Strange noises from the back seat.

Strange noises from the back seat.

“When are we going to get there?” a strange high-pitched noise ruminates from the back seat.  What the hell was that?  I look back and three little funny-looking people are sprawled out, wearing oversized headphones and chewing bubblegum.  Four big blue eyes and two almond-color eyes look back at me blankly.  One of the creatures sticks his candy-red tongue out at me then they go back to watching their movie on a DVD player.  I do a double take.  Who are these little human beings?  Do I know them?  And how the hell did they get here?

I think I’m supposed to know them; they look familiar, just much bigger, like a time warp rapidly aged the three little fussy babies I met only a few years ago.  But I guess it’s been 13 years since I first had the privilege of adding “Uncle” to my name, first welcoming Colin, then Ryan, and last but not least Madeline to my one-man Wolfpack.  When they were brand new everyone said that they were so beautiful, but they jut looked like little shriveled up aliens to me.  I was too scared to pick them up and hold them – what if I fumbled one and it fell and broke?  I had no idea what to do when they cried.  I didn’t want all that on my conscience, so I just looked at them from afar and tried to stay out of range of their bodily functions.  It started with one, but then I left for a year, backpacking around the world.  Upon my return my sister picked me up at the airport and presented me with a much bigger version of the creature I remembered.  I agreed to hold him briefly, mostly just for a photo op, and he immediately puked Gerber mashed carrots all over my shirt.  Nice.  Was this the random act of an embattled stomach?  Or was he sending a message – marking his territory, as if to say “I’m the new sheriff in town now and in case you ain’t heard it’s all about me!”    

A few months went by and they began to smile at me, and something in my heart shifted, like an icy river melting in the first warm spring sun.  A few more years and words and thoughts started coming out of their little heads, some of them actually making sense, and I was enthralled; my sister had somehow produced three little comedy machines.

“Uncle Norm, how much longer until we’re there?”  I swivel around and see that those nails-on-chalkboard noises are coming from a tall 8-year old girl, with white-blond hair as wild as a tangled fishing net.  I recognize this one - that’s Maddie, or Mad Maddie, or Hurricane Maddie, or Missy Moo Moo, though her birth certificate officially says Madeline.  She’s a trip – my little Rasta girl.  We’ve only been in the car 29 minutes and managed to make it as far as the Starbucks drive-through the next town over.  I think we’re in trouble.    

My sister and I rode this route up to the Maine lake house all the time as kids: winding up the East Coast on I-90 through Southern Massachusetts, across 290 and 495 towards Boston, and then up I-95 all the way into central Maine.  Some of my best memories are from summers in Maine: jumping in the cold, clear lake and swimming out to the float to sun ourselves all day, fishing trips at dawn to pull small-mouth bass out of our favorite grottos, and huddling around the fireplace when it rained, musty smoke from Dogwood branches rising up past the gigantic stuffed moose head on the wall.  It occurs to me that I might be a different person if not for those magical summer vacations and autumn weekends in Maine, for I was a lost kid with nothing but pavement and trouble for mentors.  That’s the kind of wisdom that unveils itself to you as you get older, and it brings a wave of gratitude within me.

The drive up to Maine always seemed like a historic and arduous undertaking when I was young, like we might as well load up our possessions in covered wagons and head out West, hoping to make it over the snowy mountain passes before the wolves ate us.  For weeks in advance preparations were made, school reading lists were pursued at the local library, and bags were packed.  The morning of our departure felt like the space shuttle was about to launch.  My sister and my mom ran around the house frantically collecting sunscreen and beach towels, and inedible peanut and butter sandwiches were encased in tin foil and plastic for the long journey.  The car was loaded, unloaded, then loaded again as we snapped at each other.  Bathroom schedules were reviewed and confirmed, as if our bladders could hear us and cooperate.  But once we hit the road there was an unspoken understanding that the transformation to this magical place could not be questioned or disturbed, less it vanish into thin air.  At least I don’t remember saying “Are we there yet?” fifty four times before we even left our home state of Connecticut.

It usually took us 8 ½ hours to reach our destination, the lime green station wagon weaving across busy highways until we hit New Hampshire, with nothing but long stretches of open roads lines with thick woods, and then into Maine, a final 90 mile home stretch to Belgrade Lakes.  We had no DVD players, no music, no video games, no air conditioning, and no chance at even a modicum of comfort.  Our sweaty skin stuck to the polyester back seat as we played the license plate game or Go Fish for 3 hours straight.  Back then you could go for an hour without seeing more than a handful of cars in Maine, and you had to look out to avoid deer more than highway speed traps.  There was only one rest area to stop and eat lunch, where we spread out or mashed peanut butter sandwiches on a dirty picnic table while the family hound dog, Button, ran circles around us spastically.

Only later in life, when we were issued our own driver’s licenses and allowed to make the drive sans madre, did we realize that ride up to Maine is actually only 4 ½ or 5 hours.  Did we miss something?  Were we supposed to make a loop around Central Maine just to fill in the rest of the time?  It dawned on me that all through my childhood my mom was driving an average of 39.5 mph on the highway – and that people weren’t always honking at us because they were friendly; the middle finger from another driver does not mean “You’re #1!”  I checked with my sister and it was confirmed – our mom was possibly the worst driver on earth, and looking back I think it would have been safer to let Button drive the family truckster.

Once we hit the 6^th hour we could barely sit still and contain our excitement; we prayed for time to pass but it still cruelly crawled on.  We knew we’d made it, that we hadn’t missed the summer entirely and had to turn around and head back, once we reached the immense, sparkling metal bridge that led us into Maine.  We sat up straight, reenergized, as we drove over the half-mile bridge, cheering like wild banshees once we drove under the “Welcome to Maine” sign.    

I snap back to the present when a soggy half-eaten pretzel hits me in the back of the head.  My sister turns around and starts yelling at the three little urchins in the back seat, and it does quiet them down for about 67 seconds.  But then they go back to staring at a 9” screen on the roof of the back seat in unison.  Thank God for these movies in the car – I don’t know how we all survived before them. 

I’ve been studying how this “raising children” thing goes and the best I can tell it’s a full fledge war of wills – each side trying to wear the other side down into submission.  It’s a grinding, gritty affair, and children are worthy adversaries.  Kids are nothing but little time and energy vampires – sucking your life away little by little until you just wave the white flag and resign yourself to a mental institution where you’ll spend the rest of your days playing volleyball in a bathrobe while eating butterscotch pudding out of a straw.  God makes them so cute when they’re little to disguise the fact that they’re actually inherently evil creatures whose sole purpose is to make parents’ lives miserable in new and interesting ways.  If it weren’t for that cosmic cuteness trick all kids would be sold to the Gypsies within 48 hours, but by the time they start growing and you realize that they’re just odd little humans, it’s too late to get your money back, even if you could find the receipt.    

A light drizzle starts to fall once we’re past Springfield.  I ask my sister if she want’s me to take over driving, but she’s fine.  I love it that we get closer as time goes on.   Her and my brother-in-law, Sean, are doing such a good job with Colin, Ryan, and Madeline – they’re not nearly the spoiled little punks that I see all over the place these days.  True, my sister has help; her Herculean parenting efforts are eternally aided by a Starbucks habit that would make a crackhead weep with empathy.  In fact she should walk around in a Mommy Nascar uniform with Starbucks, Honda, Nike, Tyson Chicken, Tide, and Charmin as her sponsors.  I don’t know if I would have the same Zen patience to put up with kids that she displays.  I’m rapidly approaching 40 years old, and its apparent that I’m not married and don’t have kids not just because of circumstances and dating the wrong gals – because believe me I’ve dodged some bullets - but a lifestyle choice.  There’s a lot I want to do on this planet before I kick it, and maybe marriage just isn’t compatible with that legacy.  And that’s OK.  Maybe it will happen for me, maybe not, but I’m not worried about it at all.  I really love kids but they don’t have to be mine to get a kick out of them.  Maybe my “special purpose,” as Steve Martin described in The Jerk, is to be a kick-ass Uncle.  I hope I live up to that. I want to be that Uncle who is really cool and hip who they can come talk to whenever they have problems and need advice – the only guy they trust to call at 3am when they need a ride because their friend is drunk at a high school party, or the one who they can confide in when life is just too heavy to figure out and they need someone they can turn to. 

They’re still too young for that now, so my job description mostly includes winding them up, enabling them to O.D. on sugar, and teaching them assorted bad words, retreating back to my own life when it’s time to pay for them or clean up their messes.  It’s a perfect arrangement; it’s not my responsibility to raise them, but it is my familial duty not to mess them up too much, less I erase the great brainwashing my sis and bro-in-law have put in. 

Like when Colin was five years old I taught him to say, “I won’t let the white man hold me down,” which he proudly recited to his kindergarten class.  Maybe that was going a little too far, but I just want to toughen him up a little.  If he got dropped off in another neighborhood and had to deal with other 13 year-olds he’d get his ass handed to him – he’s just a kid.  So I teach him how to fight a little, a good tactic if someone steps to him that will land him the first shot and leave his hands in a good defensive position.  I wish someone taught me those things.  However I’m also glad that he doesn’t need to worry about that yet.  I look at these kids and they seem so sheltered, so innocent, and it’s going to hit them like a ton of bricks once they get out in the real world. They live in a lily-white richie-rich part of Connecticut, so secluded from the hard outside world where the rest of us poor scrubs live.  I want to help soften that blow.

A few weeks before the trip to Maine I saw a picture of Colin and was stunned that he looks like a teenager already.  Did I blink and miss his childhood?  Am I too late?  No, I was there.  I remember throwing a whiffle ball to him in the front yard on a perfect summer day, sitting through school musical performances that were tantamount to oratory torture as he played the dying baboon, I mean clarinet, and throwing the football last Thanksgiving when it started to snow.  But he can’t be 13, officially a teenager, and on the brink of leaving his childhood behind forever – that’s impossible.  I think back and realize that when I was only a couple years older than him I was roaming the streets and bars of New Haven, boozing, smoking weed by the grates where homeless people camp out, and dropping acid.  That blows my mind. Since he’s 13 now and I tell him I’m going to start treating him like a grown man, which really just means I have carte blanche to curse liberally and tell wild stories in front of him. I thank my sister for raising them right, for giving them something better than I had.

Colin is very cerebral, not that he’s a brainiac at school, but he thinks everything through and carefully analyzes each situation.  He’s got a competitive streak that will serve him well later on: he pitched a no-hitter in Little League last year, and I made him autograph a game photo and mail it to me.  Mostly I just love talking to the kid – it’s like hanging out with one of your adult guy friends, and you can just have a normal conversation with him well beyond his years.  If he was allowed to use his cell phone more than five times per day and didn’t have a curfew past 9pm I would give him a ring often and say “Dude wanna go grab a beer?”  I could bring him around with me all day as a road dog.  We have a shared interest in the finer things in life – like sneaker shopping.  He’s pretty darn responsible too; for a couple of years now he’s raised chickens and guinea hens in a pen in the back of their barn.  He puts the chickens out in the yard in the morning, collects their eggs, cleans their cages, feeds them and waters them, and most importantly brings them back in the pen at night.  If he forgets to put them back in then the hawks or the coyotes make a meal out of them quickly, leaving feathers and dead chicken gore all over the yard.  He sells the farm-fresh eggs to about a dozen customers in town, and even had T-shirts printed with his info and a witty slogan:  “Northrop Farms; From our chicken’s butts to your plate.”  That’s a lot of responsibility for a kid, but he loves it, and wants to add a couple baby goats to his barnyard.  

They’re named Dopey, Ferdie (my late father's name), Guinea, Chicky, Nibs, Bully, Chloe (his girlfriend's name), Daisy, Murph, and Fireball (my favorite). He promised me the next chicken will be named "the Situation" because it will be a chick magnet!


CHEESY COMMERCIAL BREAK:  Get your Northrop Farm’s t-shirt today!  Only $20 each or $45 for two! Complete with the tasteful slogan, “From our chicken’s butts to your plate!”  Available in extra-medium.  Email me if you want one.   Norm@unityfs.com Seriously.

“Are we there yet?” Maddie screams from the back seat at rock concert volume.  I jump and rub my ears.  She doesn’t realize that she’s yelling because she’s still wearing her headphones and watching Charlotte’s Web.  The boys groan through every minute of it, but it’s important that she gets to see something that she likes every once and a while – it’s easy to get lost in a house full of boys and their sports, and she’s in a constant struggle to be heard.  I look at my watch and it’s been exactly 13 minutes since her last inquiry. 

“We have 27 hours left,” I lie to her.  She gives me that look that’s so familiar, her disapproving/stop messing with me look; one side of her face scrunched up like she just ate a lemon, with a sarcastic smile on her face.   She points to her eyes with two fingers and then points at me – I’m watching you like a hawk Uncle Norm.  I turn around and encroach the kid’s backseat airspace by slapping Colin’s leg.  He barely acknowledges me and only slips his headphones down a little. “Are you excited for Maine buddy?” I ask him.  It even sounds campy to me.  “Yeah whatever,” he responds, mostly out of courtesy for his dorky Uncle, and goes back to watching the movie.    

I understand the game a little better now; the goal of parenting is not to raise healthy, happy contributing members of society who are not serial killers, pay their taxes on time, and floss regularly - that’s way too ambitious.   As far as I can see the only directive to parenting is to somehow survive 6,570 days, or 157,680 hours, or 9,460,800 minutes – until they are 18 years old.  Only nine million minutes to kill before they can be booted out of the house unceremoniously.  Oh sure you’ll pretend that you don’t want them to go, even mustering some crocodile tears, but secretly you’ll pray that their applications get accepted to some far-away (and inexpensive) college, all the while planning to remodel their bedroom into a Swedish steam room.  A good chunk of these minutes can be crossed off with school, about 890 minutes total over 18 years with restful sleep, but the rest takes some serious survival skills.

The best way I see for the adults to win this race is to distract the shit out of them in order to kill as much of that time as possible.  The television is a wonderful device for this – so subtract 318,290 minutes - years can be crossed-off just by plopping your kids in front of a TV set.  If their favorite TV shows get boring then you can try sneakers that glow in the dark (1,614), pool parties, so they can trash someone else’s place (2,612), Chuck E Cheese (1,119), pizza (8,377), summer camp (9,084), watermelon Bubblicious gum (2,278), getting gum out of hair (5,814) Christmas presents (14,210), McDonalds (76,001), and if all else fails, homework (9 minutes).  Anything made of plastic or that requires batteries can buy you between 27 seconds to 14 minutes on the high side, a small step in the march towards 18 years passing, and the ensuing parental emancipation, a monumental victory.

We’re rolling through Massachusetts, already a few hours in the car, so we decide to stop at McDonalds.  Doing the simplest every-day task with kids involved is a major production, like walking to your mailbox but this time with a 100 pound weight vest, juggling fire, and toting a gorilla on your back.  Just to get through lunch warrants a incessant set of instructions: collect the trash that’s mounting in the rear half of the SUV at an alarming rate, put on your shoes, don’t run in traffic, get in line and figure out what they want to order, stop hitting each other, don’t change your order at the last second and hold up the whole line, go to the bathroom and wash their hands, find a table, no not that table where the homeless lady is passed out drunk, stay out of the filthy kids playground, go wash your hands again, sit down and eat, clean up the orange soda you spilled, stop arguing over who has more French fries, don’t forget their baseball hat, who needs to go to the bathroom again, no we aren’t getting desert because you’ve had enough junk food, stop whining, stop complaining, ok go get desert but do it quickly, go to the bathroom again before we leave, go out to the car, go back in and get your sweatshirt, get back in the SUV, stop fighting about who is sitting where because no one wants the middle seat, get out, reshuffle positions, get back in, buckle up before we drive off, ok we’re turning around and coming back – run inside and retrieve your forgotten baseball cap.  Is it always like this?   

When we’re at McDonalds I feel the instinct to watch over them since we aren’t alone in the protective bubble of the SUV anymore.  I grab Maddie’s hand as we cross the parking lot, and eye up everyone who is going into the bathroom after Colin and Ryan have gone in there.  Everyone seems too close.  It’s a vulnerability I don’t enjoy.  Sometimes I can’t help to think about what if something bad happened to them.  A primal rage boils within me even pondering it.  I swear to God if someone hurt them I would fly in immediately from wherever I was in the world and kill the bastard with my bare hands in broad daylight, no questions asked. The world is such a bad place. I ask myself how can people have children, knowing what the world is like, how much pain and suffering they will be exposed to?  How much decency and love is left for them to find?  Then again I think every generation says that.  If I were given the choice, considering all of the crazy struggles I’ve been through, I would of course want to be born.  Look at all the shit we’ve gone through and we turned out fine. I guess kids are tougher than we give them credit for, probably tougher than us adults.  I make myself calm down.  I come back to the moment and look at Maddie and give her a smile as she throws her pickles onto her brother’s tray, slopping ketchup everywhere.  Nothing is wrong, and this is just playing out in my mind.  Either way they are here, and I want to do my best to care for them.  I hold Maddie’s hand tight on the way out of the parking lot and give her a big hug before throwing her in the back seat. 

We drive off and I mention my feelings to my sister.  She recounts a time when the kids were really bored on a rainy day and made some bad decisions.  These little Einsteins had the bright idea to climb in a portable dog kennel bag and then surf down the hard wooden stairs.  Hmmmm….Colin and Maddie got in the bag first – scrunched up in a space only big enough for the family Golden Retriever, and Ryan zipped it up.  It seems Ry Ry had enough sense in his head not to go first.  They got ready and then Ryan gave them a gentle nudge down the stairs.  Of course they immediately went end over end and crashed down the steps in a horrifying tumble.  By the time the bag hit the floor there were already ear-shattering wails of pain emanating from within the bag.  My brother in law heard the screams and came running out and unzipped the bag and saw blood everywhere.  He pulled two screaming, panicked kids out who were so covered in blood that he couldn’t tell who was hurt and where.  He brought them in the kitchen and wiped them off with a wet towel until he could see where all of the blood was coming from, a big open cut on Maddie’s skull.  The ambulance, or “bambulance” as she would later recount, was called and they took her off for a good number of stitches.  The kids were shaken but ok.  How the hell do you plan for that as a parent?  I guess you just hope to survive and do the best you can. 

We switch over from 495 North past Boston to 95 North, which leads us past the state-run liquor stores at the gateway to New Hampshire.  The kids are bored.  I know this because they tell me every 7 minutes.  I remember being bored all the time as a child, but I also remember that no one gave a shit – not in a bad way, but parents were too busy working and trying to keep food on the table to pander to their children like they were little Roman Emperors, like they do these days.  If you told an adult that you were bored they would respond with something really helpful like “why don’t you go outside and roll in the mud and don’t come back until dinner?” or “why don’t you dress up like a speed bump and go play in traffic?”  Complaining was fruitless, so we just found ways to amuse ourselves. 

At the three-hour mark of this drive up to Maine my nephews and niece amuse themselves by smacking and shoving each other, embroiled in a bitter dispute over back seat territory that would make the Israelis and Palestinians look like lightweights.  When any imbroglio escalates to physical violence Maddie is usually right in the middle of it.  She’s the enforcer, the thug - the hooligan of the bunch.  Colin dominates his siblings because he is bigger and older, but no one has a taste for scrapping like Maddie.  I sit in amazement as she knuckles up with the boys.  Colin beats the hell out of her and sends her to the ground, but instead of crying or quitting she springs up and starts swinging right back at him – that girl’s got no quit in her.  She’s a tomboy, as apt to be in the creek behind their house catching frogs and tadpoles with her bare hands as she is in her room playing with Barbie Dolls.  She’s a wild child, a free spirit, and there’s a 50/50 chance she’s going to drive my sister to drink margaritas by noon every day.  I don’t blame her - I couldn’t raise this little beautiful hellion.  It’s perfect irony that my sister wanted to try and have a girl after having two boys, an after-thought almost, just to round out the family pictures with a sweet quiet little dainty female.  Yeah right. She may come down the stairs for school in a pink sundress, a purple beanie cap, green and black leggings and white rubber boots, her white-blonde locks going wild no matter how many times my sister brushes them.  Interesting fashion statement, but that’s just, well…Maddie being Maddie.  She’s demonstrative as a circus barker and twice as cunning; I think she’s got a little “Cafeteria Queen” in her, a nickname my sister had in elementary school when she bossed around the other kids at lunch, telling them who was allowed to sit where. 

The kids spontaneously break into a rap song that’s playing on the radio.  The boys sing the chorus and keep the loop going while Maddie sings the lead, holding up her finger like a microphone and dancing out her part as Kesha: 

“Wake up in the morning feeling like P Diddy. 

Got my glasses – hit the door I’m gonna hit this city,

Before I leave brush my teeth with a bottle of Jack,

Cause when I leave for the night I ain’t coming back!”

She goes on to rap about partying until the break o’ dawn.  I’m stunned – Maddie is a little toddler, right?  There’s no way she’s old enough to know rap songs and dance with hip hop moves.  I’m suddenly glad she has two older brothers.  I think they’re going to have their work cut out for them as her guardian, but I also know that her spirit is indominatible, and I love her for that.  She’ll find her way.

I’m sometimes curious about what’s going on in her brain – the decision making process that is swirling around behind those wild eyes, blue as the ocean but on fire at the same time.  Is she entrenched in a personal jihad against all parental authority, calculated and fully committed?  In a rare quiet moment, when she’s being punished and cast-out to the Gulag of her room, I ask her:

“Hey Maddie, do you know you’re bad, or you just don’t care?”  She smiles at me, her eyes playing with light like a mischievous old soul who knows that this life is all one big joke, and simply says “I don’t care,” and casually goes back to collecting a stack of 34 of her favorite books that I’m supposed to read to her before bed.  I stutter, about to repeat the question – maybe she didn’t understand?  But she understood, and it makes me laugh out loud. 

I long to have a closer connection with her.  Maybe that comes later.  I think there are several things that get in our way: I’m a guy and there are only so many pink princess tea parties I can endure.  Her personality is sweet but she’s not as warm and fuzzy as the boys.  When we all watch TV in the den the boys love cuddling up with their uncle in a pile of blankets and pillows on the floor, but Maddie prefers the couch by herself, or goes in the other room to ride the dog like a horse.  Of course the boys and I play sports, and “guy time” is another thing we share that Maddie and I don’t.  But I know our bond will grow, just like the closeness of all relationships ebb and flow, and I know without a doubt that I’ll always be there for her when she needs her Uncle most. 

We’re approaching the big bridge at the border of Maine and my sister and I sit up straight, energized, and roll down the windows to feel the fresh air.  It’s a seminal milestone in our pilgrimage to our promised land.  We count down as we roll over the bridge, and go crazy yelling and clapping once we hit the “Welcome to Maine” sign.  I look into the backseat in case the celebration is getting out of control, but they kids are still transfixed watching their DVD player with blank expressions.  They shush us in unison, yelling at us to keep it down because they can’t hear the best part of Shrek 19.  I yell back that I’m going to throw them off the bridge if they ever shush me again and start tickling all of them.  They whine for me to stop and Maddie kicks me hard in the forehead.  God I love these kids.  

When I look at old pictures of them I almost don’t recognize the faces looking back at me.  Colin’s always looked the same – he’s always been a little adult in a child’s body, and through the year only his body grew and changed, his mug shot staying the same.  Maddie has gotten so tall it’s ridiculous, and every year that goes by leaves her looking more beautiful and wild.  The funny thing is that Ry Ry used to be chubby as a young kid – he was always the porker, but he’s morphed into a lean and even muscular eleven year old.  But when he was 4 years old he had a big old pumpkin head and looked a lot like Fat Bastard - Michael Myers dressed up as a comically obese Scottsman in the Austin Powers movie.  Ry Ry is the middle child.  He’s a natural athlete and life seems to come effortlessly to him – everything his older brother does with intense focus and willpower Ryan achieves as an afterthought, then he goes back to looking at trees or catching butterflies in the outfield.  He has white blond hair like his sister and looks like a surfer without the beach, even wearing a shark-tooth necklace.

Ryan emanates a peaceful charisma that most adults never achieve.  He’s genuinely empathetic to the point where I think this kid might win the Nobel Peace Prize one day.  He’s also a ham – the funny one who’s figured out just how to start trouble under the radar and set up his sister or brother to take the blame when they retaliate.  When I ask the kids where they want to go to college Ryan says he wants to stay close to home and this sentiment melts his mom’s heart.  Yup, he’s gonna be a lady killer.  I’m most proud that he actually cares about other people.  When I was a kid I didn’t even have a concept of others and altruism until I was much older, but he’s already won awards for sportsmanship in almost every league he participates in.  When a partially disabled kid on the other team falls on the basketball court Ryan stops and helps him up instead of running down-court with the rest of the fast break.  He’s always got an encouraging word for other less popular kids and is friends with everyone, no matter if they are cool or not.  Ryan’s best friend is named Jack and they’re going to sleepover camp together for the first time later this summer.  When Ryan and Jack were hanging out at my sister’s house I didn’t hear Jack say hi to me, so I inadvertently ignored him.  Ryan, ever the rainmaker, called out for me to get my attention and then gently reminded me that Jack said hello, and I should do the same.  What a sweetheart.  I say wassup to Jack and realize he’s lucky to have a best friend whose like a pre-pubescent Buddah with Invisalign braces. 

When I’m visiting my sister’s house Ryan is the only one who volunteers his bed for his Uncle to sleep in, and he sleeps on a blow up mattress on his brother’s floor without complaint.  He asks for nothing, but I reward him with little bowls of assorted candy that I leave on his desk.  We joke around about remodeling “our room,” and so far the punch-list we’ve compiled includes a disco ball, a mini-bar, a karaoke machine, a neon bar sign, and a hot tub.  I’ve got everything but the hot tub being shipped to my sister’s house from Ebay as we speak.

A few years back the kids had a “Special Person’s Breakfast” at their school (everything is PC these days – back in the day it would be called a “Family Breakfast,” but I guess they can’t count on family).  I was lucky enough to receive the invite out of our clan, mostly because I was in town that week.  We had to head down the street to his elementary school at an ungodly hour – 7am.  I was still on California time so it was actually a 3am wake-up call, and a 4am appearance in public for me.  I squeezed into a tiny plastic seat, not even big enough for one of my butt cheeks, in the cafeteria. Well at least we had Dunkin Donuts coffee to try and bring me back to the living.

I had no interest in talking to the other parents who were squeezing into the seats around me.  Instead I watch how my nephews and niece interact with the other kids.  I know school kids can be brutally clicky these days.  It’s unfathomable to me that they wouldn’t be cool, that someone wouldn’t like them or pick on them.  Sure we got bullied as kids – I had the neighborhood tyrant, who had a full beard in 2^nd grade, Fat Pete, chased me every day in an attempt to kick my ass, but it didn’t seen so emotionally acute and pre-meditated.  My sis says already the girls are the worst, even at Maddie’s age, forming a social caste system based on what they wear, what they look like, what they have, and especially if they have a cell phone.

If they aren’t the coolest kids in school it may be a little tough for them now, but probably for the best in the long run.  The cool kids usually don’t stay cool long; they peak in high school and then go on to miserable lives as morbidly obese collectors of cars on their front lawns, reliving their glory days while working at 7-11.  The wallflowers shall inherit the earth.  Maybe going through those struggles – not having everything come easy, makes kids forge an inner strength, a “me against the world” silent confidence, an appreciation for what is substantial in life, that otherwise they would not.  I can’t objectively gauge where they are on that social strata because, well, I’m their Uncle, and frankly I don’t care.  To me they are the coolest kids on the planet.  I once hand-made them T-shirts that had a big star and a rocket ship on the front, and “Uncle Norm’s All Stars” on the back – Big C #1, Ry Ry #2, and Maddie #3.  That’ still how I feel. 

My sister and her husband have made so many sacrifices and worked hard to give them a good life; not just to give them a lot of good things, but a good life – that’s a distinction that most parents miss.  They get to hang out in the rustic kitchen together as they do homework, run outside between two hundred year old oak trees, collect flowers and kick a soccer ball; they have a childhood.  And it’s not a one-way street - these little aliens, bring joy to our lives.  They’ve lost 3 out of 4 grandparents in small airplane crashes. The had two uncles but one was killed in a drunk driving accident in Germany, the other estranged and taciturn, living in South Africa, but all this loss has somehow brought our family much closer; we realize how precious these little moments are and how lucky we are to have the opportunity to take the remaining journey together.   

I hope my nephews and niece like Maine as much as I did, that it becomes a secret treasure in their lives.  Maybe it meant more to me because it was so different than my everyday life – not that I had it bad, but their day-to-day existence is a lot closer to the bucolic bliss of the lake house in Maine.  I plan on sharing all of the rituals that were special to me: lobster rolls for lunch, mini-golf, and walking pine-scented paths through the forest.  I want to take their hands as we all take off running down the dock together, jumping off the end into the silhouette of the red sun, realizing in mid-air that we’re in for an icy splash, but it’s too late to go back.  Somewhere suspended in mid air, between wood and sky and lake, we’ll yell at the top of our lungs, and know that we’re alive.    

It’s 8 o’clock at night and we’re almost there.  The kids are all sound asleep, mouths agape and heads bobbing, using each other’s shoulders as pillows.  Even my sister is dozing after a long day.  As I navigate the highway our headlights wash over low scrub brush and sandy gulleys on the edges of the ink-black night.  An occasional rabbit springs away as our car drives by, but otherwise it’s silent.  I see a sign for the Belgrade Lake turnoff in 20 miles and let my foot off the gas a little bit.  I realize that I don’t want the journey to end, for these fleeting moments to pass, but I feel blessed to be along for the ride.  Maddie stirs lazily and rubs her eyes “Are we there yet?” she asks her Uncle in a soft, angelic voice.  No Maddie, we’re not there yet, but we’re close, baby – I promise.