This next week is devoted to True Tales of My Dad.
Okay, seems like a Shit My Dad Says rip-off, I know. But these tales aren’t coming up because it’s time for me to get a book deal and a sitcom. A TV show about my family relations would probably be a little more depressing, a little more Breaking Bad than Growing Pains. Although Boner from Growing Pains killed himself, so maybe we’re getting somewhere…
All that’s beside the point. The point is that there are some strange, but often pretty funny stories from any family. These are some of mine. I’ll recount them the best I can, so if there are any errors, they weren’t on purpose. And I promise you that the most outrageous parts are the most true. You don’t forget shit like that.
Tale the First: Scout Leader
Nothing about the fact that my dad was a scout leader makes any sense.
Take, for example, a hike that we went on when I was young, early elementary school young.
It was supposed to be a couple miles worth of loop, maybe three at the most. We stopped with a mile left and ate lunch, sandwiches, granola bars, and water. Eating a lunch while you’re stopped on a hike is always a great moment. It’s what everyone says, but it’s true: the food is extra good.
After we finished, we started pulling on our packs and standing up. My dad, always thinking ahead, decided that we should dump out all of our water. Why carry the extra five pounds when you could go skipping down the last half-mile of trail without it?
He unscrewed the cap on his water bottle and let the water piss away into the dirt off the side of the trail.
If life were like a movie, you could fade out from the image of water splashing into dirt and fade in on us, still walking trail a hours later.
I wouldn’t say he panicked, which was good. But he was concerned enough that he decided to cinch down his pack and run down the trail, leaving us with our step-grandfather.
After a little more walking, the trail leveled out and we were in a field. And not too long before that, dad came hauling up the trail in his old Suburban.
Conservatively, the hike was more than twice as long as he thought it was going to be, and we did the majority of it without the pampering comforts of, oh, I don’t know, water.
The point of that story is not to embarrass the man. We all make mistakes. God knows I’ve driven more in the wrong directions than I have the right ones. But I just want to plant the seed that he might not be a number one choice for scout leader.
My cub scouting career was also not that of a proud, smart, problem solver. I remember being in tears because I could not, for the life of me, figure out how to wrap a leather strap around a hoop to make a dream catcher. It didn’t make sense to me, although I guess when we’re talking about a strappy leather thing that captures your dreams, maybe logic has been left behind some time ago.
My pinewood derby cars always sucked. The first one didn’t even make it down the track. I put the provided weights into a space carved out of the bottom, but I didn’t realize that they would be dragging on the center line and slow the car down enough that it couldn’t cross the finish line. The second year was no winner in the racing department. But I went with humor, a self-defense mechanism that would last the rest of my life. Since I couldn’t make a car that would win, I would make a car that would make people laugh, hence the car atop which sat a popsicle stick outhouse complete with a GI Joe on the shitter.
These were cars that, flawed as they may have been, proved to the world that an overbearing engineer dad was not involved.
The start of every meeting at our house kicked off by saying a bunch of memorized stuff. Maybe the pledge of allegiance and scout’s promise. Something like that. Then we would light the Good Conduct Candle. I don’t know where dad got this idea, but it must have been from either some scoutmaster manual or some other dad, because this was not in line with his normal style in that it was actually kind of a good idea.
One scout, with his help, would light a full-sized candle, the kind you might put out for a fancy dinner. As long as everyone was well-behaved, the candle would burn. If someone started being an asshole, out went the candle. If the candle burned all the way down, we earned a field trip.
For the record, in four years of scouting we earned two field trips. If I can attempt some math, I would guess the average meeting was 1.5 hours long. We met twice a month. So that’s 144 hours of candle burning potential, for which we burned through two candles. So unless we were finding some of that magic Hanukkah mojo that kept an oil lamp burning for seven extra days in a row, I’m thinking the good conduct candle was heavy on candle, light on good conduct.
It turned into almost a game, a way to judge whether the bad behavior you were about to engage in was worth it. Would I, as a seven year-old boy, like to take a field trip? Hell yes. But would I, as a seven year-old boy, also like to say the word “shit”? Absolutely. So the candle turned into almost a way to remember some of our greatest hits, some of which not only got the candle blown out, but which would lead to the decree that the next time it wouldn’t even be lit in the first place. To this day, I can still remember one of the other scouts answering the doorbell, seeing a neighborhood child selling candy for a fundraiser, and saying, “You are not welcome here,” before slamming the door in her face. Candle out. But worth it.
Although we earned two field trips, we only ended up going on one. My dad, scout leader to a group of first grade boys, decided that the place we needed to go in order to enrich our scouting experience, was the Budweiser brewery.
There were horses, so that seemed scout-y.
What really blows my mind about the whole thing isn’t that he made that choice. I know the man by now and it’s pretty damn hard to be surprised by lapses in judgment.
What surprises me is that other parents were cool with it.
There were other events as well that you would think would give other parents pause. For example, why were no parents asking about the fact that every winter and every spring, one of our meetings was devoted to the removal or putting on of snow tires? We did this twice a year for four years. It was supposed to be Boy Scouts, not Pep Boys Scouts.
There were other events too that changed the tone from simple exploitation to downright danger.
For example, at one meeting we learned about electricity. Part of the activity was to change a fuse, a good, helpful task that every person should probably know how to do.
Being a big fan of adding a level of truth to our activities, my dad figured that the only way to make this realistic was to trip the breaker first. He put on a rubber dish glove, a winter glove, and then, I shit you not, stuck a screwdriver in a wall socket.
A big blue spark burst out of the socket, and he jumped back. The whole house went dark, so it wasn’t until we changed out the fuse and flipped the breaker back over that we saw the entire handle of the screwdriver was melted.
Or how about the great fire of the 90’s?
Every year, scouts go to an event called Klondike. Have you ever seen dog sled races? It’s sort of like that except instead of using dogs you use a bunch of boys to pull a homemade sled.
So you pull the sled to an area, do an activity that tests a scouting skill, then pull the sled somewhere else.
To prepare, my dad loaded up the sled with things he thought we would need. Twine, hockey sticks, wooden blocks, another hockey stick. You know, the basics.
We spent the evening beforehand practicing lighting fires without the use of matches.
Maybe other people had different scouting experiences, but I never once saw someone light a full campfire without using matches, a lighter, or a magnesium block, which is confusing because I don’t know why you would be carrying around a magnesium block with built-in flint at a time when you didn’t have matches or a lighter.
There are a couple methods. You can use a magnifying glass to concentrate light into one spot, make a hot spot, then hope a fire happens. That was probably the best. There was also this really complicated method where you made a bow and used it to spin another stick which you held from the top with a block of wood that had a rounded hole for the stick’s top. Again, why you would be in the woods with the supplies to make this tool and no matches or lighter is beyond me. But that’s probably why I sucked at scouts.
We practiced these methods, and then we used some unrolled toilet paper and got a small fire going immediately. We threw extra toilet paper into our sled, and after stamping out the fire, my dad threw the still-glowing embers into a tall plastic garbage can.
I’m assuming that most readers here don’t have any sort of formal education in fire science. I’m assuming that because if you do, I would think you would be out trying to pick up women, cooking wings, possibly posing for a calendar, and if all the other stuff is out of the way, maybe trying to save someone from something. So rather than speculate on the whys of the fire, I’ll skip straight ahead to how we found out about it.
We were all inside working on something else when my step-mom came home. We heard the garage door open (a sound that I was attuned to as it meant that I had better jump on the piano bench and pretend that I’d been practicing for the last 28 minutes) and then, instead of coming in the door connecting the garage to the house, she came in the front.
“Tom,” she said. “Did you know the garage is on fire?”
I put a question mark there, although I don’t think it was a real question. It was more of an accusation. At least I would think that’s what it was. I have a hard time assuming that someone would think that another adult would knowingly leave part of their home ablaze.
We all ran to the garage to find the trash can, formerly about four feet high, melted into a molten pool except for maybe six inches of the top rim. The fire was still going strong when my dad, in a fit of heroism, ran over and dumped the contents of half a coffee cup on it. The water hit the flames, sizzled, then flared up and singed his eyebrows.
I ran into the other room to get a fire extinguisher from the top of a bookshelf. I pulled the pin as I ran back down the hallway, but by the time I got there the fire was out.
Being the only one who ran for an extinguisher, and also being available to cook chicken wings and be in calendars, I would like the fire departments of the United States to consider this my official application. My weakest of your skills is hitting on women, but some on-the-job training should help.
The damage wasn’t too bad. Lost trash can, burned wall of the garage, and a red ski boot that was melted onto the garage wall and would stay there until we moved. But by the time we were done laughing, the Good Conduct candle was extinguished faster and more permanently than the life of an unwanted first-trimester fetus.
Fires aside, both electrical and fuel-fed, we slogged through a couple long days of bookwork and all earned the Arrow of Light, the coveted award that allows you to graduate from Cub Scout to Boy Scout, a feat accomplished by many and the only way into the Boy Scouts other than just showing up the first day and saying you weren’t in Cubs.
I did one year of Boy Scouts. The death knell of my scouting career was the trip to scout camp.
I’m no scholar, but one thing I’m good at is recognizing school in disguise. When we were told to sign up for classes at Scout Camp, my spidey sense for anything related to learning was blaring like Doc Ock was using his mechanical arms to give J. Jonah Jameson a reach-around.
I signed up for three classes, figuring that I didn’t want to be in class ALL day.
What I discovered was that these were three classes TOTAL, not three classes that I went to every day. So it was a pretty light load to have three classes to fill an entire week. It only got lighter when I showed up for First Aid II without the prerequisite of First Aid I and was told that I could take the class but wouldn’t get any credit. Gee, that sounds like exactly what I was hoping to do this summer, take a class and get no credit. Maybe we could also just sit in a school all fucking day and listen to the whimsical sounds of the electronic bells going off every hour.
So my memories of Scout Camp were brief. Shooting shotguns until my arms were too tired to lift the thing, taking a swimming test that allowed me access to a lake that was cold enough you would have to be fucking insane to swim in it any longer than it took to pass the test, and hauling up my dad’s telescope.
God knows where he got it, but he had a big, fancy telescope that was in a wooden box with Russian stencil writing on the sides. We hauled it up to the camp, a short hike that was probably shorter than a walk to the corner store but felt far enough from civilization that minor panic set in. And so far that the sky would be clear enough to see planets we’d never even thought about beyond learning them for some shitty astronomy class we were tricked into taking at a camp.
We hauled it up, shot shotguns, swam the once, cleaned a huge dining hall, and then never even opened it before hauling it back down.
I’m sure there’s some kind of metaphor in there somewhere, something about this box of potential, how we could have reached the stars. But fuck it. Who needs the stars when your dad is creating blue balls of electric light in your own home?