The Priluck Flaming Swing of Death

This incident happened two years ago, today. I’ve patiently waited for enough time to pass as to not embarrass Justin. (He has read this and approved it.) Everyone is entitled to a bad day from time to time. Justin decided to compile all his bad days into one. And, it just so happened that all of this occurred while GWE was out of town for a week on a business trip. Here is what happened:

Justin and Garrett had just begun classes at a new school. Both were very excited about the new opportunities that lay ahead, but both were having some challenges. Garrett had gotten into a few physical altercations with his new classmates and Justin was trying to make a name for himself in a grade full of students who’d all known each other for since kindergarten.  

On a Tuesday afternoon, I received a call from the school. Garrett had been too disruptive in class again and they ‘encouraged’ me to come and get him. It was a busy workday, but I knew my mother-in-law would be in the area in a few hours to help. I was about to grab my keys and head for the door when the school called again.

“Hello?” I asked.

“Hi, this is….” I cut the person off because I thought I knew why they were calling. I responded abruptly with, “Yes, yes, I’m coming to get him. I need more that 5 minutes to get there.”

“Oh. Ok.” There was a pause. “Well, we’re in the nurses’ station when you get here.” I was confused. “Why is Garrett in the nursing station?”

“Garrett? I’m not calling about Garrett. I’m calling you about Justin. You need to come and get him.”

Now, I was totally confused. Did I need to pick up Garrett or Justin or both Justin and Garrett??? What the hell was going on?

I raced to the school, hopped out of the car, and dashed to the nursing station. My mother-in-law was already there, looking incredibly concerned. As I stepped into the room, I discovered Justin sitting in a wheelchair. He was cradling his arm, the nose looked like it had been mashed to one side, and there was blood. Blood on his lip, blood on his shirt, and bloody tissues everywhere. He looked miserable, in shock, and in pain.

The nurse on call told me that he had an accident. (Really?? Do tell!) She was unclear on the circumstances of what happened, but he clearly needed more medical treatment than a few band-aids and a Tylenol. She gave me the address to a pediatric urgent care. I asked my mother-in-law to take Garrett with her so I could take Justin with me.

That wasn’t the nose he was wearing when he left for school that morning.

We ‘wheeled’ him to my car and then he and I left for the doctor’s office. I think the initial shock of what happened wore off in the car because Justin (who was slightly comatose back in the nursing station) started to come to life. The pain had begun, and he was starting to feel it. The more uncomfortable he got, the faster I went.

I think it was at this point that I called GWE to inform her that her son had been broken. I give her credit. She did not panic…out loud. She knew it was under control and being 3000 miles away was going to limit her ability to help. We just needed to get him assessed as quickly as possible. The meltdowns could wait.

When we got to the urgent care, they rushed him in for an x-ray. The doctors confirmed that he had broken his wrist and they referred me to a Sports Orthopedist. They also examined his nose but did not have the ability to x-ray his head (which I assured him was empty, but he was having none of my humor.) Their guess was that he had broken the septum in his nose.  They referred me to an Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist. I set an appointment for the following morning.

Those x-ray glasses you can order from the back of comic books really do work!

The ENT quickly assessed that he did break his septum and that he would need a minor surgery to fix the blockage. Interestingly, the ENT also had an emotional support dog in their office. Did the dog go and support Justin – the patient? No. Instead, the dog felt as though I was in more need of emotional support than the damaged boy sitting across from me. He laid his head in my lap and pitied me. Or, he smelled bacon.

Over the course of the next few days, GWE got home, Justin got his arm wrapped in a cast, and he was scheduled and prepped for surgery. I spent about 20 minutes with him in pre-op talking about everything except what was about to happen. He talked about Yo-Kai and Nintendo….and then the drugs did their job and he was out.

GWE and I met him in post-op. He was heavily sedated, but slowly coming back to consciousness. At one point, he looked up at us and loudly proclaimed, “FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU….” Concerned, GWE and I thought he was about to blurt out a very bad word, but it was too late, “….UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUDDDGE!” Yes – his first word was “Fudge.” Whew!

He lives!!!

It took a few days, but Justin finally returned to school. He had a cast on his arm (which I fitted with Velcro so he could attach his Yo-Kai watch) and a cast glued to his nose. For a kid who no one knew on a Tuesday, he was certainly a celebrity by the time he returned. Everyone knew his name!

Justin’s recollection of what happened is still a little fuzzy. He was swinging on the school swing set. He thinks that he lost his balance while going backwards and in order to “catch” himself, he put his arm out. His arm slammed into the ground and twisted. And, because his arm wasn’t there to support him, his face hit the ground. Ouch!

Once the dust had cleared, the injuries were tended to, and our collective parental blood pressure had stabilized, I told Justin that we needed something other than medical bills to remember this moment. We needed to memorialize this event with a plaque. I suggested that we should discreetly attach a sign to the bottom of the swing seat designating it, “The Priluck Flaming Swing of Death.”

Garrett’s 8th Birthday Party is (Literally) on Fire

This is what happens when you don’t blow out your birthday candles fast enough.

The birthday invitations had been sent out weeks earlier and the RSVPs had been returned. The cake had been ordered, the Game Truck had been reserved, and gifts were hidden throughout the house. There were a few “Happy Birthday” banners on the wall, but the real decorating was schedule to begin 24 hours later. Garrett went to sleep content in knowing that in just a few short hours, he would be celebrating his birthday with his family and friends from school.

What he didn’t expect was to be woken up at 1am by me whispering into his ear, “Garrett. I need you to wake up. We’re evacuating the house. There is a fire outside and we need to leave now.”

Two hours earlier, GWE stood at the back of the house overlooking the San Fernando Valley. She noticed a strange orange glow coming from behind the mountains to the left of us. In response, she turned on the news to discover a fire had started in the area. I brushed it off as not being a big deal and I went back to binge watching a Netflix series. Periodically, we’d flip back to the news and the fire seemed to be growing, but I still didn’t think it was serious. It wasn’t until I turned around to look out the back window that I realized that we might have a big, burning problem headed in our direction.

GWE asked me if we should prepare to evacuate. I thought it wasn’t a bad idea as a “just in case.” I honestly didn’t think we’d need to leave.  However, 5 minutes later, I saw the fire come over the top of the mountain and we raced into evacuation mode. Since this is the second time we’ve done this in 13 months, we’ve gotten pretty good at grabbing the most important stuff as quickly as possible.

I gently woke up Justin with the news that we were evacuating. He met the challenge head-on by going back to sleep. I tried again 10 minutes later. “Justin, I’m not kidding. There’s a fire outside. Time to go.”

Garrett was far more responsive. Once he heard what I’d said, he popped out of bed, jammed his backpack with stuff, grabbed his electric guitar, and he was out the door.

We left the house at 1:30am without any idea of where we were going. Hotels in the area were getting swarmed with calls and our friends and family were fast asleep (and not responding to our texts)…except for my mother who was awake at 4:30am in Atlanta because she’s become nocturnal, I guess? Luckily, my parents are Marriott preferred customers and she was able to use that status to get us a room at the Marriott Warner Center. It’s about 20 minutes away from the house.

We checked in, got to our room, and collapsed on the beds. GWE and I tried to bring some normalcy to the moment by getting the kids ready for bed all the while watching the local news coverage of the fire. Justin was asleep as soon as he hit the bed. Garrett was just about to close his eyes when all of a sudden, the hotel fire alarm went off. Crap!

Once again, Garrett popped out of bed, grabbed what was important to him, and then he demanded I take him down the 17 flights of stairs to the lobby because the elevators were deactivated due to the fire alarm. I protested, but he won. We walked down all 17 flights of stairs. (Fun fact: In the 5th floor stairwell, there’s a toilet just sitting there. I guess ‘when you gotta go, you gotta go.’) It turns out that there was so much smoke outside that it was setting off the fire alarms on the inside of the hotel.

At 3am, GWE texted, “Where are you?” I sent her a picture of Garrett and I sitting in the lobby.  She thought it was hilarious. I did not.

At 3:30, the elevators resumed and we made it back to our room. Garrett passed out around 4am. I think I fell asleep soon after.

At 8:30, I rolled over and saw Garrett staring at me. “Happy Birthday, buddy,” I said to him. With a look of concern on his face, his first question was, “Will I be able to go to school today so that all my friends can sing me the Happy Birthday song?” I explained to him that school had been cancelled for the day, but I’m sure they would be singing to him on Monday.

At this point, GWE and I had to balance a way to celebrate Garrett’s birthday in a spontaneous and care-free way all the while catching glances of the news to make sure that all of our stuff didn’t burn to the ground. First, breakfast!

We went to our favorite diner to grab a quick bite. It’s a real diner where the clientele runs the gambit from ultra-wealthy Mulhollanders to nightshift janitors. As we walked in, I recognized a former porn star who was leaving with her parents. (Only in LA.) We know the owner of the diner, so before we sat down we were able to fill him in our past 9 hours. We also informed him that it was Garrett’s birthday. He left and then quickly returned with a short stack of pancakes for Garrett with a candle in the middle. What followed was every patron of the diner singing “Happy Birthday” to Garrett.

After breakfast and a few other errands, we returned to the hotel so that Garrett could open some of his gifts. He was thrilled to get a massive box of 12 different “speed” Rubix cubes along with some Lego sets. He was thrilled with every gift he got.

At some point during the day, we heard from our friends Jon and Nkechi because they had finally seen GWE’s texts. They graciously took us into their home. They fed and entertained us refugees with an evening of dinner and a movie. At the end of the night, we all parted ways and returned to our hotel room.

It had been a long day. Garrett had only slept 4 hours over a span of 24 hours. He had evacuated both his home and his hotel room. He didn’t know if he’d ever seen his stuff again and it was his birthday. Anyone else would have had a meltdown at some point during the day. (Including me.) Not Garrett. As he climbed into bed, I asked him how his birthday was.  His response: “This was the greatest birthday ever!”

Live! Naked! Grills! (Not a Typo)

A few nights ago, we decided to leave both boys home alone. We felt confident that Justin could take care of himself and his younger brother for just a few hours while we had an evening with other adults. Not only did Justin meet my expectations, but he far exceeded them in a very classy way. Garrett, on the other hand, is barred from any and all electronics device in the house that have access to YouTube.

The evening began with me giving Justin one simple instruction: ‘Make sure you leave your cell phone on so I can contact you in case of an emergency and to let you know when the pizza is going to arrive.’ When the time came, I called him and his phone went directly to voicemail. He had clearly turned it off. That was the one thing I told him not to do! After three or four tries, I resorted to Alexa. I knew I’d be able to ‘Make an Announcement’ from my phone and the whole house would be able to hear me. Once he heard the announcement, he called me back. (There’s a reason he turned off his phone. I’ll get to that in a minute.) The rest of the evening was uneventful.

When we got home, Justin pulled GWE into his room for a brief conversation. I joined Garrett in the den and watched tv with him before I had to put him to bed. After speaking with Justin, GWE came up the stairs and told me that she needed to tell me something in private. I met her in our bedroom, and she proceeded to tell me this story, from Justin’s point of view:

Right after we left the house, Garrett ran upstairs to watch television and Justin went into his room. It didn’t take long for Justin to get bored, so he went to see what Garrett was watching. As soon as he opened the doors, Garrett quickly shut off the television and looked very guilty. Justin, realizing something was amiss, asked Garrett what he was doing. Garrett refused to tell him or hand over the remote. Justin spent several minutes trying to build up Garrett’s trust by promising not to say anything to us…and that’s why he offered to turn off his phone as a sign of good faith.

Once they had an agreement, Garrett handed Justin the remote. Justin turned on the TV and discovered what Garrett had been hiding. He had gone onto YouTube and decided to look up, “LIVE NUDE GRILLS.” That’s not a typo. That’s really how Garrett spelled it. Garrett was watching video after video after video of half-naked girls making out with each other. (By the way, the Parental Control were on and he was still able to watch this stuff.) In a very nice way, Justin reprimanded Garrett and told him that this was not appropriate for him to see and the he shouldn’t watch it anymore. Garrett agreed, in theory.

GWE and I were half hysterical/half horrified as she told me this story. Because our YouTube account is under GWE’s name, she was able to look up what he was watching. WOW!!!

GWE and I agreed that YouTube needed to be removed from the family television in the den. It took me a few minutes, but I got it done. Several days have passed and Garrett has not mentioned anything about it. He must have noticed that YouTube is gone by now, but maybe the unsaid is better than the said.

Summer Camp Isn’t For Everyone

This is the pre-camp photo. The post-camp photo is a lot less cheery for one of us.

Over the Summer, both Justin and Garrett attended their first sleep-away camp. It lasted for two weeks and allowed GWE and I just enough time to leave town, get drunk while wine tasting, act like adults again, and then return to Los Angeles as if nothing happened. When we returned, we were met with multiple letters from both boys. Garrett was having the greatest experience of his life and was considering relocating to the woods of Sanger, California full time…at the age of 7. Justin had a different experience. He was not having a good time. He wanted to make it abundantly clear to us that he was having such a terrible time that he never wanted to go back to camp ever again.

Part of me wanted to yell at him and tell him that he better start having fun because this camp was f@#$&%g expensive! But, I decided to take a different route. I didn’t have the greatest camp experiences either when I was a kid. So, I sympathized with his situation and decided to send him this note instead:

8/5/19

Hi Justin –

I saw the letter you mailed home and I’m sorry to hear that you’re not having a good time. I want to tell you about my experiences at camp and give you some advice on what you should think about doing. You’ve got five days left and I think you can find a way to have a great experience there, but it takes a little bit of work and you have to be willing to do things that aren’t in your comfort zone.

Grandma and Papa sent me to a four-week, sleep-away camp starting at your age. I had a miserable experience. I had a very hard time making a connection with anyone. It felt like most of the kids already knew each other or they had more in common with each other than I did. To make matters worse, my cousins were at the same camp. I think it was Grandma and Papa’s hope that (at the very least) my cousins would be friends with me and show me around. They did not. They completely ignored me. I spent the first year alone and I hated every minute of it.

And, it was hot. If you think California is hot, you haven’t felt the humidity of a HOT Georgia Summer. It was so hot on the first year that we couldn’t do any of the lake activities because they lake had dried out. You could walk out on the dock, but it was 10 feet above dry soil. Half the camp’s activities were supposed to be on the lake. But that year, there was no swimming, canoeing, fishing, etc. (Somehow the lake dried up, but Poo Pond was always full. I never understood that.)

Yes, there were activities that I didn’t want to do and thought they were beneath me. I didn’t want to sing songs and I didn’t want to dance around and I really, really hated “Color Wars.” (If they don’t do that, I’ll explain it to you later.) I disliked anything that required running or getting dirty. Just like you, I loved everything tech…and there was little to none of it at camp.

If you ask Grandma, I’m sure she remembers me sending her a note that basically said, “If you loved me, you’d get me out of here.” I’m sure she wasn’t thrilled to get it and she did not come to get me. I felt like I was alone in a place that I didn’t want to be. I was stuck.

That may have been the moment that I realized, it wasn’t up to anyone else to provide me with a good time…or provide me with friends…or make sure I was having a good experience. The truth is, it was completely up to me. So, I’m imparting this (hard-earned) wisdom onto you: Your experiences in camp (and in life) are entirely up to you. If you don’t want to participate and you don’t want to have a good time, you don’t have to. But, if you give a shit 😊 (like I tell you in golf), you may be surprised by the wonderful experiences you end up having by accident.

As I often tell writers, “Bad Decisions lead to Good Stories.” Don’t think going down the waterslide is a good idea? Try doing it anyway. You may get a good story out of it. Don’t think that trying the ropes course seems safe? Try it…you will definitely have a good story. Don’t want to ride the ATV? A good crash will always lead to a good story. Don’t want to fish? Go fishing…and then tell everyone about how the BIG one got away. Good stories and weird experiences are the things that help us create friendships. “You think you had a weird experience on the lake, let me tell you about mine….”

When it came to camp, I made 1 friend. His name was Shlomo. I’m not kidding. He was an exchange student from Israel. He was a weird kid, but my kind of weird. And, then we met a kid named Billy Mitchell. He, too, was weird. He wasn’t Jewish, but his parents sent him to a Jewish camp anyway. And finally, there was “Ice” – the only African American kid in an entirely Jewish camp. Slowly, and by participating, I found friends and we were weird together.

Buddy – it’s up to you. I’m glad you love your art, but it’s sometimes hard to make friends with your nose buried in your sketchbook.

Please try to have a good time. Do something new, something you’ve never done before. And, when you come home, you can tell me how your bad decision led to a great story.

Love you,

Dad

You’ve Got A Friend in Me

Who wouldn’t want to be friends with this guy?!?!?!?!

Garrett came home from camp in a foul mood. I heard him stomp through the front door, turn the corner, march into his room, and slam the door shut. I decided to give him a few minutes to calm down before approaching him. After about 30 minutes, I found him sitting on the sofa and gently asked, “Hey buddy. How was camp today?”

“Terrible,” he replied.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I inquired

He let out a long, audible breath and looked at me. “Fine. I had a terrible day because I asked ‘Sarah’ (not her real name) if she would be my best friend at camp and she said yes.” Confused, I replied, “Isn’t that a good thing?”

He continued, “…but then, her friend whispered in her ear and then she told me that she didn’t want to be my friend anymore.”

“Oh. I see. I’m sorry to hear that.” For a moment, we both sat in silence. He had vented and I was trying to determine what to do with the information. I could have gone with the theory of “Boys Rule, Girls Drool,” but that only goes so far. Ultimately, I chose honesty.

“Well, Garrett. Sometimes boys and girls (and grown men and women) like each other, but their friends get in the way.  If you like someone and want to be friends, you should tell them and don’t worry what their friends say. I’m sure it made Sarah feel good to know that you wanted to be her friend.” I suggested he try playing with her again the next day. If she wasn’t interested, that’s OK too.

He seemed satisfied with the answer and refocused on the video game he was playing. Garrett is clearly going to be OK. It’s Sarah’s loss…and Sarah’s friend will eventually be shunned by her friends because of her terrible judgement and gossipy ways. She will then grow old alone, spending her nights eating single-serving frozen dinners, and living with her 40 cats who will ultimately eat her face off when she runs out of cat food. (Is that too harsh? Not when you reject my son, it’s not.)