The Raging Elitist

For a moment I thought I wasn’t going to succumb to the stress of spring’s arrival – the skipping ahead an hour, the blanket of pollen that covers the lowcountry for weeks on end, the portent of summer and the dramatic shift in the family dynamic that season brings – I thought this was the year I would take it all in stride, but deep down I knew I was wrong. Much as I’d have liked to frolic in the mild sunshine and enjoy the end of winter and the brightening days, I instead suffered a brutal sinus infection, and a week of prednisone ended with me doubled over in pain in an urgent care clinic seeking relief from some unknown gastric malady. Everything has a price, and spring, for all its superficial prettiness, is an exacting sonofabitch.

 I’ve long thought that I’d one day look back on these writings and the pretty pictures that go with them and think how much I’d like to travel back in time and relive the wonderful moments I’ve had with the people I love most. Lately, as I find myself endlessly in recovery mode, I think I’d rather look back and be satisfied, maybe even relieved, that life, along with all its requisite pleasures and miseries, is over.

I’m often nostalgic about the kids’ toddlerdom, but during their recent time off from school, I was reminded of what that time was actually like. We were watching home movies in the living room for the second night in a row before bedtime, and I started to get a strange feeling of discomfort. Most of the clips were from Covid times, when the kids were between two and four and Danyelle and I spent nearly a year holed up in the house with them. I always think back on those times fondly when I stroll through the neighborhood playground remembering the way we used to kill time there. The kids were just starting to become the people we recognize today, and our house is littered with photos from that era. Normally, I can’t help but look back through rose-colored glasses.

The videos were cute and funny – Scotty making animal sounds and giving himself a Santa beard while he took a bath with Cartter was a highlight – but after several hours over two nights, and with the kids home from school for a whole week, I felt as if I’d somehow stumbled back in time. I remembered all the stress that came with the boys being so small, with Danyelle and I being younger and less sure of ourselves as parents, with all the uncertainty and anxiety that Covid brought to the world. I didn’t like it. Walking away from the TV where we’d been screensharing Danyelle’s computer, I followed the boys back toward their bedrooms, and I thought “I never want to go back to that again.”

People say the age the kids are now – Cartter will be ten in four months, and Scotty just turned eight – are about the best years of a parent’s life. I suspect those people may be telling the truth – the boys are getting smarter and more capable all the time; they’re finally really interested in sports; and they have an innocent way of seeing the world that their younger selves couldn’t articulate and that their older selves will probably forget. Even on the heels of a sickness-marred spring break, I can’t help thinking this time with them is surely the apex of my existence.

With Danyelle undergoing treatment for a torn labrum recently, I’ve had to step up and take over her some of her usual duties as chauffer, head chef, and medical liaison. It’s meant less sleep and way more time driving in traffic, but the extra time with Cartter and Scotty has been hugely rewarding. I look forward to it. I want more of it. At the same time, it makes sense that we only get to do this whole thing once. A person can only take so much.

Sport

Danyelle and I were immensely grateful during the kids’ week off from school that the boys who live next door regularly came over and rang the doorbell to ask if Cartter and Scotty could come out and play. The Rivers boys are two in number. Jonah, the neighborhood alpha kid, is about six months older than Cartter, and Judah, his thickly muscled little brother is about a year Scotty’s junior. Both homeschooled, both neck-deep in the neighborhood club’s competitive tennis program, and both beset by the unfortunate inability to pronounce the letter “r”, these bronze-skinned, blond-headed little athletes are serious about maximizing their play time.

There are tackle football games, soccer games, basketball games, baseball games, and recently, golf matches, all these events mainly orchestrated by Jonah, who as the oldest and strongest, is the de facto leader. There’s time spent lolling in the shade of course – One time I looked out the window and saw Jonah wearing headphones and carrying a metal detector while leading the other boys around in pursuit of gold rings he was convinced were buried in the soil – but mostly there are heated contests of skill and physical prowess, contests that attract other boys from up and down the street, and contests in which Cartter in particular is very eager to participate.

Lots of times Jonah will send his little brother Judah over to summon the boys, but other times he will come ring the bell himself and say something like, “Come on. We’re getting a football game together.” Every once in a while, Scotty is not in the mood, but Cartter invariably sprints out the door, the blinds rattling loudly as he slams it shut behind him. He will shovel his food at dinner time while standing up at the kitchen table and ask, “Can we play with Jonah and Judah after dinner?”

Thanks to the Rivers boys, Danyelle and I were treated several times over spring break to hours of peace. We sat with our feet up and listened to a quiet that was filled with the muffled noise of running arguments in neighboring yards and the rise and fall of the spring breeze shaking the palm fronds, as the group of boys incessantly debated the rules of whatever game was happening at the moment.

The neighborhood game of choice has a lot to do with whatever is on TV. Football is king, but its reign is particularly dominant in the fall. During March Madness there’s a surge in driveway basketball activity. Recently, over Masters weekend, golf became an obsession, and now that baseball season is getting underway in earnest, two cheap gloves are forever visible lying in the grass in our front yard. Cartter and Scotty leave them there for easy access when they want a game of catch, which often happens in the morning before school and late in the evening before bed.

“Remember when you yelled at us for rooting for the Cubs against the Braves?” Cartter asked me on the way to school one day. I do remember that time. It was three years ago, after our summer Midwest swing that featured a visit to Wrigley where we took in a game, and Danyelle bought the boys stuffed animals. They had little interest then and didn’t know the rules. Now, they’re eager to watch as many innings as I’ll allow on TV; they pull for the Braves; and they can decipher the graphic in the corner of the screen that shows runners on base, outs, and pitch count.  

They still struggle with comprehending the different numbers displayed in the golf telecast, particularly the ones indicating the most recent hole played or the score for a single round. They prefer to focus on the total score relative to par. That much makes sense. No surprise their interest in golf ballooned with the submission of a team into the annual Master’s pool, a team that hovered around the top eight for most of the tournament, and Rory McIlory leading wire to wire for his second Masters victory in a row didn’t hurt either.

The budding golf craze got an assist when I took the boys out to Patriots and treated them to their first ever round on an actual course. It was the first time I’d played since my back went out six years ago, and Cartter and Scotty were very excited to come along. I was happy that I hadn’t forgotten completely how to swing a club and enjoyed showing off. As we loaded up the clubs into the back of the minivan, Scotty asked if I was good, and I told him and his brother truthfully, “Not really.” Then, they were confused when I started booming drives and hitting greens in regulation for a six-hole stretch. I hit a particularly long bomb on eleven, a tricky dogleg left that’s difficult to reach, and as the boys watched it sail majestically over the center of the fairway, one of them asked “Is that good?” I said something along the lines of “You bet your fucking ass it is.” Cartter hit half a dozen tee shots and teed it up in the fairway another eight or so times. He played with a little three wood that I bought used four or five years ago, and he hit it squarely on several occasions. Scotty was content to ride in the cart, have a Twix, and put.

After their experience out on the course, the boys were instantly hooked. Golf matches with Jonah and Judah occupied them for hours in the park behind the house. They bequeathed Maddux’s old clubs to the Rivers boys, who, incredibly, are both left-handed, and who were both immensely grateful. The troop dug a little hole in the sandy soil beneath the oak trees near the tennis courts and played captain’s choice with foam balls. At one point I went out to check on the game, and Jonah was very surprised by the ball flight I achieved, afterwards encouraging me to join. I found a little wire survey flag along our back fence and stuck it in their makeshift hole. Tree roots and live oak leaves rendered putting quite difficult, and Cartter and Scotty developed a technique of making a trench-like path from their ball to the hole, a strategy which Jonah and Judah quickly copied.

Danyelle was so excited by this developing interest that she immediately started buying things, including a more appropriately sized set of clubs from the used sporting goods store for $150, pop-up flags made from tent poles, and lessons from a pro out at Patriots.

Finally, I’d be remiss not to mention my surprise at realizing that Cartter and Scotty are now part of the big-kid group that plays wall ball outside the neighborhood pool. Amazing how for years that game that makes so little sense to me has been happening right in front of my face, yet I somehow failed to grasp that my kids would one day inevitably be part of it. Somehow, I assumed they’d always be the babies who needed constant supervision around the pool deck. Instead, they’re suddenly part of the raucous crew moving freely in and out the gate, living a charmed kid life of pseudo-independence.

Torn

For all his blossoming maturity, Cartter is still not past bursting unexpectedly into tears. Usually, such episodes are my fault, and they arrive during moments when I inadvertently put too much pressure on him to act like a man.

One night I was mocking him and his brother at the kitchen table. They were holding their forks the way a preschooler holds a crayon, spilling food all around their plates. I put on a show aping them, one that got them laughing, but Cartter paused and looked at me wide-eyed when I said in a dumb goofy voice, “I’m an asshole!” as I pretended to feed myself. Later, he cried in his bed and admitted that I’d hurt his feelings. I forget how sensitive he is.

He was driven to the brink when his mommy took him and Scotty to the card shop only to find it closed – he’d badly wanted to show his neighborhood friends that he had been to this much revered store and purchased the kinds of football cards the boys of Creekside deal in; His eyes welled in the outside shower at the beach house when I was waiting on the water to heat up and grew irritated with him continuing to press me: “Will you wait a second?” I scolded him; And he cried in bed again the night before Easter after he learned there would be no egg hunt in the morning. He said he felt bad for Scotty. “Are we gonna go to Bebop’s or Aunt Betsey’s or anything?” he asked me. Danyelle saved the day on that occasion, finding some old plastic eggs in the pantry, filling them with crap, and hiding them around the den.

So much angst about an Easter morning egg hunt came as a surprise since it’s not something that we usually do, and because Cartter had been indulging in lots of knowing looks in the presence of his brother and lots of comments about Scotty’s naivete in private with Danyelle and me. Apparently, letting go of the Easter Bunny was not so easy for him as he made it out to be.

Most disconcerting for me, though, was when I found him with his mother putting on baseball pants and a jersey when it was north of eighty degrees outside. I said something to the effect of “Wear something appropriate. We’re not playing dress up,” and Cartter was unable to suppress a little sob that welled up in his throat. Immediately, I apologized while Danyelle scolded me, and I asked Cartter if I was supposed to sign him up for baseball. After some prying, he admitted to feeling sad about having to choose between swimming and other sports. He wants to play baseball and football, but he doesn’t want to miss swim practice. I felt awful.

At Ease

Scotty suffers little in the way of Cartter’s anxiety. He’s not preoccupied by a desire to be the best in any sport; he remains very comfortable in his alleged belief in the Easter Bunny; and he is easily satisfied with life’s simple pleasures. When I came out from the bedroom on Easter morning, and he told me the Easter Bunny had left eggs hidden in the den, I asked him how he knew. “He left a note,” said Scotty.

The buildup to Easter and his birthday seemed to bring Christmas to his mind. “I miss Christmas,” he said at one point, and on the final day of school before break, an Easter-themed dress-down day, he wore a green shirt with the words “Merry and Bright” printed on the front. I had to take him to the ear doctor that afternoon, and the doc’s comment was, “I like your shirt. Tis the season, right?” Over the last few weeks, I’ve repeatedly caught Scotty humming Christmas tunes – “Let it Snow” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” to name a couple, but there have been plenty others. His spirit has rubbed off on me, and I’ve started playing Guaraldi’s “O Tannenbaum” on the piano in the den.

When I took the boys to pick strawberries out at Boone Hall and then to the beach for a swim afterwards, Scotty remarked on the walk back to Dad’s house, “That was a nice way to spend the day . . . and tomorrow’s Easter.”

He much preferred berry picking to the all-day trip I made with him and Cartter to Bull’s Island, a 5,000-acre strip of beach and maritime forest in the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. At first, he was eager to forego the 12:30 ferry back to the mainland in favor of the 4:30 ride, saying “Yes, stay, that sounds like fun,” and he was quite pleased when we had to remove our shoes and ford a shallow inlet that cut through the beach in order to regain the path back to the island’s center – “I like this,” he said. “It’s an expedition,” – but he didn’t share my enthusiasm for the boneyard beach. A forest of live oaks dead and dying stretched out before us, some of it stubbornly clinging to the sand with its roots, much of it toppled over in the surf as the ocean chopped away at the northeast end of the island with apparent and surprising rapidity. I was stunned by the stark beauty of it to the point of tears, but Scotty said plainly, “I don’t see what’s so amazing.” After a couple more hours of marching around the trails, encountering dozens of large alligators and myriad avian species along the way, Scotty began to question his decision to stay longer than originally planned. “I’m kind of done with this island,” he said. “We’ve walked all over it.”

Such frankness is the norm for Scotty. He trusts his judgment, and he doesn’t need you to tell him what to think. Things are a lot simpler for him than they are for his brother, who’s much more concerned about other people’s opinions. Cartter wants to know what a Democrat is and what a Republican is. He wants to know what the national debt is, and when I try explaining it all to him, and do a pretty good job I think, Scotty interjects, “How did we start talking about this?” His chief concern is what we’re going to do for the day. He wants to play fishbowl as a family, and he says he wants to go on vacation like when we went to Michigan or when we went to Washington D.C. I asked him which of those trips he preferred, and he said he gets them mixed up in his mind.

The absence of worry that characterizes Scotty’s existence carries with it a certain capacity for absentmindedness. In an episode I have repeatedly forgotten to include in these posts, I grew irritated with him for managing to lose a single croc. Eventually, he found the missing croc on top of the desk in his room where he explained he and Cartter had been using it as a telephone.

Concerned

During all the sickness and injury that has plagued the family over recent weeks, Sammy has developed some strange behaviors that started me thinking perhaps she smells some hidden cancer rotting my insides. Usually, her stalking is reserved for Danyelle, but of late, she’s taken to following me around the house as well, even going so far as to let herself into the bathroom and wedge her way between my legs and the toilet while I poop. Suddenly, she’s way more eager for my attention than ever, and any hint of anger on my part sends her into a frenzy of nuzzling and whimpering demands to be petted. Naturally, I’ve wondered if she must think I’m dying.

I changed my mind during a trip to the boat landing, when Sammy whined desperately to be allowed to swim. I remembered that soon the water in the creek will be so warm and bacteria-laden that the risk of hot spots will render it unswimmable for her. Then, I thought of the fact that she’ll turn eleven this summer and that she likely doesn’t have that many swims left. Maybe, her neediness and attention-seeking behavior toward me has less to do with my approaching death than it does with hers.

Of course, there’s no telling when it comes to Sammy’s powers of perception or the exact reasons for her more mystifying behavior. The other day Danyelle spotted her frozen on the patio staring through the window to our bedroom. “She’s doing that thing again,” Danyelle said. That night, I was awakened at 4 a.m. by a hand that smushed its fingertips into the side of my head around my temple. Startled, I felt around in the bed next to me for Danyelle, but she was sleeping in the guest bed with a pregnancy pillow trying to alleviate the pain in her shoulder. My mind went immediately to Sammy’s frozen stare, and it was some time before I could fall back asleep.

Entertainment

A trip to the movies to see “Project Hail Mary” was a highlight of the break. I sat between Danyelle and Cartter and enjoyed when Cartter was startled by the alien’s abrupt appearance. Cartter was rapt throughout the entire two and a half hours. Scotty got fidgety at a couple points during the latter half but seemed to enjoy the film nonetheless.

I was disturbed when, upon walking out halfway through to use the bathroom, I opened the theater door, and it slammed against an old woman who was seated on the other side of it reading a book on the floor. In the bathroom I realized that she was the person who had gotten up and left ten minutes in, and that her husband had heckled her, “Well, it was a long shot! A Hail Mary!” When I found her still in the same place upon my return, I apologized again and asked if she was alright. She informed me that she was fine, saying “This is how interested I am in the movie.”

I thought, “Am I a gullible fool? Is the movie actually bad?” And then I thought “Will Danyelle and I hate each other when we’re old like that horrid couple?” Ultimately, I was comforted by the idea that the woman was clearly an idiot. Who brings a book to the theater? And how could anyone not understand what they were getting themselves into? It’s a scifi blockbuster about saving the universe, lady!

 On the literary front, Danyelle had the clever idea to buy Cartter a book called “Touchdown Kid,” and he has taken it up and ditched the second installment of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy he’d been slogging through at a torpid pace. He’s devouring “Touchdown Kid,” and I’ve ordered him another sports book to try when he’s finished. Meanwhile, Scotty is on his second “Treasure Hunters” book.

Within the last couple months, both the kids have read multiple books in the “Bunny vs. Monkey” series of comics. They really like these, and I’ve enjoyed stumbling upon each of them in different instances, finding a child sitting alone and giggling to himself.