Reflections from a Basket Case

Being a hot air balloon captain is a lonely existence. I imagine. I've never actually been in a hot air balloon, but I have spent several hours alone in a wicker basket, and it's no picnic. It's close to a picnic, but not close enough that you can actually have a slice of watermelon or play red rover with the other kids in your Sunday School class. Yes, you're hiding in a picnic basket because you forgot to put on pants that morning. Technically you didn't forget to put them on; you merely forgot the importance of putting them on -- a fine distinction, I'll admit. It's like when you forget that you're not supposed to drink alcohol while you're on cold medication, and that LSD technically isn't cold medication, and then you spend the rest of the day trying to peel your hardwood floors with a soup spoon.

So there you are in a picnic basket, reassessing your priorities, "pants" having shot to the top of the list. What you don't realize at the moment is that this incident will become on of your most cherished childhood memories. Yes, that's how bad the rest of your childhood will be in comparison.

I try to keep this in mind when dealing with my own children. It's not enough just to love your children, to feed and shelter them, and to make sure they receive adequate overtime compensation for double shifts at the sheet metal plant. Sometimes you have to make an effort to create memories with your children. For example, the other morning I was making school lunches for my two children, Will and Maddie. Will, who is seven, asked me why I was making three sandwiches instead of two. Seizing on what I recognized as a "teachable moment," I explained gently to my son that the third sandwich was for his older brother Chuck, who had mysteriously disappeared after the first season, but who might still return some day. Oh sure, I knew it wasn't true, but Will didn't need to know that. He would learn soon enough that Chuck was a superfluous character, and that the popularity of a local hoodlum would ensure that Chuck would never again shoot hoops in the driveway at dusk, dispensing brotherly advice.

Maybe that's the real lesson in all this. It could be that in the end we're all Chucks, characters who don't quite fit in with the rest of the cast, who fear being eclipsed by charismatic pseudo-Italians and child actors who would really rather direct. Maybe we're all doomed to be cut after the first season, never to be thought of again.