Off To College

I didn’t cry the entire way home, and I suppose that’s something.  Today, The Wife and I moved our oldest son into his dorm at college.  ($#!+, I’m getting old).  For full disclosure, he is only 30 minutes from home and about 5 minutes from where I work.  So, it isn’t as if he’s across the country or, Heaven forbid, Cleveland.  Whether around the world or around the block (everywhere I go, the Kids Wanna Rock – Bryan Adams, if you want him) or wherever he  may be, he’s still not home….pause, while I locate a Kleenex….

I suppose the emotion of the day (which started about a month before his high school graduation) comes from three things.

First, I could not be more proud of both of our boys.  They love their Lord. They are considerate and kind.  They know how to laugh.  They are smart.  They know how to face and overcome adversity.  All these things qualify The Tall One for success as he enters “The College Years”.

Second, I’m just going to miss him.  As a parent, you have to love your kids.  If you don’t answer “yes” on the application to the “Do you love your child?” question, then they don’t give you a kid, right?  So, loving your offspring is a relative (no pun intended) given.  Liking them, however, is not required.  I’ve met lots of people’s kids and I don’t know how their parents can stand some of them.  They are rude, selfish brats (just being real here).  Their folks probably threw a party when their spawn finally moved out.   I genuinely like our kids, however.

Some people say you can’t be a friend to your children and still be their dad.  I get that to an extent, but if you are lucky (as I am) as my boys get older the more I’ve been able to develop a relationship with them that is both dad and friend.  The Tall One and I enjoy sports together, share tastes in music, like the same movies and play golf together.  I’m simply going to miss him being around all the time….pause while I locate the box of Kleenex…

Studies show that men think about sex every 52 seconds.  You can question the accuracy of the results of that experi…no, they pretty much nailed it (no pun intended this time either).  The one thing that may rival how often men think about sex is how often we question our ability as a father.  As a husband, if you are doing that wrong, you have a wife to set you straight.  As a father, if your kids try to set you straight you introduce them to the "board of education".

That brings me to my final point: there is a sense of doubt that is likely unavoidable at a time when your child is moving into another phase of life.  Doubt that persistently asks the question: have you done enough as a father to prepare your son for “this”?  The answer is “no”.  There are a great many things that could have been done different, better, more often, less often, louder, softer, more strict, more lenient, etc., etc., a million times etc.  I mean we all can't be Ward Cleaver (I don't smoke a pipe) or Cliff Huxtable (I can't pull off those sweaters).

There are two things of which I am extremely confident, however.  One: My kids will never have a doubt that they are loved.  Two: However I may have fallen short, there is a God who loves them more than I do who is eternally capable of training them in the ways they should go. 

So now I’ll sit in the basement and watch pre-season football without The Tall One and hope his first night at college is all he wants it to be.  Does anybody know if Kleenex delivers?

Shopping Part I: What if You Shop Like Tony Gwynn Hit?

It’s a stereotype, to be sure, but guys are not typically good at shopping.  Some men may be good at it (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but for most of us it’s a struggle.  For this series, I’ve broken shopping down into four main categories:

1.       Regular shopping

2.       Man shopping

3.       Anti-Man shopping

4.       Wife gifts

Regular shopping can be anything from groceries to blue jeans to a garden hose.  A man’s typical success rate is about one for three on regular shopping assignments.  The Hall of Fame is full of guys that had .333 batting average and none of them do much better at regular shopping than you do.  Tony Gwynn was one of the greatest hitters of all time…couldn’t shop worth a darn.  Except for groceries…Tony knew how to buy food. 

If you return from an errand and you get one out of three items right, unlike baseball, that….that’s not good.  Say the wife sent you to the store for 60-watt light bulbs, a loaf of bread and mustard.  You bring home one of those curly-Q energy-saver bulbs (out one).  The bread you pick up is sour dough, which would be fine except the bread was to be used to make the kids’ lunches and they don’t like that kind (out two).  You bring home yellow mustard thinking that if The Wife meant Grey Poupon you could run down a limo somewhere and ask the guy in the back if you can borrow some.  You guessed correctly with yellow.  You are one for three and headed back to Kroger...not to Cooperstown.

And before you ask: Guys we don’t get bonus points for bringing home extra things not on the list.  Picking up a 100-count box of pizza rolls or the world’s largest box of Cheez-it’s or another fantasy football preview magazine does not help your case.  Shockingly, it can have the opposite effect.  Often it will produce an “I-Know-You-Were-Not-This-Dumb-When-I-Married-You” look from The Wife.

There are things that can be done to improve our batting average with “regular shopping”, but practice does not, in this case, make perfect. Oh, we may get on a hot streak and get everything right on the list for a week or two, but pretty soon we’ll go “0 for the month of October” and our batting average sinks back to normal. 

We’ve identified the problem, so here are a few suggestions of things that might actually help:

·         Send a child with us: If there is someone that wants to be at the store less than the dad, it is the kid.  They won’t tolerate any “window shopping” at the butcher shop or the beer aisle.  Their whining will motivate you to stay on task (other than having to buy a box of Sugary Choco-Bombs cereal).  Plus they likely know more about what mom buys at the grocery store than the dad ever will.

·         Use technology: Ladies, you can text the list to us.  Don’t e-mail it because we’ll get lost in some work-related e-mail chain while we are supposed to be opening the message with your shopping list.  You can also take pictures with your phone and send them to us.  You want us to buy flour?  Take a photo of the bag and text it to us and you’ll greatly improve our chances.  Tell us to buy flour and you may get all-purpose, you may get self-rising, you may get whole wheat, you may get a bouquet of daisies.  You may get any of those any way, but you are reducing the risk of failure if you give us a picture.

·          Expectations: There are lots of things we are good at.  Regular shopping, generally, is not one of those things.  If you go through Facebook profiles of every man that on your friend list, I highly doubt that any of them will list “shopping” as an interest (and if they do, their profile picture may be of them dressed as Liza Minnelli…just sayin’). So, since regular shopping doesn’t come naturally to us, give us a little slack. Sometimes we freeze up trying to decide between Red Gold canned tomatoes or a store brand.  So if we come home with the wrong one (or both) that at least shows some effort, so give us a little credit.  If we are supposed to pick up canned tomatoes and we show up with a bottle of ketchup, feel free to hit us over the head with it.  The emergency room doctor may not be able to tell the ketchup from the blood anyway.

The next installment in the Keep A Happy Wife: Shopping Series will address “Man Shopping”.  No, ladies this is not where you get to go out and buy a better model of man to replace your husband (The Wife has had her eye on that guy who plays Thor, so I know how I would be replaced, though she won’t get much trade-in value for me).  That post will address the areas of shopping at which we excel (or at least we think we do).