The Raging Elitist

Every night when I turn out the light in the hall, Cartter and Scotty yell a strange farewell to each other from their beds. I have no idea as to the origin or meaning of their nightly valediction; it rings defiant and silly through the darkness, emanating from their open doorways throughout the house and penetrating the thin wall that separates their rooms. Scotty begins the ritual with a “Good night, Cartter! Gopher-Gopher-Gopherrrr!” and Cartter replies with a “Good night, Scotty! Gopher-Gopher-Gopherrrr!” Then he pauses for just a moment before punctuating the benediction with a higher-pitched and more hastily uttered, “Gopher!” I can only guess that the purpose of all these gophers is to provide one last laugh, to remind each child of the other’s presence, and thereby to put both at ease before they go to sleep alone in their rooms.

On the last night of November this year, the gophers grew a tail. Scotty added to his usual closing remarks an enthusiastic reminder: “Tomorrow’s December first!” he said into the darkness. I was surprised, but Cartter was decidedly not, echoing his brother with a tone more reassuring than exuberant: “Good night, Scotty! Gopher-Gopher-Gopherrrr!” he said, before dropping the customary last gopher and adding, “Tomorrow’s December first!” Clearly, he understood and even anticipated Scotty’s alteration to the normal goodnight address. I walked away supposing the two of them were excited about Christmas coming and that they’d been talking about it. I was only half right. The next night I learned the whole truth. I turned out the lights, and Scotty followed up his gophers with a lilting, expectant question: “What will the elves doooo?” he hollered. Once again, Cartter deferentially, almost dutifully, echoed his brother’s sentiment: “Good night, Scotty! Gopher-Gopher-Gopherrrr! What will the elves doooo?”

When I was a kid, the big lie about Christmas magic was the one about Santa coming down the chimney. It was an easy lie, a yearly one-night stand with a lot of teasing and empty talk leading up to the main event. Somewhere along the line, that little parental cover-up ballooned into a month-long indulgence of childish fantasy called “elf on the shelf.”

Now, every December 1, little elf dolls show up in kitchens and living rooms across America, and for weeks at the outset of each day, they greet children to scenes of mischief wrought in the night. Kids emerge from their bedrooms to find notes scrawled in calligraphy, snowball fights involving marshmallows, commodes filled with cocoa puffs – it’s very involved; it happens in my own home; and yet I manage to ignore it almost completely. Days go by without my knowing what our elves have got into. They’ve been around for years now, and I’ve never once participated in the nightly staging. It will come as no surprise to those who know me that I failed to recognize my younger son’s elf fever on the eve of December 1. My Aunt Taylor summed up my typical disinterest in such matters thusly: “I can’t believe John allows those elves in his house,” she said. Her disbelief is understandable. Simply put, I’m a no-frills kind of guy.

I learned about the elf-on-the-shelf game when I was coaching a group of 11-12’s in North Charleston eight years ago. A girl with younger siblings was talking excitedly, as kids are wont to do at the end of swim practice when the endorphins are rushing around full force in their synapses. The girl blathered on about elves performing all sorts of feats in her house, and I had no idea what she was talking about. The other children did, though, and I quickly settled on the belief that the whole lot of them were spoiled. Never, I thought, would my own children, the oldest a one-year-old at the time, the youngest still in gestation, live in an elf-on-the-shelf home: Santa should be enough; Christmas should be enough. Obviously, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

There was so much I didn’t know then about the experience of having children, like the feeling I would have shortly after the elves arrived this year, when Danyelle and I flew away to New York, leaving the boys behind with my mom and stepdad. Alanis Morisette lyrics flashed through my mind, and I thought of how confused the boys would be if we suddenly died. Then I thought about the fact that if that scenario were to unfold, I wouldn’t be there to help them. It was wretchedly, powerfully sad, and my eyes welled with tears as I packed my bags.

I was called to New York for two days of trustee meetings with family board members and investment managers, and Danyelle tagged along. During our stay, we took some time to walk the streets around our old digs on the Upper East Side, where eleven years ago we shared an apartment while I was interning for a bank in Midtown. People we talked to said the city had changed since Covid, and I believed them, but to me, everything looked incredibly the same, as if Danyelle and I had never left. Even the crappy Mexican restaurant we used to frequent was somehow still there. It felt like we were, as Danyelle put it, “back,” like eleven years hadn’t passed, like we were still a young, unmarried couple, like our kids had never been born.

I was relieved when we got home. Mom came and picked us up at the airport after a bumpy flight that sent Danyelle into a panic, and when we pulled into the driveway, Cartter came out to greet us. He’d been watching for us in the den. It was cold and gray, and a light rain was falling, but he was barefoot. I got out of the car, and he looked at me with his sheepish smile and said, “You were gone so long.” I felt the same. Amazing the way eleven years can pass without notice, and three days can seem an eternity.

Mom staged the elves for the boys while Danyelle was gone with me. One night she set them up on the counter next to a stack of Little Debbie Christmas trees and a sign that advertised them for twenty-five cents apiece. She hadn’t expected that Scotty would go to his room and bring back a stack of quarters, periodically buying everyone in the house a round. Scotty is a true believer. Cartter, twenty months his elder, humors him. “I can’t believe Scotty is the only one who doesn’t know about the elves,” he told me at bedtime one night. He likes keeping the magic alive for his brother, and he likes being the older one who’s in on the secret. I like it too. Surprisingly, to both my Aunt Taylor and me, I’m glad I live in an elf-on-the-shelf home. Contrary to my prior belief, the very few Christmases I have with Cartter and Scotty can never be enough, or, to put it in their terms, Gopher-Gopher-Gopherrrr! . . . Gopher!

Rock Show

We made it home from New York in time to catch the boys’ first ever band performance. They were the most novice group of a series of “School of Rock” Mount Pleasant acts to go onstage at the “Rick House” on Folly Road this past Sunday. Their set consisted of “Radioactive,” “Let it Be,” “I Love Rock and Roll,” and “Mr. Big Stuff.” The lead singer was frequently off key and off tempo; the drummer for the first two songs was all over the place; and the second guitarist just stood there pretending to play the entire time. Maybe I’m biased, but Cartter and Scotty seemed the clear standouts. As much as I’ve listened to Cartter practice, I wasn’t surprised he played as well as he did – he got a big hand from the School of Rock faculty after his solo on “Let it Be” – but Scotty, in typical fashion, snuck up on me, holding the group together with his steady keyboard playing. He even played the trumpet lines on “Mr. Big Stuff.”

More than anything, I was proud of the way both boys carried themselves. Cartter was vocal about his nerves ahead of time, but he shook them off and composed himself, seemingly embracing the pre-performance adrenaline. Scotty was nonchalant about everything; he even mugged for the camera from behind his keyboard when he caught his mother filming, but he never missed a beat. I loved seeing them so comfortable and confident on stage. Cartter wore his pink hoodie signed by Olympic swimmer Alex Walsh and his orange crocs. Scotty went more punk rock, donning a “tacocat” tank top over long sleeves and a pair of fingerless black gloves. Neither of them let the moment get too big for them. They looked so relaxed on stage.

A Tough Pill to Swallow

After this display of composure, it came as a bit of a surprise when they came apart at the seams during the following week. Scotty had to stay home from school for three days due to a cold he picked up while we were out of town, and he broke down and cried at the pool with his mother while waiting on Cartter to finish swim practice. I didn’t witness it, but according to Danyelle, he went into the corner of the building and melted down, complaining of a temperature and fatigue.

I did get to witness Cartter break. His collapse stemmed from a nickel-sized sore under his bottom lip that began spreading to other parts of his face, another affliction that developed while Danyelle and I were gone, and the boys were in Granny’s care. One might expect Cartter’s distress was due to the unsightly lesions, but he didn’t seem to care about those at all. His problem was with the medicine the doctor prescribed. After an evening spent trying to talk him off the ledge, I have a new appreciation for the idiomatic expressions “taking one’s medicine,” “a tough pill to swallow,” and “a bitter pill.”

Part of Cartter’s fear had to do with the fact that he was being asked to take “drugs.” What if he got addicted? He also noticed the side effect “dizziness” on the antiviral’s packaging and worried that he would lose the ability to walk. Then, there was the act of swallowing a pill. I broke it down into a two-step process for him – step one: place the pill on the back of your tongue; step two: swallow water – but my instructions were of no avail, and Cartter discovered that for him, swallowing pills is actually impossible. When Danyelle took over and crushed the pill up, spooning it to him with apple sauce, Cartter made an additional discovery, that swallowing crushed-up pills is also impossible, prompting Danyelle to cave to frustration and yell, “You spit out your drugs!”

Cartter was completely hysterical, but I managed to keep him laughing throughout the ordeal, explaining that I would be writing all about it and sharing it with the world, maybe even reading the story aloud to the entire swim team. I told him that his little brother swallowed a quarter when he was a baby, and when I asked if we needed him to demonstrate how to swallow a pill, Scotty, seated at the keyboard where the background music he’d been providing had recently been silenced at my behest, scrunched up his face and asked, “Is that necessary?”

I took advantage of the chance to make what I thought were a couple of really solid impromptu speeches, one about the importance of never panicking. Panicking can’t help any situation I told the boys. Cartter met my reasoning with this little beauty: He said, “Unless you’re in a panicking contest, and they’re trying to find out who’s the best panicker.” My other monologue was about the difference between illicit and medicinal drugs, in the middle of which Scotty stood up to go the bathroom, stopping halfway there to turn around and treat me to mock applause and to hail me with a sarcastic “Bravo!”

When Cartter asked me in his bed that night if he had to take the medicine again, I lied so that he would go to sleep, so the next morning he descended into panic again, and it was his mother’s turn to lose her mind. Yelling, crying, and hurt feelings ensued, but in the end, we learned how to administer Cartter his medicine – with plenty of chocolate and peanut butter. Ice cream doesn’t hurt either. Cartter is not nearly so panicked now, but his concerns have not disappeared altogether. Last night he called me to his room and complained that he was worried that one day he’d have to swallow pills. When I told him he could just take his pills in ice cream for the rest of his life, he said, “But won’t I get fat?”

Sammy Gets in on the Act

I think I managed a lot of patience with both boys over the course of all this sickness, an opinion which I’ve flaunted in front of Danyelle a bit, but I did lose it with the dog. It happened when I was trying to eat lunch, and Sammy started dragging her ass on the floor. She seemed to be hoarding a poop – oftentimes, she refuses to relieve herself until she is taken where she wants to go. Sadly, my frustration boiled over. I set down my lunch and ushered Sammy out the back door, chasing and pushing her into the yard and yelling at her to “Go Potty!” She responded by staring at me and following me back into the house. Danyelle then took her for a walk, and Sammy still refused to go. After I went to the gym and back, I took her for another walk, during which she let go a loose stool on one of the landscaping islands in the street. Finally, when everyone returned from evening swim practice, Danyelle discovered that Sammy had scattered diarrhea throughout our bedroom. I can’t decide if it was an act of delayed obedience (is this what you wanted, Daddy?)or one of vengeance (is this what you wanted, fucker?). Either way, she really showed me.