Category: Uncategorized

Boy Rides Again

~ sanebishop ~ 2 Comments

“I bet you can’t run over Dad,” my wife said, sacrificing me.

Earlier in the day, we had taken Thomas to the park to practice riding his bike. It was a beautiful winter day, warm enough that you didn’t need a coat, and since school was out for Christmas break, the park was full of moral support. 

“You’ve got this!” said a man walking his dog, as we pleaded with Thomas to try riding his bike one more time. I’m not exactly sure to whom the man was directing his comment, but I appreciated the sentiment nonetheless.

“My helmet is too itchy! This is too hard! I don’t like bikes!” Thomas lamented. 

Santa Clause brought Thomas a “big boy” bike with no training wheels, and we thought it would be the centerpiece of his Christmas, but it quickly became the centerpiece of parent-child conflict. Thomas barely showed any interest in the bike, preferring his toy monster trucks and Legos. We had hoped taking him to the park would give him a chance to focus on the bike, but mostly he just wanted to join the other kids on the playground. 

“You have to make one loop around the park on your bike before you can go play on the playground,” we said, not realizing that we had just committed ourselves to a thirty minute journey that felt one second short of eternity. So it is no wonder when we got home that day, when my wife desperately challenged Thomas to run me over in the yard, that he finally straddled the seat with a sense of determination on his face–and grinned. At the very least, this was progress. An hour or so earlier at the park, he was kicking the bike in frustration and we were kicking ourselves as parents. 

“Just coast down the hill, don’t even try to peddle,” my wife said, giving him a hopeful push. But in his desire to flatten his dear ole Dad, he not only coasted but naturally pedaled to pick up speed. Finally, it clicked. Thomas was not only controlling the direction of his bike but providing locomotion for it. He made it to me, I fell over for dramatic flair, and now he wanted to ride, again and again. 

Here is a video of one of his subsequent rides.

A burgeoning bike rider

Blest Be the Bricks that Bind

~ sanebishop ~ 7 Comments

My first memory of legos dates back to Mrs. Baird. She was an old church lady who used to keep me from time to time. She had white hair and kept a plastic pail of the big legos in her closet. When she died many years ago, the pail of legos was bequeathed to me, and I kept it reverently like an urn, at least until Thomas got old enough to dump out the contents and all reverence was discarded. Her legos were once again in the hands of a child. 

I’ve also kept a big plastic tote of my legos, mostly a jumbled mix of pirate Legos circa the 1990s in storage, waiting for Thomas to get big enough to graduate from the pail of big legos to my tote of little Legos. I gave it to him a few months ago, and have secretly found myself enjoying recreating my lego ships of olden times. We also got Thomas some small sets for Christmas, which, after building, he summarily destroyed with a monster truck and all the blocks made their way into my old plastic tote, young and old blocks intermingling. He rummages through this tote, makes his own creations, smashes them again, so on and so forth.  

My wife finds pleasure not in building or smashing but in sorting. It is the strangest thing, but she is the type of person who doesn’t like peas to mix with corn or butter beans on a plate. I’m lucky because she generally brings order to my disorderly life, but occasionally she can go a little overboard, at which point she commandeers the whole dining room for three days in an effort to bring order to the jumbled mix of legos she has spread out over the table.

She had the look of a person obsessed so I didn’t say much. But she also had the look of a person who was enjoying her task, like she was putting together a puzzle (or deconstructing a puzzle?). In any event, she created a Dewey Decimal system for the lego bricks in our house, based on sets, like Pirates or Jurassic Park, and then miscellaneous bricks based on color. They are now all organized in Ziploc bags, in small plastic containers, and stacked on a shelf.

Personally, I don’t think I would have picked color to classify the bricks by–I think I would have chosen brick type–but let’s be honest, I would have never classified or brought order to anything, hence the jumbled mix of legos to begin with. 

Building, smashing, sorting–it takes all kinds. We’re a family of lego lovers, each in our own way. 

A Fever Dream

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

This week, I’ve been reacquainted with an old friend. A few years have passed since we last interacted but we picked up where we left off–I swabbed my nose, swirled sufficiently in both nostrils, and waited for my old friend, the Covid test, to wick up my drops of nasal juice and render a verdict: Two lines, positive. 

“We’ve got to stay away from dad for a few days–he’s got Covid,” my wife pronounced. Then she banished me to the guest room. It brought back memories from five years ago when she left gatorade and food outside my door while I sequestered myself. She had the baby monitor set up in my room so she could monitor my progress, while she kept Thomas in the bedroom with her. 

This time I didn’t have a pounding headache, but it was the same old fever, then several days where you feel like you’re living in quicksand. I first got Covid on March 4th, 2021. Back then, when you got Covid for the first time, you worried about whether or not you would survive the next five days. Five years later, the Covid era feels almost like a fever dream. 

Did that really happen?

It did. I know because Thomas was born in the hospital in 2020, with no family or visitors present for fear of spreading the virus. While my wife and I were celebrating our new life in the maternity ward and I was learning to change diapers, up above us in the ICU, people were on ventilators. In January 2022, as a county employee, I had to work at the first vaccine drive thru at our local high school. I’ve never seen people so happy and relieved to get a shot before, but that excitement wouldn’t last. By September 2022, when the Delta wave was peaking, our rural hospital was overwhelmed and turning people away. We had one of the lowest vaccination rates and the highest positivity rate of any county in the state. From that peak (or trough), Covid tapered off and slowly faded from the forefront into the background, into memory–at least for some of us. 

“What’s Covid?” Thomas asked.

I’m glad he has no memory. 

close up of a rapid antigen test kit

The Halftime Ham

~ sanebishop ~ 2 Comments

That is Thomas hamming it up front and center. He ran onto the court and lined up with his classmates and got recognized for perfect attendance during halftime at a Gardner-Webb men’s basketball game. Gardner-Webb partners with local elementary schools, giving kids a free ticket who have perfect attendance for the month. It was Thomas’s first game in a “basketball stadium,” as he calls it, and he watched the game enthusiastically, leading cheers of “defense,” often when Gardner Webb had the ball–we’re still working on game fundamentals. 

Watching him, I couldn’t help but remember my own impassioned fanaticism when I was about his age. I have always been an NC State fan and my big brother was a Duke fan. It thrilled my heart whenever Duke lost, which in those days rarely happened because they had Grant Hill and Christian Laettner. My dad and I were in Houston, Texas, visiting his cousin, when Grant Hill hurled the basketball down the court with two seconds left, when Christian Laettner caught it and beat the buzzer, beating Kentucky and depriving me of my brother’s suffering. 

The stakes were not so high in this game between the Gardner-Webb Runnin’ Bulldogs and Brevard Tornadoes, and Thomas has no brother, whose suffering brings joy, but he quickly became invested in the outcome, even if he forgot, from time to time, which team he was cheering for. A cheerleader threw him a rally rag and he maniacally whirled it above his head, and it was his most prized possession until I brought back Air Heads and Nerd Clusters from the concession stand, which was admittedly a bad decision on my part but I had waited in line for a long time and they had just run out of popcorn. What can you do? 

Thomas chomped. He cheered. He danced. He had an all around good time, and afterwards we went to look at Christmas lights in town. 

And he fell asleep in the car. 

In Defense of Compartmentalization

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

One drawback of the modern Sports Utility Vehicle is the fact that the trunk has been truncated into non-existence. Owning a SUV is like owning a house with an open floor plan. Sure, there is more space, but it is shared space, shared with all your cargo tumbling around in the back. Sometimes you hear the cargo tumbling, sometimes you smell it wafting, and sometimes you see it levitating in the rearview mirror (depending on how much air you got going over a speed bump). With a SUV, you have to live, or at least drive, in the presence of your possessions. You can’t just stuff boots in the back of your trunk and forget about them. With an SUV,  your wife would eventually smell them.

With a car, however, your options are endless. I have been riding around with a pair of old muddy manure-caked rubber boots in the trunk of my Camry for at least four weeks–and my wife has never even detected a whiff. Nor can she smell the contents of my tackle box in the trunk. I don’t go fishing much anymore, but that is exactly the point. There is fish grime and scented power baits in that tackle box that date back to the previous century. Sometimes it is nice to have a hermetically sealed trunk. 

And sometimes it’s nice to have compartments in life as well. One of my laments about modern society is that we can no longer compartmentalize. Everything is always open, always on, always accessible, always wafting into our heads, always vying for our attention. Through the conduits of wires and wifi comes an onslaught of electrons–emails, notifications, texts, videos, and social media posts–that bombard and erode the walls that protect our attention, focus, and sanity. Sometimes I think we’d all be better off if we found an old sedan somewhere, popped the trunk, and tossed our cell phones in there and forgot about them for four weeks. At the very least, we wouldn’t have to live with the manure wafting up from the screens. 

According to statistics, the average American checks their phones 144 times a day, and the average American checks their email every 37 minutes. I suppose I’m an above average American because I check my email every 37 seconds. I’m not sure what I’m checking it for, but I’m checking it nonetheless. Companies are now selling containers, basically lockboxes with a timer on them, so families can incarcerate electronic devices and reduce screen time for both parent and child. In other words, they are literally selling compartments so we can recompartmentalize our lives. 

Schools are also doing this. I guess educators realized that it’s probably not a good idea for students to be snapchatting with friends in English class when they’re supposed to be focusing in math class. In the past, such interdisciplinary communication was simply limited by classroom walls. Sure kids once passed notes in the hallway, but notes are a lot easier to police than electrons. 

All this is to say, sometimes technological progress is a synonym for societal regress. Let’s bring back the sedan, with a nice hermetically sealed trunk.