Playing House

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Family Man

By Gregory Keer

Almost two years ago, my son got married. It was a private affair. Just Ari, his beloved Maddie, and a few friends. After the simple ceremony, the couple and their guests sat down to a meal of fish sticks and carrots. No limousine picked up the newlyweds. Instead of going on a honeymoon, the couple — their shirts stained with grape juice, their cheeks smudged with washable paints — went home with their respective carpools.

It wasn’t until that night, after Maddie’s mom Sharon called my wife to share the news, that I learned about the marriage. Preparing to read a bedtime story to Ari (three-and-a-half years old at the time), I inquired about the wedding.

“Did something special happen at school today?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, Maddie and I got married,” he said matter of factly.

I choked back a chuckle. Ari and Maddie had been “dating” for close to two years. The months before their betrothal was filled with napping side by side and impassioned jealousies regarding how often they played blocks with other suitors.

“Why did you choose her?” I wondered.

“Because I love her and she loves me,” he said. “Now please read the book.”

Ari leaned on me, stuck his thumb in his mouth and his blanket under his arm. This tow-headed preschooler thought of himself as a married man. Who was I to judge?

I often find myself wondering how I got here myself. When did I go from being five years old, playing house with Kathy Kincaid from across the street, to a man in his 40s with a wife, three sons, a home, a job, and the other accessories of a grown-up life?

On the rare occasion when I’m alone with nothing to do and everyone else asleep, I sit on the couch and ponder all of this. I survey the strewn sweatshirts, game pieces, and orphaned socks my boys frequently forget to put away. I stare at the photographs on the walls and shelves capturing the memories of amusement parks and vacations. Then I go to the rooms of my sons just to listen to them breathe.

I reach my own bedroom to see my wife barely visible under the covers. Her piles of graded papers and correspondence from the committees she’s involved in spread over the nightstand.

“We forgot to sign the field-trip form for Jacob,” she mumbles throatily before drifting off again.

I sign the form and climb beneath the blankets. I stare at this woman. Her hair is disheveled; a slight frown knits her eyebrows. This is the person I married with whom I have built a life full of all the people and experiences I once only dreamed about.

There are plenty of times when I have shortness of breath, weighed down by myriad responsibilities. Occasionally, I succumb to the fantasy flashes of writing great novels in a solitary mountain cabin or of a playboy lifestyle of being surrounded by exotic women and powerful men admiring of my status.

Then there are the real moments when I know I am damn lucky to have Wendy. She’s smart, sexy, strong, and incredibly tolerant of my downfalls. But what always strikes me about our marriage is our mutual interest in working our butts off to make the partnership grow. We have plenty of leaks and holes in our marital fortress, yet we continue to patch them up while adding new rooms to labor and play in.

Our sons learn a lot about the nuts and bolts of marriage because we hide little from them. This may have helped Ari when he found out Maddie had moved to another school. He cried, but took heart in Wendy’s promise to help him phone and e-mail the woman he calls “my wife.”

Two years into the relationship, Ari maintains his unique affection for Maddie. Before his fifth birthday party, I caught him ransacking his dresser drawers.

“I have to find the right clothes to wear for Maddie,” he explained, worried since he had not seen her in a couple of months.

When Sharon brought her daughter to the door, Ari smiled broadly and guided Maddie into the party to show her around.

“She spent an hour picking out the right dress because she wanted to look good for her husband,” Sharon said.

And so it was. Two little people acting like a committed, eternally excited married couple. May they be as blessed as their parents.

Posted in Columns by Family Man, Humor, Love and Courtship, Marriage | Leave a comment

Dirty

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Family Man

By Gregory Keer

As we pack for a day on the soccer fields, my wife looks at my clothes and shakes her head.

“You know those shorts will not be khaki colored when you get home,” she says.

“I have to match them with my assistant coach’s jersey,” I respond, half-hurt she’s not fully admiring me in my uniform.

“You’re such a geek,” she confirms.

So we pile into the minivan with the ice chest, soccer balls, and three sons all gleaming in their various team colors.

At the field, nary a blade of grass can be seen. The city has been miserly conserving water so what remains are playing surfaces resembling the vestiges of a scorched earth campaign by a rival park organization. Worse yet, the wind picks up and blows mini dirt twisters.

“A boulder just landed in my eye,” Ari (5) wails in the middle of his match.

“It’s just a speck of dust,” I yell back, hoping the tiny tornadoes don’t throw a Dorothy or Toto at my kids.

Later, as we trudge over the barren prairie toward the next game, we see our friend, Dave, who coaches his daughters’ group of 10 year olds.

“The other day my girls didn’t want to run on the field because it had just rained,” he explained. “So I picked up some mud, wiped it on my face, and said, ‘See, it doesn’t hurt!’”

We all laugh knowingly, then continue our grimy experience. After three games amid the thick grit and occasional mud puddle, my shorts are indeed milk-chocolate brown and my kids are streaked like farmers in an onion patch.

And I like it.

At a time in which Americans have gone clean crazy, scrubbing ourselves sterile with anti-bacterial soaps and sanitizers, it’s a joy to get dirty. When my family gets home on a soccer day, we do shower and drop the grubby uniforms in the wash. But putting in a good day of throwing our bodies into the elements feels great.

I’m not advocating for a lack of hand washing or sneezing into our sleeves. I want to help keep my kids and the general population free from swine flu and other airborne illnesses. Yet I do think that in looking at the world as a war zone of germs, we’re taking a lot of fun out of childhood. We’re losing too much by going overboard with sanitation.

These days, many of us fear our kids will transform into Charlie Brown’s buddy Pigpen should we allow them to dig in the soil for bugs, fool around with paints, or (as infants) fiddle with their food. Over the years, I’ve been prone to blood-pressure surges upon seeing disorder and have discouraged my children’s normal, but not harmful, tendencies toward messiness. Because of this, my kids have been shy to make mud floors in shoe boxes for school dioramas or get bicycle grease on their hands despite a desire to learn how their vehicle works.

In his first two years of life, my middle son, Jacob, liked to put everything from the ground in his mouth. He ingested rocks and pebbles from the park, sand from the beach, and spare change from the sidewalk. Aside from the fear that he would choke on the objects, my OCD tendencies caused me to imagine Pokemon-like germ characters mounting bacterial attacks on his immune system. We tried everything to keep him from mouthing things and even learned about a condition called pica (or pika) which causes people to crave dirt to alleviate iron deficiency. He didn’t have pica. What he had was a natural curiosity in the world and a habit of using his mouth as one of his tools.

Six years later, Jacob thankfully shows no permanent damage from his early childhood earth consumption. In fact, there’s even a whole legion of researchers who have found that kids need exposure to germs to strengthen their immunity to various illnesses. They even suggest that (yuck) having tiny worms in our digestive tracts are good for our long-term health. This is why these scientists recommend keeping dogs and cats around for casual but fairly safe contact with dirt.

I will likely continue to struggle with my tendency for cleanliness but plan to let my kids get filthy. I will draw the line at Benjamin (11) and Jacob continuing to use their shirts as napkins, but I vow to revel in Ari coming home from preschool looking like he wrestled an overgrown paintbrush in a sandbox. This year, I’m keeping a dirty mind.

Posted in Columns by Family Man, Health, Humor | Leave a comment

Middle Earth

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Family Man

By Gregory Keer

My oldest son is entering middle school and I’m wondering who tinkered with my clock? Wasn’t it just the other day that I was in middle school? Wasn’t I so afraid of talking to other kids that I lugged a heavy book bag to avoid locker conversations and never showered after PE because of embarrassment? Wasn’t I too clueless to appreciate the smiles of Jaynee Strickstein and chose to sit alone in my room reading about The Hobbit’s Middle-earth?

For me, reality is sinking in. I’m middle-aged. And if my son’s transition to the next level of school isn’t symbolic enough, there are other signs. Two icons of my junior high years, Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, prematurely exited the world. My back muscles spasm if I look the wrong way. Facebook reconnects me with friends and pictures from my elementary through high-school years (did I really part my hair in the middle and wear such tight swim trunks?).

I stop the 8-track rewind to consider my first born. The one who had baby thighs like the Stay Puft marshmallow man and giggled hysterically when I crawl-chased him through our apartment. The one who liked to flash his size 4 superhero underpants to everyone because he thought he was cool. The one who just yesterday learned to read the picture book George Shrinks.

Benjamin isn’t shrinking. He’s 11 years old, more than five feet tall, and hipper to the jokes on The Colbert Report than I am. But over the past six months, he’s been going through his own reflection.

It started last winter, as he joined Wendy and me at meetings for the public middle schools we were considering. Benjamin looked so small as he walked through the halls of much-bigger institutions than the one he was attending. He listened to us, looking a bit lost, as we explained the various magnet and specialty programs.

“I don’t know if I’m ready to do homework all the time,” he said, sounding a little stressed. 

We worked hard to whittle down the details and help him decide. My wife made countless trips to school offices to turn in paperwork and ask questions. I went to a two-hour science meeting and brought Benjamin to see an exhibition of one program’s student projects.

The deciding factor, in addition to Benjamin’s greatest interest in learning about community work and social studies, was that a number of his good friends would be joining him if he went to the civics program of our neighborhood school.

Being with friends became increasingly vital for Benjamin in the spring as he experienced a flurry of activities to mark the end of his elementary education. He went to Yosemite National Park with his schoolmates, teachers, and mom. He ignored Wendy most of the time, but she got to be a fly on the wall to watch the social politics and see him laugh with his buddies. The trip was wonderful for Benjamin, but it heightened his emotion about leaving his cohort.

The final school weeks were marked by a host of “lasts.” There was Benjamin’s last orchestra concert after three years of playing trumpet and a hip-hop dance performance in which Benjamin shared a stage with his middle brother for the final time they’d be on campus together. Then, the elementary school culmination ceremony arrived. It showed the deep mutual adoration between the kids and their teachers. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, and Benjamin’s eyes were two of the wettest.

Year-end parties went on for at least a week, causing Benjamin and his friends to be alternately celebratory and wistful. Wendy and I grew weary of shuttling our son to so many get-togethers, yet we also were impressed with the level of connection he had made with his contemporaries.

And this is one of the important truths for me. For all his crankiness about hygiene and homework, forgetfulness about chores, and biological attachment to the cell phone we caved in to buy him for graduation, my son has a greater ease with people than I ever had. He makes friends quickly and keeps up relationships.

As he heads to middle school, I know he will not shy away from locker-side chats or ignore girls out of fear of talking to them (though he forbids me from detailing his communication with females just yet). He may be headed for big adolescent and academic challenges in the sixth through eighth grades, but he’s ready for the transition — even though I’m not so sure that I am.

Posted in Columns by Family Man, School | Leave a comment

Itchy and Scratchy

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Family Man

By Gregory Keer

With dozens of other anxious parents, my wife and I wait for our son to return from a month at sleep-away camp.

“It’s good for him to be independent,” I rationalize to a nearby dad. “The kid could barely pour his own milk before he started overnight camp two years ago.”

“The last two weeks were awful,” Wendy says to a fellow mom. “But the last few days actually hurt because we missed him so much.”

“Are you kidding?” another mother chimes in. “It was such a pleasure to get a break from parenting a preadolescent for a month.”

Wendy and I smile knowingly. Yes, there were days when we enjoyed the absence of our son’s random crankiness. Still, a month without our usually sweet-natured first born was too much.

The buses rumble toward the lot and all but the most jaded parents cheer its approach. The children wave wildly from the windows. As each bus parks, Wendy and I try to see which one our son will disembark from, jostling with other parents like crowd members at a rock concert.

We finally find him. He looks tanned, tired, and so happy to be home.

Back at our house, Wendy takes his duffel bag of grimy clothes straight to the laundry room while Benjamin heads to his room. He flops down and sighs heavily.

“I missed my bed,” he exhales dreamily.

Over the next week, our son tells tales of outdoor adventures, late-night chatter, and deep friendships he made during his month of living in Never Never Land.

But Peter Pan references are not the only things flying around my child’s head, as we soon learn when we get a phone call from our friend Karmi.

“Jaime has insect eggs in his hair,” she proclaims.

Benjamin is with my mom-in-law that day, so we call her to check his head.

“I don’t see anything in his hair,” she says. “But, tell me, was the other little boy dirty?”

Brushing aside generational misunderstandings – and the reality that Jaime is hygienically sound — of what really causes lice infestations, we immediately re-check Benjamin. When I pull back his follicles, I notice the animated activity of several winged bugs.

Along with lifelong memories, my son has returned from camp with lice.

Somehow, in seven days of walking around our (relatively) clean house and taking more regular showers than his one every two weeks that he did at camp, Benjamin failed to notice his noggin was a playground for tiny insects. I look more carefully at my boy’s scalp and notice his skin is raw, even bleeding a little from constant scratching.

“My head has been kinda itchy,” he confesses as Wendy looks for herself. She freaks out as if we’ve been invaded by miniature monsters from the third ring of hell.

After calming down a bit, Wendy and I set to work on the relentlessly complicated task of ridding our house of lice. It turns out that all of us have bugs or eggs living in our hair following a week of Benjamin hugging us and sitting around the house. Because my wife looks at this crisis like a platoon leader, she marches all of us through a regimen of medicated shampooing, hot water laundering, and top-to-bottom house scouring.

At the advice of our pediatrician and friends whose kids have come home from the same camp with a similar scalp affliction, we then call in the heavy artillery, an expert from a company mystically called the Hair Whisperer. This woman comes to our house armed with a variety of combs as well as a cocktail of tea-tree oil and other secret ingredients. She proceeds to nit-pick her way through each of us, rooting out the enemies and extinguishing them in bowls of scalding water.

For more than a week, we scrub everything and check our heads for return attacks. Wendy and I have to juggle our summer work schedules because the kids cannot go to day camp until they are lice-free. Barbers refuse to touch us. Friends politely decline playdates and dinner plans, waiting until we are given the all-clear.

Mercifully, our follicle fiasco ends and Wendy and I sit with our big boy, the scent of tea-tree oil lingering in the air. We go over next summer’s plan to shave and disinfect Benjamin before he steps foot in our house.

“But we love having you back from camp, Benjamin,” I say.

“I miss my friends,” he responds wistfully, then laughs to himself. “Just not the little ones with the wings.”

Posted in Columns by Family Man, Health, Humor | Leave a comment

Hotel Sweet

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Family Man

By Gregory Keer

Who needs airplane flights with their predictable liftoffs and restrictive windows that don’t allow kids to touch those tantalizing clouds? How exciting is it to visit national parks with wonders that are just as easily seen on the Internet without the risk of allergy attacks? What good is an island paradise when children cannot drink anything spiked with rum?

The real center of vacation fun is the hotel room.

After 11 years of traveling, my kids rank hotel visits as the most preferred part of their getaway experiences. Even if my family wasn’t on a budget, my boys would take a stay in a low-cost inn over most any other adventure.

Actually, cost cutting is where the good times begin. For our most recent road trip, my wife and I start our journey at the computer.

“Where do you want to go?” I ask Wendy.

“Let’s see what the booking sites come up with,” she says as if she’s about to roll dice.

For several hours that night, we troll online reservation services, including Hotwire.com and Travelocity.com, before we settle on Priceline.com. With the staccato encouragement of William Shatner playing in our heads, we invite the kids to the laptop to see what pops up once we commit to a room price.

“We could get a hotel for $5!” Jacob shouts from his seven-year-old economic perspective.

“Not exactly,” I reply as the response downloads. “But we’ll take $60 a night for a three-and-a-half star hotel close to the beach!”

A week later, we arrive at a fairly new hotel, albeit in a corporate park rather than near the beach (location uncertainty is part of the trade-off for a low room rate). But the kids are already excited.

“Cool lobby,” Ari (4) giggles as we head toward check-in.

Wendy pulls me aside by the arm less burdened by backpacks and toys. “We can’t let the hotel see we have three kids or they’ll try to charge us for two rooms,” she says conspiratorially. “Wait for my cell call.”

Reunited on the third floor, my giddy kids burst into our room.

Benjamin (11) heads straight for the bed and leans back with his hands behind his head. “Nice mattress,” he offers in his pre-adolescent discernment.

Jacob sets to unpacking our bags and putting clothes in the dressers. “These drawers are better than the ones we have at home,” he critiques.

Ari breathlessly yells from the window, “We can see the other buildings! Come look!”

I join him at the glass then say to Wendy, “It’s a $60 view of an insurance company, but we’re happy, right?”

For the next hour, my sons explore the room like Alice’s in Wonderland, making rabbit-hole discoveries in the bathroom (“Check out the extra shampoos in the shower!”), the TV (“Can we watch HBO Family all day?”), and the night table (“Somebody named Gideon left his Bible here!”).

Ari finds the mini-bar, opening the fridge to a world of diminutive goodies with massive prices. “Free candy!” he declares.

I rush to prevent him from doubling our hotel bill in one bite. He cries loudly and I try to shush him.

 “Yeah, Ari,” Jacob reasons precociously. “Mommy said there are people on their honeymoon, next door, so we have to be quiet.”

“There are no honeymooners, here,” Benjamin responds.

“Yes there are!” Jacob shoots back as he slugs his brother. They commence to brawl, one of the unfortunate inevitabilities of collapsing our living arrangement into 300 square feet.

“Let’s go see the pool,” Wendy announces, averting further sibling violence.

That night, all irritation toward each other has evaporated following a day of swimming and discovering free snacks in the lobby. Our sons, who at home cannot stand to be within three feet of each other, drift off to sleep together in the queen-size bed, looking like angelic urchins in a Dickens novel.

In the morning, the kids resume their rambunctiousness, throwing pillows around without a care for the “honeymooners” next door. Jacob, still a proud new reader, nags us for “hot cakes with bananas” from the room-service menu, despite our refusals. And Ari seems to have fallen in love with the bathtub – minus the water.

Still, it takes us a long time to get outdoors. It doesn’t matter if there’s a magic show in the park starting in an hour or an IMAX presentation in the science museum that would blow their minds. We’ve got a hotel room and each other.

Posted in Columns by Family Man, Traveling With Kids | Leave a comment

Baseball Smells

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Family Man

By Gregory Keer

For many fans of baseball, the game smells like mitt leather, infield dirt, and roasted peanuts. For me, it smells like my dad. A combination of deodorant soap, the faint whiff of a workday’s sweat, and the pumpkin seeds he loves to munch.

While I don’t make a habit out of recalling how my dad smells, that paternal scent comes through because we hug a lot at the game, whether it’s singing with our arms around each other’s shoulders during the seventh-inning stretch or embracing after a winning hit.

The baseball milieu is a kind of center for my father and me. Outside of the celebratory hugging, it’s a catalyst for our communication. We talk endlessly about the match at hand, the players, and the history of various teams. While others note that watching baseball is akin to waiting for dial-up service to deliver a YouTube video, the slowness of it allows us to warm up to more complex topics. In between pitches and line drives, my old man has taught me how to be a student, a worker, a son, a husband, and a father.

Dating back to 1970, I can trace most of my relationship with my dad with the pencil of the grand old game. I was a four year old, standing in the kitchen of our Northridge, California, home when I asked my father where I was born.

“In Cincinnati, Ohio,” he said. “They have a good baseball club there called the Reds.”

“That’s going to be my team,” I announced.

From then on, my dad and I had baseball in common, even though he rooted for his hometown White Sox and adopted city’s Dodgers while I cheered for the Big Red Machine.

Over the years, bats swung and balls flew through so many key moments. There was the night we watched Carlton Fisk break my heart with a towering home run to beat the Reds in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series. My dad taught me about keeping the faith, which made even more sense when my team won the final game of the series.

That lesson of hope deepened for me following my parents’ divorce in ‘77. My dad struggled to sort through both of our emotions back then, so he reached into baseball and wrote me a poem called “The Cincinnati Kid.” In it, he told me to never lose my sense of wonder and belief in the positive. The poem helped give me strength that my real team, my family, would be all right in the long run.

In the ‘80s, my dad’s baseball wisdom permeated my years of high school and college. I wrestled with fluctuating grades and a rollercoaster dating life, but my father was always there to take me to a ballgame or just watch one on TV. It didn’t matter that our teams stank in those years or that we sometimes fell out of sync with each other while I stressed over my direction in life. We had the ballpark and telecasts to reconnect us.

During the 1990s, I concentrated on building a marriage and the more acute concerns of making a living. I often felt more distanced from my father, who, like a steady hitter, never lunged at a pitch or offered unsolicited advice. He let me figure things out, preferring to show trust that my strikeouts would dwindle as I found my own approach to handling life’s curveballs.

These days, we’ve added fantasy baseball, a consuming preoccupation of statistics and strategy that keeps my dad and I talking more than ever. To others, especially our wives, it sounds frivolous, but to my dad and me, it’s a level playing field on which we compete as equals. Occasionally, my dad takes my advice on players to put in his fantasy lineup, a reversal from the years when he was the one imparting all the insight to me.

But we still go to the ballpark. It’s a place where, now, my own sons frequently join us. My dad and I continue our traditions and our talks, even as my kids tug at our elbows for more Cracker Jacks or explanations of why the Dodgers don’t hit more home runs. And the smells of the game remain, too. They’re as comforting as the first time I hugged my father.

Posted in Columns by Family Man, Sports | Leave a comment

Great and Grand

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Family Man

By Gregory Keer

One of my favorite Bill Withers songs, aside from “Lean on Me,” is the sad and celebratory “Grandma’s Hands.” In it, Withers’ soulful and blue voice sings of his grandmother, who helped watch over him and supported him with her hands of experience.

Two years ago, I lost Grandma Betty, who died at the age of 92. She, too, had healing hands. One of my most treasured memories of her is the way she used to fill up with pride upon seeing me, then pull my face to hers with both hands and say, “Gregg, Gregg, Gregg.” I’m still not sure why I deserved all that validation and, frankly, I don’t think she would want me to think about it. It just was.

While I was blessed with 42 years of having her as a grandma, my own children had the good fortune of knowing her, too. My oldest son, Benjamin, has fond memories of visiting my grandparents in Chicago, eating Grandma Betty’s rice pudding, then having a snowball fight outside their apartment. And when my Grandpa Phil’s health necessitated that they move near us, all three of my boys got the chance to have their paternal great grandparents around.

Grandpa Phil, who came to this country as a little boy from Russia, reveled in the unbridled playfulness of his great grandsons. He was particularly tickled by my middle son’s name, Jacob, which was Grandpa Phil’s father’s name.

My dad’s parents have not been the only ones to favor my children with their love and wisdom. My maternal grandmother is now of an age she would prefer I not reveal, but she is alive, kicking, and a real presence in my sons’ world. Grandma Jenny regales my boys with her angelic lullabies and abundant spaghetti with meatballs. Despite a debilitating back condition, she even manages to play cars and trains with little Ari.

Grandma Jenny also likes to tell my sons stories about me, such as the time I stole salami from my parents when I was two and the evenings I would work on school projects with my beloved Grandpa Al, who died before my kids were born. The tales that used to embarrass me when I was a teenager now serve as glue for my relationship with Grandma Jenny. Occasionally, she calls to praise me for my own stories, the ones I write about my kids in these columns. She might be too easily impressed, but the stories remind her of the mutual good fortune that she is an active participant in my boys’ lives where most children are lucky to have any sort of grandparent.

The value of my sons sharing time with three great-grandparents is immeasurable. My kids see these elderly people as vital and relevant. They’ve played cards with them, eaten with them, hugged and kissed them. I hope and expect that they will always treat those much, much older than them with respect because they have had great grandparents.

Because of their relationships with them, my boys have also learned difficult but important lessons about death. When Grandpa Phil passed on five years ago, Benjamin and Jacob were sad but still foggy about the whole thing. They had many questions about bones in a cemetery and heaven, which my wife and I did our best to explain.

After Grandma Betty’s passing, following an awful illness that emotionally drained the whole family, Wendy and I decided to have the older boys, Benjamin (10) and Jacob (7), attend the funeral. It was hard for them, and they cried a lot, mostly because they saw their parents and grandparents weeping. But it was a good thing, I believe, for them to see that Grandma Betty’s caring hands still reach out to all of us.

With Grandma Jenny thankfully still with us to sing and tell stories, and the memories of Grandparents Betty and Phil forever strong, I am grateful to all of them for giving my children a sense of heritage and an appreciation for the vitality of old age.

Posted in Columns by Family Man, Grandparents | Leave a comment

Caveboy Speaks

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Family Man

By Gregory Keer

For years, I lived with a prehistoric boy. He showed signs of modernity in his looks (no excess body hair, unless you count the shaggy haircut) and with his choice of tools (made with circuitry rather than flint), but he spoke in grunts.

“How was school, Benjamin?” I’d ask each day at pickup.

“Nnhhh,” he’d growl, like an extra from Encino Man.

I got the same responses for just about any question I dared call into his cave. It didn’t matter if I was asking about his friends or what his latest reading material involved, I couldn’t get a polysyllable out of him.

As is my usual way, I figured there was something wrong with me. After all, my son was only an elementary school student, too young to develop adolescent surliness or a calculated agenda that warranted using the silent treatment. When he was with his buddies, he never shut up. He even earned a couple of “Needs Improvement” remarks on his report cards for talking too much in class. Who was this kid and why, when he was around me, did he clam up like a low-level mobster getting worked over in a police interrogation room?

It must have been the way I asked questions, or when I asked them, or the kinds of questions. So, on occasion, I tried inquiring about Pokémon. In those cases, I got more vociferous responses … only I couldn’t understand a damn thing he was talking about between the multitude of strange “mon” names and obtuse game rules.

At that point, I pretty much gave up, assuming that I would have to wait until Benjamin was in college or a family man himself before I could have a legitimate talk with him.

Then, fourth grade happened and my young Neanderthal went verbally ape. Perhaps, in getting a little older and wiser, my 9-and-a-half-year-old suddenly found more in common with me. It was as if he realized I wasn’t a boring adult, fit only for hounding him about washing his hair for more than five seconds or eating with a fork (another example of his caveman habits).

Now, when I ask him about his school day, he responds in paragraphs. The newly verbose Benjamin tells me the slapstick jokes his friends concoct, what he learns about plant growth, even his running time for the race he does every so often in P.E.

In past school semesters, the only verbal interaction about homework involved Benjamin whining and snapping at me whenever I tried to get him to do the assignments. These days, he likes to discuss American history and report back on the solutions to the math riddles his class figures out. My favorite homework discussions happen when I help him study for his weekly spelling test. I make up sample sentences that relate to our lives and he laughs at the corniness of most of them, such as, “Benjamin thinks the whole world revolves around him.” He works until he gets them all right, which often takes us extra rounds on the car ride to school. Sure, it’s a little nerdy, but we’re bonding.

School isn’t the only topic that has Benjamin buzzing with me. He used to tune out when I talked about jazz, but now he asks to hear my old Keith Jarrett CDs and makes comments like, “Did Dizzy Gillespie really have cheeks like a blowfish?” In the past, he found pro sports boring, but now he recommends ways I can improve my fantasy baseball team. And he never liked deli food until recently, when I took him to one of my old haunts for pastrami. I still don’t believe he craves the grub; it’s the opportunity for conversation he seems to enjoy.

I know that this is precious time with Benjamin. Soon enough, adolescent hormones will kick in and he will not want to prattle on with me as much. My hope is that this year of chatter and connecting will help us pave a familiar path so that, when he does want to chew the fat, he can just head up the road to me. I’ll always be here. Ready to talk with my son.

Posted in Columns by Family Man, Humor | Leave a comment

Abracadabra

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Family Man

By Gregory Keer

“Guess who’s sitting in the school director’s office,” my wife says with irony and irritation that cut through the crackling cell phone connection.

“Jacob,” I say with a little guilt for assuming the worst of my improving but still impulsive 6-year-old.

“Guess again,” Wendy coaxes.

“Benjamin?” I respond with surprise, despite my 9-year-old’s recent visit to the principal for criminal chattiness.

“Nope,” she says.

For a moment, I search my memory banks. I’m sitting at work with an unfinished email, stacks of papers and two appointments waiting. Do I have to play daddy right now?

And then it dawns on me. I have a third child.

“What the heck did Ari do?” I blurt.

“One of the bigger kids in his class took away Ari’s toy,” Wendy explains. “Ari used his words first but when the other boy would not return it, Ari – sort of – bit him.”

I drop my head into my hands. “Did he draw blood?”

“No blood,” Wendy says, “but Beryl (the school director) doesn’t want us to pick him up because he seemed too happy at the prospect of one of us getting him like I did last week.”

I agree, hang up and try to sort this out in my mind. My 3-year-old had been having a marvelous first year of preschool. Teachers and kids found him gregarious and charming. But with two weeks left before winter break, Ari started throwing tantrums. One day he poured juice in everyone’s snack and blew angry “raspberry” sounds at his instructors, Debbie and Alee. On another day, he bit Alee for not giving him enough attention. For that incident, Wendy immediately left work to collect him from his classroom.

Today, I’m driving into the school parking lot at the normal pick-up hour, bracing for a difficult conversation about my child’s behavior and my parenting flaws. Beryl graciously receives me into her office while Ari stays on the yard.

“Before we get into everything, I want to tell you that Ari and I had lunch together,” Beryl says. “That boy is adorable.”

“He also has the adorable distinction of chomping on people,” I reply with nervous sarcasm.
Beryl laughs, then explains more about the lunch. “It was good that you and Wendy did not pick him up earlier. He really felt bad about having to stay in the office and not go home with you or play with his friends, here.”

“At one point,” Beryl continues, “Ari closed his eyes, waved his hands toward me, and said, ‘Abracadabra, Beryl go away.’ He actually tried that several times, and each time he was disappointed that I was still there.”

Oh, God, I think. My son is insulting his way toward expulsion.

Instead of chastising me, Beryl talks me through possible causes for Ari’s outbursts. Does Ari feel pushed around by his older brothers? Does he feel jealous that he’s still in school for another week while his siblings are on vacation? He has no idea how bored his brothers are because Wendy and I are working, so perhaps Ari is trying to get sent home to join the perceived family fun. Unfortunately, it all makes sense and I kick myself for not seeing signs that he was so upset.

As I drive home from the meeting, I wish I had an “abracadabra” that could make me do all the right things to parent Ari. Each of my sons requires unique approaches to his challenges. Have I run out of ideas on this third go-around?

Then I sit down with my boy on the couch to read The Escape of Marvin the Ape. He laughs and hugs me repeatedly saying, “You’re the best daddy in the whole world.”

Truly, most of the time, Ari is like this. He’s big on loving, generosity and glee. But he’s now gotten big with his temper. And I’ll need serious resolve to set him straight.

“You made your friends and teachers sad today, Ari,” I state gravely.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He holds my face with his hands as if to show me he believes in me. “No more biting.”

As hard as this job can be, there is no denying the magic that also comes from it.

Posted in Child Development, Columns by Family Man, Humor | Leave a comment

Sibs At School

Posted on March 21, 2011 by Family Man

By Gregory Keer

For three years, my sister and I went to the same school. Kimmy was especially proud of that fact, as I witnessed one day when she told another kid that if he wasn’t nice to her, her big brother was going to beat him up. Truth be told, Kimmy was the only person I was ever really mean to back then, but somehow she knew that, on campus, we were on the same team.

In those mid-’70s years, I loved having my sister with me at school. I got a chance to show off my basketball skills at recess and my student-council speeches in sixth grade, but I also noticed her laughing with her friends at lunch and leading her third-grade class in the newspaper drive. It was great to be part of each other’s lives outside the house, even though it was just for a short time.

As a new September unfolds, my two oldest boys will converge on the same campus for the first time since Jacob, 6, was in preschool. Benjamin, 10, will begin his third year at his public elementary school and will be one of the reigning fifth graders, who will graduate at year’s end. Although he had big hurdles to jump when he transferred to the school, he has since become an expert on every nuance of the teachers, grounds and events. Jacob has soaked up his big brother’s experiences by seeing Benjamin do complicated homework and attending open houses.

“I know he’s going to annoy me,” Benjamin said in a late-summer talk I had with him about Jacob joining him on the schoolyard. “He’ll drag me over somewhere to show me something like a bug he found under a tree.”

This scenario is likely, yet even the little guy who sometimes goes all “kung fu” on Benjamin is welcome to the big brother’s kingdom. “Jacob’s good at art, so he’ll like that we do a lot of it at school,” Benjamin explained. “He’s pretty fast, too. He’ll love sports day when we do relays and obstacle courses.”

While he expects Jacob to be a bit sad and confused at a new place with people he doesn’t know, Benjamin said, “(My classmate) Sean’s brother will be going into first grade. Maybe I can get Jacob to be friends with him so he’s not alone when I’m not around.”

When I talked with Jacob, he seemed mellow about not having old pals with him at the start. “I like challenges,” he offered, as if he were vying for a corporate management position. He cannot wait to ride the bus for the first time so he can talk with the other kids and trade game cards with them. He’s also eager to check out the classrooms as a student and not just a visitor.

“Will I go to the same after-school programs as Benjamin?” he asked hopefully. Jacob has been chomping at the bit to try out a comic-book drawing class and a “rock star” program ever since Benjamin bragged about them. Jacob has even begun learning the violin so he’ll be ready to join the orchestra like his brother did in third grade.

“I hope Jacob knows it’s not easy to make it in the orchestra,” Benjamin said, showing territorialism about this particular area. “I had to practice a lot for two years before I could be a first trumpet.”

Sibling rivalry will certainly find a home away from home at school. I expect to hear competing stories about what Benjamin may have said to a cute fifth-grade girl at recess or what Jacob may have done to overflow a toilet. The key is that they will be together, if only for a year.

Today, I call my sister Kim, not Kimmy, and she’s been able to handle her own battles for years, even without her big brother down the hall. But we did build on that shared school time as part of what is now a close bond. For Jacob and Benjamin, I hope they too will learn they can depend on each other even when they’re not under Mom and Dad’s roof.

Posted in Columns by Family Man, School, Siblings | Leave a comment