught my attention, and I noticed some dockworkers saying something about Danyelle’s ass and how they’d like to get a picture of it. Finally, back in the golfcart, I pressed the pedal to the floor to cross Coleman Boulevard, causing Danyelle’s dress to fly up and offering a momentary glimpse of the treasures that lay hidden beneath it. Danyelle made a little startled cry; I whooped as we drove through the intersection; and a guy on a motorcycle waiting at the red light revved his engine in approval. The kids failed to notice any of this, but safe to say, they would have deemed it all very inappropriate.

Back at the house, Cartter and Scotty’s faces lit up with expectancy when their mother, that beacon of sexual inappropriateness, suggested that we might watch Jurassic Park, a film whose screening in our living room I’ve resisted lo these many years of child rearing on account of its . . . inappropriateness. This time, I caved. Yes, it’s basically a horror movie; yes, it’s an uninspired knockoff of Indiana Jones; and yes, Jeff Golblum as a cool, sexy scientist is cringe-inducing, but despite the film’s many warts, it’s no stretch to label this garbage quality Spielberg production a cultural bedrock. I very much enjoyed watching it with the boys. By the time the raptors were chasing the children through the kitchen, I was near hysterical laughter, and when the credits rolled, I relished ushering Cartter and Scotty to bed while leaping and “rarring^*” at them.

Scotty was wearing his green alligator hoodie towel, pulling PJ’s out of his chest of drawers when I burst into his room. “I don’t think that movie’s appropriate for little kids,” he said.

I thought, “No shit,” but I said, “Oh yeah? Which part?”

Scotty turned to face me, still wearing only his hoodie towel, his little weiner hanging in front of him. He halfway shut his eyelids, and his face glazed over with impatience. “The part where she’s in the shed?” he said.

I played dumb. “What about it?”

Scotty kept on giving me the come-on-you’re-not-that-funny look, and said “The arm?”

Oh yes, the scene where short shorts wearing Laura Dern turns the breakers back on and then, after fleeing a raptor and slamming a door in its face, lets out an orgasmic sigh of relief as she collapses into what she thinks is the reassuring embrace of a fellow humanoid. “Oh Mr. Arnold,” she says. Alas, that reassuring hand on her shoulder is actually Samuel L. Jackson’s lifeless severed limb. Oh yeah. That part.

Once he was clothed and in bed, I continued to tease my newly-turned-seven-year-old. As I leaned over his bed tickling him and rarring at him in the dark, he let me know that, “If I have a bad dream, it’s your fault.” Then he asked, “What do I do if I have a bad dream?”

“Go back to sleep,” I told him.

“What are you gonna do if I come in your room?” he asked.

“Feed you to the dinosaurs.”

“I thought you loved me.”

“I do. I love you so much, I’ll help them eat you.”

Amazingly, Scotty did not wake us up in the wee hours that night. He instead fought through the weekend and endured even more inappropriateness. On Saturday, we collected Cartter and Scotty’s cousin Maddux, their friend Bennett, and Bennett’s father and little sister and went to the Riverdogs game, where it turned out to be “Fight Night.” Bennett’s Dad and I had tallboys and watched the game; Danyelle took the kids to play “mega-tag” on “Shoeless Joe’s Hill” and fed them milkshakes; and the game flew by in barely over two hours. Shocked as we were to have made it so quickly to the end, we were even more surprised to see a boxing ring set up inside the main gate as we were about to head out. So that’s what they meant by “fight night.” As we stood dumbfounded, two men in the ring touched gloves and proceeded sending their fists whistling through the air at each other’s faces. “What are those people doing, Sloan?” I asked Bennett’s four-year-old sister, at which point Maddux, eleven, chimed in quite accurately, “This is inappropriate for her. This is rated R.”

Maddux spent the night that night, and the boys all stayed up to the inappropriate hour of 10:30. We survived the entire weekend without anyone having nightmares about inappropriate sexual displays or blood-thirsty velociraptors. Ultimately, it wasn’t anything rated R that gave the kids cause for distress; it was the weekend ending. Sunday night after bedtime, Scotty emerged from his bedroom into the living room, crying. He said he was sad. He didn’t like that Maddux was gone, and he wanted to know when he would see him again. Then, he appeared in our bedroom at 5:30 after having a nightmare. In between, Danyelle and I watched a movie called Aftersun about depression and the fleeting innocence of the child-parent relationship. I cried. It’s sad to think of the world losing all its inappropriateness as the kids grow older.

Footnotes

^*While the raptors ran around in the kitchen signaling to each other about the children’s whereabouts, Cartter was prompted to ask, “How do their throats not get hurt?”

“How do you mean?” I said.

“From rarring,” said Cartter.

Miscellaneous

Cartter has been spending a lot of time in the park with his 3-wood. His friend apparently got a little tired of being outdriven and told Cartter that he was “ugly” and had a “stupid face.” Cartter was very upset. I tried to tell him that having a stupid face wasn’t so bad, but this did not soothe his hurt feelings. Nor did my assurances that he actually had a handsome face. “I have a medium face,” he said.

Took a band of boys to Top Golf and Chick-Fila on Friday to celebrate Scotty turning seven. Highlight was driving them back home and blasting such tunes as “I’m a Barbie Girl,” “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” and “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift, much to their screaming protestation. So inappropriate.