Parenting: Sunday Morning
Adventure
by Joyce Maynard
It was Sunday morning, and I thought I'd let my husband sleep in. So I
suggested to my children that they ride into town with me to pick up the
newspaper and a quart of milk. To make the whole trip a little more tempting
(since they weren't exactly running for their hats and coats, at the suggestion),
I told them we'd pick up a dozen doughnuts. When even that wasn't getting
them out the door, I added, mysteriously, that we would also have an adventure.
"You mean we'll buy something?" my son Charlie asked hopefully.
"No," I said. (Determined not to start in with another dinosaur
or Mask sticker book, requiring about twenty dollars worth of stickers
to complete.) "This will be even better."
So the four of us piled into the station wagon and headed out into the world, at seven-thirty a.m., as I began to consider just what I might be able to come up with, in the way of an adventure. We were too late for the sunrise, and it was too cold (by about fifty degrees) to have a picnic. No chance of a yard sale. Too early to drop in on friends. We live in a small town, you understand. For us, going to the car wash qualifies as an adventure. But not even the car wash was open.
One of the things that living with a young child does for you, I have found, is that it makes small things seem bigger. The sight of a tractor trailer, hauling half of a mobile home down Main Street would qualify as big news to my sons, as would the sight of a dead skunk lying by the side of the road, or our town firemen, hosing down their truck. We have been known to pull off the side of the road to inspect a vintage Cadillac with a for sale sign on it, to stop at the laundromat and watch a dollar bill turned into four quarters -- and any time any group of more than ten people choose to march through town, for some reason or other, it's a safe bet we'll turn out to watch them do it.
But on this particular Sunday morning, I wracked my brain and discovered I was totally out of ideas for adventures. No dead animals around to inspect. No National Guard units, out doing maneuvers in their camouflage jeeps. Not even a snowblower in operation.
Well, I figured, I'll let them choose two different varieties of doughnuts. But as luck would have it, when we got to the store the man behind the counter informed me that our local doughnut baker wouldn't be in with today's batch for another half hour. What to do in the meantime?
There was only one hope left: Our town dump. Which is actually one of my favorite places to go. Of course, I had no trash to throw out on this particular morning, but that has never stopped me from visiting the dump in the past. I am as likely to bring things home from the dump as I am to take them there.
My sons, hearing this plan, brightened considerably -- remembering the time we found the Barbie Camper at the dump, and the time I fished a perfectly good GI Joe, with only one leg missing, out from underneath an old toaster oven. (My daughter tried to get me to bring the toaster oven home too -- as a Barbie tanning parlor. But I have my limits.) There was one day when we found so many great items at the dump I didn't even know how we'd haul them all back to our car -- until I discovered that a local supermarket had just discarded a dozen perfectly fine shopping carts. One of which now resides (to the regret of my long suffering husband -- a minimalist, at heart) in our garage.
Now it must be said, I could see that Audrey was not enthusiastic about my plan to visit the dump on this particular Sunday morning. Once an enthusiastic dump picker, in recent years she has gotten a lot more particular about where her possessions come from. And so, when we arrived at the dump, and found a chain across the entrance, she heaved a sigh of relief, even as her brothers began to moan and wail.
"Don't worry," I told them. "Nobody would mind if we just parked outside and walked in." Nobody except Audrey, that is. Although, it should also be said, that when given the option of staying in the car and waiting for us, while we perused the dump, she chose to accompany us.
It was a bitterly cold morning, and my son Willy was, as usual, underdressed. So I lent him my hat, which he chose to pull down over his entire face, so that only his chin showed. Charlie instantly found a discarded Wild Turkey bottle he wanted to bring home to put in the spot he calls his Keeping Area, where he displays things like discarded plastic graveyard floral arrangements and a plaster sculpture of a Buddha. He also located a couple of things he thought Audrey might like, but she just shook her head. Willy, meanwhile, had located an old iron which he was carrying proudly, dragging the cord behind him as he went. Also a refrigerator magnet in the shape of a fish. To help him out (and because he was having a little trouble seeing where he was going, on account of the hat over his face), I'd agreed to carry a couple of other treasures that were getting too heavy.
As we headed back to our car, a couple of workers from the town road crew drove past us and waved, as they headed out for their day's work. Looking at my sons, skipping happily toward me, carrying their booty, I allowed myself a moment of parental pride (such bouncy boys) and satisfied reverie. I thought about the sculpture Charlie would make out of his Wild Turkey bottle, the educational possibilities of taking apart Willy's iron to study how it works, and about the lesson I hoped my children were acquiring, that simple pleasures can sometimes be found in unexpected places, and that happy times don't always require the expenditure of money. "Look over there," I said, pointing to a flock of crows descending on a pile of garbage. Nature.
And then I saw my daughter, standing -- absolutely still -- a hundred yards or so behind Charlie and Willy. Not moving. I could tell, from the way she stood, that she was near tears. And when I finally persuaded her to join us in the car, the floodgates opened.
"I have never been so embarrassed in my whole life," she said. "Anybody who saw us just now would think we were some poor family that goes out looking for old bottles and irons at eight o'clock in the morning. We all looked ridiculous. I was so ashamed."
Well, I thought about several answers I could have given my child: That there are harder things in life than being mistaken for a poor person. (Being a poor person, for instance.) That as far as I'm concerned, I'd be more embarrassed to be seen in a fur coat or a pair of ridiculously expensive designer jeans, than to be spotted, salvaging a perfectly good steam iron from our town dump. I considered telling her how unlikely it was that the men on our town road crew thought any less of her, or me, for keeping company with a little boy who likes to pull his hat over his face on cold days. All those things were true enough, and made some sense. But I had forgotten one crucial thing, in my quest for Sunday morning diversion: That being a nine year old girl is not the same as being a five year old boy, or a thirty-four year old woman. And to a nine year old, a morning of dump picking is not a great adventure. It's simply mortifying.
I hugged her and said I was sorry I hadn't understood. Back at the grocery store I picked up our doughnuts, along with a day-old sweetheart rose ("Tell Someone You Love Her") as a peace offering. And now, a day later, my sons have learned some things about steam irons. I have learned some things about daughters. And mine has, thankfully, forgiven me.
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