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ODD MAN OUT
by mimi greenwood knight

Our saga begins with a twelve-year-old boy whom I love very much—a super jock born into a family of bookworms—a boy whose simple desire from the day he was born has been to run, jump, kick, tackle, throw, hit, score, compete, excel, and dominate at anything that even resembles sports and is condemned to live with five people whose idea of fun is an historic home tour.

For five years now, this boy—we’ll call him Hewson because, uh, that’s his name—has had a dream—the six members of his family playing a simple game of kickball in our backyard. This will never happen. Instead we sit around the dinner table with a pad of paper. Someone writes an opening paragraph to a story then passes it to the next person who adds a paragraph, passes it, adds a paragraph, to see where the story will go. Woo Hoo, now that’s fun!

So it was that, as this poor kid lamented for the one millionth time how he wishes he’d been born into a normal family, I lost my head a bit and decided I could pull off a family day doing something—anything—outdoors that involves some degree of physical exertion.

Canoeing seemed like a logical choice since we live in am area where three rivers converge and everybody and his brother has opened a canoe rental place. You can rent a canoe for three hours, five hours, even all day. I figured, for us, three was pushing it.

I started the week before talking it up with the rest of the family which consists of two teenage sisters—seventeen and fifteen—one dad, one five-year-old little brother and me. Seventeen is the bookwormyist of us all. I knew we weren’t getting her in a canoe. Fifteen was a definite maybe. Five was down for some canoeing although he had no idea what that meant.

I reminded my husband, David, several times that a family canoe trip was on the calendar for Saturday. He thought it sounded like a great idea. Each time I brought it up to him or one of the kids, I felt an ever growing knot in the pit of my stomach. Water and I have never been good friends and I live my life in fear of snakes.

I love my son enough to put both fears on the back burner though, so I set my sights on the moment when we’d drag our canoes out of the water, tired and hungry but laughing about the great time we’d just shared. I tried not to think about the actual canoeing in snake-infested waters and focused on Hewson’s face as he finished a three-hour canoe trip with his normal family. It would be worth it.

The day of the big family adventure arrived with a surprise—water covering the bathroom floor. Upon inspection, my husband announced that the little valve dealie that leads to the toilet tank was shot. David is a wonderful man, a good Christian, loyal husband and devoted father but handy is a word nobody has ever used to describe him. He doesn’t know a monkey wrench from a monkey’s uncle and worst of all, he’s in blind denial about it. So the canoe trip was put on hold and here I go to the hardware store with a temporary reprieve from my knotty stomach.

I will not indulge myself by replaying the conversation where David told me that the part we needed was standard and I reminded him that my last several trips to the hardware store proved that nothing is standard and asked him to take off the little valve so I could pop it in my pocket and match it up with its replacement at the store. He gave me that women-know-nothing- about-this-manly-stuff look and I ran myself up and down the highway to the hardware store twice each time returning with the wrong size standard valve. He finally took the doodad off the toilet, dropped it in his own pocket and went to the store to get the right size. (Women!) But, of course, it would be self serving to include that part of the story. So I won’t.

With all these trips to the hardware store forty minutes both ways, the morning was dwindling and the toilet was no closer to being fixed. I figured I was looking at two choices. A) Wait and go canoeing when Daddy (or the plumber I hoped we’d be calling soon) got finished with the job or B) Take the kids canoeing myself. If the thought of paddling down a snake-infested river with David and the kids put my stomach in a knot, the thought of going with the kids and no David broke me out in a cold sweat.

I remembered Hewson—twelve years of foreign films and poetry readings—and realized that the days of him wanting to spend time with his family are limited. A couple more years and he’ll have his own social calendar which might not included us.

I sat him down and presented our options. He was a champ about it. Twelve years of a disappointing family is character building. Then I had an epiphany. The zoo!

“Hey, Buddy, I just thought of another option. We could wait for Dad and go this afternoon. We could go without him OR we could save canoeing for another day and go to the zoo instead.”

Amazingly, a trip to the zoo sounded good to him and I felt the week-old knot in my stomach dissolve. I hated myself for being so relieved to get out of my promise to my son. But I was.

Dad was out of the zoo trip because the leaky potty still loomed before him. The sisters were out because Dad has shut off all water to the house and they weren’t going anywhere without washing their hair. So at nearly lunchtime, we set off for the zoo, just me and my boys where I learned yet again that the best family outings—the real memory makers—are the ones that aren’t planned.

I was determined to do everything Hewson wanted to do at the zoo so, for the next five hours, we rode the train, climbed the rock wall, took a virtual safari ride, ate Roman chewing candy, climbed on the zoo’s historic oak trees, and saw every animal there was to see. The weather was perfect. The crowd was amiable. And Hewson was happy.

When we finally found the front gate again (which after five hours looked like a desert mirage) we melted into the car and declared it the best zoo trip ever. Five-year-old Jonah proved it by falling asleep before we left the parking lot. Hewson tilted his seat back, closed his eyes and with a sleepy smile asked, “So, can we go canoeing next weekend?”

And the knot returned to my stomach.